#gif essays

[betterbooktitles]

The screen I spend the most time with these days is a black LCD monitor attached to a PC in an indie bookshop on Long Island. I spend whole days looking at point-of-sale software called Anthology which also keeps track of the store’s inventory. Often, it’s accurate. Occasionally, it says we have three copies of The Bell Jar that have simply disappeared from the face of the Earth. No one stole them. They were raptured, like socks that never make it out of the dryer.

If you’ve never worked a retail job, let me tell you what it’s like: you come in with a little spring in your step, caffeinated, and ready to greet your coworkers and update them on how terrible your last shift without them was. Though the memory of the previous shift’s slog might give you a little anxiety, and though a hangover can make your fuse a little short, you’re in a better mood at the start of the day than at the end. Tedious tasks like ordering and unboxing books (sci-fi movies did not prepare me for how much cardboard there would be in the future) seem manageable in the morning. Customers seem kind. The items you’re selling feel necessary to human happiness. Whatever is going on in your life is put on pause to manage store operations, and time flies. Then, by 3 PM, whether you had time for lunch or not, you wish you had done anything else with your day — or, better yet — your life. 

While the back-straining work of moving inventory around the store or walking the floor helping customers all day without a second to sit down might make you physically tired, the real work of retail is mental and forces employees to become part-machine. Retail workers have to ask the same three questions (“Rewards?” “Bag?” “Receipt?”) and reply to the same three questions (“Have it?” “Bathroom?” “Manager?!?!?”) for 8-10 of their most worthwhile waking hours. 

In bookstores, there is the added expectation that while you’re participating in this mind-numbing routine, you’re at least able to pretend to like and engage with literature. I'm not arguing that people working at Old Navy aren’t eloquent or as over-educated for their job as I am. If they aren’t teenagers, most retail employees I’ve encountered have, by virtue of talking to coworkers and customers all day, the same high emotional intelligence as the smartest people I know who chain smoke outside bars. Still, my guess is that it’s rare for a customer to see a clothing store employee folding clothes, and think “I wonder what their opinion is of the latest Ann Patchett book” or “I wonder if they read Knausgård and run a book club when they’re not helping me find jeans in my size.” People see booksellers doing the same tedious tasks as any other retail employee and assume they not only possess unlimited knowledge about the state of publishing but also have unlimited hours to read while in the store. Customers hold booksellers to an impossible intellectual standard. When they fail to live up to said standard, they’re subjected to conversations like this:

“You haven’t read the latest Kingsolver?” a customer will ask, “Why not? What about this one? Or that one? It’s so good though! I thought you would have read all of these!” 

What’s a shame is that they think they’re being kind when they half-recommend, half-admonish bookstore employees. Worse are the people who are flat-out rude. Case in point, a man came into the store at hour six of my shift, and without any preamble, treating me like I was a human Google search bar, said the name of an author, then started spelling the name. When I asked for a second to look up what I assumed he was asking for, he rolled his eyes and began spelling slowly and loudly: “PAUL. P…A…U…” 

Sadly, I’m too old to be treated that way and without thinking I raised my hand and said sternly “Don’t do that.” Now some oblivious retired banker is walking around Long Island asking himself why indie booksellers are so mean. My Midwestern niceness has disappeared, my helpful attitude is now nonexistent. I have been worn down by the people I’m paid to be kind to.

Read the rest here.

[vvatchword]

Reading BioShock: Rapture (Part 6: Frank Fontaine: Funny He-He Clown Man)

<- Part 5: Three Old Men Jerking Their Milk Sticks || Back to the Beginning || Part 7: Shadow Eve ->

By Chapter 2, Shirley finally introduces a few antagonists—Fontaine, as well as G-men doing the world’s worst surveillance.

If you’re hoping for tension,

stop.

hope is a lie and this book is its grave

I Would Like to Feel Anything Please

This chapter opens on Sullivan trying to shake a G-man and failing. Apparently it doesn’t matter because he goes ahead and meets with a character called Ruben Greavy, head engineer for the Wales brothers. I’m assuming that Greavy was originally the city designer before Wales & Wales had to be worked in.

I was most interested in the G-man because I keep looking for antagonists. Ryan has a goal, right? In literally any story anywhere, there would be obstacles the protag has to overcome. One might reasonably conclude that government institutions are Andrew Ryan’s greatest foes. They have the power to stop him through legislation and force: it doesn’t matter how much money you have if your enemy can mobilize the fucking Army.

Who else has the power to stop Ryan? Probably other industry tycoons. In Ayn Rand’s fiction, company presidents commonly ally with each other and the government to stymie the goals of her Ubermensch.

Although present, Fontaine is a small-time crook and motivated in other directions and is thus a non-issue.

As it turns out, I shouldn’t have been excited to see the G-men. After info-dumping a thousand things we either already know or could read in more interesting ways, Sullivan says this:

“Maybe they’ll get a warrant after all. I don’t think they’d find anything illegal.”

So you’re saying there’s no threat.

We are in Chapter 2, on page thirty-fucking-nine, and THERE ARE STILL NO STAKES.

But Preferably Not Indignation

At this point, it’s not about not knowing who Ryan’s enemies are. Functionally, I don’t think they exist. While Shirley invokes entire government institutions, like the FBI or IRS, they literally have nothing to do and no reason to be there.

Moreover, the Olympian—Ryan’s yacht—is namedropped. Which is when I realized that it was being used as a cargo ship.

Wait a fucking minute.

Look, I don’t know shit about boats, but can you really use a yacht like that? Like to ship big ol city parts? Why would you do that? I mean there’s a certain poetic quality in, say, stripping the guts out of your pleasure yacht to bend it to base labor, but we all know Shirley didn’t think that far.

(grumbles to self. angrily notates “research midcentury yacht models and cargo ships”)

Salty — Today at 10:22 AM No, yachts can’t be used like that watchword — Today at 10:23 AM "I found this out in 1 minute Shirley" thank you I figured the design mattered Salty — Today at 10:23 AM It does You’d need some kind of crane to lower things into the water and there’s no way a yacht could take that shit without being built not like a yacht

So it turns out that Andrew Ryan has sent his chief of security personally down to the docks to confirm the time it leaves like he’s some kind of little messenger drone. Somewhere in the proceeding info-dump, Sullivan tells Greavy to leave with all of the building supplies in his ship as soon as possible in case the G-men want to raid them, even though there’s nothing illegal going on. Their reasoning is that they don’t want the US government to learn even a scrap of information about what they’re doing.

Or what? What would they fucking do? There are no laws about shipping out giant city parts. I suppose it could be framed as Ryan being paranoid, but Shirley always explains what characters are doing to the nth degree, and there’s no such explanation here.

Also, and I don’t know why this isn’t being used: the world was fucking flattened after World War II. Shipping building supplies makes a lot of fucking sense. Just tell the gubmint that you’re selling them to France or something. “Aw, yeah, Uncle Sam. You know how much the French like glass tubes. Gonna put all the filthy tourists in there like hamsters so they don’t touch anything. When you get troublemakers you just close the bulkheads and fill them with water.”

Besides, all you have to do is tell the gubmint what you’re shipping off with. It’s for records to be checked against the port that receives the shipment to make sure there’s no funny business. What I don’t remember is if you have to declare what port you’re going to—I suspect that would be the case—but I mean. LIE? This is your life’s work. LIE.

Finally, New York is one of the busiest and biggest ports in the nation. Why would anyone be looking that closely at one more cargo ship? Paperwork back then was even more annoying and difficult to grok than it is today. Imagine the volume for a port like New York’s.

Just fucking LIE.

The real point of this scene is so there can be an exposition dump. Shirley couldn’t just send a messenger who didn’t know what was going on—he needed two people who were In the Know. The important part isn’t entertainment, it’s information: unnecessary and uninteresting exposition about Rapture’s political and economic goals, why they’re shipping supplies the way they are, and the US government, all despite the characters involved being intimately knowledgeable of the situation. Also, they’re about 75% through with the entire escapade, so if this conversation ever occurred at all, you’d think it would be months in the past. The G-man is an attempt at escalation, but then Shirley immediately de-escalates by saying he’s powerless.

So, just to reiterate:

Sullivan tries to shake a tail, fails, and doesn’t care because it doesn’t matter. He shows up at a ship containing building materials for Rapture, meets Greavy, and they lecture each other back and forth about subjects they should already know to summarize a bunch of events we should have seen. As an afterthought, Sullivan tells Greavy he showed up in person to confirm the time the ship leaves instead of calling because the phones are probably tapped. Sullivan will leave before the ship leaves so he won’t actually know the time to confirm with his boss. This particular ship is one of multiple ships and represents only one of multiple shipments—there’s nothing remarkably special about it. They’re not in any danger in any way and there’s nothing the USA can do legally to stop them. End scene.

How the hell is anything this bad.

How.

There should really be like twenty chapters for every one of BioShock: Rapture’s, each explaining how we got here. Because instead of sharing the exciting cat-and-mouse shit, Shirley writes about the outcomes where everything is settled.

This is how our reflections write in the mirror universe.

I have read fanfiction by fans of every age and fluency level and ability. Most of it was trash, but it could be excused because they were young or new or amateur writers, and even then, they’re often excited about a concept and trying really hard and might have some neat thoughts to share.

This… this is on a whole different level.

Writing Is Hard (and Caring Is Harder)

The reason for this is, of course, that Shirley would have had to research several different subjects to write about them in any depth, and time was of the essence. In fact, I am now 100% convinced that everything here is done in a mad effort to save effort, which sounds as delightful as it is.

The elements he thinks to research are absurd. I am now sure that he doesn’t know how to rank research subjects by importance. He does not research, say, the histories of the IRS or the FBI or corporate espionage. No, he researches “how to install a toilet” and “historical boxing.” He’s most often focused on physical processes or what things look like—not on what people do or why they do them.

I have a new bet for you: that each chapter will be like a little push-pin in a plot point. None of them will be married meaningfully to any of the other plot points. They will be little islands in time and rely on the reader to insert connective tissue. This will essentially be a disjointed short story collection, except without any tension whatsoever, because they’re just summaries of larger stories that we never see.

Shrug

Let’s contrast this burning sludge puddle with a different burning sludge puddle: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This is a fitting contrast as Rapture is a callback to Galt’s Gulch.

The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, discovers Galt’s Gulch (libertarian paradise and Aryan summer camp) in Part 3, roughly 60% through the book. In my paperback, Part 3 begins on page 643, and the story ends on page 1,069 (nice). The font is like 6 points. I can’t stress enough how dense this book is.

Rand spends ungodly amounts of time and detail lingering on her enemies—politicians and company presidents and whiny family members. She waxes eloquent on the destructive side of selflessness. Over the course of an eternity, she displays in slow, evolving detail how that world fucks her characters over, despite all their best efforts. And oh—they struggle. They fight!

When Dagny ends up in Galt’s Gulch, staring straight into the face of Objectivist Jesus, she has been through hell, and it feels like a relief: like she’s finally free.

Galt’s Gulch was not a given—it was a process.

Rapture deserves the same build-up. The build-up is the story, you understand?

BioShock: Rapture is like a romance novel that skips all its character building and sex sequences to leap straight into post-coital snuggling. It’s not half as interesting or meaningful if you don’t include all of the pining and rage and frustration and explicit dicking.

Funny He-He Clown Man

Oh, Frank Fontaine. They done did u dirty.

Hey, hypothetical reader, I’m gonna ask you something: what do you think when you hear "Frank Fontaine"? Do you think of a funny little clown man who changes into costumes every ten seconds like a malicious Bugs Bunny? Because that’s what we have here. And, like everything else in this shapeless abortion, I hate it.

Generally, when I write a character who’s not my own, I say: “What is most interesting about this guy?” And I go for some neat character trait or behaviorism and then expand. Everything about that person fractals off of their base personality, psychology, behaviorisms, internal worlds, and past experiences.

Of course, that character doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so you know what else I do? I look at how they’re utilized in the source material, I ask what exactly the source material is, and I examine what the story was originally trying to do.

Characters Are Limited

Since the Beginning of Time, it has been popular in fandoms to act performatively enraged about how each and every character in a piece of media is not fully-fleshed out and explored to the last quark of the final atom.

First, that’s not how narratives work. Stories have to be limited by their natures: we are limited to this time, this space, this person, these concerns, these events. Material can only stretch so far, and characters can only intersect so long. It’s impossible to touch on every single concern and detail of your world, and if you attempt it, you’ll carefully hand-craft an unreadable clusterfuck.

Second, a character is not a person. A character is a slave to the narrative. They are an ingredient and a tool. Even if they’re the complete focal point of the story, you cannot possibly fully explore them. They do not have full human lives or sapience. They only have what they are given. As inhuman objects and creative constructs, they are also not worthy of the same respect as a real human being. can you believe I have to say that

Third, it’s not important to have a fully-rounded character because that’s not always what the story requires. There are all kinds of different stories outside of character-driven ones—for example, focal points might be on themes, ideas, settings, or vast periods of time, and not on people at all; sometimes the narrative as a whole is more important than the characters inside of them; sometimes the style and POV limits how much we can know; sometimes it’s simply more entertaining or informative to omit certain information; and so on.

There are many ways to be interesting, and there are many ways to string along a series of plot points, and characters are just more tools in the toolbox. Instead of raking a narrative across the coals for not meeting your standards, it’s far more sensible to ask what the narrative is and what it’s trying to do, then judge it according to the standards it was trying to meet.

The Fountainhead

Sometimes a character works best if we don’t know that much about them. In my opinion, Frank Fontaine is one of these. He has a limited efficacy and only in specific situations.

How is Fontaine used in BioShock? Sparingly, that’s how. And when he finally shows up as ringleader, it’s to head what is arguably the weakest part of the game. Suddenly you have to look straight at him for a couple of hours, and he’s just not that interesting under a spotlight. He’s a small-time crook who won the lottery; what made him interesting was the Atlas con and his friction with Andrew Ryan, and both are over. He’s not that big of a deal in and of himself. He doesn’t really have any power other than ADAM—and of course, that’s the point.

Fontaine is not a character with an arc. He can’t change and he wouldn’t work very well if he did. In fact, he’s not really a character at all—he’s an anthropomorphized human quality. One of the alternate meanings of “frank” is “honesty” or “truth”; “Fontaine,” or “fountain,” probably refers to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.

“What is the fountainhead—the source—of the Ubermensch?” Rand asks.

Levine replied: “What is the fountainhead of Objectivism?”

If Objectivism got everything it wanted, what would its world really look like? Because it wouldn’t be Galt’s Gulch or Rapture in its heyday.

Frank Fontaine is the ultimate culmination of Objectivist theory—not Andrew Ryan. The guy who wins doesn’t have to have any laudable moral qualities at all—all he has to be is the strongest or most cunning. The best idea or product doesn’t necessarily succeed because Objectivism isn’t about quality—you can just get steamrolled into bullshit because some company has more resources and social currency than the innovative little guy. If all you value is strength, all you will receive is the strong, and that strongman does not have any incentive to be anything other than a flesh-tearing, blood-drinking brute.

One of BioShock’s best qualities is how it just lets Fontaine sort of exist quietly in the background, like the faint, tense hum of an electric wire. You see evidence of him. You see what people think of him. But you never actually see him. The mystery is part of his power. Pre-twist, you only hear his voice once, and it’s probably utilized as a red herring in case you started to doubt Atlas’ identity. After all, Atlas is Irish, and Fontaine is from New York or something! You can trust Atlas!

But Can You Trust Shirley?

what the fuck do you think

I thought of just ending here and letting you figure it out but I believe this deserves just a little explication.

In Chapter 2, Fontaine—going by the surname Gorland—waltzes in, front and center, and with all the flare of a supervillain descending from on high, steals some loser’s shitty-ass bar.

“Whatta hell ya mean you’re the owner, Gorland?” … “…You’re about to sign this bar over to me, is whatta hell.” … Merton stared at the papers, eyes widening. “That was you? Hudson Loans? Nobody told me that was—” “A loan is a loan. What I seem to recall is, you were drunk when you signed it. Needed some money to pay off your gambling vig. A big fucking vig it was too, Merton!”

Fontaine got a guy drunk and made him sign something. Is this supposed to impress me?

I cut a ton of needless bullshit out and I still didn’t cut as much as I should have. (A “vig” is a gambling debt, so “gambling” is redundant, among other things.) What shitty dialogue this is. I told you, McDonagh isn’t the only one you should be cringing at. Shirley is terrified you won’t understand him so he makes sure to explain every point three times over.

When Levine writes “CIA spook” or “das vedanya,” it’s not to prove his work. It’s there because it makes sense there. When Shirley uses a specific term, it’s to show off. It’s like a little kid running up to show you that he finished a question on his homework. Except he does it every time he finishes something. And he’s always wrong somehow.

“Vig” in particular got me.

“Vig, you know! Yeah I looked it up! Vig! A gambling debt! Bet you’ve never heard that before! I researched! See! Vig!”

I will find your thesaurus, tear each page out one by one, and eat them in front of you without breaking eye contact. You will see me when you get up at midnight for a drink of water, slowly crunching in the dark. When you call the police I will evaporate. All that will be left is the hardcover, tented over a single dead roach pinned to the floor. At night you will hear me whispering from the walls: “haaaaaaaack”

Cynicism, Nihilism, Gnosticism, Humanism

Frank Fontaine is the most cynically written of all the characters thus far. He’s the one with the most obvious To-Do List.

“What do I need to establish about Frank Fontaine?” Shirley asked himself. “Let’s see: he is a conman. He is a great actor. He needs to find out about Rapture and get there somehow. He’s a super-awful guy. I should establish his background, motivations, and how he learned his skills. I know! He lived in a vaudeville theater!”

All right, all right. Let me be fair. I would bet money that Levine is the source of that background bit—BioShock features a million stages for a reason that I will someday write about at length—but god I hate it. I was in one-act play and I have watched hundreds of films but it doesn’t mean I know how to act. Isn’t it enough that Fontaine learns to manipulate others, perhaps out of a sense of childish self-preservation before evolving into predation? Does it have to be a big show?

…yes, I guess. Fuck. Because gnosticism.

Gnosticism is one of those BioShock themes that I least expected in this novel because it is a pure thought exercise and exists on several metaphorical levels. I’m sure Shirley has been informed of its existence, but we all know how he’ll handle it (he can’t lol). All you need to know about gnosticism is that it’s a philosophy that believes the physical environment is a broken copy of a higher reality. Even though the physical realm is fucked, it can still point toward a higher truth. In other words, you can learn from the physical world’s half-truths to achieve gnosis—knowledge of that ultimate spiritual truth—and thereby ascend to that higher spiritual plane.

But Ken Levine has a different take on ascension.

According to Levine, you learn by going through the horrors of life, but the truth is not some beatific vision. There is no god and there is no better world: there is Only Man. All you learn is that human beings hurt each other, and that they won’t ever stop, and to survive, you must go to war yourself—whether you like it or not. In the process, you struggle toward an understanding of how to make a better world, but there’s a catch: you have committed all kinds of harm out of ignorance. By committing that harm, you have ensured that the damage goes on… and on… and on.

No human being can avoid this.

Nobody can just TELL you how to make a better world—it’s far too big and complicated a place, and it’s always changing. You have to experience it for yourself to understand how it works. That means you can’t take your knowledge to others, either—because not only can future generations not understand you, your own knowledge is highly individual, and the world is continually changing so that you’re always one step behind. Future generations have to make their own mistakes in their own unique settings to figure out how best to live. In the process, they fuck up the future in a whole new way.

