The ideal Fire Emblem story doesn’t exist. In a medium like gaming, which requires so many competing needs, there simply aren’t enough resources or possible compromises available to achieve such a feat. Given that fact, we settle for as good a story as possible — and opinions vary based on many personal factors. However, I think most fans of the franchise want strong characters challenged by a compelling plot that work in unison to elevate the act of actually playing Fire Emblem.

Some entries get close to ideal (Tellius supremacy) and others fall short. And for a long time leading up to the game’s release, it appeared Fortune’s Weave would align more with the former than the latter. However, after putting in 120 hours to experience the vast majority of the game, I’m unsure whether that’s the reality we live in.

Don’t get me wrong — I really enjoyed this game and the characters who bring it to life. But I can’t ignore the mound of narrative problems Intelligent Systems swept under the rug in hopes no one would notice. Unfortunately, the cracks start to show as early as the latter half of many Part 1 routes, and things only get worse from there. Seeing those flaws despite the game’s abundant potential left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

However, I also understand both the nature of game development in general and the arguably absurd ambitions of this specific effort. Fortune’s Weave attempted to do the unthinkable, and I have to respect the attempt. So the question becomes how much can we forgive? What can we look past? Because at the end of the day, the game’s narrative collapses under the weight of its own scope, squandering a robust start by fumbling a unifying focus throughout the rest of the story.

Honestly, this piece is just as much for me as it is for anyone else struggling to draw a conclusion. All I can do is lay out the issues, as I see them, and hope the act brings me enough clarity to make a firmer judgement. For those who want to follow along, let’s get started.

Prologue: The framing’s upfront ludonarrative dissonance

In medias res is one of the oldest storytelling techniques in history. That’s because, while it might seem smart to start at the beginning, no such thing exists. Just as in real life, all stories and the characters they contain exist within the historical context of the world they occupy. That means it’s important to fight the temptation to keep backing further and further away from the story that matters just to give a full picture. There’s a reason we don’t start at the founding of Dagda, Sothis’ descent from the Blue Star, or the war-weeb spreadsheet-simulator equivalent of the big bang.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean a story can or should start anywhere. That decision matters a lot because it sets the tone for everything to follow. And, to the game’s detriment, I don’t think Fortune’s Weave makes the right choice.

The game opens in the aftermath of Balor’s revival in a war-torn Dagda as the living are faced with extinction. And more than ever, our thin veneer of traditional fantasy is stripped away in favor of outright science fiction. The shock, in many ways, is compelling for both new players and old alike. Most everyone can appreciate when their expectations are toyed with in a respectful way. Fortune’s Weave manages that, at least. The question is simply: at what cost?

Before answering that question, the other piece of the puzzle we need to unpack is Fortuna and everything she represents. Not as a vessel of Sothis or an individual character, but as an agent of the gameplay itself. Because, in my opinion, the choice to start the game effectively in what we think of as Part 3 stems entirely from the way Intelligent Systems wanted players to experience the act of playing this game.

To start, Fortune’s Weave lives up to its name by threading all its disparate paths into a single save file. How, then, could the developers justify that as a choice supported by the story? Enter the game’s favorite buzz word, “causality,” and the silent, blank slate recruited to right its wrongs.

At the same time, for whatever reason, Intelligent Systems is adamant about maintaining the modern, quality of life ability to rewind turns in a way that gels with the story. The two, together, create a compelling reason to make the choice experienced in the game.

Despite that fact, the decision creates an incredible amount of ludonarrative dissonance — a perceived conflict between a game’s story and its mechanics. Because, at the end of the day, asking anyone to care about a world in turmoil before they know about those embedded in the conflict is a tall order. And asking them to care when their point of view character (Eshmel) has no point of view is almost insane.

Simply put, Intelligent Systems’ bizarre attachment to silent protagonists clashes with everything they should have learned about good Fire Emblem stories. Not that The Blazing Blade is a particular high point for the story, but there’s a reason Mark drops into the background immediately so players latch onto Lyn. Plus, I never heard anyone clamoring for more Byleth since Three Houses dropped in 2019, because that game had the same problem.

The characters all of us care about, who get us to care about the story, are all dead when it begins. Sure — it’s our job to save them through time-shenanigans. But what if we just… didn’t need to? Personally, I would have much preferred starting with each Flame Lord without Fortune’s Weave’s current framing device draped overhead.

Doing so would put players a bit more in the dark. They might not understand what is at stake for the larger story. But I don’t think I ever cared about that. I mean, we know how these games end. Why not focus on the personal struggles of Cai, Theodora, Dietrich, and Leda? That’s what’s novel. We’ve fought half a dozen crazed dragon gods and their armies of the undead before.

Part 1: A wealth of threads with no real pattern

So the framing starts the story off with a brief stumble. It’s possible to recover from that, and Fortune’s Weave gets off to an excellent start at doing so! But before long, a few loose threads start poking out. And by the end of almost every Part 1 route, the narrative begins to unravel.

I believe this happens because Intelligent Systems couldn’t reconcile their desired scope with the practical considerations of game development. Or, simply put, they tried to do too much. They knew it, too, given they cut four routes from the base game! And it’s ok they did that. It was necessary to ship on time.

That said, their decision not to rework the game’s story around just the base Flame Lords was not ok. Making players buy DLC that we hope will fill in some major, outstanding blanks is actually as close as anyone can get to a cardinal sin. In fact, Fortune’s Weave’s lack of a comprehensive story that stands on its own at launch probably puts an asterisk next to its standing in the annals of history regardless of how well the Orchel, Tanimun, Anatola, and Bertrand routes round out the narrative. Thinking about it truly makes me feel crazy.

But before I start ranting earlier than necessary, I’ll refocus with this sentiment: it is possible to tell a compelling story that merges multiple points of view along the way. I grew up reading epic fantasy where it happens all the time. The Last of Us Part II pulled it off, as did Grand Theft Auto V, and Halo 2. Unfortunately, Fortune’s Weave does not achieve the same success, and the problems begin in each Part 1.

Each of the base four Flame Lords do feel like the main characters of their own stories to start, and they all offer different glimpses into the larger mystery that led to Balor’s resurrection. They each also offer a unique tone that makes plaything through the same period of time from different perspectives not just tolerable, but enjoyable.

Cai’s route excels when it comes to crafting relationships and characters you care about. Dietrich offers interesting examinations of lore and philosophy that are often only gestured at in other routes. Leda has an apt flair for melodrama no one else can match. And Theodora brings the most well rounded experience that gets her closest to feeling like the “canon” main character of Fire Emblem tradition (which we’ll unpack more later).

Still, the stakes don’t feel consistent throughout, and that’s because the overarching opposition puts up a flimsy effort, at best. For all of the juicy potential offered by Lady Raksha’s Order of Mithras, spreading the conflict with its members so thin (and then not even letting you see how two of the three sisters meet their end?) is a huge missed opportunity.

Yes, they had a hand in many of the situations that plague our protagonists early, but only Leda seems directly connected to their actual plans. And given the entire rest of the story hinges on their actions, the lack of set up means the Order falls flat. And without any good will bought from more direct involvement in the early story, it becomes harder to overlook the way everyone (the Gods of Dagda, but really Solel) lets them go about their business with impunity.

While this is jumping ahead a bit, by the time Lyrah revives her father at the end of Part 2, it almost feels like a disconnected event you were vaguely aware of in the background. It should feel like the villain out-played the heroes despite their best efforts to stop them. But all Cai cares about is saving Castor. Dietrich wants to kill god. Theodora is trying to keep her kingdom together. Only Leda’s revenge plot properly injects The Order of Mithras in a meaningful way.

Why? Make them overtly responsible for the schism between Solel and Aurora. Let them play off Dietrich’s “bestial” impulses by offering an opponent greater than any other he could imagine. Center the Order within Dyan’s repeated rebellion. Then, give each Flame Lord a different peek into the plot to revive Balor. But most importantly, let the main characters know what Lyrah is planning before she does it!

Choosing to keep them in the dark could work through dramatic irony in a tighter story, but a game like this doesn’t have the space to bank on that alone. Better to rely on the simple tension of understanding what they’re up against, feeling like they stopped it, and then finding out they were wrong.

It feels obvious when I write it out, but I imagine the decision not to do all this will be clearer after getting the other half of the game. My guess is having 8 different routes meant everyone only got the barest crumb of central plot relevance, and that’s just a bad choice. Don’t tell such a big story if there’s not enough substance to justify it.

Part 2: Floating a Stitch

Since I failed to avoid ranting already, I might as well continue. What the fuck is up with Part 2? It’s just blind luck I decided to give Theodora the first run at it, but I never would have guessed her story in that slice of time is simply the only one that matters.

And if there was any doubt the plot got away from the developers before, Part 2 is the nail in the coffin. I simply can’t believe there’s any alternative explanation for shoving the other three main characters so far into the background that the only justification not to skip their run is for fear it might stat-screw your characters. This entire section makes it painfully obvious that the only portion of the game that got much care was Part 1.

But before getting further into that, there’s an even more offensive issue to address: the complete lack of a real transition.

When I started Part 2, I assumed that’s where the time skip would be because so much seemed to happen between then and the end of Part 1. Dagda woke up (somehow the Emperor Returned), Solel is dead — and so are Lyrah’s sisters. It’s unclear how or why any of that happened, but the game sure is uninterested in even attempting to tell you later.

Beyond that, the story offered in Part 2 isn’t even good because Dagda is a terrible villain with no set up while Lyrah swoops in at the last minute despite paying lip service as a puppet master in Dagsion.

Now, I do think the idea behind Part 2 has promise. Theodora having to deal with her greatest fear, that the empire would turn on Saramis, is compelling. Part 1 even does a decent job setting that up by talking about the People of the White Egg and the massacre of Damascar. But with only 5 chapters, Dagda’s mustache twirling from atop Solel’s throne as he sucks down the entire population of his capital like a smoothie comes off as cartoonish.

There is a world where Fortune’s Weave could salvage that, but it would have required more set up about what happened to Dagda and why (though I imagine that’s what Orchel’s Part 1 will highlight). Yet even then, the appeal of a crazy villain often wears off too fast. When characters don’t make choices in their right mind, the resulting lack of agency saps the tension from the narrative.

Lyrah exploiting Dagda’s fear of death by feeding him crazy juice so her dead dad could absorb his brother and conquer the world has narrative legs, but only if she gets the spotlight.

And you would think the fact she doesn’t get more attention means Dagda gets all the screen time, but you’re wrong. Instead, an insane amount of time is given to Lind — some random asshole you fight in the game’s prologue who also shows up for a single moment in one chapter of one route in Part 1. But we never get much about his character or motivations beyond the most surface level. He’s just the pawn Dagda throws at you while someone else tugs on his strings.

Just… none of it makes any sense. The entire thing feels like a major rush job that could only be explained by a lack of development time. Maybe it could have made sense with a few extra chapters to flesh out Part 2’s main players. But as it stands, this is really just Theodora (and Bertrand, sort of?) doing basic war shit without anything interesting to continue building up the stakes.

And it’s not like every Flame Lord needed their own bespoke story. But Fortune’s Weave could have at least paired two of the four off for a bit before bringing them back together in the last map before Part 3. Imagine Theodora calling on Cai, who gets to grapple more with his nature as a demigod (good foil for Lind)! Imagine a route where Dietrich and Leda attack the conspiracy behind Dagda’s return! Both of those sound way better than what we got, and it took me about 10 minutes of thought!

Part 3: The framing’s backend ludonarrative dissonance

And so we return to the other side of the game’s framing. Also my composure, I hope. Because, thankfully, the story in Part 3 is better than Part 2 in many ways. Eshmel was at least properly set up as the sole POV character from the jump. The Flame Lords, despite taking a regrettable backseat to him, get some good moments that help them complete narrative arcs started in Part 1.

The problem, however, is the game’s mechanics once again hamstring the narrative’s efforts to tie the story up with a nice bow. Because after railroading players in Part 2, they return a sense of freedom by bringing back the map. And that seems like a good thing, right?

It’s not, really — or at least in the way they chose to do it. That’s because, by letting players build their own squads from among the full cast to tackle underworld gates as they want, the developers allowed for circumstances where you can miss all of Part 3’s narrative value.

By this I mean you can fail to bring story relevant Flame Lords into battles against plot relevant enemies. Take Cohen and Mahadu, for example. Why is it even an option for me to fight them without Leda and Theodora, respectively? It completely changes the dialogue and the narrative consequences of that fight.

Also, why aren’t any of the risen dead more strongly died to Cai and Dietrich? I guess the latter has his flimsy romantic (???) connection with Lyrah — not that the story even attempts to explore it post Part 1 — but you’re telling me Castor wasn’t one of the Gate Lords? The best they could come up with for Cai was Zenzele?

