#i love a metanarrative

[visenyaism]

*watching the play within the play that clearly highlights the themes of my narrative and foreshadows the circumstances and tone of my epic and tragic downfall while recontextualizing myself as an performer in a tragedy without any agency of my own* luckily all this stuff is random and fake

[a-treatise-on-velociraptors]

The Dracula Daily experience is so interesting on a third re-read. The first time reading was interesting for a similar reason--the small pieces of the story unfolding in real time allowing the horror of it to sink in, allowing for analysis and prediction and discussion to build on itself. But the third? We've been here before. We feel like we should have been here before. Jonathan has been here before--how could he not? We're sending him on his business trip again, watching him stumble into every choice because he can't change a bit of it, he's a book character he's not a person with agency but it feels like he should be because we've been on this ride twice now, both times over the same stretch of time as the characters. The reason the Daily experience is so interesting is it isn't like re-reading a book for the third time normally, where as much as you read with a new lens each time your pace will be different, you'll end up skimming over some things and focusing in on others. We're stuck on this train along with our good friend Jonathan Harker and it will move along the tracks as fast as Bram Stoker intended, goddammit. So we sit here yelling at this character written over a hundred years ago to just stop, turn around, don't start the story you're stuck in again. But he does.

[leletha-jann]

Favorite Footnotes of Girl Genius: An Appreciation (3/?)

The Professors Have Entered the Chat, Agatha H. and the Siege of Mechanicsburg, page 141

Authorial voice of the self-insert characters who are writing the book you are reading, who can't resist commenting on their own presence in this story. We're several layers deep into the conceit and dropping. Love it.

[ilions-end]

i’m obsessed with how quintus’ need to make posthomerica so morally edifying accidentally makes him portray the most intriguing odysseus i’ve come across outside of homer

quintus is notoriously uncomfortable with heroes not acting upstanding all the time, or having conflicts with each other, so achilles and ajax and diomedes and neoptolemus and everyone else aren't really allowed to have complicated feelings about anything, and if they disagree with anyone, the Correct and Moral opinion always convinces everyone within a couple lines and then they're all friends again.

but quintus has to collect (mostly) all the events that take place between the iliad and the odyssey in one straightforward narrative, including several shady and self-serving things odysseus does, so quintus' solution is... he writes them but just doesn't comment on them. none of the characters seem to notice whenever odysseus lies or omits part of the truth or follows his own agenda; the text itself lets those moments slide past without acknowledgement. and all the while of course odysseus is also brave, and strong, and passionate and tactically brilliant. he IS undoubtedly a hero.

it makes for such a crazy metanarrative because on the surface odysseus is following the same kindergarten morals everyone else is, but secretly he's playing his own game! it feels like i'm a character in the story because i'm listening to odysseus describe something that happened in an earlier chapter, and i'm the ONLY ONE who goes "wait, that wasn't what happened. ...was it?" it makes me diegetically think "oh okay i need to keep an eye on this guy, he's got everyone else convinced". he's not evil, he's not a villain, he has a ton of positive attributes! but he's the only one in the story who knows how to lie (he even seems to lie TO the story), and that makes odysseus hold so much potential power and danger.

[bagelarts]

i'm late for rock day, but in rock's mind every day is rock day

[eleiyaumei]

My brain after reading about Mystic Messenger's secret metanarrative:

(I already don't like the Mint Eye metanarrative but this... is churning up my insides >.< Can't MM be just about character development and relationships? ^^')

Person on deviantart who saw the parallels back when DDLC came out

[unionizedwizard]

man. i just had the single most emotionally scarring dream ever. and this is coming from someone who only ever has nightmares and awful stress dreams. what the fuck

[scribefindegil]

Ever since I first listened to the Wintersmith album (periodic reminder that if you like Discworld you should absolutely listen to the Wintersmith album) I've been haunted by visions of a stage musical. You'd have a Narrator character to do exposition and voiceovers, like in The Good Witch song on the album. And they'd wear a very particular hat. And for the whole play no one would acknowledge them. Maybe they'd even get to a closing monologue, tell the audience that it's the end. And only then would Tiffany turn around and look at them for the first time, as the opening notes of We Shall Wear Midnight start playing.

