#getting weirdly philosophical is the only way I know how to process my emotions okay.

[fleshengine]

I'm experiencing a weird level of cognitive dissonance rn because I'm a couple weeks into a depressive spiral and people keep being nice to me and I think I don't deserve it and yet.

I just had a meeting with my media writing prof and after learning that it'd probably be the last time I see him this year (our class just doesn't meet the last few weeks), I asked if I could hug him and when he hugged me back he repeated "you're a good person" a few times as he patted my back. I'm really behind in the work for his class, but he said forget it and just work on the final project and he'll pass me. He listened to my problems in my other classes and seems to genuinely care. I don't understand it.

Again and again and again I am shown kindness that I swear I do not deserve. Why? Why can't everyone just hate me? It would be so much easier if I was given up on! I could go home and rot in my room and kill myself in five years when I hit 26 and achieve nothing with my life. But nooooo I'm likeable and people care about me so time and time again they see me stumble and lend me a hand that I sully with a touch. I cannot compare. I cannot balance on their shoulders. The rope ladder they throw down chafes my hands and they reach down and tell me one more rung!

In a just world I wouldn't receive this support. Then again, in a just world the things that made me this way wouldn't have happened and I wouldn't need this support. The world is unfair and I am forced to accept the advantage over and over.

[minor-solemnity]

What's your favorite character from the golden trio era?

Oooh idk possibly this is an unpopular opinion - at least it was when I was like, properly in the fandom rather than where I am now which is firmly on the sidelines with my hands over my ears and ignoring everything that I don't like - but Cho Chang. This is probably in part because she got so much undeserved hatred (thank u fandom and author racism) and I am predisposed to like characters that people don't like.

I find her character so heartbreakingly real in a way that I think is entirely accidental on JKR's part. I don't think JK can write women. (Plz don't hate me for that, but like, it's true.) Everything interesting about the characters we are meant to like gets sanded down and ignored in the later books - Hermione's whole thing is like, book smart but not emotionally intelligent, she wants to be right and have people know she's right more than she cares about their feelings. She thinks rules are important until they apply to her. She is ruthless and vindictive and petty. These are interesting character traits that just get completely dropped in the later books. By the time book 6 ends and book 7 starts Hermione is 'wife' and 'mother' and it's kinda sad.

I digress.

Cho's boyfriend is murdered. Cho is understandably upset and heartbroken and sad af. She tries to find comfort in Harry because Harry was there, Harry must understand. Harry can help her process. Their ways of dealing with trauma are completely opposite to each other. Cho seeks emotional vulnerability and closeness from the boy who, of all people, will understand. Harry's way of processing trauma is to ignore it. It happened, it sucks, I will never speak of it again (until all my unprocessed emotions come spilling out and I end up lashing out and getting angry). Those two ways of dealing with trauma are not going to work well together. Harry is honestly a dick towards her - she's his fantasy. She's not a real person to him. When that fantasy comes crashing down he behaves pretty awfully towards her. And if you're reading critically, you come away thinking yeah, Cho's a whiny crybaby who doesn't get Harry at all. What a bitch. When in reality, it's more like - Cho is seriously fucked up and is trying to come to terms with her grief and seek comfort in someone who she thought would get it.

Imagine being like, 16 and being isolated and sad and so fundamentally misunderstood. Imagine being 18 and your friends are dead and the boy you liked is still dead and the other boy you thought you might like is a hero and the only thing you're really known for is the mess that is your grief. Imagine that the popular consensus is that your grief is something to be ridiculed.

I tend to pick and chose which parts of the extended canon I believe in, but I believe in Cho moving to America and getting hitched to an American muggle dude. (Moving to America is probably my own headcanon actually). What would motivate her to move across the world? Grief? Wonderlust? Anger? I imagine it's all three. Idk if this is a relatable feeling to a lot of people, but I get it. I have a constant itch under my skin that tells me to move on whenever a place starts to feel too much like home. To leave. To escape. Nowhere feels like home because home is a collection of broken things. It's a hall of funhouse mirrors - the wires in your brain get mixed up. Comfort and safety become synonymous with 'i will fuck this up' and 'i don't deserve this' and 'everyone will leave'.