I guess, at least, Gilchris and the kings of Arago might make interesting story beats with Bertrand while Talimun can say the same for Vandahl (maybe Drake?). But still, it’s a wasted opportunity that lengthens the shadow of Ludonarrative dissonance cast over this game.

All that said, the special dialogue you get isn’t even that compelling anyway. I was actually incredibly disappointed that Leda doesn’t have unique dialogue for Father Mahdel or Maria, for example. They’re ultimately little moments to quibble about, but including them would have gone such a long way to fleshing out the story.

But frankly, all of that wouldn’t matter if Part 3 had an actual story to contend with. But because the entire structure revolves around taking down underworld without creating any interesting twists in the process, you just sort of go from fight to fight. Which, I guess, is just as well. Doing more would be wasted on the Promised One.

The game couldn’t even come out and confirm the Promised One is a reincarnation of Solel — sent back by Sothis to make up for the inaction that allowed for Balor’s return in the first place. Leaning into that might have made his story worth experiencing! But if it weren’t for Fortuna’s lakeside chats about the true nature of Sothis (missable, btw), there’d basically be nothing going on.

It’s also worth mentioning, though perhaps only barely, that Balor doesn’t make an appearance himself until the last possible second. For all of Sombron’s faults, at least he had the respect to show up more than 5 seconds before his demise!

Seriously — if Intelligent Systems was so determined to do jack shit with him, why not subvert expectations by making Lyrah the final villain all along? That could have been an actual subversion. If spending centuries trying to revive her father was just an elaborate and violent attempt to cope with the trauma of losing a parent and pursue revenge against the entity at fault, that would have been really interesting. But no. We have a crazy dragon god, again.

Also, while I don’t want to dwell on it, Dagda came off way more crazy than Balor. Just sayin’.

Conclusion: I’m disappointed because I care

I could probably keep going at Fortune’s Weave for longer, but what I’ve laid out above is hopefully enough to get my point across. This game really just didn’t come together like I hoped it might.

Maybe that’s because a bigger story leaves room for more mistakes. I certainly appreciate the attempt — and I even see the vision! With a bit more time, money, and care, I believe the developers could have solved every problem laid out above.

What’s more, I really need to reiterate that despite the story’s flaws, I liked a lot of what we got. If the story was an irredeemable mess, I wouldn’t have spent hours venting my frustrations about it. Because love and hate often go hand in hand. Emotional reactions come from interest — not apathy.

The Sothis-verse is an incredible addition to the Fire Emblem legacy. I felt that way about Three Houses and I feel that way about Fortune’s Weave. I only wish the games could capitalize on the potential on offer.

Fingers crossed that, 10 years from now, when we get to dip back into this world, fans will get a story that makes all these missteps worth it in the end. If not, well… I guess I can always hope the Genealogy remake is real.

At its core, Fire Emblem is a series about war. The settings may change and the shades of black and white may blur to different degrees, but good overcomes evil through the combined effort of those willing to fight. For many players, these stories of heroes slaying rampaging dragons and dark gods create the hook that keeps them coming back with each release.

As one such player, that love of a compelling narrative is what left me with such complicated and largely disappointed feelings about Fire Emblem Engage. And while I am far from the only one to feel this way (or to feel differently), much of the conversation I’ve seen online falls short of exploring issues with a sufficient level of nuance. It’s hard to blame anyone for that, since so much “discourse” is limited to short-form platforms like Twitter and Reddit, but I wanted to dig a little deeper.

My plan is to break down the elements of Engage’s story, explore each one in some level of depth and highlight choices that I might have made differently. That last part you’ll have to take with a grain of salt since, despite my creative writing degree and 15 years of various writing work under my belt, I’m not a game dev. I’m just a guy who really loves good stories, who thinks about them deeply and who has worked plenty to build his own throughout the years.

Acknowledging reality

Before we get into anything, though, I need to take a second and address the small herd of elephants in the room. Attempting to jump into a discussion like this without doing so would be a disservice.

First, I really liked a lot about Engage — particularly the gameplay. The Emblems felt novel and fun without ever getting repetitive. I also enjoyed many of the characters and have added a handful to my list of all-time favorites. This analysis of the game’s story is not an attempt to invalidate this game or tear down anyone who enjoyed it. I’m writing this mostly to work out my own thoughts and hopefully contribute to a communal understanding of this series’ story.

Next, Engage is far from the first Fire Emblem game to stumble with its story. I hesitate to get into specifics regarding which games have issues since many people have different opinions (though I am a diehard Tellius-lover), but we can all agree that Fire Emblem isn’t a collection of modern day, Arthurian lit-fic.

These stories are about young royals leading “armies” of like 40 people on a romp around the world in search of MacGuffins that will kill god. However, the more ambitious stories have reached some incredible highs, leaving me to feel that repeating such success is a goal worth chasing. Every game should have a Black Knight and not a Death Knight.

Finally, I feel it’s really important to acknowledge that game development is hard. Many devs I know consider it a miracle that any game comes out, ever. So many players know so little about what goes into this process, which can make commenting on the fruits of this labor feel sketchy at times. It’s possible to absorb a work outside the context of its creation, but that feels more at home in a 200 level English class than real life.

The fact is, a team that was probably a bit too small worked with what I’m sure were too few resources to get this game out without enough time. In that sense, the developers should feel proud to have put out such a good game while still striving to improve going forward.

Elements of the story

I’m sure I could use a preexisting framework for approaching Engage’s story, but it made more sense to just think through my own approach. Most of this emerged from reading discussions online that conflated a bunch of separate (but related) factors, leaving conclusions muddled.

To capture the full picture of my issues, we’re going to look at four story components: plot, characters, world building and writing. The plot will deal with the mechanics of the story — what and how things happen. Character will explore why things happen, as well as the arcs that do (or don’t) develop throughout the main story. World building will explore the game’s setting and writing will look at the actual words on the screen.

All of these components are somewhat interwoven, so it can be difficult to address one without at least gesturing at the others. However, I’m going to do my best to keep everything as contained as possible for the sake of coherence. Then again, I’m not getting paid to write this, so I’ll assume you followed whatever outcome you get.

They kept it simple (stupid)

Fire Emblem Engage does not have a complicated plot. As an “anniversary” release, it intentionally follows in the footsteps of games like Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, which was a very simple “young band of warriors fights against world-threatening evil dragon.”

I’m going to assume you’ve completed Engage so I don’t need to paint the broad strokes beyond Good is right and Evil is wrong. Also, coming together is better than spurning those around you to live alone. I‘d rather dig into the weeds.

The most glaring issue is this plot lacks depth. Almost everyone trips over themselves to help Alear at all costs and no one expresses much agency. They have to gather the Emblems and there’s a well known process for this that mostly requires visiting the local ruler, one after another.

There is very little internal conflict or tension at any point, as everyone Alear brings together gets along almost immediately. Everyone sort of knows their role and plays their part, outside of the Veyle subplot.

That’s not a death sentence, but it presents two problems. First, it’s hard to get too into what’s going on because the water only comes up to your waist. Second, because the plot is so shallow, you can see the majority of it coming from a mile away.

Sometimes it’s nice to wade through calmer waters, but I’m personally looking for rapids. It’s more compelling to experience a game with real twists and turns, where characters we like butt heads and disagree despite finding a way to come together. Walking from point A, to B, to C, to D, to E doing the same thing over and over is just boring after enough times.

It’s also worth mentioning that, despite being a story mostly about Alear and Veyle, the plot is crowded. There are a lot of lordlings to meet in the front half of the game, and you pretty much take turns focusing on each country for a few chapters at a time until they fade into the background.

Firine never grapples with the discomfort of its pastoral society going to war. Brodia never does much with the loss of its king. Solm doesn’t get to explore its isolationism and Elusia never grapples with being the Fell Dragon’s pawns.

There simply isn’t time, because Alear has to forget about all of that and save his coerced sister from their dimension hopping father. But also, because we spend the first half doing all that other stuff, there’s not a whole lot of time to set up Veyle as a deuteragonist or Sombron as the villain. Veyle gets much better treatment than Sombron, but they could both use more space.

This brings us to the actual faces of our opposition, the series-given four “generals” who do their master’s bidding. And based on the sheer screen time they receive, Zephia, Griss, Marni and Mauvier are the only bad guys we could conceivably connect with throughout the story.

Yet, despite being more persistent than a teenager’s acne, the story refuses to tell us anything about them until the last possible minute. Engage would rather hold every card close to the chest until the very end for a mediocre reveal than to tip their hand even a little bit and give players a reason to be interested.

Zephia only hints at her desire for the unconditional love of a child (or her agreement with Sombron). Griss can’t stop hitting himself long enough to express the depths of his loyalty to Zephia. Marni can’t stop impudently pouting (while also talking so much unwarranted shit?) long enough to justify her antics. And Mauvir just refuses to be a character until the game wants you to recruit him.

The story could have given each Hound an opportunity to take the spotlight in a chapter or two, exploring facets of their personality and background that led them to serve such a force for evil. Instead, the Hounds have to fumble so many Emblem rings that Alear is unthreatened enough to let them escape repeatedly.

Also, the end of the game makes some weird choices that raise too many questions to be worth it. First, while the game had to introduce some plot device to explain your in-game ability to rewind time, the story doesn’t need to drop you into a causal time loop where Alear creates the own circumstances for his rebellion against Sombron during one of the final chapters. It adds so little to the story while taking on all the baggage that always comes with time travel.

Next, Sombron’s extra-Elyos origin comes so far out of left field that it’s not even funny. I mean, the existence of Emblems requires acknowledgement of a multiverse, but the story’s refusal to do anything with that concept until the actual last chapter makes the decision baffling to me. If you’re going to go in that direction, take some time to set it up.

Sombron could have easily just been from Elyos all along. Many other Fire Emblem worlds have their own Fell Dragon. He could even keep his mysterious Emblem of Foundations as a motivation, because there’s no hard limit of 12 rings.

I could have maybe tolerated parallel worlds OR time travel, but both just stretches the story on too many axes. I thought the point was to keep things simple?

We’re gonna need a bigger oven

To call the majority of Engage’s characters half-baked seems unfair given the constraints of a video game and the series’ history as a whole. After all, it’s so typical to rely on tried and true tropes that Fire Emblem has a grand tradition of characters filling the same roles in almost every game.

And while that flies for your background characters (the ones who show up along the way before never speaking again), the expectations are a bit higher for the main characters. But as I mentioned in the last section, there are A LOT of characters who want the screen time needed to develop.

To start, there’s Alear and Veyle. They’re the most important and they both do have full, satisfying arcs. I like Alear overcoming his initial fear to become a (somewhat too) compassionate leader. Veyle learning to stand against what she knows is wrong is also fun to watch. Both could be done better with some minor tweaks to the rest of the story, but they get the job done.

But then there’s Alfred, Diamant, Ivy and Timerra. Also Clanne, Framme and Vander. And don’t forget the second string royals: Celine, Alcryst, Hortensia and Fogado.

That’s just on the side of good, too! We can’t ignore Hyacinth, Zephia, Griss, Marni, Mauvier and Sombron. If you’re going to rely on the same cast of villains, they need to be treated like fully-fledged characters (which is probably why most Fire Emblem games are so content to use “flavor of the chapter,” near-faceless minions outside of the two or three true villains).

I’d even argue that the Emblems would be far more compelling as characters if they had more than a tiny bit of time to be a part of the story. And given the fact that Alear gets incredibly emotional, multiple times, about losing the Emblems, the story clearly wants you to care about them as people.

You could say we already know these characters since they come from past games, but that’s not really a good excuse for two reasons. First, the game explicitly says the Emblems are NOT the same as their counterparts. Second, not everyone is familiar with every other Fire Emblem game. If you want to have a self contained story, where players can enjoy the whole experience without any outside homework, you have to treat them like you would any other new characters.

I count 19 characters that I’d want to have some kind of arc and 12 Emblems that could do more as stronger, static characters, but there’s only 26 chapters worth of story and a handful of paralogues. Now, I could overlook the younger royals, and the game clearly wants to (though why include them if that’s the case?), but everyone else needs to be a more complex character if they’re going to compete for screen time.

Diamant and Ivy do earn small arcs, but they deserved more time to cultivate them. Meanwhile, all four Hounds get their crumb of development shoehorned into the chapter before their death (or the chapter before they switch sides, in Mauvier’s case). Meanwhile, Hyacinth and Sombron are never more than mustache twirling monsters who do evil for the sake of it.

With that said, now is probably a good time to talk about supports in this game. I should start by saying there’s no way in hell I would ever want to watch every three-part conversation in this game before writing an analysis like this. That’s just too many hours of my life that I’d never get back. The best way to experience supports is naturally, by playing the game, and I did see my fair share.

What I will say, though, is I think support conversations are not a substitute for actual development. That must be front and center in the narrative or you run the risk of players missing it.

Supports are far better at exploring history, character quirks and the world they live in. Those supplement the narrative to make it feel more natural. And by fulfilling that role, whatever amount of supports a player happens to unlock enriches their experience proportionally.

