#i used really common bases which kinda disqualifies them inherently

[unorcadox]

a couple of bonus troll edits i made to fool weirdcord into thinking i was a noob <3

[innuendostudios]

We’re talking about adventure games again! Or, more accurately, we’re speaking in the context of adventure games about why some genres are hard to define, different ways of thinking about genre, and what genre is even for.

If you'd like to see more work like this, please back me on Patreon! Transcript below the cut.

Hi! Welcome back to Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? Meditations on the life, death, and rebirth of the adventure game.

Adventure game.

Adventure game.

Ad. Ven. Ture. Game.

What kind of name is that, “adventure game”? It’s an atypical way of categorizing video games, I’ll say that much. We usually give game genres titles like "first-person shooter," "real time strategy," “turn-based role-playing game.” Real nuts-and-bolts kinda stuff. Meanwhile, "adventure" seemingly belongs on a turnstyle of airport paperbacks, in between "mystery" and "romance." When they slap that word on a game box, what is it supposed to communicate to us?

Other one-word genres, I can see how they get their name. A horror game is horrifying, a fighting game earns its title. But how is exploring an empty, suburban house an adventure? Why is exploring a universe not?

When I started this series, I offered up the rough-and-tumble definition of adventure game, “puzzles and plots,” and said maybe we’ll come up with a better definition later. That was… four years ago. Sorry about that. I know it’s a little late, and a lot has changed, but I did promise. So we’re gonna do it.

Today’s question is: What makes an adventure game an adventure game?

This is a tricky sort of question to ask, because, upon asking, we might stumble down the highway to “what makes an adventure novel an adventure novel?”, “what makes a rail shooter not an RPG?”, and that road inevitably terminates with “what even is genre?”, the answer to which is a bit beyond the scope of a YouTube video essay… or, it would be on anyone else’s channel, but this is Innuendo Studios. We’ll take the long road.

Welcome to Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? A philosophical interrogation into the meaning of genre in and beyond the gaming idiom, with the adventure game as our guide.

***

The historical perspective reveals only so much, but it is a place to begin.

If you don’t know the story, in 1976, Will Crowther released Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-based story game set in an underground land loosely based on a real Kentucky cave system. The game would describe what was happening in a given location, and players would type simple commands to perform tasks and progress the narrative, usually a verb linked to a noun like a book that writes itself and responds to directives. This was the first of what we’ve come to call “interactive fiction.”

Crowther’s game - often abbreviated, simply, Adventure - inspired a number similar titles, most famously Zork, which was called an “adventure game” for the same reason Rise of the Triad was called a “Doom clone” - because they were more or less mechanically identical to the games they descended from. This is where the genre gets its title.

But the evolution from then to now has been oddly zero-sum, every addition a subtraction. As more and more adventure games came out, the text descriptions were eventually replaced with graphics, still images replaced with animations, the parser replaced with a verb list, and the keyboard itself replaced with a mouse. In the progression of Zork to Mystery House to King’s Quest to Maniac Mansion to Monkey Island, you can see how each link in the chain is a logical progression from the game preceding and into the one that follows. But you end up with a genre that began comprised entirely of words on a screen but that, by the early 90’s, typically possessed but did not, strictly speaking, require language. There is no question wordless experiences like Dropsy and Kairo are direct descendents of Monkey Island and Myst; that they are therefore in the same genre as Wishbringer, despite zero obvious mechanical overlap, is, for a medium that typically names its genres after their mechanics… weird.

(Also, for anyone confused: Nintendo used to delineate games that explored a continuous world from games that leapt across a series of discrete levels by calling the latter “platformers” and the former “adventures,” and an earlier game in that model was the Atari game Adventure, which was, itself, a graphical adaptation of the Crowther original, so what 90’s kids think of when they hear “a game in the style of Adventure” depends on whether they played on computer or console, but that lineage eventually embraced the even fuzzier “action-adventure” and is not what we’re here to discuss.)

So the connection between the genre’s beginnings and its current incarnation is less mechanical than philosophical. Spiritual, even. Something connects this to this, and we’re here to pin down what.

Now, you may be readying to say, “Ian, it’s clear the determinant of what is or isn’t an adventure game is pure association and there is no underlying logic, you don’t need to think this hard about everything,” which, ha ha, you must be new here. I would counter that, as soon as a genre has a name, people will (not entirely on purpose) start placing parameters around what they consider part of that genre. Even if it’s just association, there is some method to which associations matter and which ones don’t. So shush, we’re trying to have a conversation.