[craftlands]

i need everyone to know that while the chance of Horropedia having read House of Leaves is incredibly low, it is not zero if he's from Los Angeles specifically -- while the book was first published in March of 2000, there were print copies of the rough draft circulating around tattoo parlors and similar in the late 1990s, and also allegedly a website hosting PDF versions of at least part of those rough drafts

[phosphoresccent]

storyteller xephos headcanons (honeyphos)

consider, if you will, a storyteller!xephos who became a god after the grief of feeling honeydew's soul unravel grew so great he forced the very narrative to give him the power to change it.

but there are some things beyond even him - even now - he can't fix the unraveling, only halt it in place like an insect in amber. he keeps him close but carefully doesn't think about what he's keeping close, lest the weight of it tear him apart

forcing his friends to play through a 100 lives and deaths, combing through memory and interaction to build back up something of honeydew's soul, but unable to admit to himself what hes looking for - still trying to see the edge of honeydew's dry humour in one of lalna's jokes

honeydew there, unable to really communicate, halfway into not being anything anymore, having to watch his friend tear himself to shreds looking for scraps of him, who gets pieced together into being again, having to be more and more present as xephos forgets himself in his grief, but still really only worried about how guilty xephos might feel, and feeling guilty himself because of it but "only xeph remembers, the poor sod. it's like it didn't even happen, to the others."

the insane bias towards eachother that doesn't need to be romantic but is very "you are the only other real person in the world, to me" -

[carlyraejepsans]

bad character take on the tl, 13 dead 300+ messages in #bad-opinion-zone

[dropespeon]

god. me when characters escape the narrative

[waitingforsecretsouls]

Zahard x Arlene is SO "strangles you with the red thread tying us together" core... Zahard remaining haunted by Arlene's prophecy for the rest of his life and Arlene devoting the rest of HER life to her all consuming hatred for Zahard and setting said prophecy of his downfall into motion.

Forget about her so far pretty generic romance with V, (often further distilled down into the blandest possible core of m/f ('he was a boy, she was a girl', 'wholesome') without even acknowledging the edges canon gives them (going to war together - the whole "battle couple" thing you could make out of that alone - , what about their underlying ideals? Edahn doesn't mention Arlene as particularly taken with Tower residents and even acting as frequent intermediary between Zahard and V, so how did they mesh in that regard? Having to watching it all crumble, slipping away as literal fugitives, the breakdown of their relationship potentially even prior but definitely following their sons murder, etc.)), Zahard and Arlene is where it's at. It's literally the dynamic that created the plot of Tower of God.

[fettery-fetterie]

It's already joever for me so let's go say:

(wait why did I say joever? I meant to say it already late for me)

Implied suicide/suicide ideation??????

Peka but he has found a way to "die" and now every now and then kills himself in order to relief the pain of the wait. Peka who has experienced the freedom of death like if a soothing sleep was only to wake up again as if his death meant nothing. Because it doesn't. He can be put back together whenever he feels like it.

Peka who desperately wishes for death. Peka who hopes for the day he doesn't wake up and can finally rest for the eons he has been going through

[bellshazes]

my first two jobs ever, in order, were "board game teacher" and "university library assistant," so tho I've never formally studied games (I have been dropping out of college on and off since 2015, and was a freshman in 2012 lmao) I've been casually exposed to games and the people who make and play them in a professional context, as well as having the research skills to help close the gaps. i actually kind of hate playing board games but i loved GM-ing the coop arkham horror and watching my players, which i did for seven years straight.

my current fixation is the result of several years' fucking around on YT watching all kinds of game content, from LPs to specific game dissection to video essayists. jacob geller and folding ideas are kind of gold standards, but this week I've been really enjoying errant signals in particular. Sometimes I'm introduced to concepts this way - ludonarrative dissonance, ergodic literature, the magic circle, etc. that, and getting recommendations from friends or accidentally stumbling into game studies via other research (such as the paper i wrote a few years ago on theater-as-games in prison contexts). most of it though is having thoughts and opinions on things and letting it percolate until i am dangerous enough to find someone who's already explained a concept better than I could, and then running with that. find something that cites its sources, and then chase the ones that seem interesting.

my syllabus post is very much not a reclist, though i do in varying ways recommend everything on that list and it might be of use. here's some stuff I think would be great starting points:

Rules of Play - Game Design Fundamentals, Salen and Zimmerman. This book is an excellent resource, as it introduces a wide variety of scholars who you can dive into as it is relevant to your interests as well as providing tons of useful frameworks and vocabulary to go hunting. It's an easy read with concise bullet-point summaries after each chapter, and the PDF is hyperlinked for easy navigation. I might have found this via Wikipedia, honestly.