Does anyone actually live here?

Elyos feels like an incredibly empty place. I suspect this might be due to the Switch’s hardware forcing the developers to avoid showing something akin to a crowd, but the result left the world feeling hollow (outside of one post-battle map early in the game). And while it seems trivial to complain about the lack of everyday people, who is Alear fighting for if not them? Is their suffering not what drives him to action in the first place?

Beyond that, the story makes multiple assertions without trying hard enough to back them up. First and foremost, no one seems even a little interested in exploring why the Divine Dragon deserves such fervent worship/adoration in the first place.

The game vaguely implies civilization owes Lumera (and Alear, sort of) for stopping Sombron 1,000 years ago, but their “divinity” is never explored. Other Fire Emblem games named Divine Dragons as the uplifters of humanity, but we can’t just assume that’s the case here.

And OK, I could look beyond that if we ever got a sense of what role Lumera played in the 1,000 years she hung out in Lythos. Does she act as a peace keeper? A religious figure? An educator? Because it seems like she just sits in a room guarding the Emblems while everyone else pays her the occasional visit out of lip service. Yet, everyone talks about how sad they were to lose Lumera and how much they loved her. What did she do to ever warrant such affection?

That information would also help us set expectations for what Alear will do for the world after the war is won. The game ends on a coronation with him being named some sort of supreme ruler, but each of the four kingdoms still has their own king or queen. What is the give and take, here?

Conversely, there’s no attempt to explain why Elusia would ever worship a Fell Dragon who A) treats everyone so terribly and B) seems to offer the country nothing in exchange for its loyalty. We’re told Hyacinth “succumbed to the Fell Dragon’s influences,” but that doesn’t really tell us anything.

Was he manipulated psychologically or through magic? Zephia can make Veyle evil by increasing her dragon instincts or whatever, but is that what happened with Hyacinth?

Going back to the Emblems, their presence in the story doesn’t get any exploration, either. Who made the rings and why did they do it? What have they been used to accomplish in the past (other than defeating Sombron)? These are not essential plot questions, but knowing the answer to some extent would help the world feel more lived in.

I’d also like to know what Zephia was up to in the 1,000 years between the past and the present. We know Veyle sort of bounced around, hiding and being abused when she couldn’t manage that, but Zephia is an unknown.

Is she responsible for spreading the gospel of Sombron? Was she just biding time until the Emblem rings could be used again? Why not attempt to acquire the ones outside of Lythos slowly, over time, through more subtle means? If she had, the assault on Lythos would have completed her goal right away.

Finally the Corrupted rob Elyos of its humanity by giving Alear an easy, faceless foe to kill. That’s safer, but it’s not as interesting as fighting other people, and it contributes to the feeling of emptiness in the world. Everyone other than the game’s characters might as well be Corrupted, for all we know.

Oh yeah — we also need more “regular” characters than we get for a similar reason. Outside the royals and their retainers, there are only FIVE characters who just exist as normal people: Yunaka, Jean, Anna, Lindon and Seadall. Two of them show up in paralogues and one is a recruit you can miss.

I know all the retainers have their own backstories and families that make them more grounded than the many lords, but their reason for fighting is less compelling than it could be if they didn’t have such strong ties to royalty.

After all, they’re oath-sworn to protect their lord and participate in this war. That’s sort of a choice, but it’s way more interesting for someone like Jean to go to war as a kid — or even Lindon to switch sides mid-battle.

Now, before moving onto the next section, I want to clarify that there are some things we DON’T need to know for the sake of better world building. While I disagree with the choice to make Sombron from “somewhere else,” everything that happened there doesn’t actually matter. The Emblem of Foundation doesn’t actually matter.

Knowing the answers to these questions couldn’t hurt, but there are already way more pressing issues at hand, and there is such a thing as leaving something up to the player’s imagination. Conveniently, this would all be solved if the game just made Sombron from Elyos all along.

Striking the right tone

This section is going to be somewhat short because I don’t think there’s much to the problem with the writing. In fact, given the direction the developers chose, I actually think the writing is as good as any comparable video game.

However, “the direction the developer chose” is key to my personal issue with the writing. I prefer a more serious tone for Fire Emblem. Unfortunately for me (and some others), Engage is incredibly light, sometimes to the point of being outright goofy.

That isn’t to say I’m against humor or fun in this series, as plenty of more serious games feature both in their scripts. But while Fire Emblem is a story about good versus evil, it’s always told through the lens of war. And even in the most clear cut conflicts, war inflicts pain, suffering and trauma on everyone involved.

Yes, life goes on. People have to go shopping. People enjoy a nice cup of tea or their favorite books. They still talk about wearing makeup. But there’s always a subtext of conflict hanging over everyone’s head. And maintaining that presence is important because it teaches us something important about war: it’s hell.

It’s OK to derive entertainment from a war-game, but no one should walk away saying “what a breezy battle that was.” Characters like Clanne shouldn’t quip about how well they did in a fight without acknowledging that he’s killed someone (another reason the Corrupted are bad when overused).

You are welcome to enjoy a story with a light tone, but I don’t think a massive war should be the backdrop for that experience. There’s too much inherent suffering involved for that to feel anything other than a little disrespectful.

Tying it all together

Now that we’ve laid out all of the problems, here’s where I make my best attempt to offer a solution. At one point I entertained going chapter by chapter, character by character and creating an entire blueprint for improvement.

Then I realized that’s halfway to an actual job, which I don’t have enough time in my life for. Instead, I’ll offer some more general takes.

First, cut Firine and Solm if Engage doesn’t want to add more chapters to give them real depth. Their cultures are interesting and I’d love the time to dig deeper into them, but they are not as tied to the surface conflict between Brodia and Elusia that dominates the first half of the story.

If the game must keep the countries in without adding more chapters, don’t bother making the princes and princesses more than background figures (or leave them out entirely). That way, we can keep the settings while focusing on the characters that actually matter. Rewrite the retainers as regular people and let them share the plight of their homes through supports.

Next, we need more of Veyle from the start, given her importance to the back half of the game. Besides, it’s not like anyone was surprised that her split personality instigated the plot in the first place. Let her take center stage from the get-go to make her heel-turn even more satisfying.

This also comes with the upside of giving us more face time with the Hounds, and it eliminates the need for the two random Elusian underlings (Abyme and Nelucce) that show up just to die. If the Four Hounds are going to be the only real villains in this story, give them time to do it right.

While we’re at it, use the Corrupted much more sparingly. Have Elusian soldiers fighting most of the battles. It makes Ivy and Hortensia’s stories much more compelling.

That said, moving all of this story to the front half gives us room to learn more about Sombron’s motivations in the back end. It would also provide a lot of space to learn about things like the Emblems and the history of Elyos.

You can also dig deeper into Engage’s central theme: coming together is better than being alone. Alear and Veyle already get a good amount of space to do this in the last bit of the story, but more would never hurt.

Then, as we wrap the game up, cut the time travel. What we can keep is Sombron’s desire to escape into the multiverse to find the Emblem of Foundations, but do not ground his origin in some other world. That just invites unnecessary trouble.

Also, all throughout what I’ve laid out above, the game should shift its tone to be at least a 50% more serious. We should feel the gravity of going to war, of losing fathers and risking lives for the world’s sake.

And that’s basically it! I think doing all of that would help alleviate a lot of my issues and create a better story. The pieces are largely there already. It’s just like we opened a 100 piece puzzle box to find 500 pieces inside, half of which don’t actually fit with the main picture.

Anyway, I’d love to hear what others think of both Engage’s story and my analysis of it. I’m sure some people will say I’m being too harsh in places or that I’m taking this too seriously, but my goal was always to express my own issues and share what I would have done differently. You are more than welcome to disagree!

Anyway, last week I laid down the basic foundations of esports journalism. Armed with that knowledge, you should be ready to tackle more complicated tasks, such as coming up with your own story ideas and pitching them to actual outlets. That’s a particularly exciting step, because these two articles provide what is essentially the bare minimum required to actually do this job. Let’s get started.

Beats

In journalism, a beat is like a specialty. At larger papers, reporters are assigned ones like “government,” “education,” or a particular sports team. The latter should clue you in on what beats should look like at an esports publication — they typically involve particular games or teams.

A lot of the time, that is the case. Outlets like the Game Haus have individual reporters for the majority of teams in the LCS, OWL and CDL. Other outlets, like Hotspawn (to use a random example), have reporters for just games in general — like Super Smash Bro. Ultimate or Dota 2. But in some ways, esports is also kind of weird. In the case of beats, reporters are also often divided into categories like “news” and “feature” writers.

The reason that’s weird is because reporters shouldn’t “specialize” in a particular kind of journalism. A good, well-rounded journalist should be able to write the kind of article each story requires (and that’s why these lessons will include the entire spectrum of story types). Handling the breakdown this way stunts a reporter’s growth and gets in the way of building trust within a community.

My personal opinion about why this split happens is because it helps justify the way editors pay their journalists. News writers get paid one rate and feature writers get another, generally higher rate. Few editors are really that stingy about a news writer putting together a feature or vice-versa, but it’s just not the way things are done in traditional journalism. The reason? Because most journalists get a salary. And why doesn’t that happen at most esports journalism outlets? Because, sadly, they really don’t have enough money to pay 99% percent of their people a salary.

While that’s important, it’s also a little beside the point. The ultimate point of this section is to point out that the first place to start when looking for a story idea is within your beat. And if you haven’t been assigned one by an editor, feel free to pick one for yourself. The constraints can help narrow your focus down to a more straightforward range of subjects.

From there, think about what the community you represent cares about and write those stories. Who do they want to hear from? What should they know? Are there people abusing power or doing great things that are going unnoticed? These subjects are all perfect fodder for a fledgling reporter. They also will help build the trust within the community I mentioned before. And once that’s built, people start coming to you with ideas. Not all will be very good, but some certainly will. And once you’ve established a pipeline of information coming to you, it’s much easier to focus on brainstorming the big ideas yourself.

Keeping an eye and ear open

The other way to come up with stories is by looking around and listening. That is usually much easier when you’re able to work among your beat physically, but at least esports is a relatively online environment. Still, the idea here is simple: pay attention to what’s going on.

Follow the majority of relevant players and teams on Twitter, or put them on a list that tracks their tweets. Follow the developers of the game — both the company and individuals. Follow casters, analysts and other journalists. Hell, you should probably follow people in games you don’t care about or cover.

The reason is, all of these people will say things constantly. The overwhelming majority of it will be worthless as far as journalism is concerned, but the odd comment can occasionally spark an idea. This is especially true for your fellow journalists. It may seem taboo to build off someone else’s story, but there’s no rule against it as long as you give credit where credit is due. Journalists inspire each other plenty, even applying the same ideas to different games or teams. As long as you don’t pass off the idea as your own and link to the original source, all should be well.

Additionally, get involved in the conversation when the opportunity calls for it (and by that I mean don’t be a creep by injecting yourself into places you don’t belong). If you’re visible enough, people in the community will remember you. If they remember you, they’ll try reading your work. If they read your work, they may like it. And if they like it, they’ll trust you.

In traditional sports, being visible often involves showing up to practices and other media events, which gives the opportunity to build rapport with players and staff. Unfortunately, this is far from a typical practice within the esports industry. Instead, if you’re living in a city that hosts esports events, find the league’s PR and get some credentials. Show up, introduce yourself and ask to interview someone. Meet your colleagues who are there also. These people may seem like your competition, but they’ll more likely be your co-workers at some point. It’s a damn small industry and it helps to have friends.

Also, as much as I personally hate reddit, esports communities are quite deeply nestled into the site. Most of the content is low effort garbage, but something may spark an idea on rare occasions. Someone may ask a question that no one has looked into, raise a problem they’re facing or even make a claim so stupid it requires refutation. What you should generally avoid is cherry picking whatever has been upvoted and writing an article that amounts to “look at this cool thing.” People already looked at that cool thing, which is why it’s at the top of the subreddit.

Story idea exercise #1

This exercise is nice and straight forward, and doesn’t require any made up scenarios about CLG doing impossible things during the playoffs. Instead, I want you to pick an esports beat. It can be a beat for any particular game or team. It doesn’t matter to me. Then, find three to five story ideas that are inspired by what members of the community are talking about.

Please provide links to the discussion or comment that inspired the idea and explain what the story would be about in general. Don’t worry about fleshing it out fully just yet. The time for that will come soon.

How to pitch a story

Having a million story ideas isn’t worth shit if you don’t have somewhere to publish it. Sure, you could self publish on medium. But if you’re reading this article, I doubt you have the audience needed to get many views without some serious work and a share from someone who has real reach. So how do you get someone to publish your story (and pay you to write it)? You write a pitch.

A good pitch is more art than science, because every editor cares about slightly different things. Many have a general idea of what they’re looking for, but they want it ordered in a certain way. Or they don’t care about a particular subject that someone else really cares about. Or they want the pitch first and then some samples of your work.