Everyone thinks they’re going through hell looking for heaven, but it turns out it’s always been about this fucked-up world and this fucked-up present with its fucked-up people. All you can do is your best with what you know.

The way Levine illustrates this is that art and artifice performatively point toward that ultimate higher truth: there is no escape, and we are destined to hurt ourselves and future generations in an unbreakable cycle. BioShock is existential horror at its heart, and it’s the best kind—the humanist kind.

So, thematically speaking, Fontaine being a literal performer, acting for our education and elevation, is correct. If you pay attention to the game, every character functions this way. Everything is a performance for your benefit as player. I have to admit that it makes sense. Plus, other than working retail, entertainment is a great way to learn how to hate the human race.

I still hate it. I want Fontaine to be more grounded, I guess. Every time I imagine him in a theater I cackle a little.

Cardboard People

Returning to BioShock: Rapture, the first problem with Fontaine’s section is that he doesn’t feel like a person. I don’t get a sense of his past, even when it’s explicitly mentioned. I bring up Fontaine’s past because people do what they do based on a complicated play of psychological need and lessons learned to survive past environments.

Alas: Fontaine is a one-note mustache-twirler. He wants to get money why? To get more money. Not to survive, not to defy the privations of his past, not to take vengeance on an uncaring world, not to bang girls, not to buy cool shit. He just fucks people up because that’s what he does.

Also, despite being a petty criminal, he seems above and beyond the law somehow. I’m not afraid for him when that G-man from earlier walks into his bar.

…oh, for fuck’s sake, that’s still my optimism talking. I keep expecting this book to work like a book. This thing is the hairy knot you find at the bottom of a drain.

Anyway, the second problem with Fontaine is that the entire story works to his benefit, and it’s immediately ludicrous. Instead of giving Fontaine problems to solve—and giving Andrew Ryan ways to work against him—you know, like real human beings with brains—Shirley just throws information and idiots at Fontaine constantly.

Allow me to illustrate.

Frank Fontaine gets his bar by drugging a guy who is dumb with or without intoxication. Fontaine wanted this bar so he could listen into bar patrons’ conversations for hot tips on gambling and grifts. When does this pay off?

guess

If you said, “Immediately!”, Fuck You! You are correct!

[Fontaine] wiped at an imaginary spill on the bar, edging closer. “But can we count on Steele?” said the one some called Twitchy. He twitched his pencil-thin mustache. “Thinks he’s going to challenge the Bomber next year…” “So let him challenge; he can lose one fight. He needs the payoff, needs it big,” said the chunkier one of the two, “Snort” Bianchi—with a snort.

is this a joke

This is one place I am not sure of Shirley’s intentions. Is it supposed to be bad? Is it supposed to be funny? Is he making fun of me or is he just dumb enough to think this is clever?

What I think this dialogue and these characters represent is Shirley’s attempt to complement BioShock's audio diaries. Again, we hit that divide between the ways stories are best told through different mediums. BioShock’s audio diaries are the literary equivalents of bullion cubes. That’s because you experience dialogue sparingly in a video game, and most content is wrapped up in gameplay, so you’ve got to get your whole idea across as quickly and densely as possible.

It’s for this reason that every BioShock character is an outsized caricature. In the same way that Fontaine is a symbol of Objectivism in its purest form (let's face it, the fountainhead of Man with a capital M), McDonagh is Andrew Ryan’s conscience, and Andrew Ryan is Man falling for the lies of the demiurge. Jasmine Jolene—whom we will see in Chapter 3—represents untenable fantasy.

Oh, and Shadow Eve.

Y’all wanna talk about Shadow Eve? I do. There's only like three of us reading this and I'm counting myself so I'm assuming the vote is unanimous.

Long story short, Shirley doesn’t understand the differences between video game narratives and literary ones, and this fact is probably going to hurt me until the end of this entire broken endeavor.

Shirley also feels like he needs to show Fontaine at work at all times. In his mind, Fontaine is nothing but cons 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Shirley only knows what people do; he doesn’t know why they do anything.

In any case, Fontaine shoos off the Great Value Mobsters, for he has spotted our G-man from earlier, a man named Voss. It appears that Voss is looking for informations.

[Voss] leaned across the bar so he could be heard over the noise. “Word on the street is, this here’s your joint now.”

Originally, I had been reading this quickly, only to run into this paragraph and get terribly confused. Like damn, word travels fast, it’s been 30 minutes and everybody already knows this is Fontaine’s bar?

I had to go back and re-read. The passage of time is suggested somewhere in the info-dump that tells you everything about Fontaine instead of growing him organically over a generous period. It’s done terribly but at least it happened.

Voss crooked a finger, leaned even farther across the bar. Gorland hesitated—then he leaned close. Voss spoke right in his ear. “You hear anything about some kind of big, secret project happening down at the docks? Maybe bankrolled by Andrew Ryan? North Atlantic project? Millions of bucks flowing out to sea…?” “Nah,” Gorland said…. “What kinda deal’s he up to?” “That’s something we don’t… something you don’t need to know.”

haaaaaa haaaaaaa haaaaaaaaaaaaaack

In any case, Fontaine has it in mind that if there are millions of dollars flowing out to sea, he wants in on it somehow.

He didn’t hear anything about Ryan for a couple of days, but one day he heard a drunk blond chippie muttering about “Mr. Fatcat Ryan… goddamn him…” as she frantically waved her empty glass at him. “Hey wherezmuh drinkie?” demanded the blonde.

oh…………. oh this is a hate crime

Have you ever heard of Born Yesterday (1950)? Go watch a clip and listen to the actress, Judy Holliday. Her voice is what I hear in my mind. Except in Born Yesterday the protag is a human being and not a one-dimensional cutout with tits. And Born Yesterday is perfectly representative of its time so the fact it’s outclassing a writer in 2011 is shameful. The only question I have left about this book is, “Who cannot dunk on John Shirley?”

Now I think I understand Shirley a little better. I’m going to give him the benefit of a doubt and assume that we are looking at this crying woman through Fontaine’s eyes, and that this is not reality, but his fucked-up perspective.

You know how I was talking about the relationship between third-person limited POV and bedrock reality? This is one of those breakdowns. In third-person limited, we can see inside of one person, but nobody else. They occupy a world limited by their bias, but that world operates outside of them according to its own logic, which our Subject may or may not be able to comprehend truthfully. There should be clear divisions between what the Subject knows and perceives versus what is happening outside of them. When outside characters speak, or outside events occur, the reader should be assured that they really occurred in the ways they are shared. Otherwise there’s nothing solid to latch onto.

But I’ve got to be honest: I don’t know if this is intentional or not. I have never questioned point-of-view this way in my life. How much have I taken for granted in my tiny span? How do you learn to do something like this so, so badly?

This is John Shirley. We taught him wrong, as a joke.

Of course he wears all black and a goofy hat. Then he sucked all the contrast out until he was clothed in void. Does he think he’s a warlock

Long story short, this POV shit feels like madness to me. Should prose cause seasickness? The way this book is fucked up is one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had. Although I’m learning a great deal from it, I also hate this experience. And I hate John Shirley.

“I’ll have a Scotch if I can’t have my man back,” she sobbed, “that’s what I’ll have! Dead, dead, dead, and no one from that Ryan crew is saying why.”

Ms. Ogyny the Exposition Whore has managed to interest me despite my deep loathing. I spy a mystery!

Coincidentally, this is why Fontaine’s sections tend to be the most interesting: he’s actively trying to figure things out where other characters just kind of hover in time and space.

New Reasons for Me to Feel an Unearned Sense of Superiority

Some of Shirley’s idiosyncrasies start popping out here because I’ve had some time to suffer under his patterns, much like a player getting their ass handed to them under an Elden Ring boss. For example, he sticks dialogue inside of descriptive paragraphs, and he thinks “went on” is an acceptable dialogue tag. I thought that was a fucking error until it happened the second time.

(✿◠‿◠)ノ.❀。• *₊°。I still think it is a fucking error ❀。• *₊°。 ❀

In my opinion, dialogue can be stuck with a descriptive scene, but it should be limited to the speaker’s actions alone. The implication is that the speaker is performing an action while speaking. Shirley will just slap dialogue into a paragraph with multiple actors and let the reader sort it out.

The reason why this is a problem is that it becomes questionable who the speaker is until you find a subject-verb or infer from context clues. Also, the longer the descriptive sequence, the more you have to think about the time taken to say the sentence as the character is performing the action.

You do not want your work to feel like this:

This is where I noted another little idiosyncrasy: every time Shirley does any research, he regurgitates it almost wholly undigested. Here, in an example from the prologue, he discusses the outfit of a Red Army soldier:

“Father,” Andrei whispers, in Russian, turning to look at a tall lean man in a long green coat with red epaulets, a black hat, a rifle slung over his shoulder. “Is that man one of the Red Guard?”

“in Russian” no shit

“Oh, that’s perfectly reasonable,” you may protest.

Then how about this sequence in Chapter 2, where he talks about boxers:

The talk at the crowded bar tonight was full of how Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, back from the war with a pocketful of nothing and a big tax debt, was going to defend his world heavyweight title against Billy Conn. And how the retired Jack Johnson, first Negro to win the heavyweight champ title, had died two days before in a car accident. None of which was what Gorland needed to know.

(✿◠‿◠)ノ.❀。• *₊°。then why the fuck did you mention it ❀。• *₊°。 ❀

My chief complaint about the first set of descriptors is the list of prepositional phrases and weak adjectives and verbs. It’s a lot of talk with no power or aim. Additionally, Shirley just wrote about a dozen other people while mentioning their appearances so briefly that they might as well have been plywood standees, so a thoughtfully colorized soldier jumps out like a cat in a shitty horror film. That said, if you’re not a picky bastard, it may not bother you.

But the second one is outright incorrect. None of these historical people or subjects have anything to do with Fontaine’s current aims, nor with what he does next. It’s just there to prove that Shirley did research. If anything, it shows Shirley’s weakness: he doesn’t know how to smoothly blend research into his work.

This description is like stirring your cookie batter three times and calling it done, then spooning out a big lump of baking powder.

Shirley just put that shit in the oven.

“I just want my Irving back,” she said, her head sagging down over the drink. Lucky the song coming on the juke was a Dorsey and Sinatra crooner, soft enough he could make her out. “Jus’ wannim back.” He absentmindedly poured a couple more drinks for the sailors at her side, their white caps cocked rakishly as they argued over bar dice and tossed money at him. “What became of the unfortunate soul?” Gorland asked, pocketing the money and wiping the bar. “Lost at sea was he?” She gawped at him. “How’d you know that, you a mind reader?” Gorland winked. “A little fishy told me.”

gross

God, this paragraph is ugly and I hate it. Shirley splits the lady’s dialogue, part of which butts up against Fontaine and two sailors and causes a moment of cognitive dissonance. Shirley is ridiculously specific as to the song playing when “soft crooner” would have sufficed. The true note of interest—the data that Fontaine is sniffing out—skitters around the outsized imagery like a stupid cartoon creature.

Shirley does have a strength, and it’s in visuals. I can see and feel and smell this bar. Unfortunately, his visuals are static and progress little to nothing. Also, from what I can tell, it’s his only skill, unless causing headaches is desirable.

Also, before I leave this part, I want to clarify that there’s no problem with mentioning historical events, organizations, music, speech, people, etc, in your historical novel, and in fact you should, but if that description is at the expense of your plot, you have erred.

In any case, Fontaine asks this unfortunate caricature of womanhood what happened to her beloved. Shirley writes a long and embarrassing paragraph of dialogue that cannot end soon enough, and when it does end, it’s like this:

“Well, I went over to the place that hired him, Seaworthy Construction they was called—and they threw me out! Treated me like I was some kinda tramp! All I wanted was what was comin’ to me… I came out of South Jersey, and let me tell you, we get what we’re owed ’cause…” She went on in that vein for a while, losing the Ryan thread.

You lazy fucking bastard.

This is not the first time Shirley has ended a paragraph like this, either.

A Visual Depiction of the Dismount

Look, there are graceful ways to ease out of dialogue. Shirley doesn’t care what they are. Dialogue stands between him and a description of a “zoot-suiter [putting] a bebop number on the juke.” Do I care about that, sir? I do not. How about Andrew Ryan? How about Rapture? How about

Fontaine Shapeshift Moments Numbers 4, 5, & 6

One of Shirley’s responsibilities as writer is that he needs to illustrate the kind of person that Fontaine is. As far as I’m concerned, he’s done it several times over. It is abundantly clear that Fontaine is an asshole, and it’s clear what kind of asshole he is, even if he is kinda boring. Now that Fontaine has the Rapture thread, you would expect for him to follow that, because that’s what I’m reading this book for.

Obviously, that’s why Shirley takes Fontaine to a boxing ring! Because it is time to throw a fight! After all, we must follow up on that Great Value Mobster thread! We care so much about that! My heart throbs with anticipation! About Twitchy and Snorts!

See, Shirley did not illustrate one specific trait of Fontaine’s, and he thinks it’s important enough to digress to it: Fontaine’s ability to shapeshift, as it were.

“My name’s Lucio Fabrici,” Gorland said, tying Steele’s glove’s nice and tight. “Bianchi sent me.” … “Fabrici” had gone to great lengths for this disguise. The pinstripe suit, the toothpick stuck in the corner of his mouth, the spats, the toupee, the thin mustache—a high quality theatrical mustache carefully stuck on with spirit gum. But mostly it was his voice, just the right Little Italy intonation, and that carefully tuned facial expression that said, We’re pals, you and I, unless I have to kill you.

Wait. Was “spirit gum” called that in 1946? Oh, I don’t care.

It’s worth mentioning that I have noted two black characters so far—the boxer from the historical infodump and Steele’s trainer, who Fontaine paid to scram—and Shirley doesn’t let the trainer talk. And you know what? Given how he writes dialogue, that’s probably the safest option.

After Fontaine throws the thrown fight, he goes to his bookie operation.

[Fontaine] walked over to Morry, to have a gander at the take, and heard a couple of the dockworkers talking over their flask. “Sure, Ryan’s hiring big down there. It’s a hot ticket, pal, big paydays. But problem is—real QT stuff. Can’t talk about the job. And it’s dangerous too. Somewhere out in the North Atlantic, Iceland way…”

First of all, there’s the unnecessary description. Can’t we just assume that Fontaine walked somewhere? What does that add to the narrative? Use stronger imagery or take that shit out. That’s literally your only skill and now you’re fucking that up, too.

Second of all, split the dialogue off, why do you keep sticking it to random fucking descriptions.

Third of all, how does the entire fucking world not know what Andrew Ryan is doing? Half of what Fontaine has learned has been from overhearing random people. It’s like the whole universe is conspiring to help Fontaine out, and it’s getting a little weird, I’m gonna be honest. Every time I randomly overhear people it’s things like grocery lists and brain-dead political takes. When will I overhear where to find one million dollars

Then there’s how Fontaine reacts when he overhears this information. This sentence immediately follows the paragraph above:

[Fontaine] slipped outside by the side door and set himself to wait.

He literally says nothing to anyone. He just leaves. He’s just had an intense exposition-filled conversation with his employees and then he’s like whoops bye bitches fuck your lives

Look at how fucking pathetic this sentence is, too. “Set himself to wait”? I actually double-checked this after an edit because I was sure I’d inserted a typo. No, it’s just this bland.

This whole sequence was almost certainly written at a sprint. Words and phrases are weak as shit—no emotional power, no visual or spatial sense, no movement. There are no smooth transitions and, quite naturally, no tension. It’s just one domino falling after another. You wanna take a moment and think?

NO.

RUN BITCH.

RUN

Fontaine follows the deckhands until they reach their ship—the Olympian.

Gorland tilted his hat so the G-man wouldn’t see his face and strolled over, hands in his pockets, weaving a bit, making like he was drunk.

There’s some more embarrassing tryhard dialogue but you can read it yourself.

“Making like he was drunk.” jesus christ are you even trying

The only important part is the deckhand arguing with an officer.

“I just ain’t shipping out to that place again, and that’s all there is to it,” snarled the deckhand in the black peacoat. … “I don’t mind being on the ship—but in that hell down below, not me!” “There’s no use trying to say you’ll only take the job if you stay on the ship—it’s what Greavy says that goes! If he says you go down, you go down!” “Then you go down in my place—and you wrestle with the devil! It’s unholy, what he’s tryin’ to do down there!”

Wait. What? Why? Why is it unholy to build things under the ocean? Look, I was a religious nut for a huge portion of my life, and I can’t remember any taboos about checks notes building underwater?

As the deckhand takes off, having quit employment with Ryan Industries, Fontaine sees a piece of metal, picks it up, and runs after the deckhand.

“Hey!” the man yelped. Gorland held the deckhand firmly in place and pressed the end of the cold metal pipe to the back of his neck. “Freeze!” Gorland growled, altering his voice. He put steel and officiousness into it. … “You think I’m some crooked dock rat? I’m a federal agent! Now don’t even twitch!” [Fontaine said.]

Fontaine flashes a fake badge, then gets this deckhand to spill his guts. In two pages, he learns about Ryan building a city beneath the sea, complete with information about its technology and current state of construction.

End chapter.

Fontaine’s section of Chapter 2 runs from pages 39 through 54. In about two weeks, he has pretended to be six different people and learned everything he needs to know about Andrew Ryan.

You Can Always Try

I don’t know what Shirley was on at this point. In my mind, you devote one chapter to Fontaine at the tail-end of one really good con. Really put your effort into the con, show the ups and downs as the criminals attempt to outmaneuver the popo. Maybe show Fontaine fuck up some other criminal and then take his name. A shadow steps out of the smoke, adjusts his hat. “The name is Frank Fontaine.” Ohhhhh noooo I thought Frank Fontaine was that other guyyyy ooooooh shiiiiitttttt! And then never give out his background the rest of the story, and never show his internal world. Third-person objective: narrator stands outside of everyone. Keep Fontaine a huge question mark the entire story.

But Shirley was like, “Give Fontaine 3,000 cons in the same chapter, one after the other after the other, nonstop, don’t breathe, don’t stop, go go go go, and do it in such a way that Fontaine looks like the only human player in a world of NPCs.”

It just feels so unnecessary.

Here are images of Fontaine and Atlas.

That’s called “growing your hair out” and “cosmetic surgery” you fucking dumbass. It’s not that big of a deal. Now write something I give a shit about.

Question: how couldn’t the feds get all of this information in all the same ways, plus some? This is the FBI in 1946, the USA has just gone through WW2 like gangbusters, the Cold War is just warming up, and—most terrifyingly of all—J. Edgar Hoover is the FBI director. You think they give a single shit? Hell, I’m not sure they’d have to do much in the way of skullduggery at all. So far, the biggest problem with keeping Rapture secret has been employees talking.

Long story short, now Andrew Ryan and the US government look like chumps, and the narrative has the gall to imply Fontaine is skilled when he’s just unreasonably lucky. And if there’s one rule you should never break for a BioShock story it’s to make Andrew Ryan a fucking chump.

If You Must

Although having Fontaine front and center is not ideal, it’s also doable. So far, he’s the most interesting character in the book—probably because he’s solving the Rapture mystery. There are elements he doesn’t understand, which is a kind of tension, even if there are no repercussions for failure.