A Play of Bodies: A Phenomenology of Video Game Experience, Keogh. What I'm currently liveblogging - it is firmly a literary/philosophical work, rather than by/for designers, and correspondingly it's a little more difficult without at least passing familiarity with cyborg theory or any brand or offshoot of post-modernism, but still fairly digestible and a great read so far.

My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, Nardi. Found this during my theater-and-games paper, and MMO anthropology is not really my thing, but it's a nice complement to the other books as an explicitly player-theorist perspective. Also provides a more approachable introduction to a variety of theorists and sources. (Open access on JSTOR!)

Draw Your Weapons, Sarah Sentilles. I'm biased because I discovered this book by accidentally attending an author event at my local museum, and the games portion is incidental, but if you can find it I think this analysis of the relationship between depictions of violence and violence itself is worth your time. Memorable re: games for its discussion of Press F To Pay Respects.

here are some videos which I offer as examples of channels you might enjoy diving into, looking for additional jumping-off points:

Playing as Anyone in Watch Dogs Legion, Errant Signal. I really appreciate Errant Signal's thoughtful, personal approach to analysis and especially his highlighting of buried gems in his Blips series as well as his non-self-deprecating reevaluation of some of his older analyses over his decade plus career making videos.

Controllers Control Everything, Game Makers Toolkit. Discovered via the Boss Keys series highlighting the souls games, and although I think his channel is (increasingly) geared toward devs, these are well-constructed, thoughtful videos about many aspects of game design. Even when I don't personally get what makes him enjoy Zelda dungeons in that specific way (I'm an outlier), I appreciate his analysis.

Mega Microvideos 2, Matthewmatosis. Perhaps better known for his extremely long-form essays, I love Matthewmatosis' series of microessays framed like Wario Ware minigames. They are brief but don't pull punches, and the format is uniquely delightful. (See also this microessay mixtape.)

Making Sense of Catherine Full Body, SuperButterBuns. She doesn't do much essay content, I guess, but I she loves Catherine and the Persona series, and this dissection of Catherine Full Body is an absolute treat.

Jon Bois. Okay, mostly not about games, but like - come on. 17776 and Breaking Madden, alongside everything else he's ever done, fit because I feel like they do. If nothing else, I think Pretty Good and his general use of Google Earth as a medium for storytelling have a lot of utility in talking about digital media. He's good for the soul.

The Future of Writing About Games, Jacob Geller. One of the gold standards for a reason - and especially if you're looking for further solid recommendations for other writing/creating about games. This video in particular discusses & links to some really great pieces, but his Big List of Other People's Video Essays is also a great way to spend the next month of your life. (You might notice some crossover between this list and his, only some of which is coincidental.)

if i have any conclusion, it's that my current fixation on digital literalism is me finally finding an outlet/academic match-up with a fascination i developed in 2015 when studying gonzo lit. i think the utility of academia and the long history of scholarship on a given topic, as a non-academic, is to help you express ideas or reinterpret beliefs or experiences you've had to others without having to reinvent the wheel. i always become most energized when i stop worrying about knowing all the bg and chase whatever is useful and affirming or enlightening to me. and you can get pretty far if you think about why you like what you do, and just - enthusiastically also consume non-academic stuff. maybe this is a note more for myself! but thank you for the opportunity to monologue.

[millionsknives]

im so obsessed with the way tristamp breaks the fourth wall with music. in episode 2 the radio host was like ‘anyway here’s a tune’ right before the opening played and then episode 3 gave me chills when vash started to panic because he heard nai’s piano overtake the soundtrack. we are all listening to the same music we are all part of the same narrative