The first thing to do, before anything else, is determine the right audience for your story. Who will read this thing and justify someone giving you money to write it? If you haven’t got that figured out, you’re playing Russian Roulette with your foot. Sure, you could get lucky and still attract an audience anyway, but you could also demonstrate that no one is going to read your work and not get another opportunity to write for an outlet.

So, after you figure out your audience, find an outlet that caters to that audience. We’ll get into the details of that briefly a little later, but there are many options.

From there, things start to get a bit more difficult. The next step in this process is to find the person who accepts/approves pitches. This is, for some stupid reason, by far the most frustrating part pitching. Sites have multiple layers of editors with multiple levels of publicly available contact information. Sometimes you just have to DM someone you’ve never spoken with on Twitter and say “Hi there, my name is X and I’m an esports journalist who wants to pitch a story to your outlet. Who is the right person to contact and how can I get in touch with them?”

If you’re lucky, someone will answer. If not, they won’t, and you have to just start sending emails blindly. Random emails are a last resort, but sometimes the wrong person you sent the pitch to will take pity on you by forwarding it to the right person.

But before that, you have to write the pitch. Doing so can be tricky, as mentioned, but here are a few general rules of thumb:

• Offer a high level, tight description of the story idea right away.
• Mention who you plan to speak to for this story or people you’ve already spoken to. It also helps if you clarify the likelihood that those people will actually go on the record.
• Finally, it never hurts to include a link or two to your previous work.

The good news is some blessed outlets have articles dedicated to explaining what they want you to include. This one is for the Washington Post’s gaming vertical, Launcher. This one is for Polygon. In many ways these two are asking for similar things, but there are still differences. The first thing to do is google whether there’s instructions. If not, do what you can.

Finally, the last thing to keep in mind is a lot of people simply won’t answer. It sucks, a lot, but there’s no way around it. Most editors are super busy and are inundated with thousands of emails every week. If they get one from an email they don’t recognize, chances are they’ll gloss over it. I still think it’s a little rude to ignore a pitch (at least one that isn’t a giant mess), but not everyone feels the same. All you can do is send a few follow up emails and hope they answer eventually.

Oh yeah, one more thing. No matter what you do when pitching, DO NOT SEND THE SAME PITCH TO MULTIPLE OUTLETS. Imagine what would happen if both places get back to you and say “yes, I’d like that piece.” If they do, how do you think they’ll feel when you tell them another site already got back to them first? The answer is: jerked-around.

There’s no hard and fast rule, but give an outlet two weeks to answer two attempts to reach out before taking a pitch somewhere else. If they get back to you after that, it’s ok to say they’re out of luck. And for the record, while this also sucks, it’s important to remember that they’re usually helping you out. By the time you’re a big enough deal to flip the leverage, no one will make you wait two weeks before answering.

Who to pitch a story to

This answer is a bit more complicated, because we’d all love to be regular contributors to the biggest sites, like ESPN Esports. Unfortunately that just isn’t going to happen until you’ve built up a portfolio of stories and worked your way up the chain. Don’t let that discourage you from chasing your dream site, but it should help you set expectations.

If you’re brand new, start with the smaller sites first. If you’ve done other kinds of journalism and want to pivot to esports, feel free to punch a bit higher. Maybe gaming outlets that are open to esports stories would be most interested. And if you somehow have a huge scoop that you think could turn a lot of heads, go all the way to the top. If something is juicy enough, the big fish will bite.

What I’m not going to do here is make a list of every esports publication out there. It would be a very quick way to date this article, since sites come and go so frequently. But if you’re going to be a journalist, I trust your ability to research homes for your outlets. To be honest, you should already be reading articles from many of them before wanting to write your own.

Pitching exercise # 1

For this exercise, take one of your story ideas from above and pick an outlet that suits it. Then, write out a pitch for the idea following all the criteria mentioned above. If you’re feeling bold, include the contact information for the editor you’d contact (just don’t dox someone by publishing info that is private).

What’s next?

Now that you know the basics of writing and how to come up with good ideas, it’s time to talk about, well… talking. The next lesson will cover everything you need to know about sources, from finding the right ones to asking them the right questions. I highly recommend you read the next one when it drops, because if esports journalism is lacking anything, it’s primary reporting. Tweets are a piss poor substitute for a good interview, and I think you can get a hold of people easier than you think.

Otherwise, keep reading, writing and gaming.

With that being said, no one decided to try my exercises the first time around, which is honestly not a surprise. These articles are meant to be a resource that sits on the internet to help people when they need it. They just haven’t been around that long, yet. So until people start answering, I’ll just post my own takes. And if people decide to answer after the fact, I’ll edit the best responses into this post. This opportunity is brought to you by the power of editing and notifications.

Here are the exercises from last week’s lesson on writing like a journalist

Exercise #1: angles

The goal here was to list three to five different story angles for the following scenario:

“Your inside sources tell you that on the day Riot Games plans to officially release Valorant, they also plan to announce the formation of a new, franchised league. The success of the beta and the desire for organized tournaments was so overwhelming and rapid that they felt it was possible to begin right away. They announced ten teams, and offered the slots to existing LCS franchises first. Seven teams bought slots for $20 million, but Team Dignitas, Golden Guardians and FlyQuest opted out of the deal. Instead, the slots were bought by FaZe Clan, NRG Esports, and Envy Gaming.”

This was my favorite answer from the comments: (NOT APPLICABLE, YET)

Here is my take on some angles:

• Straightforward “Riot announces new franchised league” story.

This one will probably cover a lot of bases, but ultimately it’ll be boring and end up regurgitating a press release nine times out of ten.

• Instead of the straightforward approach, you could focus on how public demand for organized play got Riot to accelerate their plans. You can also explore whether the new Riot league will shut down the third party leagues that led to this in the first place.

This one looks at the same story from the angle of the people who worked hard to organize beta tournaments and show Riot they could launch their own, successful league. It’s a more community focused take than looking at it through the lens of just what Riot is doing.

• Could look at how the LCS/LEC might inform this new league, which is launching very quickly with an unknown (but relatively short) amount of time spent planning.

This one looks at the logistical function of the league and how it might mirror or differ from Riot’s current offerings with the LCS/LEC. It’s probably more business focused than anything, since it’s about operations.

• You could look at the ten teams and explore what players they have or might be interested in, or how their operation in other games might signal success with Valorant.

This one is very esports focused and would rely on the audience’s interest in teams and players. It would probably do well on most sites that cater to an audience that mostly cares about the esport more than/as much as the game itself.

• The story could focus mostly on the $20 million franchise price tag, comparing it to things like LCS/OWL/CDL/etc.

This is another business focused story, but one that’s concerned more about the teams than the league operations in the first place.

• The story could focus on why the three LCS teams opted out of the Valorant league.

This one feels like it could be good anywhere, depending on the answer, and is probably the most juicy angle of the bunch. The only hard part is it requires at least one team (ideally more, though) to go on the record about why they’re sitting out.

• On the flipside, you could also write about the three new teams that scooped up a franchise slot.

This one is also good anywhere, and probably much easier since the teams will be excited to talk about their entry into the league. It’s probably fluff unless you really dig into how the cost will impact the team, whether they’re set up for success, etc.

And that’s just the seven that came off the top of my head. With some more time and deeper thought, it’s totally possible to dredge another half dozen ideas out of this scenario. I’ll leave that to you as a way to get more out of the exercise, but hopefully this has shown that there are lots of angles to every story. And while a lot of the same information would go into each take, treating it all like one story is a disservice to your outlet. But at the same time, don’t think your outlet will need to hit every angle. Just report on the ideas that fit your audience.

Exercise #2: Inverted pyramid

This exercise asked you to order the information in the following scenario from most important to least important, as if it was going in a story:

“In a long series of tweets posted Tuesday morning, Anne Example explained she has endured months of online harassment from professional CS:GO player Billy “Demonstration” Bob. He plays for the North American team ‘Not A Real Org,’ and has a reputation for trolling behavior online. She claims the situation became too much to bear when, during a stream Sunday night, Demonstration leaked Example’s home address and encouraged his fans to egg her house as a joke. Instead, Example (a streamer herself), was swatted by an unknown party while live on Twitch. No one was harmed during the event, but she claims it was a traumatic and frustrating experience. Demonstration has been let go by Not a Real Org, which called his actions disappointing and unacceptable. Example also said she is holding a small donation stream on Wednesday to replace the door that was irreparably damaged during the swatting.”

This was my favorite answer from the comments: (NOT APPLICABLE, YET)

Here’s my take:

1. Lead with Not a Real Org dropping Demonstration for harassment
2. Follow up with the details about the harassment from Anne Example’s tweet.
3. More specifically, start with the swatting and work backward to him encouraging people to egg Example’s house on stream.
4. Then go into past occasions Demonstration has harassed example. Go into him harassing others if evidence exists.
5. Talk about Demonstration’s reputation for trolling.
6. Talk about Example’s donation stream.
7. Finish with a bit about the prevalence of harassment in esports/offer resources for others facing similar situations.

I think this is the ideal organization. While the harassment is the impetus for the news, the consequences are the most compelling part. If Demonstration hadn’t been let go, this would have been a much different story. But once that’s out of the way, it’s important to go right into the details of his worst offense. From there, it’s easier to walk backward through the other ways he’s harassed Example. Then you can unpack Demonstration’s history of being a troll and potentially bring up what Example is doing to recover from the incident. Finally, especially in stories with victims, it’s good to include resources for people who might be in a similar situation, just to help out your audience.

It may be tempting to lead with Anne here, but in this case she doesn’t seem to be a particularly famous figure herself. People are more likely to care about the player being punished for their actions than they are to hear someone they’ve never heard of was harassed. All the same information ends up in the story, but ordering it the way I mentioned above gives people the best possible chance to get all the information before giving up.

Exercise #3: summary ledes

For this exercise, I asked you to write three different ledes for the following scenario, with each one focusing on a different choice of the five Ws:

“After years without winning a domestic title, Counter Logic Gaming shocked the League of Legends world on Sunday by going from last place during the 2020 Spring Split to winning the 2020 Summer Split playoffs. The team was largely anchored by Eugene “Pobelter” Park, who replaced Lee “Crown” Min-ho in the mid lane, and defeated favorites Cloud9 in a close 3–2 series. CLG brought home their first title since 2016 at the Talking Stick Resort Arena, in Phoenix.”

This was my favorite answer from the comments: (NOT APPLICABLE, YET)

Here is my take:

What lede: “After going from last place in the 2020 LCS spring split to winning the following summer split playoffs, Counter Logic Gaming have pulled off the turnaround of the decade.”

This lede is compelling to those who are interested in underdog/comeback stories (which is most people, to be honest). It immediately tells people that a team went from awful to good, then let’s readers know the team and ends on the significance of what they’ve achieved.

Who lede: “With deft leadership from Eugene “Pobelter” Park, Counter Logic Gaming have won the 2020 LCS summer split playoffs after ending the previous split at the bottom of the standings.”

This lede is compelling to those who are interested in both Pobelter and CLG. It also still includes their accomplishment, setting up the rest of the story.

Where lede: “At the largest esports event ever hosted in Phoenix, Arizona, Counter Logic Gaming have followed up on a disastrous split by winning the 2020 LCS summer playoffs.”

This lede is compelling to those who care about esports in Arizona (which is probably like a couple hundred people, tops). Probably only good for local news, but it eventually gets to the information most people would care about.

Hopefully this shows that there are different ways to write tight summary ledes depending on the angle of the story and the most important information.

And that brings us to the end of this week’s exercises. I hope my answers were helpful, and I hope getting to read some of the best answers from among the readers is something that actually happens down the road. In the meantime, keep an eye out soon for the next full lesson.

Anyway, today’s lesson will focus on teaching you the skills needed to write like an actual journalist. This is important, especially when first starting out, because everyone can tell when you don’t really know what you’re doing. My fondest wish is that, after reading this and writing your first piece, people ask, “where else have you been published?” Only then will my job be complete (not really though. There’s way more to cover).

Why start here?

I can imagine many people thinking about how they would teach someone to write an article and starting with an earlier phase of the process, like coming up with a good idea. While that makes sense, after a fashion, consider the following.

Knowing how to come up with a good idea won’t stop anyone from mangling the execution of said idea because they don’t know any better. As much as I wish I could, I can’t just stop people from writing while I try to help them improve. Considering that fact, it’s actually far better to do a good job reporting on a mediocre idea. Besides, an editor would be far happier to workshop a bad pitch than they would be fixing a really rough draft.

Also, while we’re on the topic of “why start here,” it’s important to understand this only covers the most basic principles of journalism. There is far more to writing news, features and every other kind of story than what is contained within this article. Yet all of the lessons below apply in basically every case, unless stated otherwise, down the road. We’ll get into more advanced material later, but these are the tools you’ll bring with you every time.