This tension is accidental. Just like every other character, Fontaine’s challenges and enemies are either neutered or indistinct. He hovers in a kind of eternal limbo where he is everything he has ever been. We can’t pretend it’ll get any better from here on out. However, let’s pretend that Shirley gives a fuck.

Now that Fontaine in a traditional character-driven narrative, we need to give him an arc. The Fontaine of Chapter 2 must not be the same Fontaine we see by the end of the story. We know Shirley will fail, but that’s the standard we’re going to judge him by. Remember: this isn’t BioShock-the-game. We’re writing literature now, so the aims and methods are different. If you’re going to use him as a major antagonist, he needs challenges to surmount, same as Andrew Ryan and Bill McDonagh and every other character ever.

So if you’re going to use Fontaine in this role, he has got to have an arc of some kind. He’s got to have something to overcome or learn or become because he’s in the kind of story that calls for that.

A competent writer would give you a reason to be interested in Fontaine. Shirley knows you’ve picked up this book because you’re a fan, so he presupposes you already are. So he just… doesn’t try.

jesus christ this lazy bastard. I hold him in utter contempt.

And I am just now at Chapter Fucking Three.

<- Part 5: Three Old Men Jerking Their Milk Sticks || Back to the Beginning || Part 7: Shadow Eve ->

[merp-blerp]

So I haven't seen Disney's Wish myself (I'm waiting for it to assumedly go to Disney+, theaters are a lot of money to spend too often), so I can't speak on the film from my own point of view yet, but I have seen the reaction to it so far and I wanted to share my thoughts on why I think some of these reactions are happening, based on my own experience of watching and listening to the Disney fandom's critiques over the many years I've done so. These are just my observations based on my experiences and it's okay to disagree, just be cordial.

Opinions below the cut ↓

I feel like a part of why Wish is the way it allegedly is has to do with something that has been plaguing Disney for a while: trying to prove bad-faith criticisms wrong instead of knowing their strengths.

I'm sure they still happen, but especially in the early and mid-2010s Disney had a lot of half-baked criticisms directed at their stories and characters. Wish might be another one of many attempts to quell these critiques. For example, I remember a common piece of writing advice would be to make villains complex all the time, with villains who are evil for evil's sake being seen as less well done (this was towards media in general, but it applied to Disney too), so Disney began the surprise villain and/or the sympathetic villain trend in their films. Now people have seen that shtick so much they want traditional villains back (me too). It's now overdone and no longer shocking or subversive in their movies anymore. [And as a little add-on, I understand why people want King Magnifico's design to be more "traditionally villainous" but I'm actually happy he isn't, as it's really hard to design a villain like that without perpetuating some kind of bigoted stereotype that a lot of traditional villains have. Even Mother Gothel, one of the last, if not the last of the classic villains Disney has attempted, had a lot of antisemitism baked into not only her design but also her actions. Disney's done that a lot, which is likely accidental, but still bad. I'd much prefer him to look and act like some guy over an awful Jewish stereotype or something similar.] People also called princesses with the temperaments of, say, Aurora, Belle, or Cinderella "boring", or hell, "sexist" in their characterization, so the heroines were made more relatably quirky, as that type of humor towards/by girls and women were very popular in the 2010s. Asha is allegedly somehow both socially inept and socially competent, which arguably isn't a flaw at all, just contradictory. (My neuro-spicy brain wants to somewhat lean towards neurodivergence when I hear that, but I haven't seen the film, so what do I know?) Now people are souring to that too, understandably, as that humor's kind of dated and overdone with Disney's heroines. These traits aren't bad on girls automatically, especially if they make sense for the environment they grew up in like Anna or Rapunzel, but they've just been done to death with Disney. Ironically, now when I see people suggest alternative traits for Asha they propose a more "sophisticated", "mature", or "self-assured" type of personality, aka, what the "sexist" traditional heroines had a lot of the time.

The newer tropes Disney tried to do in place of their old ones don't have as much staying power as the old. Once they're done so much they get stale. If they're based on trends in media rather than being actually captivating in writing, they become timely. People can digest characters like Cinderella, who are interesting and aren't overly worried about upholding trends in their characterization, for centuries whether they realize it or not. But characters like what Asha is allegedly like are based on trendy, shallow politics that aren't as deep as they sound, maybe sometimes even circling right back into the bigotry it was trying to combat (like the girl-boss stuff), and become overdone and/or dated if they aren't done well or in a new way. I feel like because of the poorly made assessments that people used to make towards Disney, Disney is almost embarrassed by their past films when they really shouldn't be. This is why the recent remakes tend to over-correct the originals. In the original Beauty and the Beast, it was not a flaw that Adam was eleven when he was made to look like a beast in my opinion, it just made it more interesting, but some reviews saw it as a bad thing, so they changed the line in "Be Our Guest" that implied his age. It was seen as a flaw that the original Cinderella didn't have a clear reason to stay with her abusive family, even though that's how familial abuse works often and it's really rude to victims to ask "Why don't you just leave?" or something like that; so Disney gave Ella the explanation that she stays because it was her father's home in the 2015 remake, which only added more flaws when you remember that she does leave the house in the end anyway. What was the point in saying that? People wanted strong female characters, so Mulan in her remake is a flawless, emotionless girl-boss. It was seen as sexist when female characters wanted romantic love because "girls don't need a man, so romance is sexist", so Disney stopped telling love stories and focused more on issues of the self, which isn't bad, but now people want Disney to tell love stories again and are disappointed that Asha didn't have a romance with the mostly cut "Star-Boy" character in Wish (again, me too, I love Disney's love stories). All of these are overcorrections to things that were never flaws to begin with, just nit-picks from bad observations of their films. There are too many examples. It's like Disney is insecure.

If Disney understood that these things weren't bad in essence, Wish would be more liked by its critics; if Disney wasn't afraid to let their female characters have actual flaws, not see romantic love as something dated, not continue to listen to these types of shitty judgments, or just take more risks again because that's what shaped the company—taking risks against the odds, Wish would be better (I assume all of the former based on what I've heard, again I haven't seen Wish myself). The pseudo-feminism and CinemaSins type of critiquing from the 2010s has mostly died out. The culture's changed. The tropes people once condemned are now being begged to be brought back. What goes around comes back around. It showcases what was truly timeless and what was just a trend in media.

In my opinion, old bad-faith "fan" responses are partially to blame for these themes in recent films, but of course, Disney is ultimately at fault because they make their own choices. There could also be plenty of other reasons why Wish feels half-done to some, like the alleged poor treatment of employees behind the scenes.

By the way, if you were a Disney fan who had these types of opinions in the past, you shouldn't be hard on yourself about it, especially if you were just a kid listening to and trying to appeal to the adults that were around you or influenced you. The latter is the boat I was in once, and now I've grown up past that. Needlessly cynical film takes and pseudo-feminism were all the rage for a while and many have had that phase of being really into those mindsets. You're not bad if you've been in it at any time in the past as long as you are learning and growing.

I'm choosing to be optimistic about Disney. Somehow I still am. They have been in a creative rut for what seems like a while now. Disney-creative doesn't seem to be allowed to tell the stories they want to tell, instead being made to cater to the wrong people. The people who like to insult Disney more than they like watching their films. They should make movies for the fans of all ages who love them. But I believe Disney can bounce back from this. Disney has been through rough patches before, but these rough patches in the past have led to eras like the Disney Renaissance. I'm hoping the backlash from Wish will lead to Disney making changes once more. They've done that repeatedly in their complex 100 years of establishment. Gone are the times when the Disney remakes were panned by fans but still made tons of money that justified their continued production. And long gone are the days when fans were actually excited about the prospects of Disney recreating their movies (because yes people felt that way once upon a time). Now the remakes aren't making as much as Disney wants and sometimes even flopping. Gone are the days when their animated films were their critical lifeline, Wish proves that they are not immune to being received poorly. It's time for something new. Or old done new. Just something different. It would be one thing if this were just another bad movie, but this was their 100th-year celebration, you think they'd be more careful to not muck it up. But apparently, all it did was reflect all the flaws that have been in Disney's storytelling as of late. That's why the backlash is so great. It feels like the last straw. Once time goes on past the 100th-anniversary era, I think the hate for Wish will die down, but that wouldn't make it less potentially flawed. When I first caught wind of this film, way before we had a trailer even, I was very excited that it seemed like a return to form for Disney, but apparently, it might not be, and that's got a lot of people disappointed, especially since this movie was meant to be a celebration. I've loved Disney for as long as I can remember and I know a lot of people are the same way. People wouldn't be so disappointed in the state of the company if they didn't care deeply about Disney and believed that they could do better. I still think Disney could be great. I still believe in them. They just need to believe in themselves again.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading! ♥

[eucanthos]

critical brain hypothesis

The brain operates near a/its critical point, rather than being precariously poised there. This arrangement offers much-needed stability while still enabling highly efficient information transfer and processing.

Gerardo Ortiz remembers well the time in 2010 when he first heard his Indiana University colleague John Beggs talk about the hotly debated “critical brain” hypothesis

Ortiz promptly identified one of the knottier problems with the hypothesis: It’s very difficult to maintain a perfect tipping point in a messy biological system like the brain.

Ortiz’s criticism has beleaguered the theory ever since the late Danish physicist Per Bak proposed it in 1992. Bak suggested that the brain exhibits “self-organized criticality,” tuning to its critical point automatically. Its exquisitely ordered complexity and thinking ability arise spontaneously, he contended, from the disordered electrical activity of neurons.

Bak’s canonical example of a self-organized critical system is a simple sandpile. If you drop individual grains of sand on top of a sandpile one by one, each grain has a chance of causing an avalanche. Bak and colleagues showed that those avalanches will follow a “power law,” with smaller avalanches occurring proportionally more frequently than larger ones. So if there are 100 small avalanches in which 10 grains slide down the side of the sandpile during a given period, there will be 10 larger avalanches involving 100 grains in the same period, and just one large avalanche involving 1,000 grains. When a huge avalanche collapses the whole pile, the base widens, and the sand begins to pile up again until it returns to its critical point, where, again, avalanches of any size may occur. The sandpile is incredibly complex, with millions or billions of tiny elements, yet it maintains an overall stability.

Scientists often use the same model for criticality as they do for nuclear chain reactions. In nuclear fission, a fission event gives off two particles, and they each give off two more, and so on, yielding a branching ratio (the expected number of descendants from a single event) of two. Such a system goes “supercritical” to produce an atomic bomb. Meanwhile in a “subcritical” system, the branching ratio is less than one, and so the chain reaction fizzles out. In a critical system, the branching ratio will be exactly one, setting off a sustained nuclear reaction capable (for example) of running a power plant indefinitely. Similarly, if the brain is truly critical, there will be a power-law distribution of avalanche sizes, but one neuron should, on average, activate one other neuron.

If the brain were extremely subcritical, according to Beggs, incoming signals would get damped and have no impact. “It would be like trying to talk to someone who is asleep or drunk,” he said. In a supercritical brain, incoming signals would get lost in a frenzy of electrical activity, and the effect would be like trying to talk to a seizure victim. Beggs and others argue that the neural network is most sensitive to incoming signals at the critical point. There, a chain of active neurons allows information to spread from one brain area to another without dying out prematurely or exploding.

Excerpts from Jennifer Ouellette's essay for Quanta Magazine June 14, 2018. Bill Domonkos' gif 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/brains-may-teeter-near-their-tipping-point-20180614/

[billyjackass]

wrote a transsexual feminist essay on my website—posting it here in case it resonates with anyone, especially multigender or two spirit people <3

[stanwixbuster]

A Narrative Designer Dissects Generation Loss

(And Further Thoughts on Dollhouse-like Streams)

I keep saying how Jerma's ushered in an entirely new narrative medium and no-one's believed me.

This has been stewing in my mind for months. Ever since watching The Dollhouse Stream while going through a bout of just-got-my-second-covid-shot fever, one thought has carved itself on the inside of my skull. It is something I truly believe, and am baffled that more people aren't talking about.

Livestreams are evolving into an interactive narrative artform.

Generation Loss has only cemented this for me.

This is something I will keep yelling from the rooftops until my throat is sore, and this essay is my desperate attempt to get other people to start paying attention to interactive livestreams.

Livestreams as a Medium

By definition, a livestream is anything broadcast over the internet to a live audience. Over time this has generally fallen into a standard format thanks to the community of livestreaming centred around Twitch, of a livestreamer playing a video game with a live chat engaging in the experience in some capacity. This is to the point that someone who describes themselves as a "streamer" will come with the assumption that they play games for a live audience.

However, this is a flexible format, and doing out-of-the-box livestreams is nothing new. Stream team Radio TV Solutions are infamous for putting on weird, absurdist, and even genre-bending takes on playing games for audience entertainment. Some of their streams can be likened more to a live broadcast show, rather than a simple "gaming stream".

But, what we're focusing on here are interactive livestreams, and not just streamers taking an interesting spin on the format. Such examples are the likes of Charborg, presenting his chat with a question, with individual members voting on a response, to then be dragged at random into a literal court of opinion to debate the reason for their choice. He puts his audience directly in control of the stream and its direction, with both streamer and chatter having to "roleplay" into the experience.

Interactive livestreams even extend beyond Twitch's roots of gaming content. Alistair Aitcheson is known for his interactive art streams, where he creates paintings with direct input from the audience watching. Here, the audience decides what Alistair should do and how he should do it, whether that be drawing a black cat, only being allowed to paint with his elbows, or using mayonnaise as a pigment.

But, by far, the most famous player in this space is streamer and former TF2 creator (of which, as someone who's been a fan of his since 2012, am shocked that more people don't know) Jerma985. Over time, Jerma has become known for his "big streams", where he will do anything from broadcasting a fake family dinner where everyone but Jerma is an actor that have never met each other, to digging up rocks in the Nevada desert in collaboration with a local science institution, to organising an entire baseball game of half actors and half actual athletes, complete with a full live commentary.

In 2019, Jerma broadcast "The Carnival Stream", a defining work for interactive livestreams. Jerma played the role of a ringmaster, bringing his chat around various carnival games that could be played with Twitch chat-powered robots. Almost immediately it became a sensation, and put Jerma down as one of the most innovative livestreamers to date. It was something Twitch had never seen before. Truly, no-one was doing it like Jerma.

At this point, livestreams are a medium that are going through radical innovations. People are doing interesting things with the concept, experimenting with what you can and can't do, and pushing them into new and fascinating directions of entertainment.

How do you turn entertainment into an artform?

The Impact of the Dollhouse Stream

During my undergraduate, my professor told me one thing I've held dear to my ethos ever since. Discussing the ways narratives are woven into video games, he said:

"The difference between a toy and art, is that art is able to tell a story."

It's a measurement that's never failed me. Everytime I've looked at something, and wondered if I could call it art, I remember this. Art is made through narrative. And one thing I'm always fascinated by, is if a medium can tell a narrative uniquely compared to others. I develop games fulltime, and both my studio and solo projects are focused on how to most effectively tell a story through whatever means it finds itself in. Interactive narrative experiences are something I hold very dear.

When Jerma announced "The Dollhouse Stream" to broadcast in 2021, the hype was electric. By now Jerma's big streams had become an internet sensation, even to the point of being affectionately dubbed "The Superbowl for the gays". With the only information on the stream being something influenced by The Sims, taking place over three individual broadcasts, tens and thousands of viewers tuned in to watch.

What we saw was, I truly believe, the beginning of livestreaming turning into an artform.

The Dollhouse Stream took interactive livestreams in ways that have never been seen before, and it's an absolute marvel that it exists at all. It was brilliant, hilarious, and absolutely groundbreaking.

And, there was a plot.

It was a loose plot, and just served as a way to funnel more shenanigans on screen, but it existed and fulfilled the exact purpose it was set out to do. There were defined beats, a set way it was going to end, and the interactive elements were giving a unique experience on how we'd get there.

This is where I felt my fixation latch. This could be a new narrative medium.

I prayed, and hoped, this was just the beginning of streams like this.

An Analysis of Generation Loss as an Interactive Narrative

(And Other Parts that Caught my Attention)

Disclaimer: Any critiques in this section are given entirely in good faith, and have no bearing on the immense amounts of work by those who worked on Generation Loss. This comes from me believing with my whole heart that interactive livestreams could, and should, be judged as an artform, and thus subject to the same level of critical analysis.

My prayers for more were answered when Generation Loss was announced as a "live interactive horror show". I decided to go into the stream blind, for better or worse, only knowing that the stream was based around horror, and almost certainly would be set in its own self-contained narrative. There was supplementary media around it to hype the stream up and flesh out the story around it, but I wanted to see how well this could stand on its own, and if interactive livestreams really could be the new narrative medium I was hoping they were.

Episode One

was absolutely not what I was expecting.

The tonal whiplash I felt on realising this was being played as a comedy is not something I'm quite able to describe. 

This doesn't make it bad; far from it. In retrospect it's a perfect intro to the slow descent from light-hearted comedy romp that's almost self-aware into a serious psychological horror.

Being familiar with The Dollhouse Stream, the structure is almost identical, with an audience presented with a choice, going to a timed vote, and having the choice with the highest percentage play out in whatever ways it might. Between beats of the audience picking a choice and seeing its consequences, the downtime is filled with the streamers reacting to the choices, shooting the shit, or guiding the stream through scripted plot beats.

But Generation Loss takes it in a slightly different direction. The Dollhouse Stream is based on life simulation games, with the audience trying to keep Jerma alive (or, most of the time, deliberately starving or exhausting him to see what would happen), earning money to buy furniture, upgrading the house, and sitting back to watch the chaos they've inspired. 

Generation Loss, however, commits to the theme of an adventure game.  Ranboo wakes up in a cabin, realises they're stuck in there, and we're presented with the first choice of picking somewhere to investigate, and later learning that we have an inventory. There's no objective, beyond a vague semblance of knowing we need to get out, and having to explore to find out what we're supposed to do. As the audience we have direct control over his actions, and decide where Ranboo should search next, guide him through various puzzles, and help him out of precarious situations.

Once I settled into what I was watching, the stream was great. It kept up the pace, everyone was hilarious, played into its cheese, and was a solid take on an interactive livestream. 

But, the one thing I was hoping for wasn't there, with interactivity that was played with in interesting manners. It was fairly obvious that every choice would lead us to the same, if not a similar outcome. With The Dollhouse Stream, Jerma choosing to flirt with someone rather than simply talking to them could have huge impacts on where the day-to-day plot would go, and how everyone else responded to it in turn.

After some thought, I settled on this being episode one. Something new could be coming in the future, and there was no way the advertising banked this hard into horror to just be a simple comedy setup. This episode was a great start, made good use of interactive livestreams as a medium, and made me cautiously optimistic for the rest of the series.

Episode Two

Starting episode two, it took me all of three seconds to recognise the Saw inspiration and know exactly who would be behind it.

For those who haven't been following Jerma for long enough to cause permanent damage to your psyche, Jerma has an ongoing joke of putting on an audio filter and speaking like Jigsaw, running through bizarre or entirely mundane takes on Saw traps. This all stemmed from one House Flipper stream, which quickly spirals into an insistence that the Saw movies have an obsession with neurotoxins and nerve agents, which chat is very quick to disprove, and the legend of GYAS is born.

So as a Jerma fan, witnessing the culmination of a years-long bit, this was fucking hilarious.

