#ENGINEERS ARE TRAINED TO WORK!!!! AAAAAAAA EXPLODES AND DIES

[hideyseek]

hmmm critiques and wishlist items for the writing of the spirealm below

i think one of the things that really frustrates me about the writing for the spirealm (aside from the way that the dialogue seems to have been written for a radio play and is therefore repetitive and often restates information already extremely clear to the viewer from the cinematography) is that it doesn't strike the specific "acting within a game" balance that i personally want as a person who studied computer programming

there's all this worldbuilding around the rules within a door and the behavior of npcs and what's needed to find the exit door and the key within each door. narratively, this consistently also involves some kind of heart-to-heart or demonstrated understanding of some core experience or emotional wound or backstory of the door ghost. but — in those confrontations, i wish that the show picked a side more.

either option 1 — following through what happened in door one with the snow village, where it turned out to be UNUSUAL for ljs to have a heart-to-heart, and he subverted whatever the normal door rules are in order to leave (we also aren't ever told this which weakens the thematic and narrative impact of his 'subversion' imo). or, option 2 — how games work irl, which is that there are certain key phrases to say to important characters, or key actions to do, that unlock further information and story progression.

as it is, to me, the spirealm toes an awkward line between these two options. the viewer is never given enough information about the true rules of each door to feel tension that the main characters will get into trouble (in fact we're basically told nothing about them beyond this sort of arbitrary "there is one taboo condition per door" which for some reason wasn't true in door 1 but has been true for all subsequent, more challenging doors). the final confrontations with each of the door ghosts seem to consistently follow a pattern of some heart-to-heart conversation but the conversations are written as though they are conversations held between two human people, rather than one human player and one npc who behaves according to specific rules and needs to be told a specific thing in order to react a certain way.

it's possible i'm missing something big behind the intention of the show, to be written this way, but for now i'm mostly frustrated. to be honest, to make the storytelling more effective, i would be really happy actually to see a show like this lean more heavily into pattern stories, or some of the techniques that work well in time loop stories, where main characters (or door travelers in this case) have to try different actions in the same scenarios to change things or get different results slowly after an accumulation of information and understanding of the situation.