Finding the right angle

There are so many esports journalism outlets, even in an industry this young. Almost all of them are competing over the same audience and fighting to break the exact same stories. If Yiliang “Doublelift” Peng left Team Liquid tomorrow for a new team, every single esports outlet worth their salt would have a story on it as soon as possible. But with 57 stories about the same damn subject, how does any site ensure theirs is the story someone reads?

Well, the big sites can rely on the size of their audience. That’ll work, for now, while there isn’t much competition at the top. But in the rest of the journalism industry, which is rife with serious competition at every level, they distinguish their stories about the subject by finding a good angle.

What that means is their journalists and editors decide, often together, the best way to approach a story. Using the Doublelift example, there are a lot of different routes to take depending on the context. Someone could write about what the move means for Doublelift himself, what it means for the team he left or what it means for the team he’s joining. They could examine just this move and project forward, or they could look back at the result of his moves in the past. There are also literally dozens of people to talk to about the subject, ranging from players and coaches to experts and owners.

With so many different directions, there’s no reason any outlet’s story should look almost identical in structure to someone else’s. If all you’re doing is taking the straightforward approach to get the story out first, consider that SEO rankings can only do so much. The bigger sites will still publish first (they often have better information and access due to their reach) and get the traffic.

So in my humble opinion, there’s little reason to race for the publish button before considering a unique angle. Timeliness is important because people want the news as soon as possible, but they also want something they can’t get anywhere else. The best journalists do this at the beginning of story writing by coming up with good angles every time.

Angle exercise #1

What I want you to do now is open a google/word doc and get ready to write, because this is your first practice assignment. There will be others, and I ask that you post all your answers in the comments at the end of the article.

Here’s how this one will work. Below I’m going to give you a chunk of information about a fictitious piece of news. Using all the information given, write down three to five different angles you could take when writing this story. Next week’s post will have my answers, as well as my favorite answers from you all posted in the comments.

“Your inside sources tell you that on the day Riot Games plans to officially release Valorant, they also plan to announce the formation of a new, franchised league. The success of the beta and the desire for organized tournaments was so overwhelming and rapid that they felt it was possible to begin right away. They announced ten teams, and offered the slots to existing LCS franchises first. Seven teams bought slots for $20 million, but Team Dignitas, Golden Guardians and FlyQuest opted out of the deal. Instead, the slots were bought by FaZe Clan, NRG Esports, and Envy Gaming.”

The inverted pyramid

Next, it’s time to explore a phrase that sounds more fancy than it actually is: the inverted pyramid. When writing an article, it essentially means “get to the fucking point.” And since they can’t print that in textbooks, here we are.

There is more nuance to the concept than that, though, and there’s a good reason we write this way. If you think about it, the journalism industry’s number one enemy (after misinformation) is our audience’s attention span. It is so painfully short, and it doesn’t help that every reader is constantly assailed by distractions nearly every second they spend reading your story.

Considering that fact, it may seem like a miracle anyone reads a story to completion at all — but you’d be wrong. It’s actually just proper application of the inverted pyramid. Here’s how it works in more detail.

Always write your stories in order of importance as opposed to anything else. Put your most important details up top, because there’s a good chance that’s literally the only part of your story 90% of people will read. That may sound depressing, but it’s the reality we live in. The good news is, if you do it right and the news is interesting enough, people will read the next paragraph. And then the next, and the next. Maybe they’ll even get to the end. But if they don’t, at least they’ll walk away with the most important information possible.

So just to be crystal clear, this is your priority order for writing stories.

1. Most newsworthy information, which often requires answering the five W’s (who, what, when, where, why).
2. Important details and context.
3. Extra background information.
4. There is no fourth step — stop writing your story before it gets too long for anyone to read.

As they say: that’s it. That’s the tweet. Remember this order and your stories will be much more readable.

Inverted pyramid exercise #1

Did you think there’d only be a single assignment this week? That’s pretty funny. But no, there’s going to be one for most of the practical skills I’m teaching you. What I want you to do here is explain how you would organize a story based on the following information:

“In a long series of tweets posted Tuesday morning, Anne Example explained she has endured months of online harassment from professional CS:GO player Billy “Demonstration” Bob. He plays for the North American team ‘Not A Real Org,’ and has a reputation for trolling behavior online. She claims the situation became too much to bear when, during one of his streams on Sunday night, Demonstration leaked Example’s home address and encouraged his fans to egg her house as a joke. Instead, Example (a streamer herself), was swatted by an unknown party the next day while live on Twitch. No one was harmed during the event, but she claims it was a traumatic and frustrating experience. Demonstration has been let go by Not a Real Org, which called his actions disappointing and unacceptable. Example also said she is holding a small donation stream on Wednesday to replace the door that was irreparably damaged during the swatting.”

And before we move onto the next section, it feels important to point out that while this is a hyperbolic example for the sake of a journalism exercise, women all throughout the esports industry are harassed all the time. Don’t do it yourself for any reason, and take that history of harassment into account when you’re reporting by not making things harder for any victims.

Writing compelling summary ledes

So remember point one from the inverted pyramid section? A shorter, proper name for what that point looks like in practice is a lede (or lead). The first paragraph of every story, regardless of whether it is done properly or not, is called a lede. This is your first impression, and often a good indicator of whether a journalist knows what they’re doing or not.

Want to know the biggest giveaway for a basic news story is? If the lede is way too long. And by long, I mean more than 40 words or so.

Yes, you read that right. Under ideal circumstances, a lede should be about as long as the paragraph above. A good rule of thumb is to keep it at 25 to 30 words, with a 40 word maximum. In a perfect world, you can accomplish this in a single sentence, but two is acceptable if need be. For a really complicated story, three is pushing it but not a capital offense.

And before you start complaining about how hard it will be to squeeze an entire story’s worth of important information into so few words, remember that most of you live on Twitter. I wholly believe you can do this. Additionally, this is a rule you get to break later once you’ve gotten more experience and know when longer ledes are appropriate.

Still, it can be hard, does take practice and your editor will probably rearrange what you’ve written on occasion anyway. But writing like this is the best way to guarantee everyone who opens your article will get the most important information, even if they only read one sentence.

As point one of the inverted pyramid section explained, the best way to stick to this tight restriction is to focus on the “who, what, when, where and why.” Not all of them will fit in every lede, so use your best judgement when picking which are the most important. Anything else can be saved for later.

In my experience, the who and what are most important. The why is up there too, but it is often too complicated to fit into a tight lede. Besides leaving this out often creates a hook that pulls a reader deeper into the story, which is a good thing (you won’t make them wait long for it, anyway).

As for the where and the when, the former is less important in the age of the internet and the latter is often assumed to be recently, since it’s showing up in the news that day. Still, just because these aren’t the most compelling parts of the story doesn’t mean you should leave them out of the lede. Details matter, and sometimes it’s really easy to fit them in.

It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to follow all of these rules and end up with a really boring lede that doesn’t really compel people to keep reading. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of practice to write really good, compact summary ledes. Despite this, take a look at some hard news outside of esports and you’re likely to find some good examples.

With that said, it’s also important to note that you don’t always have to get fancy. Sometimes the news is really simple, and just the bare facts are enough to get the point across effectively. If your story is only a handful of paragraphs anyway, this fact probably applies. When that happens, don’t blow a brain vessel trying to be clever and you’ll crank the article out much faster.

Finally, despite limiting a lede’s scope to so little information, multiple ledes on the same subject can focus on different things. A lot of the way you order information depends on your story’s angle. And considering that’s the case, you know what I’m about to ask for…

Summary lede exercise #1

That’s right! It’s another exercise — this time about writing different ledes for the same information. What I want you to do is look at the information below and write three ledes that prioritize three of the five Ws differently. Please also include a brief explanation about how effective each lede is at conveying the story’s important information (which means consider the angle).

“After years without winning a domestic title, Counter Logic Gaming shocked the League of Legends world on Sunday by going from last place during the 2020 Spring Split to winning the 2020 Summer Split playoffs. The team was largely anchored by Eugene “Pobelter” Park, who replaced Lee “Crown” Min-ho in the mid lane, and defeated favorites Cloud9 in a close 3–2 series. CLG brought home their first title since 2016 at the Talking Stick Resort Arena, in Phoenix.”

Yes, I know that this example is far-fetched for a few reasons, but please ignore the most egregious ones: that COVID-19 will be handled well enough for an in-person LCS Summer 2020 finals and that they’d hold it in Phoenix. But as an Arizona based optimist, let a man dream.

Nut grafs

While you can tell a lot with a lede, there’s no way to fit an entire story into 40 words. So once you’ve written your lede, it’s time to write a nut graf. Yes, graf means a paragraph. It’s journalism lingo, just like lede.

As for the purpose of a nut graf, it should contain enough to tell the story “in a nutshell.” This is where the most important details/context goes that couldn’t fit in the lede. The why often fits here because the space restrictions on a nut graf are much looser. It should still be fairly short (like any graf in an article), but there’s definitely room for three to four, complex sentences if need be.

Speaking of why, this is also the perfect place to justify why this story matters, which is also instrumental for keeping a reader interested. Finally, it should also open up the rest of the story, because even the nut graf doesn’t have enough room for everything.

After that, you’ll continue on with the rest of the story as normal, which I say without explaining what that means. The reason for that is it depends on the kind of story you’re writing. So, we’ll get to that when we talk about how to write each one. But if you follow the inverted pyramid and throw in some original reporting (y’know, quotes and the like), you’ll be fine.

Nut graf exercise #1

There are no more exercises. Congrats! This isn’t something you need to practice quite as much as a lede. Besides, if I ask you to write this for some scenario, I have to make up even more fake info, and you’ll basically be writing a whole story anyway. I probably won’t ask you to do that until later (yeah, I probably will at some point).

But in the meantime, if you’ve gotten this far without doing the other exercises, go back and do them. Please :)

Wrapping up

This doesn’t mean I’m wrapping up this article just yet (soon though). What I want to touch on briefly is how to end a story. By the time you get to this point of the article, there isn’t much important info left to share. Despite that, it doesn’t mean you can just blow off the end. Your reader committed to this, so do them the courtesy of finishing strong.

Unlike writing an essay, wrapping up doesn’t mean summarizing everything you’ve already written. The best thing to do is to either look ahead with some extra but ultimately unnecessary context. If you’re writing a match recap, let the reader know when and where they can watch the next game. If you’re writing about a new patch, let them know when to expect the next one. If you’re writing about a person, let your readers know where they can be found online.

Sometimes you’ll mix it up in other ways, but this is generally the best thing to do when in doubt.

What’s next?

First off, if you listen closely, you’ll hear me clapping for you. Thanks for making it to the end of the first proper lesson. I really appreciate you both validating the time I spent writing this and taking an effort to improve your craft. But we’re far from finished, so keep an eye out for lesson three next week. We’re going to back up a step and talk about how to come up with good story ideas and how to pitch them to outlets. When combined with what you learned from this, you should have everything you need to start a proper esports journalism career (whatever that means).

Otherwise, if you’re reading this long after it’s been initially published, you can find a link to that next lesson here. And if you actually did the exercises, this will eventually be a link to both my answers and some of my favorite/the best responses.

In the meantime, keep writing, reading and gaming.

That education often comes in the form of personal experience and sometimes comes in the form of learning through observation. But editors, the theoretical best educational resource possible, are unfortunately underutilized. The demands on their time can often be overwhelming, and the amount of staff who need help can make the kind of regular, individualized attention required for consistent growth impossible.

So, to help shoulder some of that burden and foster improvement throughout the industry, I’m offering my expertise. From this moment forward, if you’re reading this series to learn more about esports journalism, consider me your editor. And if that’s the case, you probably have an assignment due in my comment section by the end of the week.

About the editor

It would be naive to think anyone would listen to advice without knowing more about the person giving it. Hell, it might be naive to think anyone would listen to my advice even after learning more about me. Regardless, here’s a bit on my background and why I started this project.

For those of you displaced in time, I decided to start this in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic for a number of reasons:

1. I have always wanted to help esports journalists improve their craft. As much as I am capable of writing and reporting, I have preferred the act of editing since day one.
2. The job market is abysmal right now, and not using my experience in some form is a waste. Since there are no esports editor roles available at the moment, I decided to simply declare myself everyone’s editor. It is indeed as presumptuous as it sounds, but I’m hoping to make up for that fact by being helpful.
3. As I mentioned above, a lot of other editors don’t have the resources to do this themselves — at least not for everyone that wants to learn. Anyone can be a journalist if they want, and anyone who wants deserves to know how to do the job well.

Now, how can you be sure I know what I’m talking about? Well, you’ll probably have to decide for yourself. And to be honest, I am far from the final word on any subject brought up in this series of articles. There are a lot of smart, talented editors out there in the world, and if they disagree with anything I’ve written, it’s worth listening to what they have to say. I’ll always turn things like that into a discussion.