But as someone looking to this series as a new narrative direction for interactive livestreams, I started to get a little concerned. It seemed to be hitting much the same points as The Dollhouse Stream, without really pushing into new fields on the narrative side. Perhaps "horror" was mislabeled, and "comedy horror" might have been a more apt description. Critically, maybe the angle I'd like interactive livestreams to be taken in wasn't the intent of this series. It was definitely enjoyable, but maybe I was looking for something that wasn't put there in the first place.

The moment that turned it around was this:

This is when Generation Loss became what I was looking for.

Everything about this moment works spectacularly. Charlie's almost immediate transition from silly jokes about toy racing cars to guttural screaming; the delayed, almost confused reaction from Ranboo; the cut straight back to the jokes, leaving the audience to digest what just happened, alone, with no-one on screen to help us through it.

This simple 10 seconds made the entire episode work. We now have a frame story. What we're seeing isn't reality (and as we later learn, is a literal show), and occasionally we see through the gaps in the curtain. Suddenly, the goofiness can be leant into. We can lean into it as hard as we want; there's no bearing on what's actually happening. Then you're sat there, laughing at streamer shenanigans and jokes, with a subdued sort of horror that you'll never know when the curtain will be pulled back again.

My main wish for this episode was that the curtain was pulled more effectively. Each streamer more than adds to the comedic side to the stream, then when it was pulled (or at least, when I assume it was), I don't think it landed as well as the operating table. 

Some examples are the deaths. Ethan's stands out to me, as one that gives me some of the most mixed emotions. Just as itself, watching Ethan die off-screen, only hearing his voice, while Ranboo and Sneeg stand and barely react to it in stark contrast to Austin's panic, works extremely well if you look at it as a scene out of context.

The problem is, I think it breaks an established rule. The rule being, as far as I can tell, that while the show is running everything is seemingly inconsequential. Once Ranboo wakes up, and both of us learn of the show masking everything, we're free to see the reality under it, making us more similar to each other than he'd like.

On the operating table, we're given a precedent for what green slime actually is. Now, any time we see it, it's in a very different light, and entirely recontextualises the first episode.

But now when Ethan dies, we... do see blood? I was under the assumption that blood was censored on the show in some capacity, and the glitches are the show breaking down and getting a brief slice of the reality of the situation. If it isn't, what happened with Charlie? Did this one death in particular make it through the censors, for some reason? Did it have something to do with the setting adjusted on Ranboo's mask before this room was hit? If so, it seems like a bizarre choice, both in-universe and for the narrative impact it had.

We return to some of these spots in the next episode. It feels like a missed opportunity to not play off these moments as a fake-out on the show-side, and then discovering they were actual deaths when the reveal's made. Instead we have people dying in gruesome manners, to then reveal they're... still dead. It's an alright reveal in the context of the line between reality and fiction being blurred, but one that could be much stronger.

All of this isn't to say that every death needed a moment where the line between show and reality is crossed. Vinny's death is a perfect example. It's a full Looney Tunes bit of being (literally) ragdolled across a room, with cartoonish fanfare, and then met with a hilarious demise of being hit in the head with an anvil. The reality of this... I like that being left to  our imagination. It's a good one.

The death I felt was the weakest was the combined deaths of Austin and Sneeg, getting crushed by a moving wall cutout Ranboo manages to fit through, of which, through many ways that are immediately obvious, could fit several people through with some amount of problem solving.

Was this... funny? Absurd? Are we supposed to laugh? It's played in a goofy manner, definitely, but this was just after Ethan's death. We already know these people are dying by this point, or at the very least grievously harmed, so having two people die in succession to then be immediately swept under the rug was odd. After Niki's death, which accomplished a shock death that's moved on from almost immediately very nicely, it felt like a backtracking in tone and redoing a beat we've already seen. 

On top of that, Austin reacted to Ethan's death, and then to the continued lack of reaction Sneeg and Ranboo have. I took this as Austin no longer being controlled in some capacity, so it doesn't make that much sense for Austin to die in a way that has a logical way out. Sneeg's does make sense, having been fully put under again. And going back to the point of the green slime, wouldn't it be much more effective if Ethan died in a way that isn't seen, perhaps only briefly and then cut off, to then see Austin freaking out over "nothing"?

I felt a bit of dissonance. Maybe this was the intent, but I don't think it landed in the right way. Instead of thinking if I should be concerned if that was a real death or not, like Niki's, I was more wondering if I was supposed to be thinking that. I was confused rather than horrified.

To give my fair dues, the moment with Sneeg realising where he was, and his attempted escape, was really good. It's a subtle moment at first, only shown by a glitch and Sneeg snapping out of an apparent fugue, to try to find his way out while pretending he's still under it. Our next curtain pull is Sneeg being dragged back into the show to be reset again while everyone's frozen, which I only fully caught on a rewatch as a literal pause of the show.

Another part of this episode that weakened it was something I didn't even realise would be an issue with interactive livestreams. With The Dollhouse Stream, if someone went on a bit of a joke tangent before moving onto the next part, it was fine. You're here to laugh and it only played into the strengths of the whole thing being a comedy setup. You're going from one thing to laugh at, to another thing to laugh at, and now you're on a detour for something else to laugh at that wasn't fully planned. The beats feed into each other.

But with Generation Loss, I was wanting everyone to move on so we could see the next horror beat. I wanted to be on the edge of my seat wondering what's going to happen next, and instead I was waiting for this line of jokes to wrap up. It was funny, because these people are full-time entertainers, but I didn't want to laugh right now.

Even with that said, I'm honestly not sure where that line should be. One part of me thinks this episode would be much for the better with some tighter pacing, but another couldn't bear to not have my heartstrings pulled by fulltime gay Austin's four children. Not even mentioning his one wive.

And wrapping up what I thought would be a small tangent before I get to the reason this essay exists in the first place, even with some tonal inconsistency and downtime between beats, I adore the details in this episode you only catch on a rewatch. For example, this tiny moment in the second to last room, where Ranboo is tapping out a morse code SOS signal with one hand, to then stop himself with the other.

Now that's sick.

Right; let's talk about why I'm here.

I was delighted to see that in this episode we got some neat interactivity that did have some narrative knock-ons. I was, finally, seeing what I came here for! Thrilling! 

The critical moment of interactivity is the carousel, at least for the narrative, of which we get to choose two people to save and bring with us for the rest of the episode.

Yes, of course, our choice to save Niki gets her killed, but isn't it nice to play a part?

 If we chose someone else, we could have got some pretty different improv sections or possibly new plot beats entirely. It's a good way to add some narrative branching while still progressing through a defined story with one ending.

The other interactive portions of the stream lean into one of my favourite parts of narrative design, of tying game mechanics to the story you're telling. Where the first episode takes on the style of an adventure game, the second is more akin to a gameshow. "Show" is the key word here, and the crux of the whole frame story this episode introduces. We're watching a silly little show, with some silly little entertainers, playing some silly little games that have absolutely no bearing on any possible reality. At all.

And since we're entertaining ourselves with something so mindless, not really caring about what's happening behind it, some equally mindless and pointless games would be a perfect supplement for this show. At first I wasn't a fan of these game sections, until I started to think about why they'd be put there. It's padding. A distraction. It literally covers the entire screen, demands your full attention by not allowing the story to continue until it's done, all to take your mind off what you're looking at and any discrepancies you might have seen before. It's not obvious, initially causes some friction, and really elevates the medium it's in once you start thinking about it a little deeper.

This is what I'm here for; this is the potential I saw.

With a very nice ending to round it off, and a full reveal promising the horror to run deeper as we continue on, my cautious optimism on how this would be wrapped up persisted.

Episode Three

Episode three is the tonal peak of the series, and by far the strongest episode. It strikes the perfect balance between humour and horror, and really shows the strengths of interactive livestreams as a narrative medium.

It starts almost immediately where we left off from the previous episode, tilting further away from comedy, and then sets us on a slow descent into absolute horror. This progression is done wonderfully. There's even a few sporadic jokes that land during the shift, before committing to it entirely by the ending.

My worry was the overarching story would not land. That there would be one huge lore dump explaining every detail of this corporation behind everything we just had to know. Instead, it's kept pleasantly vague with enough details for us to fill in the blanks from the previous episodes, and add some fantastic context that makes the whole series' worldbuilding stronger.

And a genuine question, did Charlie get acting lessons at some point? His swaps between goofs and terror are stunningly natural and lad's got some pipes on him that fully convinced me he was scared for his life.

Subtlety is the last thing I expected to be impressed by during this. Instead of having its messages laid out explicitly by one character going on a years-long monologue, they're told through environment, character reactions, and from details we've caught previously. Instead of spelling out a message on how streamer personalities are seen by others, you can show us a literal commodification of going live from derelict storefronts.

Cross-stream invasions will never get old. Ever.

This episode is where the series starts to make a fantastic use of every part of the medium it's in. Namely, as a filmed medium, between excellent shots of the live portions, especially during the chase scenes, to some near-seamless cuts to the prerecorded cinematics.

This is the first livestream I've ever said: "Wow, the cinematography's fantastic."

And hilariously, for the episode that ended up being my favourite, is the one with the least amount of actual interactivity. There's only two choices the audience makes, and both are extremely well-placed and well-done. It shows so well how it's not how much interactivity you shove into a medium that enhances it, but when and why you use it.

The first one is a subversion. Everyone loves subversions. We make a choice, but Ranboo now ignores us entirely. By doing so, and revelling in his newfound freedom, Ranboo condemns himself with the wrong choice.

Is it better for us to be in control of Ranboo? Should we be?

There's even subtle storytelling that doesn't come from an interactive moment directly. One happens during the final cinematic before the last choice. This one tiny moment, that I didn't even realise was there until seeing brief mentions of it in chat.

There's an exit sign that Ranboo misses.

And, critically, there were people in the audience who didn't.

Consider us, as we were controlling Ranboo before. There very well may have been moments Ranboo would have missed entirely if not for our choices to bring them there. If we were still in control, could we have sent them that way? Would we have been able to? Would it even be considered a freedom, if he didn't make the choice to reach it?

We're now forced to watch him head to one inevitable fate, just as he watched everyone before him.

The second, and final choice, is the climax of the entire series. Ranboo's final send off, after the show's had its run with him, is up to the audience to decide if he should live or die. Even after managing to be free of audience control, to the point of actively rejecting it, Ranboo is still beheld by it to the very end.

There's even a narrative element to seeing the decision shift in real time, told entirely by the audience watching. Chat immediately floods with attempts to save Ranboo, the knee-jerk reaction on being faced with the option to kill them. Then, as the announcer details the actual fate of being left alive, with Ranboo's slow realisation that they'd consider it worse than death, the bar slowly creeps over to the right, flicking back and forth over the 50/50 mark.

And then, as the choice times out, deciding to give Ranboo an apparent mercy, chat is immediately flooded with laments on if it was the right call as the credits roll.

Absolutely stellar.

This is, for all intents and purposes, the first ever narrative-heavy interactive livestream. It's the best one because it's the only one. There's wanes and waxes, with parts that didn't land, some that very much did, and an experience that I still enjoyed immensely, if not mostly on the novelty of the medium, and the obvious heart that was put into every part of it. Quoting myself to a friend minutes after the stream ended:

"i feel like i just watched the second movie ever made"

 And, should Ranboo, Jerma, or literally anyone else pursue narrative-heavy interactive livestreams further, there's so much that could be learnt from and expounded on into something incredible.

That excites me. That really excites me.

Interactive Livestreams as a Narrative Medium

This begs the question: where do we go from here?

I'm pulling away from Generation Loss specifically, and now asking to the question of narratives in interactive livestreams in general. Could we consider interactive livestreams a new narrative medium? Or is it a subgenre of another type of storytelling, with much the same considerations and impacts?

What we're really asking, is this: how does an interactive livestream tell a story through audience interaction? One of the best ways we can do this, is to start making comparisons between interactive livestreams and other mediums, and seeing what lessons we can and can't learn from them.

So, with this in mind, what medium is one of the most famous and wide-spread types of interactive media? What medium is an intersection of many others, and is able to use their strengths and limitations as a story demands? What medium has decades of experience in narrative agency and responding to the choices of someone engaging with it?

Video games.

The Narratives of Interactive Livestreams

Let's analyse The Dollhouse Stream as we would a piece of interactive fiction. It already has many terms describing narrative structures and systems, and the progression of The Dollhouse Stream fits quite nicely into them.

We're going to jump to the first choice made in the house itself in episode one, where the "game" begins proper. There's intricacies happening right up to that point, but we'll discuss what they are in more detail shortly.

The audience's first choice, between working out, going outside, and using the toilet, is exactly the one you think it is. Ignoring the innate comedy of piss, a choice is made, some amount of content happens, and then the stream continues on until the next choice.

This is what's known as a "bottleneck", where a choice branches out, and then collapses back down to a main branch. This main branch, typically dubbed "the golden path" (GP), is the path with the most content, the path a designer tries to guide the player down for narrative satisfaction, the "win condition", or other similar denotation. How the GP is defined exactly depends on the type of story being constructed.

So here's a question: what's the GP of an interactive livestream?

This is where analysing interactive livestreams in this way can only take us so far. The thing is, this idea of branching out and bottlenecking, implies that after the bottleneck, the stream would progress the exact same no matter which choice was made. This is decidedly not true, for many apparent reasons that I'm sure you can see. In an alternate vote where, shockingly, chat decides to not make Jerma piss, he would have had to make very different jokes.

Also, looking at this diagram might imply that the entire stream is put on hold when a vote takes place, like in interactive fiction when a choice is presented and the game effectively pauses until the player picks one. Audience choices are actually running asynchronously to the stream, and the streamers can fill the gap with improv until a choice is decided. Things can even happen mid-decision that has an impact on how the audience votes. Screaming "Please let me die", perhaps.

Instead, the narrative of interactive livestreams put us on an entirely different kind of story.

One type of narrative system is known as "attribute-based stories", sometimes called "quality-based stories". Where a block of narrative content is reached, and based on the choices made during it, an attribute is applied and carried through the rest of the story. These could range from obtaining an item, getting level experience, sating a survival need, changing relationships with other characters, or a literally limitless list of others.

How attributes are used, and when they're applied, is down to the designer. Imagine you go to a pub with the attribute "had a bad day at work". You enter, make some choices, and leave with the attribute "got into a bar fight". Once you return home, you could mention the attributes you gained during the day with your roommate, with some special content playing out based on it. Perhaps "put on your favourite shirt this morning" and "got beer spilled down your shirt". This is an admittedly crude explanation of attributes, and doesn't even begin to look at the narrative complexities it allows, but hopefully gives you a good idea of how they work.

Generation Loss, likely from its initial influence from adventure games (of which, structurally, is almost one in the same as interactive fiction), and later game shows, doesn't stray too far from a branch and bottleneck format. But, this doesn't stop attributes being used effectively, both by streamers playing off improv and making some minor changes to the narrative, even with the ending being predetermined.

Conversely, attributes make up almost all of The Dollhouse Stream's narrative. Every choice, furniture, interaction with other characters, and even audience reactions can be thought of in terms of attributes. One of the most well-known moments of the series comes from something developed almost entirely on attributes:

Jerma and Emilia.

This thread starts once the audience decides to call for "sexy maid service." We're given what was sure to be a brief joke, and are greeted at the door by a maid played by Ludwig, later finding out he's playing the character of non-binary maid Emilia. 

The audience is immediately smitten. They love them. A choice is made to flirt with Emilia, and the rest is history.

Their relationship continues with a date invitation, Jerma sleeping through it, awkward interactions, development with the rest of the cast. And, in a culmination of all of this, Jerma cheats on Emilia with Death, with one of the most infamous scenes in the series bringing up every attribute this relationship's gained up to this point. Jerma calling Emilia a "stupid maid" out of context, the missed dates, every insane occurrence that's happened in this house, all comes out in this one moment, and it's just as impressive as it is the funniest shit I've ever seen on Twitch.

You don't know how high they can fly.

Emilia was intended to be a small gag. Instead, through audience popularity, and building a whole story on nothing but attributes, they became a critical character of the series. By playing into each other, the audience and streamers have, very effectively, created an entirely new plot thread for the stream to follow, which has had sweeping effects on the entire narrative.

This is a level of interactivity that games could only dream of. Sure, you can always comment on the player picking up the green sword instead of the red, but can you comment on their emotional response to that decision? Their thoughts on not taking the red? If we become fixated on it, are we then able to reference it as a cute nod or critical plotpoint, and change the future of the game based on it? If the audience doesn't care, can you drop it entirely, and bring in something else you have prepared?

That level of narrative fidelity is nigh-impossible to hit in a video game. There's a reason games that get even slightly close to emulating this, like Disco Elysium, are revered as technical marvels.

Let's consider how this could be applied to another technique used by games to deliver as much interactivity as possible, while cutting back on the amount of assets needing to be created. Rather than scripting entirely new locations and environments for every choice made, choices are instead put back on the characters. The same general series of events take place, and what changes is how the characters react to them. They can change the narrative based on if they're the one to perform an action, if they do an action at all, how their relationship with other characters pans out, and, if the story calls for it, if a specific character survives.

In interactive livestreams, these characters are no longer AI reacting to scripted events you meticulously plan out to land. These are real, actual actors who can respond, adjust, and create new content on the fly based on previous attributes, with the only real limit being their skill as an actor. Most importantly, they can improv their way out of something going entirely off-rails, and possibly make something even better than the original plan. 

This was starting to sound familiar to me. What other medium have stories created through a two-way relationship between separate parties? What other medium requires everyone involved to be fully playing in the headspace of the story, and be willing to bend, and possibly break it?

TTRPGs.

An interactive livestream manages to create the hyper-personalised story of a TTRPG, with choice mechanics of video games, combined with the visual spectacle of theatre and film.

And that's thrilling.

Structuring the Narrative of an Interactive Livestream

Let's temper our excitement for a minute, and bring our attention back to the concept of a GP. A GP, as we saw earlier, isn't really a structure we can apply to interactive livestreams. Even if we meticulously plan out everything to the minute detail, one improv'd line could throw the entire thing off. And if we do want to make something to that end, we could just, you know, make a scripted show. It doesn't exactly fit the spirit of an interactive livestream and what it could do.

So as much as interactive livestreams can lean into being a live medium and using improv to carry it, they still need to tell a story, especially if it wants to lean heavier into the narrative side over improv comedy. 

I'm proposing a term of "golden nodes" for interactive livestreams. This takes the idea of a golden path, but shifts it to better fit how interactive livestreams come to be. A golden node is a piece of content that must be hit at some point. Either because they are the ending state of the stream, enough preparation has gone into them that it would be a catastrophic waste of money to not show it, or has critical plot beats that forwards the story being told. How we get there (in terms of making a complete story, and less so on how good it will be) is irrelevant, and where something entirely unplanned can crop up.

We could try running through The Dollhouse Stream and categorising golden nodes, but this is something you can't really define with something so heavily reliant on improv. What we might think was a golden node might have been improvised on the day, and something we think might have been made on the spot had weeks of planning. Sometimes it's obvious, like organising a bear attack complete with a bear costume, or having a whole lighting setup for a party, but when so much is made up on the spot, it becomes much harder to define which is which. And often, it's a bit of a pointless exercise, and more of a fun fact you hear in the BTS.

On the other hand, as you would expect from something much more focused on telling a pre-planned story, Generation Loss is much heavier with its golden nodes compared to The Dollhouse Stream, and much easier to guess which were planned and take stabs at what was improvised live. I actually wanted to take a stab at mapping the whole series out, complete with attributes gained, used, and estimating which nodes were golden, but...