I want so many things for Cho. I want her name to make sense. I want her to be seen as something other than 'pretty' and 'sad'. I want her in Boston slamming Sam Adams by Sam Adams grave because she finds it funny. I want her in Boston, learning to drive a car (stick-shift because the driving instructor had made a comment about how automatics are easier to learn and she is tired of people seeing her as something weak and unable). I want her road-raging and I want her to drive across the country because why the fuck not. I want her in New York and the city is so frantic and no one looks at her and she feels so small and the lights are so bright and she thinks maybe she could disappear here and no one would ever know. I want her to find a group of women rollerskating and maybe they invite her to their roller derby group. It isn't flying, but it's fast and aggressive and she's never allowed herself to be aggressive like this before. She's not allowed herself to be angry like this before. No one else has allowed her to be angry like this before.

I want her to go to California and to go to Angel Island and I want her to understand that there have been people like her before. That she is not alone in this feeling. I want her to meet a dude who's studying for an MBA - he doesn't know who she is. Doesn't know what she is. She's just this cute girl who drinks Sam Adams even tho that's a Boston thing and they're in San Diego. He's probably a frat boy. I want him to be a frat boy who takes his degree too seriously and wakes up at like 5 because he's also a gym rat. He takes her to his boxing class. She probably cries during and hey that's okay - she has a lot of shit to work through, he can tell. He doesn't ask about it. Just says her accent is cute. Maybe she starts taking night classes, maybe she doesn't. She's weirdly technologically illiterate - she sends him postcards even though they live in the same city. She says its because her school didn't let them have phones. She's never seen a Tarintino film and that's just like... not cool. They watch True Romance on his shitty box TV in his room in his frat house and she laughs (she laughs like the violence is cathartic) when Alabama completely destroys Virgil. He looks at her and she shrugs and says 'I get it.'

She says that's she's leaving soon - doesn't know where. Probably isn't coming back and again that's... not cool. She's weird about some stuff. Won't talk about home - won't say where she's from. He should be fine with it because like, it's not as if this is anything serious and his life is pretty clearly planned out. Get an MBA, work in some start-up tech company - the internet is a thing now and god, there's money to be made. He thinks maybe that she should like, stay but she also seems like the kind of person who doesn't know how to stop running. And look, he's doing an MBA. He rushed his frat. He goes to boxing every morning without fail. He's determined. He's not good at letting the things he wants go. But he lets her go because she doesn't want to stay. One night afterwards, his frat bro says, philosophical because they're crossfaded, that maybe she can't stay. Maybe she won't let herself stay. And that... That sounds about right.

So he waits. He waits and he gets postcards with no return address - in Seattle, she tries ice hockey. In Miami, she tries surfing. He almost gets on a plane to Cincinnati because she got into a fight with some dude who made his girlfriend cry in public. Apparently, she knocked him out with a punch just the way he showed her to. It feels weirdly romantic.

I want her to write a postcard to him when she's sitting in a bar in Las Vegas and I want her to include a return address. I want him on the first flight out, because fuck his classes? She included a return address. He asks her if she's ever going to go home and she looks at him and says, 'What? To San Diego?'

[adobe-outdesign]

The Big Grand TIOL Review/Critique

I’ve been covering my thoughts on this a bit during my liveblog, but I figured I should punch out a proper review.

No spoilers review: This one’s a bit tricky in terms of reviewing it. The reason for this is that, in a way, I feel like some its weaknesses are part of its design, so it’s not fair to critique them.

Basically, DCTL is the essential BATIM novel, in that it does exactly what you’d expect a BATIM novel to do. Don’t get me wrong, it was by no means paint-by-the-numbers, but you had all the BATIM staples in there. Game-canon characters, the machine itself, people getting turned into cartoons, the Ink Demon killing shit, ect ect.

TIOL is different because it’s basically an in-universe memoir written by Joey about his life and philosophy. So the thing is, when you boil this book down, it’s kind of almost not a BATIM book in a way. It features a game-canon character and dives deep into his backstory, but most of the book has little to do with the studio until like the last 4/5s or so.

So on the one hand, I feel like that’s a problem, and we needed more game-canon characters, more about the cartoons, ect. But then again... it wouldn’t make sense for Joey to spend his entire life rambling about the studio instead of talking about his early years at all, would it? So in a way I can’t really fault the book for it.

In terms of flaws, it honestly has less than DCTL--while DCTL had some major glaring problems, TIOL is fairly solid all around, but is less of a satisfying read due to its premise, making it hard to compare the two.

In terms of whether or not you’d enjoy the book, I guess it’s most important to know what you’re going to get out of it. If you’re like me and like extreme character studies and backstories, de-fictionalized in-universe media, and long philosophical talks, you’ll probably really enjoy it. If you don’t and want something more standard for BATIM, stick with DCTL.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, though I do like DCTL more at the end of the day. I’ll give this one a solid 6/10.