Undercutting myself aside, I do have quite a bit of experience. To start, I have a master’s degree in sports journalism from Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. While you may aptly notice that sports are not esports, it’s the closest I could get to an advanced, relevant degree in the field. That’s where I sharpened the journalism skills I developed during the past decade. My actual journalism career started in 2009 as an undergraduate, working at the University of Arizona’s Daily Wildcat. I worked as a copy editor and video game reporter for the Arts and Entertainment desk, but I eventually spent time as both copy chief and the assistant arts and entertainment editor.

After graduating, I wrote for numerous outlets while working a non-industry communications job. These sites and organizations include places like Kotaku, Polygon, Tespa, Cronkite Sports, Global Sports Matters, SB Nation and a few other places that are still in the works. I also worked as an editor, specifically, at Upcomer (for as long as that site lasted, at least). I’ve covered plenty of subjects, but I try to report on esports whenever possible.

I prefer to write long-form features when possible and my original esport is competitive Pokémon. However, since readers have short attention spans and most people prefer tier one esports, I’ve had to learn a lot so I could make a living. And, at least before this pandemic thing, the making a living part was going pretty well!

Anyway that’s a lot about me. Let’s get to the stuff you actually care about.

The esports journalism landscape

Before exploring more specific, granular lessons, let’s take a look at some big picture stuff — like the overall landscape. It’s primarily divided into two groups: the people we cover and esports journalists themselves.

The former group is made up of professional players, coaches, teams, game developers, tournament organizers, fans and beyond. And even though they write like journalists (and many journalists contribute to these sites), official, league produced content does not count as strict journalism. Without these groups, we would have nothing to report on. However, without us, their reach would be much smaller (regardless of what they might believe). I’ll go more in depth about this group when it’s time to talk about sources.

The latter group is made up of all the esports outlets. The biggest and best are those like ESPN Esports, which has far more resources than most other sites thanks to the size of its main site (ESPN proper). They often feature the best reported stories from many of the best journalists in the industry, and their stories are edited by the best editors. These are the sites most people dream of working at full time, because it comes with a livable income and incredible opportunities.

Then there are the likes of Dot Esports and Inven Global and many other endemic outlets. These sites don’t have quite the same resources as the industry leaders, so they have to churn out far more content about much wider subjects. This includes everything from game guides to online drama, all alongside more traditional esports journalism. These sites are where almost all of the biggest names in the industry got their starts, and where many still work to this day. Their journalists are also paid, but usually at a rate that requires some to grind out articles (sometimes at multiple sites) to get by.

There are also what you might think of as non-endemic outlets, which occasionally publish esports stories alongside their normal material. Sometimes their primary focus is general gaming, sports or business, but they are still worth paying attention to. In my experience, sites like the Washington Post’s Launcher and Polygon have been great examples of this category. And since their scope is so much larger, they tend to have better rates and support for freelancers.

After that, there are plenty of smaller outlets that don’t have many resources at all. These sites are often run as passion projects on a volunteer basis, and can be a good place to try your hand at journalism when first starting out. However, because they are so small, they rarely offer the same opportunities for growth as the previously mentioned sites. If your goal is to make a living off of esports journalism, try and cut your teeth at a larger outlet as soon as you can.

Also, it would be remiss not to warn burgeoning young journalists about predatory sites that want to exploit your labor for little to no pay. How can you spot the red flags? Well, the biggest culprits are outlets that lure people in by offering to pay per view, as if anyone will earn more than a few dollars per article unless you get lucky and go viral. Others promise a certain opportunity only to back out down the road.

As a freelancer, you really don’t have much protection from anyone, so just be sure to get everything in writing, from rates to other agreements. Read any contracts you sign, and don’t be afraid to argue about specific clauses you don’t like. It may be non-negotiable, but it never hurts to ask.

Finally, while we’re on the subject of bad actors in esports journalism, the most important identifier of a shady outlet is how honest they are with you and how equitable things are. Even if a site pays per view, are they up front about how little money you’ll make? If you’re spending the majority of your week writing for a single outlet, did they make you a staff writer instead of a contract worker? Lots of sites struggle financially in the industry right now, but the best ones to work with are the outlets who look out for their writers instead of trying to cash in off of them.

Content versus journalism

Next, it’s important to understand exactly what we’re creating in this industry. Esports journalism, like a lot of new media, doesn’t adhere to the same, rigid structure of traditional media. However, it still uses the same underlying structure. Despite that fact, many journalists don’t know how to differentiate between the types of writing that they and their peers are putting out.

The word content is thrown around a lot these days, creating some confusion within the journalism industry. What exactly is journalism and how is it different from content? I like to think of their relationship like this:

You know how all squares are also rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares? Well, all journalism is content, but not all content is journalism. The biggest differentiator is original reporting. When you’ve spoken to someone and put their quotes, verbatim, into a story, that’s journalism. Once you replace those original sources with secondary sources, like Tweets or statements given to another outlet, you start blurring the line. If you’ve just taken a press release, rearranged the words and added your personal thoughts, that’s definitely “content.” There are a lot of other differences between journalism and content, but you’ll see them scattered throughout this series instead of compiled into some list below.

Anyway, I don’t want to cast content in a negative light, because the industry frankly still needs it to survive (for now). But I’ll be frank: I generally don’t enjoy most content. It’s usually boring or the author is too self-indulgent. At best these stories can be useful or entertaining, but they rarely scratch the same itch good journalism does.

People read journalism because they care about what the sources (pro players, coaches or league commissioners) in the story have to say. There are exceptions to this rule, but only in very specific scenarios. The most common of these is when a person has worked hard as a journalist for years and established themselves as an authority on the subject they cover. Readers know this person, trust them and reward them with their attention.

Another example is when reporters have a very personal stake in a story — a perspective only they can offer to their audience. This is why a lot of broadcast talent makes successful content. Not only do they have the trust and attention of an audience, but they have more familiarity/access with a league than even most journalists.

Otherwise (and I mean this in the kindest way), most people do not give a single shit about what you think about any given subject. There are a million people sharing their esports opinions on the internet every day, and even a nicely written post isn’t that different from the best of what you’d find on Reddit. Relying heavily on opinions really only works because readers either a) like to feel validated by others or b) like to loudly disagree.

My point is, while journalism often requires a bit more time and effort than content writing, it’s usually a more worthwhile endeavor. Eventually, if you stick with it, you’ll find yourself in a better position to write opinion pieces. And when you do, you’ll have enough experience behind you not to write something you’ll regret later in your career. Writing regular news will also become such a joke that you’ll have time to really make even those stories your own.

Defining roles and relationships

Finally, I would be remiss if I ended this post without a clear explanation of what your job is as a journalist and what your editor’s job is. This may seem like the peak of condescension, but you might be surprised at how many people don’t know what is or isn’t someone’s responsibility at an outlet. Anyway, here’s the gist.

Journalists

Your job, first and foremost, is to report the truth as fairly and accurately, while doing as little harm as possible in what should be a transparent process. These are the heart of the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics, and we’ll get more into why they exist later. For now, know that working in this way helps you accomplish your job, which is to report the news by telling compelling stories that speak truth to power.

More specifically, that requires you do a number of tasks first, like pitching stories, picking angles, contacting sources, brainstorming questions, conducting interviews, transcribing direct quotes, coming up with headline ideas, finding photos, hitting deadlines and writing rough drafts. These are all both basic and obvious tasks you could probably have guessed on your own, but your job isn’t over once your rough draft is submitted.

There’s actually a bit more to do. To start, read your own story for errors when you’re done. While it is your editor’s job to make your story flawless, it’s a two-way street. The less time we have to spend on minor mistakes you know not to make, the more time we can spend on the finer details that really make articles stand out.

So, whenever you’ve finished a piece, read the whole thing out loud and make sure everything sounds right. Not only will reading it in your actual voice ensure you go over every single word, it will help you hear whether there are any awkward lines. And trust me, this is well worth the extra time, because editors do remember when you turn in giant messes. If you want the best assignments when it comes time to hand them out, your odds of getting picked go way up if you make an editor’s job easier.

Next, after the story is edited, read it again and compare the changes to your original draft. Check to see if your editor left you any notes. Then, take a second to internalize the edits and understand why they were made. Editors don’t expect writers to grok every single change right away, but we will get tired of fixing the same things over and over. And if you can pick up on suggestions quickly, you’ll shoot up to the top of your editor’s list of favorites in no time.

Finally, always ask questions, in all areas of life. A curious mind is the most important thing a journalist can have, as it will lead to more, better stories than you could imagine.

As for what isn’t your job? Well there isn’t too much that comes to mind that isn’t easier to frame as a simple description of your editor’s job. But there are a few things worth mentioning specifically, very quickly:

1. It is not your job to burn out on stories for little to no pay. Know your worth, and refuse to do what amounts to a salaried job for less than an actual salary (even a small one).
2. It is absolutely not your job to make up any information, ever, unless it’s for satire. And if you’re writing satire, it better be CLEAR and ACTUALLY FUNNY.
3. Actually, just stay away from satire.

Editors

The heart of an editor’s job is in the name, but there’s so much more to it than simple line editing. Editors are often leaders, too, and are responsible for your growth as a journalist. If all they do is polish up your story and say “good job, here’s your money,” they’re only doing half their job. Either that, or they have so much editing on their plate there’s no time for anything else.

But yes, much of their job involves digging into the nitty-gritty of your stories, checking for grammar, syntax and style to make sure it’s actually readable. They also should do fact checking whenever possible, acting as a safety net in case a reporter gets something wrong. And a lot of the time, their experience with well written stories helps them arrange the pieces in a way that’s most compelling to a reader. Also, they should probably spend a portion of their time thinking of good story ideas, as experts, and assigning them to their best journalists for the job.

Once that’s done, they’ll also usually put the story into the back end of the website, upload photos (that you should have found or taken), write a final headline and hit the publish/schedule button. They actually do a lot of stuff before the actual editing, too, like helping journalists settle on an angle and answering questions about the reporting process.

In terms of leadership, it’s also an editor’s job to decide the overall direction of the site. This can be in a macro sense (like if a site works on the business of esports or on one specific title) or in a more micro sense (like if the audience prefers interviews to recaps and guides).

Editors should also protect their staff from all sides: the public, upper management and even themselves. Much of that protection is offered through the act of editing itself, but it also involves taking responsibility for editorial decisions. Simply put, journalists make mistakes, and it’s an editor’s job to stop them. If one slips through, that ultimately lands on the editor’s shoulders. If an editor is hanging their journalists out to dry after a story has been published, they suck.

Finally, there are a few things that editors absolutely shouldn’t be doing. The first is over editing your story, to the point where you can’t even recognize who actually wrote it. If the story requires such drastic changes, that means there’s a big problem somewhere in the process. It could be with the editor, but it could also be with what you wrote. If it happens with a news story on a tight deadline, chances are they simply didn’t have time to pass it back and show you what exactly went wrong. But if it happens with a feature story that has no pressing deadline, stand up for your work and ask them why so much has to change.

Otherwise, no editor should be perfect, because it’s impossible. Honestly, if there’s one thing you learn about editing from this whole thing, it should be that even editors make mistakes. That’s why, in a perfect world, multiple editors read over every piece before hitting publish. So if something slips past them, whether it’s in your story or someone else’s, remember to be understanding. Just send them a polite DM or email and they’ll be glad to fix it ASAP.

Reasons to do journalism

In the esports journalism industry, it sometimes feels like there’s a self imposed divide between the work we do and the rest of our professional peers outside esports. It’s almost like a weird sense of pride about the differences between our work and theirs. I’ve always found this strange, since I’ve never seen a significant difference between reporting on esports and anything else.

At the end of the day, it’s all journalism (or at least it should be). We are not separate from the media, nor are we beholden to any different standards. Besides, odds are pretty good that, at some point in your journalism career, you’ll be reporting on something that doesn’t quite have to do with esports. Despite this, the same skills and experience will apply.

Regardless, I’ve thought a lot about why some of us see ourselves as different from a local government beat reporter, for example. It could be because our subject matter is so different and grounded in an entertainment industry. But then you’d expect there to be a greater affinity to traditional sports journalism, which is also something I haven’t seen much.

Instead, I think it has to do with motivation and the reason many people get into this field. Some have always had an affinity for writing and use their love of esports as an outlet. Others want to be esports journalists so they can see matches up close where it’s exciting and get to speak with players/professionals. But very few get into it because they love journalism, and that creates problems.

To wax poetic for a moment, journalism is about more than writing or the thrill of meeting your favorite players. It’s not even really about giving people the content they want to read. At its core, journalism is about providing people with information they need to make the best decisions when interacting with a part of society — esports, in this case.

That’s why a site’s leadership makes editorial decisions about what to cover, and covering important issues in esports matters. There are many examples of journalists holding esports organizations accountable for not paying their players, or for the bad behavior of players themselves. These articles have had an actual impact and made this industry a better place.