I've spent far too long on this already.

A few notes I did make on the deaths in episode two, for the curious:

Niki was voted by the audience as the first choice to be saved. If the any-person voted was the one to trigger this, Austin, Ethan, or Niki could have died first.

Vinny's death is a cinematic dependency. Unless multiple videos were shot for it, Vinny had to die at that point.

Ethan's death could have been anyone

I'm personally convinced Sneeg was railroaded to survive until the end, given how well his reset state plays off Ranboo's new emotionless performance.

Keep in mind, this is entirely from my own perspective as someone watching from the outside, and approaching it from the perspective of a narrative designer trying to maximise unique outcomes. I've had to make several assumptions here and I could be entirely off-base.

Despite my crashing out, mapping the livestream out like this shows how rail-roaded episode three is, to the point you can actually draw a solid GP for it. It also shows that, even with many golden nodes to hit, episode two manages to have quite a few moments that could have gone differently based on audience choice. At least, if my assumptions are correct.

So, this leaves me with a proposed set of terms for discussing interactive livestream. Interactive livestream are built around "nodes"; chunks of content that have been explicitly planned out and prepared for before the stream begins. Some of these are golden nodes. Golden nodes could be anything, but are things that must be hit before the stream is over. Other nodes may be optionally hit, and entirely unplanned and improvised content can happen between any nodes. During unplanned segments and nodes alike, everyone (and, really, everything), can gain attributes, which can be brought up at any time to the story's discretion.

Maybe these terms are useful. Maybe they aren't. We'll have to wait and see.

The Limitations of Interactive Livestreams

As much as it's fun to speculate what could be, we, unfortunately, live in a real world with restrictions and limits of what we can do.

One of the most obvious ones is budget, and with the amount of moving parts an interactive livestream has, budget becomes a vital topic to remember. But budget isn't just a matter of money. Consider, if you had unlimited money, and were writing a novel by yourself, how fast could you work? Let's say you write a solid 2,000 words a day, and to you, a novel is complete at 80,000. In this example, you're going to live to 80 before peacefully dying of old age, and start your novelist career at the ripe age of 20.

Even if you had no worries about having a roof over your head, feeding yourself, never getting sick, never taking holidays, and sacrificing every day of your life to writing novels, not even accounting for slowing down as you grew older, or editing, publishing, and the entire escapade on getting your work noticed by others, you would be able to produce 547 in your lifetime, with half a manuscript left over. 

Now consider this when you do have a limited amount to spend and a deadline to hit, and now you're writing something that could have five novels worth of storylines, involves visuals, audio, music, technical implementation, and now considering interactive livestreams specifically, set design, filming requirements, human needs of catering, sanitation, and shelter for your cast and crew. 

Suddenly, two novels of content compared to five looks much more appealing. Interactive narratives not having limitless branches isn't a matter of not wanting to put everything you've got into a project. It's a matter of production realism.

Time is a resource, and one you need to spend just as wisely as money.

This is something very important to remember for interactive livestreams. It's also something to consider for ways we could cut out the expensive parts of one. Could we create one that doesn't have a fancy camera setup? Do we need camera visuals at all, making something akin to a live narrative podcast? Do all interactive livestreams need to last several hours, or can we reduce the scope of time? It wouldn't have the exact same spectacle as a several-hour live filmed show would, sure, but that doesn't mean we can't make impactful narratives with it. Do you know how many eggs we've cracked with 5 minute twine games?

Limitations are also not just a matter of production. We need to think about limitations of a medium itself. A novel, with just text, doesn't have the liberty of showing you something in a visual format, and has to rely entirely on words to communicate the same information. Of course, you can bend and break the rules a little and include pictures in your book, but that starts to cross the line into other formats. Now we're not just a written medium, and have other considerations to make as well. And, generally, writing a paragraph of description is quicker than drawing a picture. The real challenge is making a paragraph just as impactful as a picture in the same spot.

For interactive livestreams, its limitations are a bit tricker to define, being an intersection of so many types of media right off the bat. I'm woefully undereducated of the limitations of filming and live shows, and unfortunately cannot speak to how they would shape how a story is developed. But, what I can do is talk about possible limitations in narrative interactivity. There are a few that jump to mind immediately.

As much as we can talk about audience choice in interactive livestreams, this begs an interesting question, of what happens to the choices the audience doesn't pick. In a game, this is pretty simple. That choice is blocked off, it may have consequences, and the player lives with the choice they did make.

However, games are not performances. They're pieces of media that can be replayed on-demand. If you want a different experience, or want to see what that choice you didn't make actually did, all you have to do is start again.

An interactive livestream does not have this liberty. Once the livestream is over, it cannot be replayed by the audience for a different outcome. Every choice is final, the narrative responds to it, and whatever outcome the then-live audience chooses is the one that's the final outcome for everyone else watching the vod.

In a game, there's often a discussion about how much it should branch around a choice, especially if that choice leads you on an entirely different path with unique content. Someone might not be interested in another run, and unless you really put replayability forward as a selling point, or make it a central mechanic of the game, it's a high gamble that a lot of the content you put a dear amount of effort into will never be seen.

For an interactive livestream, that isn't a matter of content that won't be seen on one run. That's content that won't be seen, period, and is effectively discarded after the stream ends. If we have a story with two immediate branching paths, that's two interactive livestreams worth of budget, for only half the content being delivered.

Looking at this diagram, we can see what content someone sees on one run of a typical branching game. There's a lot they saw, but much more that they didn't. Imagine that this is now the planned content branch for an interactive livestream. Imagine that each one of those nodes is the equivalent to a room in episode two of Generation Loss, and how many uncoloured nodes there are in comparison to red.

Are linear bottlenecked choices the only outcomes for narratives of interactive livestream if we're not depending on improv? Is there an upper limit to how much "true" branching you can prepare before you start hitting the limits of your budget? Can there be an interactive livestream that manages to give several ending options based on the path taken, or will it always have to collapse back down to one alone, or an ending with one diverging choice in the final moment? Does this strip some audience agency, knowing that in spite of their choices or "playing along", they will never be able to change where the story is going, or only making one difference right at the end?

Equally, however, the audience will never know. With a game, an inconsequential choice can always be scrutinised on a replay. Finding out that if you choose to shoot someone, you always miss, and gives you the exact same outcome as letting them live. In an interactive livestream, to the audience, that other choice is permanently gone as soon as we decide to let them live. We will never know what shooting them would have done. It's a kind of choice funneling that games could only dream of.

Compare this diagram, showing a heavily bottle-necked story in a game with multiple runs:

To this one. The same story, now adapted for an interactive livestream:

Interactive livestream are already making use of this. Consider the first choice in episode three of Generation Loss. The scripted event is the audience picking one code, and Ranboo picking any other to forward the plot. The "true" code is chosen when the audience picks it, and Ranboo picks a different one to trigger the security lockdown.

In a game, the first time we play this would have much the same narrative impact, but not so on the second. If we pick a code, enter it, and find out on the first run it's wrong, we remember this on the next. We can try to cheat a little and pick the code we know is correct from the previous run, only to find that no matter what, whatever we pick is the incorrect one. Replay value is a little cheapened.

In an interactive livestream, however, as far as the narrative goes, we will never know anything different. Our first choice is the only choice. The yellow code is always incorrect.

Will audiences wise up to these moments and start to tire of it? Will we get good enough at disguising them and striking a balance between actual interactivity and putting the audience on rails? Who knows. We have to do it and find out.

Here's another thing I've been wondering in terms of limitations, of the kind of narrative setups you can and can't do with interactive livestreams. I mention this, because currently the two story-heavy interactive livestreams we have are based around the concept of an audience directly controlling a streamer, who (and in the case of Generation Loss, not at all times) is aware that they're being controlled and broadcast live.

The Dollhouse Stream takes it in a comedic direction. The entire inspiration of the stream is based on The Sims, with Jerma directly taking mannerisms and inside jokes from the games. Jerma is fully aware of the chat controlling him, and at times openly antagonistic of choices made or not made, but always plays into the character and follows whatever decisions the audience makes.

Generation Loss, as discussed, is the horror inversion of this. Ranboo starts blissfully unaware of the audience controlling them, and the fact this is even being broadcast, and plays into it much like they were making the choices themself. Soon after he learns the truth, he's terrified and defiant of the audience previously controlling him, which marks a point in the narrative of things turning south.

It's pretty interesting to me that both of these are built on the audience being in direct control of a streamer as an extant character to itself, and the streamer fully aware it exists, at least in different capacities. It's like we're already having some meta commentary on the whole medium before it's even fully hit its stride.

I'm certain there's ways to create interactive livestream that don't immediately jump to this as how the audience interacts (the first thought takes a similar thread of video games, where the audience "is" the person they're "controlling", and as a character they and the audience are one in the same), but I also posit this. Does the audience need to control a person? Could they control the environment a streamer is in, and possibly the stream itself? Could the audience be an additional character to themselves, not in direct control of others present? Could we hotswap control between different people on the fly? There's room to explore what the audience actually controls and why.

This is also said with an understanding that both The Dollhouse Stream and Generation Loss are, in varying capacities, commentaries on livestreaming and impacts it has on both streamer and audience. This is excellent, and I'm certainly not calling it a dead-end for interactive livestreams, but I am saying that this medium has potential outside it.

And something else I do wonder about, is the tone of narratives in future interactive livestreams. They, obviously, have their roots in streamer culture and the personalities that have come from it. Each of these personalities, being comedic entertainers, always bring their own jokes and riffs and are predisposed to making people laugh from observational humour. It begs the question, will every interactive livestream have some kind of jokes and tangents to it, and all have some form of improv comedy? Will there be ones that manage to break away from this entirely?

But then I think of some criticisms of video games, of saying that things are too "game-like". Which, to me, is similar to walking into an Italian restaurant and complaining about the amount of pasta. Maybe this is similar. I think we simply don't have enough interactive livestreams to call it.

We need to see more.

We're on the Frontier of a New Way to Tell Stories

This is the point where I fully convinced myself of something I'd been suspecting from the first ten minutes of The Dollhouse Stream. By trying to analyse interactive livestreams as interactive fiction, I was met with caveats and exceptions. As a TTRPG, more caveats. As a standard video game, more. This wasn't a simple matter of treating it as one medium, and keeping in mind one adjustment to make it work. There were sweeping knock-on effects that didn't match with any existing interactive media, and forced me to rethink how to approach it from the ground up.

This is how, I believe, interactive livestreams sets themselves apart from other forms of interactive narratives, and into their own category entirely. They are simply something unto themselves. There's many questions here, and they can only be answered by those who will strike out to try them, and I eagerly await those who do.

We are currently seeing, in real time, a new form of interactive media being developed right in front of us. And one I believe, with the right hands and direction, could easily ascend to a point of being considered art through narrative.

I see nothing but potential. There are so many ways to take this medium and I am begging more people to put their hat into the ring to see what the true limits of it are beyond theory and speculation.

But, it needs that direction. It needs people who understand choice in media, and for the love of god, it needs narrative designers at the helm. My obvious bias as a fulltime game designer and solo narrative dev come through here, but there's no other medium that's produced talent better equipped to tackle this.

I'm right here. Someone hire me.

To which my question is: if you're in the games industry, and not instantly smitten by interactive livestreams as a new medium for storytelling experiences, what the hell are you doing?

And if you're not, and read this for whatever reason you did, I hope you can see what I see, and are as excited as I am.

[journey-to-balance]

Beyond Valentine's Day - Romancing the Every Day

I admit it - I am a hopeless romantic. Yellow roses, antique French lace and hand-painted Limoges porcelain all make my heart flutter. I love the grand "big deal" surprises, like a trip in spring as much as anyone else, but I think it's the small, day-to-day gestures that transform our lives and leave a lasting imprint on our hearts.

I think a romantic lifestyle is a state of the spirit, the daily appreciation of the beauty all around us. This means cherishing what we value most in our lives: love, joy, beauty, family and home. Our home becoming our haven, a sanctuary away from our fast-paced world.

Living a romantic lifestyle means having fresh flowers on the kitchen counter at all times, even if it's just a few decorative branches snipped from the garden in the twilight of autumn or during the barren days of winter, a single rose by the bed, and candles at dusk and at mealtimes. I'm a hold-out-for-old-fashioned-elegance woman. I believe in heirloom or thrifted silver and nice dishes for dinner, tea poured every day in porcelain cups, and reading by the welcoming coziness of a warm fire.

Carving out our own space, filled with laughter and our own rhythm - what could be more romantic than that? There's no rush, no keeping up with the neighbor, nor societal pressure, only what feels authentic and true. We celebrate the 12 days of Christmas, and consider our trees guiding lights during the stark, gray, winter hours. There's no arbitrary man made new year celebration prior to a natural spring, no new year-new me lists, no pressurized goal posts or expectations. In fact, I never know when I will be stimulated by new ideas or inspiration. I do know that it always shows up when I show gratitude to the mundane - the warmth of the sun, the freshness of the air, having access to books and music, or even how the light hits the bark on trees when we are walking in the woods with our dog.

I guess what I am trying to say is that, for me, living a romantic lifestyle means being at peace and in love with my Creator. In many ways, romanticism transcends physical objects, and becomes more of an ideal. More than travel, gourmet food, fine décor, and antique trinkets, it means making the imperfect refuge we call home, a special dwelling. Romanticizing the every day means creating a nesting place, a meaningful haven for ourselves and our families, focusing on rearing children to become warm, well-cultured, principled adults.

There's nothing mystical, no real secret to romancing our everyday. All that is required, is that we begin to look at our days through a lens of joy, and gratitude for what we already have, actively expressing appreciation and enthusiasm for simple things, not afraid to share one's excitement in honest and true ways for this one singular existence and limited time here on Earth.

I over romanticize life, I glamourize life.

I will forever sing to the birds, whisper to the moon, dream aloud to the stars and celebrate in prayer. I will forever rejoice in my existence and not take a single tear for granted, and neither should you.

Valentine's Day is Every Day. You may think me silly, think me looking at the world through rose colored glasses. I... I view this as my life's philosophy. And with that, I bid you well, and send you my love.

Respectfully, Maritza.

Our Journey to Balance

[tutuandscoot]

Let’s talk about this lift

~an essay

First, some brief history..

This is probably VM’s most iconic lift, along with ‘The Goose’, and to a lesser extent I would also say the curve lift in MR (the Prince Lift). I include that last one from an ‘iconic Olympic moments’ pov. It is often used in media packages for the Winter Olympics. It was one of the most iconic moments to come out of VM’s performance- because of the way it fit with the music, created a moment, electrified the crowd… it just became one of those things that you now picture when you hear Come What May, and a truly memorable moment from their skate- when you think of triumph and super human achievement that’s an image that comes to mind. It’s an Olympic lift. In that respect I place it in the same company as the two former lifts, however I wouldn’t give it the same VM specific, iconic to them status as the two former.

The difference with The Goose and this lift (which will be referred to from here on as the ‘Carmen Rotational lift’ (CR) as I hate that other name it was given) is The Goose was largely popularised within the skating community. [I may be wrong with this, I wasn’t around back then but from what I’ve understood and learned about their career/legacy]. (Also I’m not going to recite the whole passage about it’s creation from the book.. IYKYK). It was first performed in Pink Floyd. It was then used as one of the many, but maybe most memorable, highlight moments in Mahler. The fact that in Mahler she originally jumped out of it seemed mind blowing, then when it was changed to blindly falling back into his arms I think just added even more to it’s poetic beauty and mind boggling difficulty. This lift was made famous in 09/10 and was then retired from competitive programs. It became ‘their move’ not just of the season but of their careers among fans especially, and/or anyone who attended ice shows more than once. It’s an iconic move, but it largely stayed iconic within the confines of the skating community, maybe seen more now through FS edits on IG & TT.

The CR, debuted in the 12/13 season as the furious, passionate, violent climax to Carmen. Now this post isn’t about that program so I’ll keep this brief, as with all* their programs they were always able to create new, or modify lifts that were unique and deliberate for each character and storyline. Carmen as a piece is arguably the most raw and thematically dark program they ever did, and this lift, along with several smaller, nuanced moments throughout the program are such perfect embodiments of the specific character interactions they wanted to portray. It’s violent, it’s unexpected, it’s daring and death-defying… one slip on that exit and her head would smash the ice and she could be paralysed.

Moving onto this lift in MR..

Lets start by talking about the athletic and logistical nature of it.

As with everything they do, they make it look so easy. And as has been discussed many times, the reason they can do the lifts they do and make them so unique and seamless is because they play equal parts. It is not simply Scott lifting Tessa- she gets herself into and can hold herself in all types of bizarre positions effortlessly while Scott is the strongest, most secure male partner for her in the base/facilitator of the entry and exits of these lifts.

So let’s break this down. First, let’s talk about Tessa’s role

[WARNING: prefacing this for all readers that NO negative/crude/ comments/rbs will be tolerated, this is an educative/admirational essay. ALSO: discretion is advised for younger readers- adult themes will be discussed].

They prepare for the lift with just two backwards travelling synchronised crossovers, just two to gain a huge amount of speed to get up the momentum they need for T’s flip. She kicks her left leg up then forcefully (but not aggressively) digs her toe pick into the ice and immediately starts the twist and dives forward while still travelling at speed.

So now once she’s off the ice (which I guess is officially when the 7secs for the lift starts ?) is when it becomes mind boggling when you break it down. As she twists and flips, as she takes off she can’t really see him, she just knows he’s gonna catch her. She sees him briefly as she twists towards him but she’s in the air at this point so the lift can’t be aborted (side note: that’s the other thing with a lot of their lifts- they are so dangerous and physically demanding, there is often this kinda point of no return.. I’m sure they do, as we’ve seen in some practice footage, have emergency exit strategies if a lift doesn’t go right) but with this one, considering the speed and that they are travelling backwards, at least in this transitional part before she gets on his shoulders there’s kinda no going back.

What’s so interesting when you start to look at the detail of it.. she doesn’t just twist to flip forward and stays square, she continues to twist a bit because of where he has to step in and forward.. as she goes upside down, her body continues to twist slightly and her right arm gets left behind (1). Once he’s rotated her enough, she gets her right arm out from beside him so quickly and smoothly (2) and immediately starts to square up her shoulders and hips so as she sits up she’s as even as possible as to not throw off the rotation and sit on his shoulders evenly (3). Also while this is happening, she needs to be so specific with how wide she opens her legs. Too wide and she’ll slip off his shoulders, too narrow and he won’t be able to get his head in between. Also, partly due to the twist but also because he is stepping forward from her right side (once she’s twisted) she has to open her right leg slightly wider than left so timing wise it matches up to when he is stepping forward and he has that space as he’s coming from the back to be in line with her (4). The timing has to be perfect because if he steps forward too early he’ll hit her leg. Then once he’s in position she has to close her legs tight together- since that’s really the only point of contact/stabilisation for her throughout the rotation.

1. Upper body is twisted-hips slightly uneven, shoulders more so as right arm gets left behind. 2. Hips have evened up and right shoulder is brought forward. 3. Sit bones are even and right shoulder is (just about) square approaching top of the lift. 4. Right leg open further than left

Once she sitting up right- which she basically does all on her own, he is more or less acting as the pivot point for her hips and she rotates, there’s a little assistance with his left hand but it’s pretty much just her core strength. As she sits up, she has to not throw her upper body forward. She also has to be so careful not to use her legs to get her up because if she were to continue bending her knees and her skates go back, she could risk stabbing him in the back. So what she does to counter all that, is she does more of a ‘crunch’ motion- she lifts her knees up/brings her chest to her knees as she hunches forward, but keeps her hips very square and balanced as to not throw off the axis of the turn (5).