Spoilers below the cut:

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Okay, I lied. I’m not gonna include an ugly section this time, mostly because, as I said before, this book has less glaring issues than DCTL did. With that said:

The Good

If you like Joey, you will love this book. I’ve said before that Joey is the best character (strictly speaking) in BATIM because he by far has the most depth, showing a layered and interesting character. This book takes that and runs with it, giving a deep look into his psychology, philosophy, and overall explaining a lot about why he does what he does and his way of viewing the world. It’s legitimately well done and makes you look at his character in a new way, and as someone who loves character studies this whole thing was a real treat for me.

They do a very good job making this feel like an actual memoir. Nathan is editing and leaves footnotes, he wrote a foreword explaining this is a reprint, Joey blatantly lies a few times because that’s what he’d do, ect. 

Also, if you enjoy foreshadowing dialogue--which I do, very much--there is more than enough of that here.

This one might be cheating because it’s probably unintentional, but there is a ton of Joey being gay in this book, some of it really overt. I’m not going to go into it much here as Dreamfisher already summarized everything for me, but yeah, there is no way this man is straight.

Everyone who was OOC in DCTL seems to be better here. Sammy, while still an asshole, is neither as big of an asshole as he was in DCTL nor is he being racist. Bertrum is still affable towards Joey, but here it makes sense because they literally just met, and unlike in DCTL he even corrects him on his name.

Other characters get some screentime, and while brief, it’s nice to get some more characterization for them, especially because a few of them never showed up in DCTL. Jack Fain in particular gets some much-needed characterization and really shines here, as well as Nathan.

While it’s not overtly ha-ha funny, I did chuckle a few times. Most at Nathan’s notes, as half of them are just blatantly contradicting Joey’s lies.

We get a bit more info on Henry and Joey’s relationship, as well as how the cartoons were made.

The Bad

As mentioned above, there’s weirdly not a ton of BATIM content in this. Sure, it’s about Joey, but the bulk of the novel features book-canon characters only and is more focused on how he got where he ended up than stuff regarding the studio. It doesn’t really feel like a BATIM novel until about 4/5s of the way through. Like I said above though, I don’t know how much I can critique that, as it’s kind of inevitable with a memoir.

There is a lot of navel gazing in this. If you like philosophy you’ll enjoy it, but if you don’t it might get irritating, especially when it’s just Joey’s opinions over and over.

While we get more info about Joey and Henry and how they met, there’s not much info given on their relationship. Joey just talks about how much he totes didn’t need Henry while Nathan indicates that it was way more personal than that, but we never learn how personal. It makes sense as Joey’s the one writing this, but it still would’ve been nice to hear some more remarks from Nathan on the matter or something.

There’s like a 50 page or so detective mystery that I didn’t really care for. There was nothing really wrong with it, but it didn’t feel like it told us a ton about Joey, and there’s not a lot of emotional investment as we don’t know these people. Combine that with the mystery being unsolvable to the reader (because Joey leaves out crucial information until the reveal) and it just kind of felt like a pointless side detour, and like that time could’ve been spent on something more interesting. Most we get out of it is the origin of Bendy’s name.

There’s a weird inconsistency where Joey claims he made Bendy (not surprising), but he also goes over the moment when Bendy was made and it blatantly shows the two collabing, so at best he would’ve been Bendy’s co-creator. It’s just strange that he would describe the process like that instead of changing it to fit his lie. I think the implication is that the process itself is fake--that Henry had nailed Bendy’s design when he first showed it to Joey--but like I said, the scene contradicts Joey’s claims regardless.

There’s not really a... plot? Not surprising as it’s a memoir, but some memoirs do a good job of building a climax by showcasing an important moment in the person’s life. Here, because things are being told out of order, we never really get a climax, as there’s no action and Joey’s little emphianys are scattered throughout. There’s kind of just a lot of people standing around and talking and not much actual action going on.

I was kind of hoping this book would go into Joey’s black magic stuff. I need to make this clear: I don’t think BATIM should ever go into this too much, as it’s really just the macguffin that explains the plot, and it wouldn’t make sense for Joey to sit there talking about all the cool satanic bullshit he’s been doing lately anyway. However, Joey’s mentioned the “Gods” before, so I was kind of hoping for something about his thoughts about religion or something that would hint at the demonic stuff. He thinks about the afterlife a lot, but that’s about it.

Overall

Like I said, you have to know what you’re getting into when you pick up the book. If you read this and it sounds like something you’d enjoy, then grab it. If not, then don’t bother. For me, personally, I’m glad I read it, even if it wasn’t quite on the same level as something like DCTL.