With that being said, whatever your motivation for doing this work is fine. Sometimes one motivation can change into another, too. But if your goal is really to find an outlet for your writing, to see the excitement up close or even to make a lot of money (lol, good luck), there are other, better ways to accomplish those goals. The people who don’t burn out of journalism are the ones who are doing this because they think their readers deserve to know the truth about what’s going on in an industry we love.

Now, you can call that idealistic if you want. I’ll gladly cop to that. And while you certainly can’t pay to keep the lights on if your editorial decisions don’t give your audience at least some of what they want, outlets that are more concerned about making money than doing good journalism certainly aren’t in the business for the right reasons.

What’s next?

if you got this far into the lecture and still want to learn more about esports journalism, you’re in luck. This is just the first of multiple lessons on the subject. The next piece will always be added in as a link in the previous one once it has been published, but here’s a preview if you catch this right as it goes live.

Instead of starting from the ideation phase of telling a story, we’re going to dive right into the basic mechanics of writing. There will even be exercises included, and I highly recommend posting your work in the comments. I promise, if anyone gives you something other than constructive feedback, I will D E L E T E them.

So check back often, or follow @Krellitlikeitis on Twitter. You’ll probably get a bunch of Pokémon in your timeline, but at least you won’t miss when a new lesson gets posted. Otherwise, thanks for reading, and I hope you found this lesson helpful!

(Lesson two)

While building their Dallas Regional Championships team, Aaron Traylor said Wolfe Glick showed him and Justin Carris the damage calculations for Blast Burn Gmax Charizard. At first, he balked at the idea. But when Traylor compared the numbers to Overheat and considered the rest of their team, he said he knew the trio of trainers had found something powerful.

“That was when I knew we were going to win the regional,” Traylor said.

The other 543 players at what became the largest Video Game Championship regional of the modern era had no idea, even by the end of the tournament’s first day. Traylor slid into top 32 cut with an 8–2 record while both Carris and Glick fell short of joining him at 7–3. Glick, a popular selection for highlight matches as the 2016 world champion and current North American International champion, managed to avoid revealing their team during the event, possibly thanks to a shortened stream schedule.

Traylor only provided his first hint at victory during his top 8 match against Justin Crubaugh. His Gmax Charizard powered through a Thunder Wave in game one and whittled down a dangerous, Scope-Lens Togekiss while it slept. Traylor even avoided being punished for using Blast Burn twice after his Gigantamax ended.

Apparently, that was how game one usually went for him. Traylor said that out of all his many sets, he only lost the first game in his loss to Carris during the tournament’s Swiss rounds. His game two against Crubaugh, which played out similarly, reinforced why Traylor had found so much success with this team.

Despite this, Traylor found himself in a difficult situation in top 4. He was up against another Justin (Burns, in this case), who brought four of the same six Pokémon as Crubaugh. Traylor said that gave his opponent additional information about how to handle the match up.

“They had a similar team and it was challenging in the same ways, so I had to do different stuff,” Traylor said. “And at the end of the day, he got a little lucky, so it pushed me in ways that other opponents didn’t.”

The situation looked dire during the first half of game one, but by bringing his previously unseen Trick Room option, Traylor eked out a close win. But Burns adjusted where Crubaugh couldn’t, quickly removed the first half of Traylor’s team and brought his Rhyperior to handle Trick Room. He did land a number of well-timed critical hits, but Traylor couldn’t risk that happening again by sticking to his original plan.

That was when he said he decided to improvise.

“Wolfe and I came up with a game plan, and that was me sort of going off script in game three,” Traylor said. “He was like ‘you need to do this every game and stick to it.’ But in game three, I had this crazy game plan and I just decided to do it. And I could see him in the audience like, watching the steam, like ‘no!”, head in hands.”

His crazy plan was to lean on the original core of their team, Duraludon and Whimsicott. After losing his Togekiss and removing Burns’ Grimmsnarl, he used the potent combination of Fake Tears and Life Orb boosted special attacks to bring him to the edge of victory. Then, after enduring a powerful Thunderbolt from Dragapault, his Jellicent closed out the set with a Water Spout.

At that point, only Bingjie Wang stood in Traylor’s way, with a seemingly easy to handle Pokémon anchoring his team: Durant. With a Gmax Charizard in tow against a Pokémon that’s four-times weak to Fire type attacks, victory looked certain. Yet, Durant was faster than Charizard, and its Hustle boosted Max Rockfall would almost certainly land the knock out after the residual damage from sand.

Traylor handled the issue like a champion, dancing around the Durant until he could vaporize it. Wang did get a bit too aggressive in game two by not protecting his Durant with Follow Me, but Traylor was playing like a man on fire. He showed no fear as he ordered his Charizard to attack in the face of potentially lethal damage.

In the end, Traylor proved a number of things with his win. First, that he shines under the limelight of regionals streamed by The Pokémon Company International. Traylor brought home his first regional win at St. Louis in 2015, the very first regional streamed by TPCI.

Second, he proved that players may have overlooked Gmax Charizard, as well as other Gigantamax forms. Traylor said he expects the community to look at all Gmax Pokémon more critically as they’re added to this year’s format and beyond.

Finally, Traylor proved the potential of teamwork in what is normally an individual esport. In addition to the joy he felt from winning such a huge, grueling regional, Traylor said he was also proud of what he’d built with Carris and Glick. His only regret was that the three of them didn’t make top four together.

“I would have been much happier if it was the three of us in top four, because I think this team deserves it,” Traylor said. “But ten rounds of Swiss is really hard.”

With the first regional of the Sword and Shield era in the books, trainers are now setting their sights on the first International Championships, which takes place in Melbourne from February 21–23. In the remaining weeks until then, trainers will be exploring new teams and learning from the lessons provided by the Dallas Regional Championships. To get started, check out Traylor’s written team report and Glick’s video report on the winning squad.

Millions of high school students have participated in traditional sports for decades, but the rise of high school esports may give a new segment of teenagers across the country the chance to reap the same benefits as their athletic peers.

Leading leagues

While the esports industry as a whole is still young, high school esports are in their relative infancy. Numerous leagues have popped up around the country and offer students the chance to pursue a new kind of competition, but not all of them survived more than a few years. Despite that, companies like High School Esports League (HSEL) are thriving, and new efforts to organize esport competitions are emerging every year. Based on HSEL’s recent growth, co-founder Charles Riley said the future is looking positive.

“Man, the past year and a half has just been explosive,” Reilly said. “All the schools you see on our map, those have been signed up since fall of 2017.”

The map lists more than 1,700 schools, with at least one (if not many more) in every state across the country. There are even a few schools participating in HSEL from Canada. Each school has the potential to field multiple teams for major titles like League of Legends, Overwatch and Counter Strike: Global Offensive, and each team has at least a handful of students on it.

That’s a lot of growth for a company that Reilly founded with two other friends while they were still working day jobs. Reilly was delivering pizzas and running tournaments on the weekend before getting a job selling parts at Subaru to pay for prizes and website development. Their league was a free service back when it was more of a hobby, but Reilly said things really picked up in 2017 when they attracted 200 schools while charging $5 per student. Comparing that to HSEL’s current number of schools, the company has almost increased its reach 10 times over.

Not all leagues have seen the same success, however. High School Starleague (HSL), founded in 2011 in a similar fashion to HSEL, ceased operations in 2018. Co-founder Zach Cronin-Hurley said he started the league alongside Adriel Leung as a sophomore in high school after playing StarCraft II in a different league that was disorganized, unsatisfying and only for individuals.

A week later, Cronin-Hurley said he and Leung decided to create a better, team-based league. Since Cronin-Hurley’s mother was a web developer, she helped the pair set up a site where they could organize the league. After getting a few of his classmates to help out with further organization, they posted the league’s information on a popular StarCraft II community hub run by one of the largest esport organizations in North America, Team Liquid.

“We thought if we could get eight teams, we could run an eight-team bracket and this would be a huge success,” Cronin-Hurley said. “We passed eight within an hour, and by the time signups closed, I think we closed with somewhere around 60 teams.”

That’s when Cronin-Hurley said he realized that if there were 60 high schools that wanted to participate in a league like this after only a week or two of work, there had to be something more they could do. So, his team kept at it.

“There were a ton of mess-ups, I’m sure, in that first season, because we were literally all high schoolers trying to run an organization,” Cronin-Hurley said. “But we made it through and actually got then up-and-coming caster [Erik] DoA [Lonnquist] to cast the finals over summer.”

After a successful “season zero,” HSL pushed forward. They added new games, like League of Legends and Dota 2, and even partnered with Collegiate Starleague. However, the founders and new staff eventually made the transition from high school to college. As Cronin-Hurley got involved with his on-campus robotics club, he took a step-back from HSL. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who started focusing on different goals.

“The people who were on the leadership end weren’t in a position where they could make it [HSL] their lives if they got the funding to do it,” Cronin-Hurley said. “So, they never really sought a lot of funding, whereas some of the other leagues started to. Having that monetary disadvantage, having just a few people volunteer to run it basically, eventually bogged down the organization.”

While many high school esport leagues are founded by fellow enthusiasts to connect clubs across the country, at least one is taking a different approach by working with state high school athletics organizations.

Legacy Esports, founded in 2018 by CEO Andrew Barnett, is in the process of establishing state esport championship leagues in Arizona, California, Louisiana and New Mexico — with other potential states on the horizon. While coordinating with the Arizona Interscholastic Association (AIA), Legacy got very close to launching one such league in the spring of 2019. Schools in Arizona were putting together teams and building completely new computer labs where students could compete. But in a press release to member schools, AIA director of business development Brian Bolitho announced they would postpone the inaugural season until the fall of 2019. He claimed his organization hadn’t given all schools enough time to register teams and prepare their technology.

According JD Healy, Legacy’s liaison to Arizona, both organizations are still feeling out the process of how to let the information about high school esports proliferate through schools. He said that sometimes athletic directors and principals might not even realize their school has an esports program on campus because a teacher outside of athletics is running it.

“Rather than have one of those situations where a small percentage of schools are involved in it, and so everybody looks at that first year and goes, ‘Well do we put an asterisk next to that state championship?’” Healy said. “Nobody wants that. It’s not about not about jumping out there and trying to get this done quickly, it’s about trying to make sure that it’s done right.”

The AIA also previously had some uncertainty about which games schools could participate in. They tentatively planned to hold state championships for League of Legends and Rocket League before pivoting to Overwatch and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate after opening registration. Healy explained that, unlike traditional sports such as football or basketball, esports are actually owned by companies. As a result, leagues must acquire the proper license before schools can compete.

“We’re trying to respect what the state associations are trying to put together,” Healy said. “We have to at the same time, respect all the publishers and the hard work that they’ve done to make their games what they are today. So, we go to them, we look at their guidelines, we supply all the data they need to try and show them how we are adhering to those guidelines. And we let them know how much the kids want to play their games.”

Impact of esports education

League organizers aren’t the only ones who have noticed how much students want to participate in esports competition. Mike Russell, a social studies teacher at Complete High School Maize in the Kansas School District, said he has seen huge impacts since integrating esports into his school. Russell entered his team in an HSEL league in the spring of 2018 and began to see his students benefit. He said they improved their communication skills and online behavior. This led him to develop an entire class based around esports, called Gaming Concepts, alongside CHSM’s principal Kristy Custer.

The one-hour class includes both free time to game and a structured lesson on subjects such as hand-eye coordination, health and nutrition logs, streaming and basic PC components. Russell said students in the course have improved their grade point averages by 1.3 points, and that players on the esports team have improved an additional .389 points.

Gaming Concepts also has a 94 percent attendance rate (well above the 85 percent goal), which is why the class is held in the mornings. Russell added this incentivizes students to show up to campus and attend the rest of their classes. He gave an example of one student who missed 21 days before starting the course, and only four days after.

“This student is not a unique case,” Russell said. “This happens every semester, and we’re just in shock over how good the numbers are.”

The class is also a safe environment for students to practice perseverance, according to Russell. It’s a valuable skill that Russell said students cannot learn without experiencing failure, and it’s a skill they’re better off learning in school than after they graduate.

“Video games allow students the unique opportunity to fail at something and try again, but with no harm to themselves,” Russell said. “Perseverance is very important as a life skill. Imagine trying something once, failing, and never doing that thing again. So many inventions and ideas have come to fruition because of perseverance.”

Gaming Concepts has also been such a success that Russell and Custer have been invited to give multiple talks on the subject. They’ve spoken at the Mid-American Computer Educators conference, the Future of Education Technology conference, the Global Esports conference and to many individual schools.

“We have had overwhelming support at these conferences and have had the opportunity to win over some educators that were a bit apprehensive about starting a program in their own schools,” Russell said.