I feel like the Olympics version was the best version of this lift, because where as in other versions, some where she really hunched over but the weight was back (7), and others where she didn’t hunch over as much- she sat upright but she still held his head (6), what they achieved this final time was a balance of all of it. She got into that hunched over position and ‘grabbed’ his head right away- which I imagine just from a physics perspective, being in the tightest shape possible at the top of that lift is the most aerodynamic position. She also sat upright enough- or should I say she wasn’t hanging back on his shoulders - her thighs were at/close to a right angle.

5. Hunched over so her head is right above his. Curved spine for tighter ‘ball’ shape. Hips square- not hinging in an acute angle. Knees not physically moving but pressing upwards to counter knees and skates bending back. 6. Spine straight, only head bent forward and not touching his. 7. Hips at an acute angle, slipping/hanging back-knees bent over shoulders, skates uneven meaning hips aren’t square.

Lets break down Scott’s part in the lift before continuing:

So, as said before, they are skating backwards very fast, he quickly positions on himself in a spread eagle. I’d say it’s this position specifically so she has clear ice to dig her toe pick in for the flip-he could’ve traveled backwards in that parallel stance but would be in T’s way, also the SE position is more flattering and increases the difficulty of the lift.

Where I say she’s flipping blindly and just knowing he’s there, yes that is part of it, but if you look closely. Just before she goes he has just the tips of his fingers on the crest of her pelvis. I’d say that’s the ‘go’ signal (8). If you’ve seen the footage of WYWH where they had to abort the lift (I’m sorry I can’t find it to link) you will see he has his hand in this same ‘go’ position, but stops it by putting his other hand on her other hip. Now in a competition scenario (OF COURSE safety comes first) its not really possible to stop. So with a lift like this where it’s a blind entry and she just has to go.. they know each other so well they could have their eyes shut and he knows exactly when she’s going and knows she won’t hesitate, that’s the signal they use. So, as soon as she takes off his left hand position switches to being in front of her as she flips forward (9) and becomes that first pivot point across the front of her hips. Once she forward and moves past horizontal, his right hand comes over the top and pushes her back down and around. That hand isn’t really doing any lifting though. This whole thing isn’t really even a ‘lift’ (in terms of lifting her upwards, it’s a movement that results in her off the ice). The only point of weight baring contact is that left hand/arm and that only bares weight for not even 180 degrees of her rotation. That right hand then keeps contact with her and does a full pivot on her back to her hip to give her some assistance in getting up, and holds her steady as that the left hand switches from her front to her hip.

8. Light contact so she is aware of him spatially. Prepares to launch off toe pick. 9. As she flips his left hand moves in front of her across her pelvis to catch and establish pivot point. Right hand prepares to push and rotate her upper body.

THIS IS ALL BEFORE THEY’VE EVEN DONE HALF A ROTATION ON THE ICE!

Ok let’s keep going.. I’ll discuss both of their roles simultaneously from here on.

By the time she’s fully in position, they’ve already done a half rotaion, Meaning she has to do that sit up- getting past the hardest bit which is moving through horizontal, with that turning force pushing sideways and around her as she sits up. They only stay at the top of that lift for no more than 1 rotation, so it’s so important that she gets to that position and holds it as quick as possible and can spend as much time held there before changing position again so we see that image and it doesn’t just become all messy transitional movements.

Another important factor in making it work so well and would’ve taken so long to perfect, is he had to get his head right to the top of her legs before she sits up. This is what creates the visual everyone freaked out about, but it’s very important from a safety aspect that he does because as she sits up, she is gonna slide back a bit. Going from a position where there is no bend at the hips, to a hinged hip position, causes the thigh bones to slide backwards [try this for yourself- if you lay on the floor legs straight out and do a sit up/roll up, as you reach towards your toes you will feel your sit bones slide back, as you roll back down, you will notice you have shifted a few centimetres backward]. So here in this gif: the tops of her thighs, just under her sit bones get onto his shoulders as he gets his head in place (10) but as she sits up and hits that position, it’s more the middle of her thighs on his shoulders (11). This is important in creating that tight shape once she at the top of the lift. Obviously she isn’t actually ‘sitting’ on his shoulders, her pelvis is off at the back, so they have to get as high up on her thighs as possible onto his shoulders so she can squeeze her legs together and hang on that way, creating more of a ‘sitting’ look, rather than hanging off with just her knees bent over his shoulders and therefore look like she’s falling off.

Watching in slow motion, she is really only at the top of that lift for no more than 1 rotation-starting it when she’s facing the direction they have come from, when she faces that way again is when she starts to change position. This is really impressive because it is such a highlight moment in the program. It has a huge impact and carries so much emotion, while it really only lasts about a second out of a seven second lift (I’ve timed it and they actually complete it- the whole thing in six seconds easy).

So this is where the CR portion of the lift transitions into a hybrid with the Latch rotational lift. Its a very similar position to that in Latch but has a quite a few differences, partly because of the different position they are moving out of.

Where as in Latch, she only has to slide one leg off his shoulder, and they were facing the same way. Here she has two thighs to get off and twist/change direction. To get out of this sitting position, their timing with each other has to be impeccable for it to look as smooth and clean as it does. It’s actually very hard to notice when and how they change position when watching it at full speed.

Here I will break down the lift in written form, and at the end of this part of the analysis is a chart of accompanying screenshots showing each position at each half rotation.

How it works is: at the 1/2 rotation (12), T has got her position. She stays here fully for really only 1/2 a rotation, before she begins to change her hand position (13), completing the first rotation. By 1+1/2, I think very cleverly, Scott releases holding her with his right hand when she is facing the direction they came from and his right hand is upstage (away from camera) therefore we don’t see the change in hold (14). By the time they have made another half turn, completing 2 rotations, T has straightened and slid her left leg off his right shoulder and is now lying with her right side over his right shoulder (15). There is a point in this which lasts for again about a half rotation, where T has no hold on him at all- she has lengthened her arms from where she was holding his head, her legs are no longer squeezed tight together around his neck to hold on-they are now in about a 90 degree split. Scott is holding her just around her right thigh which is also rotating as she slides down his body (visible in motion between images 14+15). When the lift is at speed, there is no way to really comprehend all that is happening and how much coordination this takes from both of them to make it look so clean and effortless, all while he is maintaining speed and rhythm of each rotation on the ice- every rotation matches and is perfectly controlled and balanced despite the weight changes, curve, etc. He is also turning to the left- I don’t know if this is his more comfortable side, I know with jumps most skaters prefer left but since these are essentially chenés the left is often more uncomfortable- though thinking more about it many of their rotational lifts do turn this way so I guess that isn’t an issue. The thing that is so glaringly obvious, but is also the thing, at least I often forget/take for granted, is that are not doing this on the dry floor without fast rotation- it is on ICE, and happening within very fast rotations and must be completed in a matter of seconds. It’s easy to overlook all these things because of just how good they are and how easy they make it look, but breaking it down reveals all the tiny details that if one thing is off could affect the whole lift.

In just one more full rotation, they are essentially in their final position, with just T left to lock her hands together. From the position we left them in with just the one point of contact from Scott, we see his hands change to his right hand over her front (16), to hold her lying now on her back over his right shoulder, to then be able to completely release his hold around her leg with his left hand, which has to slip narrowly between his body and now her right leg which is dropping further down. His left hand then comes over her and reaches around to her right hip. Finally, that right hand/arm which was holding her over the top as she was lying facing up on his shoulder, releases once the left is now around her to move to holding the base of her head and support her neck (17). [pfeew that was a lot!] Tessa meanwhile has maintained such a strong and clean position throughout this transitional phase of the lift. This is an instance where it is not so much up to Tessa to get/move herself into a position, but she is required to stay so strong yet pliable for Scott to move her into that final position. With something like a rotational lift where there is a central axis point of all the moving parts and any unnecessary movement could fight against that centre of balance, counter balancing through their body positions and not ending up fighting each other for position is so necessary, and that’s exactly what they both do. From that 90 degree split position, over the final half rotation Tessa gradually closes her legs straight, finishing with that right leg in a parallel retiré position. Her body flips from right, to back, to finally left side lying against him- a drop in position from her pelvis above his shoulders, to finishing with her shoulders at the same height as his. In less than three incredibly fast revolutions that is a considerable amount of movement and to be made to look so smooth is very impressive. Finally, and again this goes back to the cleanliness of the lift as it relates to aerodynamics and not throwing off the axis of the rotation, she slips her right arm down his back so that isn’t something else pressing against the force of the turn. Her left arm stays high and circles around till she has been lowered enough and is rolled the right way around to wrap that left arm around his neck. The last thing to happen is her right arm passes forward past her side to be held by her left hand.

Another thing that is so impressive about what Tessa does in this lift is the use of her core to keep her legs up. From the second she moves out of that position at the top of that lift, she isn’t particularly high off the ground. She has to use her core to keep her legs lifted, straight and pointed- it is not simply the force of the rotation doing that. She is obviously not close enough to actually hit the ground, but to still have the affect of it being a ‘lift’ and that unlike other girls she is not just simply being thrown around by her partner.

The whole lift is completed in about 4 1/2 rotations. It is just mind boggling really, thinking about all the detail in it. This is classed as a level 4 (the highest level) lift- and you can see why, although comparing to many others both of this era and currently, it probably should’ve been classed as about a level 10.

What is also particularly impressive with this lift is the musicality. It’s very hard to hear but there is a little trill in the music right as she’s in her flip and ends as she sits up.

Now let’s talk about it artistically.

Firstly I want to say a few things: All art is subjective/interpretive. It is completely up to each audience member to interpret and decide what you are seeing the artist/s do. Sometimes it may be very literal- the artist/s is telling/showing you exactly what is happening, but more often than not there is always an element of interpretation and that varies between each viewer. I feel this lift is quite obvious what it’s implying, my take on it I think is the same as most, but maybe with a bit more artistic and athletic nuance..

So YES. Everyone on Twitter/tumblr/media outlets who childishly freaked out about it and talked about TS like strip teasers, this lift is exactly what it looks like. It is implying sex. It is meant to look like a sex act. And, credit to them for their artistry and bravery, a pretty dark and twisted version of sex.. now let’s talk about it like actual adults appreciating TS’s beautiful artistry and not like 5 year olds seeing the word ‘F**k for the first time.

Moulin Rouge is a very ‘sex’ orientated story. In the live show 95% of the chore is sexual. That’s just what it is, it is a factor in the story. Both consensual and non consensual. TS needed to portray what happens in this story, not only the sex but the abuse, the prostitution, Satine’s death, them falling in love, the setting of the story and the stakes at play, in just 4 minutes and with 3 tracks from the movie soundtrack. That is a lot to take on and frankly only a team of VM’s quality could pull this off this well. Baz Luhrmann confirmed as such that in watching TS he didn’t feel like he was watching an ice skating routine, but a ballet; a masterful piece of story telling where you felt so overwhelmingly invested in not only their characters but them as performers. TS said upon hearing it they felt so connected to the music and the story and it had all the things they wanted in their final competitive program:

Something raw, contemporary. Something with passion, drama, romance. Something with a changing storyline they could evolve over the telling of that linear passage of time where everything is affected by what comes before it. Jealously, rage, sex, raw fiery chemistry.

To convey all of those things in 4 minutes through a piece of art with very specific restrictions as to what must be included/excluded, to work all those themes, emotions and physical acts in in a way that is seamless, athletic, beautiful, classy while at the same time not shying away from being literal about certain things. It’s the true mark of genuses.

There’s several different ways they could’ve incorporated the idea or in their case ‘act’ of sex into this program (or any of their programs that warranted it for that matter). They had to find that balance of sensuality and sex in their choreography and story telling because they just didn’t have the run time, set, costume/s appropriate setting/audience or physical (movement) freedom to perform and compete something so stylistically reminiscent of the movie or stage show. Their MR program is ‘sexy/sensual’ (specifically the Roxanne portion) but for the way they told the story, to compress it into free dance format while hitting all the emotional beats, and as dancers, interpreting the music and convincing an audience, it needed to be this big highlight moment- as this scene is in the movie and is a huge turning point for especially her character. It’s a testament to their bravery as artists to make that big moment also the most ‘controversial’ (as some critics called it) but, pivotal moment in the program through choreography that you’ll remember. They could’ve done ‘sex’ in a story dominated by sex in many ways, but as with everything they do, they manage to incorporate it into an element, make it so classy and kind of in a way, give to the story and musical grandeur what it deserves without shying away from the darker themes, and also give us what we want without giving us too much. There are obviously several other references to the ‘brothel’ and ‘prostitution’ setting of the story and in fact the very first lift of the program- the stationary lift has an even darker context seen so subtly through their movement than most would think (but that’s for another post).

What’s brilliant about the way they did it was it’s athletically spectacular, but also as harrowing and (if you think about it the way I do) upsetting but in a really beautiful way to see them perform as their characters but appreciate them as people and their friendship- the strength of their bond to move in and out of the platonic friendship and their dance partnership where they are actors of the highest, most believable quality.

So, let’s talk about it emotionally- and how it managed to produce such visceral reactions by combining the athleticism and artistry.

• The Position: As I mentioned above talking about the movement break down. Earlier in the season, she didn’t hunch forward over him as much as she does here. It was a difficult position to balance. Here at NHK it’s very balanced but she stays upright. Here at nationals she hunched over more but slipped back.

[Side bar: I’m not gonna go back and track down all the articles about this lift [here’s two I found by accident later on after I wrote this post] and line them up with dates and what happened when, so if I’m wrong oh well, I’m not gonna stress it’s just a lift we’re talking about, but my research tells me that the stuff about this lift and that it supposedly had to be changed because it was taken to some board and it was deemed “too sexual” so it was “banned” seemed to occur after nationals when the media around everything olys related was gearing up. They were also announced as flag bearers so idk if that had something to do with it- sweet ol’ 🇨🇦 didn’t want their flag bearers performing o*** s** in a skating program at the olys. [that was a joke]. Anyway. The line VM gave was not that the lift had been banned, but after going back and watching tape, they didn’t like the shape of it, so they changed it. This contradicts what they said later about them going back to the CR lift for the IE, and that ‘they wanted to go back to original vision and intention’ of that lift. To be fair they do say that as they changed the second half of the program and music it ultimately made the whole story less dark, so not having an as intense and literal lift position for the new version they felt was better. I’m not totally sure what I want to believe, I understand that reasoning behind changing it more over the ‘someone banned it because it’s too sexual’- after the hell they went through with Carmen and having to change all that and forgo their true vision over a couple of people getting offended- I think at this point they were done being told what to do. The idea of it being too. ‘R rated’ for an Olympics viewing audience is BS- the lift is so quick and children would not understand what was going on. Not to mention really the most spectacular part of the lift is the twisting freaking back flip- I think kids watching would be more inclined to exclaim ‘did you see that girl do a backflip on ice!’ rather then ‘hey that’s a sex position’. So, if I may theorise for a moment: What I WONDER is if they changed it because they were trying to get T into that hunched over position and it wasn’t quite working- as seen at nationals, so they played around with other positions. It could’ve also been that with the points between them and 📎✂️ so (unnecessary) tight, and as they said, refined everything to the point where no marks could be taken off. This again is ironic considering as they said here that the lift in the TE was marked lower so they went back to the CR.. so there’s my theory on that. I’m not sure considering I always like to believe what they say, but the contrast between the CR lift at nationals, then when they went back to it after the team event is so obvious and it looks so much better then all the times before, I like to think they must have been aiming to get to that- an even more literal position for a while. Ok side bar over].

They achieved what I think is as perfect a position they could in this final performance. She hunched over him so her nose almost touching his head. She (just about) held his head with her elbows in. She squeezed her legs tight. When seeing it at full speed, while in that top position, you can’t see his head. That’s for me what gives it off as what they are implying. While earlier in the season, it’s still pretty obvious but that specific position they hit adds so much emotion to it.

The idea is that she has her hands clasped behind is head and forcing him into her. (I believe in one of the articles I linked above it’s what one reporter describes what she’s doing as- I can’t remember though it may be a different one). That’s not exactly what she’s doing but that’s what’s implied, and by this version at the olys it looks most like that. I would’ve loved to see them actually be able to do that because the lift is what it is- there’s no hiding from that- so if there was some way it would’ve been possible to complete that image I would’ve loved to see them do it. (I feel) it’s because the lift and rotation is so fast there just isn’t the time for her to actually clasp and unclasp her hands in less than one rotation. I also think, even though it’s only marginal-he is so close to her body he can hardly see, but if she were actually forcing his face into her her, having what little he has of peripheral vision in the position they do probably aids in his balance and spacial awareness. (I know this little bit seems contradictory to what I said about it being so quick kids wouldn’t understand it- but the difference is kids/people in general seeing it once and fast, and taking no further interest in TS, and taking the interest in dissecting it athletically/artistically for appreciation purposes- of course looking at it more with that educational frame of mind more can be gathered).

• The emotional factor/what is happening in terms of the story: I’m gonna do my best to just ramble about this exact moment and not go into the whole thing (I’ll do that in another post). I’ve thought about this in different ways. Earlier in the season, when they still were doing the (what I call) ‘darker’ version of it, where Scott’s character in Roxanne was more menacing and aggressive. Playing not so much a specific person in the story but more the idea of what is happening to T’s character, I saw the lift as him assaulting her. They go into it with so much aggression on his end and it feels more violent. He’s more that version of the character/s of the one/s doing the abusing to Satine (The duke and then also Zidler in enabling it). In the diagonal leading up to it he is playing to the darker, aggressive voice on the lyrics ‘you’re free to leave me but just don’t deceive me’:

The olys version differs where they softened his character and he starts playing into Christian’s qualities earlier. On this same bit of chore he’s playing to Christian’s side of the lyrics, and as they go round into the lift it’s T with more aggression. He’s trying to help her but she’s so caught up and afraid and feels she has no choice so all that anguish she takes into the lift and out of panic and confusion she ends up assaulting him. It’s amazing how they can take literally the same chore and music and just by tweaking the character intentions it can have a huge impact on the direction of their specific story.

Another way to read this is more literally to the scene in the movie (up until recently I hadn’t seen the movie so I had adapted my own interpretation based on that I understood of the story). This scene in the movie is comprised of intercuts to Satine having to seduce and ‘go through’ with letting the duke r**e her in order to continue funding the Moulin Rouge- and her livelihood, and Christian watching the company’s corps play out this tantalising tango in front of him as he yearns for Satine and fears for her safety. The scene then is alarmingly cut as Satine races into Christian’s hotel room, throwing herself into his arms desperate for him to keep her safe as she couldn’t bare being tortured (emotionally/physically) by the duke any longer. She begs Christian to run away with her and promise they will stay together forever. This moment literally plays out this entire scene from the movie in one lift- the terror in the climax of Roxanne, to falling into Christian’s arms as he screams ‘please believe me when I say I love you’. In this one lift, Scott transforms himself from the duke (or representative of the duke’s character intentions) to Christian promising to protect Satine. I’ve said it many times before but I’ll say it again: give that man an Oscar!