Meanwhile, on the west coast, Carlos Aldaco has reached a similar conclusion to Russell by taking a different route. Aldaco is the guidance technician at Troy High School in California’s Fullerton Joint Union High School District, and he is also the esports program general manager. Troy is known for producing one of the first professional esport talents who started in high school (League of Legends player Eugene “Pobelter” Park), but Aldaco said education takes priority over performance.

Troy’s esports program participates in a league organized by the North American Scholastic Esports Foundation, which Aldaco said works with state departments of education to ensure students are getting more from their experience than just the fun of competition.

“NASEF is more about education because they do realize that not every student is going to be an esports player,” Aldaco said. “But it’s a growing industry. You could do something related to esports — maybe you can do marketing or business.”

Aldaco added that NASEF even has an A-G approved curriculum, which is a series of standards required for students to get into University of California and California State University schools.

Student success

While school staff are focused on educational opportunities, Mark Lee and Allison Trinh appreciate them as well. Both are seniors at Troy High School and said they learned numerous skills while participating in the esports program. Lee spoke about the way his communication and problem solving improved while preparing for games, and Trinh gained many new skills as the manager of Troy’s girls League of Legends team.

“I think I’ve developed many skills that other students haven’t, especially when it comes to emailing other business, contacting companies and even getting to know underclassmen,” Trinh said. “I’ve learned more skills I can probably use later in life.”

At the same time, both also spoke to the newfound sense of belonging created by Troy’s esports program.

“When I was a child, my dad would force me to, like, find a hobby or a sport that I was good at,” Lee said. “And it never really clicked for me, but I was still a super competitive person. So, I feel like having like esports can help me satisfy that competitive aspect and will also be good for me.”

As for their personal futures with esports after graduating high school, their answers differed. Trinh said she’s planning to pursue a very different career but added that she wants to keep in touch as much as possible with what’s going on at Troy. Lee, on the other hand, said he knows playing for the University of California, Irvine isn’t in the cards when he starts there as a student, but he fully plans to get involved behind the scenes.

The price to play

Despite the benefits, it isn’t cheap to establish an esports league. According to Russell, it cost CHSM more than $15,000 to turn a former library into a gaming lab. Most of that cost came in the form of the high-end computers required to compete without any technical issues.

Almost half of the funding came from grants. One from the district’s technology team paid for six computers, while a grant from Walmart paid for a seventh. The money for the other eight computers came out of the Maize Education Foundation. Russell said these equipment costs will be hard for schools to avoid, but that local resources may alleviate some of the financial burden.

That, of course, doesn’t include what it costs for a school to participate in a league. HSEL has a number of different registration packages, ranging from $25 per season for a single player to $700 for unlimited players — which their site describes is a 30 percent savings. According to Reilly, while he isn’t sure which package is most popular, he did know HSEL didn’t want to price schools out of participating.

“We don’t want to overcharge these schools, so everybody gets the same thing at this point.” Reilly said. “It’s just for those larger clubs, we don’t want to charge them thousands of dollars to be a part of our stuff, so we cap it out.”

Legacy Esports and the AIA have yet to set a particular price-point, according to Healy. The original plan was to charge $50 per student, which would allow them to participate in any number of games. Then Healy said the organization considered that some schools might field multiple teams in the same game, so they considered a flat rate. While there won’t be an official answer until closer to the beginning of the fall season, Healy did say the cost will be adjusted as necessary on a year-by-year basis. He stressed another goal as more important.

“We’re trying to figure out more and more ways where we can make this to where, you know, the kid that’s playing is less impacted,” Healy said.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t cost anything for students to participate in NASEF’s league, according to Aldaco.

Feelings on the future

With so many people involved in high school esports, there are many different ideas about where the industry will go. People like Russell said they think esports will be in 80 to 90 percent of high schools within the next five years. Aldaco said he’s trying to grow the industry with patience by increasing awareness through conversations with other schools. Healy envisions so much popularity that leagues will have to divide themselves into smaller regions and divisions, just like traditional high school athletics.

For Trinh and Lee, their idea of the future is all about students. Trinh said she hopes what Troy High School is doing can teach others that esports is an opportunity to learn new skills and even earn college scholarships.

“We want to encourage other students to realize you don’t have to be a professional just to play esports,” Trinh said. “You can be at the lowest level or have the lowest experience in it and you can still be a part of esports.”

Lee, instead, said he hoped future growth would cause reduce the stigma against esports that makes it difficult for students to openly admit they plays games for their school.

“While there’s also a competitive aspect, it’s also about having fun,” Lee said. “If you’re always concerned about telling people what you do, it’s kind of hard to really enjoy what you’re doing. And for me, embracing being a part of the school and being part of the first wave of esports has made it a lot more enjoyable to play for the team.”

No one knows for certain where high school esports is going, but based on all the people involved, it certainly isn’t going away.

I’ve always been intrigued by the Devil, as a character. From John Milton’s Paradise Lost to Masaaki Yuasa’s Devilman Crybaby, Satan’s defiance of God is one of the most intriguing acts across all forms of storytelling. Why does he do it? Are his actions justified? What does a benevolent God hope to accomplish by casting out his creation? The questions that defiance raises, and the lessons gleaned from that decision, are perfectly reflected in this latest Netflix sensation.

— MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW —

Love DOES exist. Therefore, there IS sadness

The series opens with some of its biggest themes right out in the open, though it attempts to obfuscate them by initially presenting their opposites. Ryo Asuka states as the first lines of the series that he believed love does not exist, therefore there is no sadness. He intentionally says this in the past-tense (foreshadowing his change of heart), but the viewer is likely too busy trying to acclimate to notice or remember until Ryo finishes the sentiment during one of the closing scenes.

Regardless, Devilman Crybaby is entirely about the existence of love and sadness, as well as their importance to a fulfilling life. Akira Fudo serves as the main vehicle for proving these ideals, but Miki Makimura, Miko Kuroda and many other characters in the cast also reinforce the same concepts.

The way Devilman Crybaby defines or portrays love is very nuanced. Sex is another front-and-center aspect of this series, and is inherently entangled with the concept of love — but Devilman is primarily concerned with something more intimate. Love is Akira choosing to save Miki from Ryo at the risk of having his secret exposed. Love is the way Kozo Makimura chose to defend his demon-possessed son from the military, despite the fact that Taro had killed his mother. Love is Miki accepting Akira in his new state, despite the violent acts she saw him commit during Ryo’s broadcast. The point is, love is about how our relationships encourage us to act selflessly.

What’s also interesting is that, while hate is often described as the opposite of love, Devilman Crybaby uses sadness as its foil, instead. This creates an affect where a negative emotion often directed at others is replaced with a negative emotion that a person has to deal with internally. In this way, hatred can emerge as a shade of sadness — a la Miko hating Miki when in truth she was sad that she couldn’t compete with her in track — but it never becomes the primary emotion.

This builds the foundation for Ryo’s redemption, and it’s important that he ends the series as a sad character instead of a hateful one. While his rebellion against God and his hatred for the weakness of humanity might seem to reveal his true feelings, they actually belie the sadness underneath.

The consequences of being cast out

Ryo, after revealing himself as Satan, tells the viewer that he was cast out of heaven after challenging God. This is his source of his motivation, subconscious or otherwise, for much of the series. That being said, the crux of the story rests on understanding why he defied God in the first place.

To understand this, we have to do some extrapolating from the only explicit clue we’re given: Satan’s description of God as “icy.” There are many ways to interpret a single adjective from an unreliable point of view, but understanding Ryo’s personality paints a bigger picture.

The first brushstroke leads us once more to the beginning and end of the series, in Ryo’s proclamation that love and sadness do not exist. These are not the underlying pillars that hold up the universe, but rather the underlying pillars that hold up his character. We constantly see him act on these beliefs, too, in both the many flashbacks to his childhood and in his actions in the present. For the most part, he displays a complete inability to understand either love or sadness when expressed by anyone — himself included. After all, he clearly has always loved Akira despite not understanding that feeling until the end of the series.

And therein lies the rub. Up until the final moments of Devilman Crybaby, Ryo does not understand love or sadness. Thus, one can infer that perhaps calling God “icy” refers to a lack of love felt from his creator. After all, if he was surrounded by a whole host of angels who do understand and feel God’s love, defiance is a fitting reaction. Children who do not understand or know how to properly express their emotions throw tantrums all the time. Whatever outburst Satan had that caused his expulsion from heaven follows the same logic.

Now that we understand what pushed Satan to rebel, it’s important to try and understand what God hoped to achieve by kicking him out of Heaven. Doing so seems rather subjective, but if we remember that one of the series’ themes is the importance of love and its relation to sadness, it’s possible to decide on an interpretation that stays consistent with that theme.

A lesson, not a punishment

After finishing Devilman Crybaby, I saw some takes that viewed Satan’s time on Earth as a punishment for rebellion. That’s a perfectly fine head-cannon, but it seems completely inconsistent with love as a theme of the show, to me. A show about love would not contain a God (a being traditionally described as all powerful and all loving) who would punish any of his creations for anything. Even if you try to justify it as a punishment through the lens of sadness, that is a distortion of how Devilman Crybaby portrays sadness. It is inextricable from love. It’s not an end in and of itself, but a means to one.

With that being the case, it makes much more sense that God expelled Satan from Heaven to teach him the error of his ways. What were his ways again? Not understanding love. And what does Ryo learn at the end of his relationship with Akira? That love exists, that he is sad about losing Akira and that both emotions are important. You can really feel it at the end of the series in the way he cradles Akira’s bisected corpse and sobs with more emotion than he had previously ever displayed.

Of course, this whole argument relies on the acceptance of love as a central theme to the show. I’ve already listed a handful of examples of love spread throughout the series, but a single moment in the final episode encapsulates it more than any other: the baton scene you see in the gif at the beginning of this section.

While love is a huge theme in the show, this scene uses the relay race as a perfect allegory. It creates a chain of love, where each character gives and receives it to someone else. Miko gives it to Miki, and the two explicitly state their love for each other before their deaths. Miki also loves Akira, which is most obvious when she reassures him that they are family. Akira calls Miki the person he loved most while meeting with Ryo after her death, but he has also spent most of his life loving Ryo. Finally, while Ryo never had love for anyone else in the whole world, it is his realization that he loves Akira that grants him redemption.

Everyone deserves a second chance

After realizing what his misunderstanding of love has wrought upon the world, the angels cleanse the Earth of all life in the same way they did before. If you go back and watch the scene where Satan describes it, you’ll notice that the Earth originally had no moon. It is only after the first cleansing that you see it in orbit. And as you can see above, after the Earth is cleansed a second time, you can see a second moon.

Regardless of what this will do to global tides, think of it as a metaphor for Satan’s second chance. God wiped Satan’s slate clean and let his first return to Earth be a chance for him to learn about love as humans do. This is when Ryo meets Akira, washed up on some cliff. Love grows between them, and it takes Ryo losing Akira to uncover those feelings.

Once God saw Satan learned his lesson, he wanted to give him a second chance with another clean-slate. It stands to reason that humanity will repopulate the Earth as they did following the first cleansing, and it also stands to reason that Satan will find a way to reconstitute himself. While it’s impossible to say whether or not Akira, Miko or any of the other characters will be reincarnated as well, the implication is that things will go differently this time around. Satan has clearly learned the lesson that God wanted him to, and it doesn’t really matter whether that nets him a ticket back to heaven or the chance to live a truly loving life on Earth.

What matters is that, because storytelling is an instrument for learning, the viewer should walk away with new depth to their understanding of love and sadness. Ultimately, what I think this aspect of Devilman Crybaby teaches us is this: while people are capable of horrible things, we must remember to seek love in our lives. That will often mean giving and accepting love from others, but it will also mean learning to cope with the sadness that inherently comes along for the ride.

That’s a message that can always resonate with humanity, which constantly struggles against intolerance on multiple fronts — and that’s one of the things that I think makes this series so resonant. The reason the deaths hit hard and the violence may make you feel uncomfortable isn’t because Yuasa was trying to make a spectacle. It’s because those uncomfortable feelings make us confront the sadness we all carry inside. We understand, through empathy or sympathy, what it’s like to lose a loved one. We all fear the violence someone who has forgotten about love can inflict on others. But if we remember that everyone is experiencing their own levels of love and sadness, we might be able to make enough of a difference to drive back our darker impulses.

Final notes

I wanted to conclude with the admission that this is simply a single take on a single theme in Devilman Crybaby, explained through the lens of my own experiences as a white, Jewish, straight dude. I know there are other themes and layers that were not addressed here, and the fact that those exist is further proof that this was a well written show.

I chose to focus on this subject, in this way, because I don’t have the experiences to properly convey the deep sentiment of “otherness” that the demons (specifically Devilmen) represent. Heather Alexandra and Chris Persons do a good job touching on this during their discussion over on Kotaku, and I encourage you to check it out if you want to read more about it. I think those themes are congruent with the rest of my analysis, but I felt talking about them might put me out of my depth. Regardless, I hope you found something interesting here