In a way I feel a little bit ridiculous spending months and months composing thousands of words to explain a 6 second movement in an ice dancing program. And I’m questioning whether I would’ve had it not been for the ‘controversy’ around it. Yes, I remember the FB posts talking about how ‘these Canadian ice dancers had to tone down their free dance for the olys’ and ‘you won’t be seeing this lift from Canada’s top dance team at the olys’. All made to drum up hype.. but then instead had actual consequences enabling those who can’t tell the difference between sleaze and superior artistic expression. I more than anything was astonished at Tessa’s athleticism and fearlessness. “She did a back flip entry into a lift on freaking ice!!” I’m pretty sure was my reaction, but then immediate after was stabbed in the heart with aching emotion for what that movement and moment was implying in the context of the story, and my heart continued to ache for days on end rewatching this beautiful masterpiece by some of the most fearless artists I have ever seen, on top of the narrative of these precious best friends who had never left each other side for over 20 years in pursuit of greatness in their field and admiration for each other.

I’m going to finish this post essay off by speaking more broadly about the judgement passed on them more so than other teams for boundary pushing themes and choreography, and maybe offer a way to understand their art form on a deeper level.

There are several instances of lifts performed by both pairs and dance teams that transition through ‘sensitive’ positions as a matter of entry and exits. However the difference with this lift (and the stat lift and their other programs with similar themes) is the entire thing is intentional to what it is implying. The ‘eye catching’ position serves as both a means to transition into the main feature/positions of lifts, but it is that very lift position that is implying that moment in the story, and funnily enough, it seems that the position at the top of the lift is the most “””concerning””” part of it. I don’t mean to labour the point of this and reminisce on the controversy, trust me I don’t like it because I understand what they are doing and have never had a problem with it, but I think this is useful in understanding this art and how to convey a story, even if those stories are sometimes uncomfortable- TS are being truthful and honest and want to be literal yet tasteful in the way they tell their stories which they always managed to achieve.

The idea of ‘intent’ with something like this has come up before with them in relation to Carmen- some posts from way back in the day commenting on ‘the thigh grab’ moment. There was a post in helping people understand the difference for those non-versed in artistic movement and physical story telling, that Scott would always be touching/holding/grabbing Tessa’s thigh/s as a matter of partnering and lifts, but the difference in this moment in Carmen was the ‘intention’- it being deliberate and removed from transitional/lifts/partnering movements. That was the entire point of that moment for it to be intentional, obvious, send shivers up your spine. On the opposite end of the (lack of respect/lack of common sense) spectrum there was another old post I came across that claimed in one performance he had reached his hand and grabbed all the way up under her skirt, which was not only completely incorrect (that’s obviously not what he did) but utterly disgusting the fact people were seemingly getting their jollies over something that was completely exaggerated. Now, we’ve all heard references to the ‘OG Carmen’- the ‘very very very’ not toned down version, the ‘NOT Mickey Mouse’ version.. so could that have actually happened in the original version? Maybe. Sure. Would I have been outraged by it and objectified them for being s**ts? NO. There is appreciating intent without it being completely literal, and not exaggerating something to claim they were actually ‘grabbing’ or doing whatever when they clearly weren’t, however if they were to, that should also be respected in the context of what their craft is. There is a matter here of ‘artistic consent’ that they (and all partners doing this sort of stuff) need to have. In the case of actors in a movie/TV show it comes in the form of contracts, chemistry tests, and intimacy coaches (which is actually something finally starting to make its way into the dance world), in TS’s case it is years of foundational trust in each other and a mutual desire to challenge themselves as artists, this along with having coaches and mentors at a young age (and throughout their career) that nurtured their relationship and gave them a safe space to learn how to be intimate with each other. Had either of them ever felt uncomfortable with anything at all, they would have been honest with each other and it wouldn’t have happened, or they would work around their apprehensions through comfort and communication. But because they have (artistic) consent- all of it is 100% consensual, there is zero need to think of any of the more ‘questionable’ choreography they do as anymore than simply choreography servicing their story. Obviously, and I say all the time they have to be very brave to put out the stuff they do- anyone does (not that I’ve seen every program ever so I’m sure there have been others taking on ‘riskier’ subjects) it’s obvious they have felt very connected to these stories for them to be so passionate about performing them, doing them justice and interpreting them the way they want. It has nothing to do with wanting to perform sultry, sensual, ‘R rated’ choreography for the sake of it. They can and when it’s warranted, do it so well because of their trust and chemistry making those moments all the more emotional because you really believe them and feel invested in them as characters and artists.

If you have made it to the end of this essay, thank you for sticking at it all the way through, I know it was a lot but I felt it deserved it, and as I did end up expanding on, it’s not just about one lift, one moment, but learning to understand and appreciate them on a deeper level. I hope this was educational/informative, maybe even a bit emotional.. (I always like my posts to have that flavour). I like to think those who read my posts are here for the in depth study and appreciation of these incredible athletes and we can move on/ avoid all the trashy stuff xx.

[kurolini909]

Jfkeksms I have... So many essays... Due to next week...

[mstudi0s]

Creating to Create -

hello,

One of my more recent hobbies that I used to do a lot when I was younger is paint. I have been painting with watercolor for about some weeks now. For no particular reason what so ever, it's all just for the sake of wanting to feed that urge to want to do art and create something. And something I found was that I enjoyed doing art more now than I did when I was younger because there isn't this pressure to try and create a "perfect" piece to post to the internet for likes and views. 🤍

I am simply creating just for the sake of creating. I am not looking for approval or even validation. All I want to do is just express myself and flow through the piece, allowing for whatever creativity to just leave my body however it has to. It's very freeing, actually. I enjoy not having this need to try and be perfect and all the societal standards of how art should look clogging my brain and disrupting the process. I also found that when I am just in a flow state and letting my heart direct the brush instead of my mind, I create much better pieces than I ever did when I was allowing my mind to take over. 🤍

I recommend trying this out one day. Create for the sake of creating with zero need for approval.

[thesecretfeminine]

The Works of Joan Didion- The White Album

Hi everyone, in this post I want to write about the books by Joan Didion that I have already read, and something about them. Each book will have a separate post.

The White Album

Published in 1979, The White Album is a collection of essays, and alongside Slouching Towards Bethlehem, one of Didion's most famous works. The essay sections are titled with unadorned statements, calling forward the raw California Didion comes from.

I.The White Album

II. California Republic

III. Women

IV. Sojourns

V. On the Morning After the Sixties

My favorite, or at least the one I remember best is "In Bed", where Didion writes about her experience with migraine. It doesn't really have much to do with the book's other themes, but it says something about Didion personally, and the way she writes about such an unattractive topic is incredible. Most of the book focuses on the sixties and seventies culture of America, and Americana continues to be her most prevalent theme.

It's worth reading for the writing alone, but it's incredible to read about someone's personal experience with those mythical figures we have now immortalized (The Doors, Charles Manson.. etc.). We mostly learn of retellings these days, so Didion's account is now especially personal and refreshing.

-Sophie

[vvatchword]

Reading BioShock: Rapture (Part 5: Three Old Men Jerking Their Milk Sticks)

<- Part 4: Going Down || Back to the Beginning || Part 6: Frank Fontaine: Funny He-He Clown Man ->

I think the “going up is like going down” line snapped me.

Initially, I tried to be fair about John Shirley’s intentions and work. I don’t know this man. I have read some interviews and I am reading a book he wrote—all fractions of a fully-lived life. But when I shared Part 4 of this rant with Salty, she popped out with a good point.

“You can TELL he thinks himself above Video Game Writing,” she said. “You can just TELL.”

I realized then that I had been allowing that suspicion to fester in the back of my mind, unacknowledged. But it must be acknowledged. It must be acknowledged that Shirley probably doesn’t think well of any of us. Remember that quote—“I did more [research] than most readers needed”? And the obvious, obvious signs that he barely did any research at all? How about when he bunched BioShock into a list of “other tie-ins,” or described it as “basically” “at least in large part” “science-fiction horror”?

No, I think I can definitely settle my suspicions and say it: this man has absolutely no respect for the game—and by extension, no respect for us as fans.

What a fucking joke.

A Necessary Digression

Let me tell you something, friend. Let me tell you right the fuck now. You will come to choice points every now and then that ask you to appeal to either a Normie or a Weirdo. Perhaps someone is pointing out furries with a hardy-har, or mocking an involved Dungeons and Dragons game that is too passionately played, or aghast that an adult has an enormous collection of Gundam Wing figurines, or tee-hee-heeing about how horny some piece of fanart is.

You will be tempted to throw the Weirdos under the bus. You may even agree at first. Why, those people are Weird, but not you! You are not Weird! You are a balanced and intelligent adult who just happens to be a little quirky every now and then. Quickly, appeal to the Normie before they arrow in on your own weird traits!

Guess what.

You are a fucking Weirdo. That is what you are. And more than that, you know those other Weirdos? They’re your tribe. They may not be in the exact same ballpark, but they are still your people, through and through. They possess all the same traits that make you “you”—they’re just dialed in different directions. When the chips are down, they will understand you. There is a high chance they will support you when the Normie world is confused, disdainful, and thirsty for your blood.

The Weirdos are your allies. They understand the Truth: that human beings are inherently the weirdest, dumbest, cringiest motherfuckers on Earth, and to deny that is to deny reality. Embrace it, for it is true.

You should never, ever, ever throw your Weirdo family under the bus for Normie Points. Never. Never. Never. You’re Weird and you should own it. Own it and support your fucking family, you fucking cowards.

Normies will turn on you in an instant. You will never be acceptable enough for them—not unless you destroy everything you adore—and that is a sacrifice you should never make. Normies have either spent their lives squelching what is weird about them to such a degree that they are functionally husks, or they are actually Normal, which is a fate worse than death.

John Shirley is throwing us under the bus. John Shirley thinks so little about you and me that he farted out a disconnected series of vignettes that barely qualify as literature. He gave us his absolute least effort and took most of his time in interviews to elevate himself. There is fanfiction out there that towers over this pathetic garbage.

John Shirley is a man who wrote a short story about “a girl who dies from cum.” John Shirley wants to be spoken of in the same breath as Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert. Do you know who those people were?

They were fucking Weirdos. They were Weirdos in an age when it was culturally acceptable to beat them up. Keep in mind—right now it’s cool to be a nerd, but that sentiment is maybe 20 years old. When I talk to my therapist, I still have a knee-jerk reaction to protect my beloveds: I can tell her about all my peccadilloes without hesitation, but it takes me a herculean effort to mention the things I love. It’s not that I’m ashamed of it: it’s because I know there can be severe social repercussions for doing something a-Normie, and there is a not insignificant population who will take out their insecurities on me. There is no reason to inspire needless antagonism.

But when someone puts down a Weirdo in front of me?

Friend, it’s on. I will go for a throat. Weirdos are my people. They’re my family. To protect a fellow Weirdo is to protect yourself. I will not suffer an environment where it is okay to hurt someone for harmlessly enjoying themselves.

John Shirley is a fucking Weirdo, too—but he thinks some Weirdos are more acceptable than others. He thinks it’s possible to be Acceptably Weird. When he gets in front of an interviewer, he allies with the fucking Normies. He thinks he's humoring us and that he earned value because he won some no-name award 20 years ago.

Bitch. Get on my fucking level… if you can even see it.

Back to Chapter 1

I guess it’s time to go back to BioShock: Rapture and finish vivisecting Chapter 1. You may have noticed I only touched the first page of Chapter 1. That’s because it had the worst sentence of all time. Let’s see if I can get past Chapter 2 without making a big deal about something.

I suspect you can see the places where Shirley planned or was given information because he includes absolutely all of it, and in detail. For example, he discusses the layout and interior decorating of Andrew Ryan’s apartment to excess.

This is how I used to win NaNoWriMo.

The door clicked within itself—and to Bill’s amazement it didn’t swing inward but slid into the wall up to the knob. He saw there was a metal runner in the floor and, at the edge of the door, a band of steel. It was wood on the outside, steel inside. Like this man was worried someone might try to fire a bullet through it. No one was visible on the other side of the open doorway. He saw another hallway, carpeted, with some rather fine old paintings, one of which might be a Dutch master, if he remembered anything from his trips to the British Museum. A Tiffany lamp stood on an inlaid table, glowing like a gem. He walked down the hall, into a large, plush sitting room…

Why is there a knob at all? Oh, never mind.

I’m cutting out some extra description of the rooms, but it’s all like this, and very little of it is terribly interesting. Most of it is for this purpose: “Andrew Ryan is loaded!” Some of it, like the “Dutch master” bit, is to emphasize McDonagh’s background (he went to the British Museum! Because he’s British!). The story continues in this vein for a while and it’s fucking boring. It doesn’t say anything about Ryan or McDonagh after a while—it just pedals in place, squawking: “Ryan is rich! Ryan is rich! Ryan is rich!”

You know what is interesting?

Like this man was worried someone might try to fire a bullet through it.

That, my friends, is character-building. That’s something worth talking about. The reader already knows that Andrew Ryan is rich; let’s give them a little something extra about the man himself, right? I love the little hint that McDonagh should take as a warning—the paranoia, the lack of grace, the possibility of violence. Delicious. Omnomnom.

Too bad this kind of shit only appears once every 2,000 words.

It’s also interesting that McDonagh is attentive enough to pick out a painting as a Dutch master’s—I couldn’t do that and I love art dearly—but I don’t think that’s actually character building so much as it’s an extra “Ryan is rich!”

In any case, static descriptions mean the plot has staggered to a halt. They should be avoided or minimized for that reason. Here, we describe the contents of a room and the layout of an apartment over the course of five straight paragraphs, perhaps about 300 words, saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over.

It’s not particularly well-described, either. The Tiffany lamp “shines like a gem”, a table is “intricately carved,” and a piano shines like a mirror. Yeah, sure, that’s all flavor, but it’s not remarkable. It sounds like my grandma’s house. I feel like a rich person’s house should be amped up by 3000%.

Also, does it all need to be here? Can you say this with fewer words, or in such a way that it says something about Ryan’s character? Does any of this propel the plot in any way?

Not really, no.

All that said, now I think I could find Ryan’s restroom blindfolded, because for some reason, it is exceedingly important that you know how to maneuver Andrew Ryan’s apartment. Pretty sure that Shirley drew it out on a piece of notebook paper and, refusing to waste one iota of labor, shared it outright.

Maybe he was trying to win NaNoWriMo, too.

I Hate It When I’m Right

A lot of my observations from Part 1 are all coming together here, and I hate how right I was. Shirley is visual to the detriment of the plot; it’s arguable that “visual” is all Shirley is. Shirley does not understand tension and undercuts it constantly. Shirley does not often understand what he’s talking about, and is probably a spectacularly stupid person who has gotten by on connections, personality, and confidence alone.

Take, for example, Shirley’s love of lists. When he doesn’t particularly understand something, he just starts listing adjacent qualities. I’m not sure he understands anything. I think he mistakes lists for comprehension. I read three different interviews spanning ten years, and in every single one, he answers questions by babbling a bunch of quasi-related elements. Everyone moves on because what else are they supposed to do? He technically answered them.

Shirley isn’t a liar, but he also doesn’t describe the actual subject at hand. He just dances wildly around the point, and then dances away a little at a time until you forget what you were talking about. It’s like someone who’s not quite fluent focusing more on their words than on what they are trying to say. It’s peak chatbot behavior. And it’s all done completely confidently—brazenly, even. He thinks he’s good at this.

Maybe you can fool a 20-year-old blogger by bullshitting your way through their interview, but I’m a crusty old superfan with an endless fascination for the video game you’re denigrating and I want to punch you in the dick.

Salty and I agonized about what to call “the act of describing a subject accurately in a way that suggests comprehension.” It’s not “extrapolation” or “expansion,” and “description” is far too vague. Whatever it is, Shirley does not have it.

Salty — Today at 12:25 PM It’s like he heard you like fish so he slides a glass of water at you like ;)

So, stranger on the internet: you don’t think you can write?

Friend. Beloved. You absolutely can. You can do anything. Just march into a publisher’s office and be like LOOK HERE MOTHERFUCKERS,

You’ll be kicked out, for you do not have one ounce of the self-assuredness of John Shirley.

How does a human being get this way. How does a creatively-defunct person like this become a writer. There absolutely was a witch’s curse at some point. “Your books will make mooooneeeey, John Shirley! But you will be a filthy scum-sucking haaaaaaaack!”

At Least Nobody Knows What They’re Doing

Bill went through the archway as the man in the suit answered a chiming gold and ivory telephone on a table in front of a big window displaying the heroic spires of Manhattan. Opposite the window was a mural, done in the sweeping modern-industrial style, of burly men building a tower that rose up out of the sea. Overseeing the workers in the mural was a slim dark-haired man with blueprints in his hand.

I love the idea of Andrew Ryan mythologizing himself. This mural is somehow the stupidest and best detail so far. This description puttered halfway toward what Ryan is, then veered sharply to the left and fell off of a cliff.

“I’ve got to be really secretive about my plans,” Andrew Ryan says. “Also I’ve got to commission this art piece for the foyer in my apartment, where I will only live for the next year at most. Hey artist stranger, here’s what I want explicitly. Paint it where all my visitors can see it.”

I need a new word for the feelings this book gives me. Like I hate it and disagree vehemently with almost every single choice for every single reason, but I’m also kinda laughing and doing that little sideways nod thing. “Stunned” and “shocked” are just not complicated enough.

The buff guys are a great choice btw.

That’s my destination, Bill thought bitterly. The crapper. A fine crapper it might be, one of three. My destiny is to keep their WCs in working order.

I feel you, bro. That’s my whole life.

Speaking of crap, here’s how Shirley writes Ryan dialogue.

“Eisley, you will not make excuses! If you cannot deal with these people I will find someone who has the courage! I’ll find someone brave enough to scare away this pack of hungry dogs! They will not find my campfire undefended!”

Nope.

Shirley just said, “If you cannot deal with [x], then” three times in a row, just in different colors and with slightly different hairstyles.

Andrew Ryan’s dialogue should be punchy. He says just what he needs to say, just when he needs to say it. He says what he thinks the truth is, and he knows explicitly what he thinks and why he thinks it. He doesn’t throw in a lot of colorful language for no reason—it’s all utilized for a purpose. He’s a skilled rhetorician and orator—that’s how he got thousands of people to abandon their lives on the surface world. Most importantly: every new sentence is a new idea. Andrew Ryan does not repeat himself. Git gud or git fucked, scrub.

Shirley is not the only one bad at writing Andrew Ryan. As it turns out, almost nobody can do it right. The writers for BioShock 2 were equally fucking horrible. Here’s an audio diary I particularly loathe.

White is not black, Dr. Lamb—down is not up, and straw is not gold. Look around you. Rapture is no miracle—it is a product of reason, impossible unless one and one are two, and A equates to A. —“Ryan vs Lamb: Reality,” Andrew Ryan, BioShock 2

Andrew Ryan repeats the same thought over. And over. And over. And over.

This writer is fumbling around for how Ryan might sound because they don’t understand the subject they’re trying to explain. They end right where they started. This speech is a creative exercise at best, bullshittery at worst. It should have been thrown in the trash. It ended up in a finished product because the writer (rightly) knew that nobody else understood Objectivism, either. It just sort of sounds right. If you’re a fucking moron, that’s enough.

It’s worse than that, though: this merely repeats the basic tenets of Objectivism as found in every Ayn Rand novel ever. “A Is A” is literally the title of Part 3 in Atlas Shrugged. I’m pretty sure that “one and one are two” come from an essay she wrote, but I can’t remember where I read it and I don’t care right now.

Why are these Andrew Ryans shitty? Simple: these writers only understand Objectivism on a surface level. And to understand how to write Andrew Ryan, you’ve got to understand Objectivism. You can’t just parrot aspects of the dialogue. There are ideological and psychological underpinnings. If you don’t understand why someone would give their lives to something this fucked up, you can’t understand how Ryan is going to talk.

More than that, you’ve kinda gotta be a good writer. I mean sorry to all the hacks out there but part of why Ryan works is that he’s written well. For illustration, here are some transcripts sampling Andrew Ryan’s speech, all by Ken Levine, who can actually write, probably because he’s a big reader. (No, he does not return my calls.)

While you read these, consider the following:

Who is the audience?

What is the purpose of the speech?

What is the purpose in-story?

What makes good writing good?

So dark in here. If only your friend could look up and see you. Maybe you could warn him. If only you could do something… anything… except just stand here and watch him die. — “Watch Him Die,” Radio Transcript from Smuggler’s Hideout, Andrew Ryan, BioShock

Here Ryan taunts you as you helplessly watch splicers crawl down to murderize Atlas in the Smuggler’s Hideout level. God it’s so fucking good. Gives me chills even separated from the game. I remember beating my wrench on the window and yelling at the monitor.

Are there any huge words or concepts here? No. But look at how much delight Ryan takes in tormenting you. He makes this shit personal. He’s very dramatic, but he’s got a knife to your neck. He knows he can afford it.

This is all just flavor. This is to escalate the tension. And I love every second of it.

You ooze in like an assassin and then you try to sneak out like a thief. You're no CIA spook. Who are you? Why have you come here? There's two ways to deal with a mystery: uncover it or eliminate it. — “Like an Assassin,” Radio Transcript from Smuggler’s Hideout, Andrew Ryan, BioShock

Here, you’re leaving the Smuggler’s Hideout and heading to the Arcadia level. You’ve just seen Atlas’ family get blowed the fuck up. If you’re new and unbesmirched by spoilers, you are probably 1000% on Atlas’ side and want to kick Ryan in the nuts.

I think what I like best about BioShock is how personal it feels. You end up feeling special, like a part of the game itself. Let’s face it: that’s part of its design.

When you best Ryan—even if it’s a fractional win—he feels personally affronted. It’s also delicious that Ryan keeps trying to figure you out. I remember yelling at the monitor about how I just crashed here buddy would u PLEASE calm the fuck down

Levine does not throw in “CIA spook” to ground you in the era or to flex about how he did research. I mean, it certainly does ground you in the era, and it says something about what Ryan thinks of government, but these lines are mostly about Andrew Ryan’s process of elimination and intent. He’s asking completely reasonable human questions.

Why are you here?

What do you want?

Why did you act the way you did?

Also note the effective use of verbs and the elevation of the tension. You just pissed Andrew Ryan off. He’s coming for your fucking blood now. You gon die.

I came to this place to build the impossible. You came to rob what you could never build—a Hun gaping at the gates of Rome. Even the air you breathe is sponged from my account. Well, breathe deep… so later you might remember the taste. — “A Hun at Rome’s Gates,” Radio Transcript from Arcadia, Andrew Ryan, BioShock

Ryan does invoke some history here, but the Hun v. Rome image stands on its own, and it’s for a purpose. He’s classically educated, intelligent, and capable. He sees himself as an exclamation point in a history book. He knows he’s done something not everyone can do. He’s got weight and he knows he can swing it. What the fuck are you?

To go a little further, he’s proved all these things. He’s not blowing hot air. He really did some pretty incredible shit and you aren’t very much in comparison. You can believe him.

Look. This is just good writing. “You came to rob what you could never build.” What did you feel as a new player when he said that to you? I was mostly befuddled, sometimes arguing back to the screen (“Motherfucker I just crashed here!”). The way he belittles you—you’re not just a leech dependent on its host, but part of an ancient play as old as time, a force of entropy to be heroically overcome.

Eventually, you’ll find out he was right.

What is the difference between a Man and a Parasite? A Man builds. A Parasite asks, "Where is my share?" A Man creates. A Parasite says, "What will the neighbors think?" A Man invents. A Parasite says, "Watch out, or you might tread on the toes of God…” — “A Man or a Parasite,” Audio Diary, Andrew Ryan, BioShock

This is perhaps the most bombastic of the Ryan speeches, but that’s for a reason. This is Ryan preaching to his followers. He’s spelling out a difficult concept to make it as accessible as possible. He says, “Here’s Goofus, here’s Gallant.” This is the ideal, this is the dumbass. Here’s what we want, here’s what we hate. Simultaneously, he educates you—the ignorant player—about the weird, convoluted subject you’re engaging with.

Ryan tends to be at his most bombastic during audio diaries because he’s talking to the people he’s already sold his ideal to. He doesn’t just vomit a thousand words out of the thesaurus.

Look. I think as writers we start out feeling our ways through prose, just nosing along until we find whatever makes us feel good. Not all of us are going to take that next step up—when we don’t just write to feel, but choose our words with logical intent. Each word, sentence, paragraph, chapter, and part has to have a purpose.

This is especially important in video game writing, when most of the content is in gameplay, not prose. Levine had to say a lot with a little. And Jesus Christ, does he DELIVER.

It’s kind of hard to miss because of the number of audio diaries, but Ryan really doesn’t talk that much to the player. Atlas has that honor. Ryan only speaks when he has a purpose or has been emotionally compromised. He gets more bizarre the closer you get to his hidey-hole, but that makes sense: he’s losing. And he has a lot to lose.

And then you return to fucking BioShock: Rapture and you have to read this hot fucking garbage.

“But by ascending,” Ryan went on, shoving his hands in his jacket pockets and taking a pensive turn about the room, “one makes one’s own class, do you see? Eh? One classes oneself!”

“Pensive” does not belong anywhere near Ryan. Ryan preaching out of the blue to a stranger, also no. Ryan pretentious? Absolutely not. There is no pretense with Ryan. He is what he is. It’s both his strength and his ultimate weakness.

These scrubs confuse “bombastic” with “redundant” and attempt what they think sounds intelligent. They’re not actually intelligent and they don’t actually know what’s going on. What makes Ryan magical is that he’s not only fucking intense, he’s substantial. There’s thought and intelligence and capability behind all of the rhetoric. He’s a villain you can respect because he doesn’t just do bad things to be bad—he ignores his social and emotional and psychological needs, and every conceivable need of other people, to do what he feels is logical. That’s fucking terrifying. It’s worse than madness. Anybody can do this. Anybody for any ideology. You could do this. I have done this.

Well. I guess I didn’t build a personal utopia and kill thousands of people. That’s one point for Team Watchword.

Meanwhile, the only things these hack writers know to do is go over the top. They throw in a couple of historical references to make it look like they researched, add some dramatic flair, talk far too long, then pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

No wonder Ken Levine didn’t write anything extra for this novel—it would have put his name next to John Shirley’s. If I were Levine I would be like “ohhhh nooooo” and just leave. No, it’s okay, you can put your whole name on it. I’m fine. You’re fine. It’s fine. Bye. Forever. No, no, it’s okay. Own it. I’m changing my name. I’m moving to another country.

Bill + Andrew, Sitting in a Tree

Bill was kneeling to one side of the toilet, using a spanner to tighten a pipe joint, when he became aware of a looming presence. He looked up to see Andrew Ryan standing near him. “Didn’t intend to startle you.” Ryan flashed his teeth in the barest smile and went on, “Just curious how you’re getting along.”

Andrew Ryan? Smiling?

It is so, so hard to return to this book after reading transcripts from the game. I hadn’t touched the original material for a while. Fuck, I want to play it all over again.

Half of why BioShock: Rapture hurts is that Shirley often gets so, so close to what Andrew Ryan would probably do.

Salty — Yesterday at 9:53 AM [It’s] like watching someone leap confidently for a slam dunk and then slam the basketball into the face of a little old lady sitting in the stands

One thing that made Andrew Ryan so effective was that he’s a great “realistic” Randian Ubermensch. And Randian Ubermensch behave in very specific ways. They do not give a single solitary shit what other people are doing with their lives. They are so self-centered they can’t understand anyone else, and according to their belief system, they shouldn’t even try.

That said, they are processes people. They do find technology and labor interesting. They don’t judge you for what kind of labor you do—they judge you for the quality of that labor. Multiple “good” characters in Rand fiction have blue-collar jobs. So it makes sense that Andrew Ryan would be interested in the work being done in his apartment. Whatever man must do to survive is not below him.

If you don’t know, this chapter is based on the following audio diary:

I met Ryan the day me and the lads were installing the bathroom plumbing up in his posh Park Avenue digs. "Oi!" says he, "What's with all the brass fittings? General contractor had me down for the tin." "Well," I says, "I supposed it's the contractor then who'll be bailing out your loo once a fortnight, is it? If it's price you're worried about, I'll be picking up the brass, so not to worry, squire." "And why would you be doing that?" says he. "Well, Mr. Ryan, profit or not, no man bails water out of privies built by Bill McDonagh." The next day I finds out, I'm Ryan's new general contractor. — “Meeting Ryan,” Bill McDonagh, BioShock

This diary made me realize a few things. First, they’re not fixing something—they’re building something. Why the hell would Shirley change that? Maybe it’s because he needed them to meet each other for the first time.

When I heard this audio diary, I envisioned it as, “McDonagh has worked for Ryan for a while, because building a new bathroom would be work-intensive and might take a few days. It’s just that McDonagh didn’t stand out until he had to see the bill or the construction, whichever came first.”

But Shirley wanted a mutual first-time impression, I guess. Seems a bit limited, but what do I know.

Second, how did Levine pull this dialogue off where Shirley fell on his face? I’d have to confer with someone from the UK to know how accurate it is. Its success is probably due to the voice actor. I wouldn’t feel confident writing it, I’ll just say that.

Third, look how vivid and strong these characters are. We’re barely in this scene and you know exactly who they are, what they value, and how many fucks they give.

Meanwhile, Shirley is like: “What if I write Andrew Ryan like that creepy uncle your parents told you never to be alone with”

I was going to write more about how that Andrew Ryan characterization pisses me off but I think I’ll just let the audio diary do all the explaining for me.

On another note, why are there so many goddamn typos? I’m talking about the period that should follow “went on.” Look, copy-editors miss shit all the time—it’s the human condition—but this is excessive. I’m not even a quarter through this book and I think there’s been at least one typo per page, if not two or three. This is embarrassing.

Every time you edit a story, you have to pass it by the author to get their okay, and you pass it back and forth until everyone is happy. I suspect time was a major factor, but the errors are so egregious—even in sections that should, by all rights, be older and therefore cleaner—that I’m starting to wonder if Shirley was an ass on top of everything else.

One of Shirley’s interviews supports this guess. He mentioned “bitching” about inserting new details to correspond with BioShock 2, and described himself as an “independent-minded breed.” Except unlike Ken Levine, he is utterly incompetent. What a fucking nightmare.

I’m coming back around to liking Levine, you guys. He was right about how shitty the John Logan BioShock script was, and he was right not to involve himself with this thing, either.

You should’ve stopped him, Levine. You should’ve told him to go home and lube up his Bram Stoker Award.

I wish I could be cool enough to be Levine’s friend, but he’d probably mace me and shoot me into space with his mind.

Ryan looked at him with narrowed eyes, rubbing his chin. Bill shrugged and focused on the pipes, feeling strangely disconcerted. He could almost feel the heat from the intensity of Ryan’s personality. He could smell his cologne, pricey and subtle.

Well, damn. I’ve read enough fanfiction to see where this is going.

Ryan’s sexuality is kinda questionable—he may be bi, but the only relationships we can tell for sure are those he had with women. Fort Frolic is full of lurid possibilities, but they may just as easily be rumor.

But McDonagh’s sexuality is never brought up. And this is from McDonagh’s POV.

Hmm. HMM. This is kinda special.

Shirley is dumb as a stack of logs, but he stumbles into a good paragraph every now and then. Do you think he meant to do this or not?

Contact me with your opinion. Make it explicit.

[Bill] took the receipt book from his pocket, scribbled out the cost. There’d been no time for an estimate, so he had a free hand. He wished he were the sort to pad the bill, since he gave a percentage to Chinowski and Ryan was rich, but he wasn’t made that way.

That last sentence helped me put a finger on why I hate the McDonagh characterization.

Levine has stated repeatedly that McDonagh represents Ryan’s conscience. Remember that audio diary up there? McDonagh wouldn’t even think of padding the bill. It simply would never occur to him. He’s just going to do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do. Most likely he’s acted on his principles so long that it’s just second nature to him.

But Shirley writes him so full of misgivings. It’s like he’s never met a person like this before. Go ahead, let him be firm and principled. I mean, that’s what he is. You’ve even said as much. Stop babbling and let the man’s deeds stand.

Also did that second sentence throw you for a loop, too? What does it even fucking mean? That McDonagh is free to determine the cost? How awkward.

“Thank you, sir.” Bill took [the check], tucked it into a pocket, nodded to the man—was he mad, staring at him like that?—and started hastily for the front door.

Kiss him Bill. He wants it Bill. Kiss him full on the lips. Give him a little tongue bill

What makes this particularly interesting is that Bill McDonagh is the one giving off the gay vibes, not Andrew Ryan. I’m okay with it, but I don’t know what Shirley does and doesn’t intend because he’s fucking awful at everything. Remember: he wrote that sentence that put “limey grease monkey” in the mouths of Americans, so he might just be super shitty at POV on top of everything else. I guess it’s possible that Shirley only intends for Ryan to be interested in his principled nature.

The problem is, Shirley is generally so fucking obvious, and so literal, that this feels far too subtle for him. Like I wouldn’t put it past Shirley to add a couple of notes about how Bill feels about the Gays.

[Bill had] just gotten to the sitting room when Ryan called to him from the archway. “Mind if I ask you a question?” Bill paused. Hoping it didn’t turn out that Andrew Ryan was a poof. He’d had enough of upper-class poofs trying to pick him up.

THERE IT IS

“What if they don’t understand me?” Shirley asks himself.

Then they should git gud, asshole.

Also, just in case you forgot, this is what Bill McDonagh looks like.

wolf whistle

When I first saw this picture back in 2009, I thought McDonagh was in his mid-sixties. I figured that heart-shaped blotch was a liver spot, which you develop as you grow older. However, it’s equally possible that this is just a tuft of hair or a birthmark. Even considering this, I wouldn’t gauge him as anything less than his fifties. I figure he’s around Ryan’s age—which is fitting, given his status as conscience.

Unfortunately, as this is a tiny scrap of game art that you only see for five seconds at a time when an audio diary plays, we can’t count on it being completely accurate. First, it’s art, not a photo, so there’s a certain level of stylization. Second, it’s not high-definition. Finally, there are the specific needs of a video game. BioShock did not need to be especially clear about how old this guy was. There’s even some benefit in keeping his background kinda malleable.

Also, if this photo were “taken” in 1946, and McDonagh died somewhere in 1959-60, that would put him in his late thirties to mid-forties during the events of this book. And even that isn’t a given. When was this picture taken? Were photo IDs customary in 1946, or were they issued when smuggling became a problem? That would make him yet younger in the book.

Long story short, McDonagh’s age is highly variable and depends on a combination of factors, including game development and the necessities thereof. However, I think I can make a pretty good case that he’s an old fuck when he dies, and he’s at least middle-aged when he first talks to Ryan.

I think you’ll see what I do, eventually—that this McDonagh reads as a young man. Low twenties, maybe. He’s unsure of himself. He’s looking for romance so he can start a family. His schooling comes up front and center. This is not the McDonagh that stands up laughing at the idea of padding a bill. This is a McDonagh that doesn’t fully know himself.

This may not be a huge problem, but cognitive dissonance hits me every time I read about him having Youngun Problems. All I can think of is that liver spot.

Also: exactly how many high-class poofs were trying to fuck him? Is that really a common thing or is this the only way that Shirley knew how to bring up The Gays (tm)? Because McDonagh does not strike me as a handsome person.

Granted, I’m ace as hell. There are people out there who think Augustus Sinclair is handsome. I don’t get it but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

“Where do you think a man’s rights should end?” Ryan asked.

Oh, god.

On one hand, this is Randian as fuck—her characters ask each other pretentious loaded questions all the time. On another, BioShock is a more “realistic” take on the Randian mythos. If there’s one thing you should never, ever do, it’s laugh at Andrew Ryan. You should take him seriously at all times. That’s where he shines.

Wrong time, wrong place, wrong person. Wrong.

God this writing makes me tired.

“His rights, sir?” … “Rights are rights. That’s like asking which fingers a man should do without. I need all ten, me.” “I like that. Now—just suppose you lose one or two fingers? What would you do? You’d think yourself unable to work, and you’d have a right to a handout, as it were, eh?”

oh HA kill me

Please imagine me—a small, pasty, lumpy ball with legs—running in from the side and kneecapping Ryan with that undressed satyr statue. Because that’s what I desperately want to do.

So. You should be able to read this paragraph on two levels and both should make sense.

Let’s say you physically lose some of your physical fingers off of your physical hand.

Let’s say you lose some of your rights, and must go on without them.

The first one works. The second one, though…

“So if you had your rights taken away, you’d think yourself unable to work” is how this translates, and… what

There’s a “good” character in The Fountainhead who is a labor organizer. Company presidents are very often Rand’s villains. Role will not save you in Rand-Land: a man is defined by what he does, not by his title. A huge sin in Objectivism—arguably The Biggest—is taking advantage of someone’s labor without paying for it.

Andrew Ryan establishes Rapture with the hope of leaving everyone their figurative fingers.

I mean, he fails, and we know why it doesn’t work, but that’s his goal. I doubt he’d be like, “Aw yeah, fuck your rights!”

I mean. Yes. He’s technically a walking human rights violation, but he has a very different concept of what they are, just according to the most hideous life philosophy ever penned. The Objectivist says, “A man should be free from other people, and they should be free from him in equal measure.” They consider it a right not to be imposed upon. To create without someone waltzing in and trying to take it from you.

Long story short, I think Shirley confused himself. I told you he doesn’t know how to focus completely on a single point—he only knows how to say what might be involved with it. He also doesn’t know how to access an idea by itself without its tethers to the real world. I’m sure he thinks he’s being very smart here but a little smoke is coming out of his right ear and a couple gears have slipped.

These paragraphs—and the following scene, where Andrew Ryan susses McDonagh out—didn’t need to happen. You see it in the audio diary, don’t you? You see how it works? How snappy it is, how much it says with so little? McDonagh was stunned that his simple act resulted in such a big reward.

I’d expect that Ryan’s behavior in prose wouldn’t be any different. McDonagh’s personality and actions were enough for Ryan. That’s 100% Rand.

I don’t think Shirley understood this. I think he felt like there needed to be more explanation. That alone means he doesn’t get shit.

God I hate this book. And I’m so tired. And I just realized I haven’t gotten to Chapter 2 yet. Dear fuckin baby jesus I’m just now there how the hell has this happened to me?

bye

<- Part 4: Going Down || Back to the Beginning || Part 6: Frank Fontaine: Funny He-He Clown Man ->

[fieriframes]

[Historia de la eternidad, essays.]

[thatepilepticfriend]

It’s gotten to the point of the semester where at 10pm I was writing an essay due the next day while watching Teen Beach Movie 1 & 2

[newrhythmzine]

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