***

Another one-word genre named after a philosophical connection to a single game is the roguelike, christened after 1980’s Rogue. And, in 2008, members of the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin set about trying to define the genre. (I promise I’m not just going to summarize that one episode of Game Maker’s Toolkit.) Attendees began with a corpus of five games that, despite not yet having an agreed-upon definition, were, unequivocally, roguelikes, an attitude roughly analogous with the Supreme Court’s classification of pornography: “even if I can’t define it, I know it when I see it.” And, from these five games, they attempted to deduce what makes a roguelike a roguelike.

So perhaps we can follow their example. We’ll take a corpus of five games and see what they have in common. How about The Secret of Monkey Island, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Myst, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Trinity? All five visually and mechanically dissimilar - three third-person and two-dimensional, one first-person and three-dimensional, and one second-person and made of text (no-dimensional?) - yet no one would dispute they’re all adventure games.

Okay! We can see a lot of common features: dialogue trees, inventory, fetch quests. But here’s the rub: to define the genre by the first two would be to leave out Myst, and defining it by the third would leave out Gabriel Knight, and, honestly, any one of these would exclude LOOM, which I think anyone who’s played one would look at and say, “I know an adventure game when I see one.”

For the sake of inclusivity, we could go broad, as I did with my “puzzles and plots,” and, while this does include everything on our list, it also, unavoidably, includes games that provoke the wrong reaction, like Portal - “I know a puzzle-shooter when I see one” - and Inside - “I know a puzzle-platformer when I see one.” Trying to draw a line around everything that is an adventure game while excluding everything that is not is no easy feat.

The best adventure game definitions are written in a kind of legalese; Andrew Plotkin and Clara Fernandez-Vara have both tackled this, I would say, quite well, with a lot of qualifications and a number of additional paragraphs that specify what counts as “unique results” and “object manipulation.” It takes a lot of words! And no disrespect - I can’t have an opinion in less than twenty minutes anymore - but I can’t help thinking we could go about this a different way.

What the Berliners cooked up in 2008 was, instead of a lengthily-worded definition, a list of high- and low-value factors a game may have. The absence of any one was not disqualifying, but the more it could lay claim to the more a game was… Rogue-like. These were features that could exist in any game, in any genre, but when they clustered together the Berliners drew a circle around them and say, “the roguelike is somewhere in here.”

A central idea here is that the borders are porous. If we apply this thinking to the adventure game, we could say that Inside and Portal are not lacking in adventure-ish gameplay; they simply have too low a concentration of it to be recognized as one.

This is genre not as a binary, but as a pattern of behavior.

***

So, to unpack that a little, I’m going to use an allegory, and, before I do, I want you to know: I’m sorry.

In 2014, professor and lecturer Dr. Marianna Ritchey, as a thought experiment demonstrating the socratic method (I’m sorry), hypothesized a conversation between Socrates and Euthyphro (I’m sorry) in which Socrates posed the internet’s second-favorite argument: is a hotdog a sandwich? (I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We’re doing sandwich discourse.)

Ritchey imagined Socrates asking Euthyphro to define “sandwich,” and sparking the dialectic in which Euthyphro offers up increasingly-specific definitions of “sandwich” and Socrates challenges each one with something non-sandwich that would necessarily fall under that definition: is a hotdog a sandwich? is a taco a sandwich? are three slices of bread a sandwich?

Now, in this scenario, Socrates is - as is his wont - being a bit of a tool. Euthyphro does all the work of coming up with these long, legalistic definitions and, with one, single exception, Socrates sends him back to square one. But Socrates is making a point, (or, rather, Ritchey is): can we really claim to know what a sandwich is, if we can’t explain why it’s a sandwich? Perhaps we should admit the limits of our common sense. Perhaps we should embrace the inherent uncertainty of knowledge.

Or perhaps we could tell Socrates to stop having flame wars and think like a Berliner.

Does “sandwich vs. not-sandwich” have to be a binary? Could we not argue that a sandwich has many qualities, few of them critical, but a plurality of which will increase a thing’s sandwichness? Are there many pathways to sandwichness, a certain Platonic ideal of “sandwich” that can be approximated in a variety of ways? What if the experience of “sandwich” can be evoked so strongly by one factor that some leeway is granted with others? What if many factors are present, but none quite so strongly that it generates the expected sensation? The question then becomes which factors contribute most to that experience, and how much slack can be granted on one axis provided another is rock solid.

A sandwich is not merely an object. It is a set of flavors, textures, sensations, and cultural signifiers. We so often try to define objects by the properties they possess and not by the experience they generate. But a sandwich does not exist solely on the plate, but also in the mouth, and in the mind.

Let us entertain that it’s fair to say a difference between a chip butty and a hotdog is that one feels like a sandwich and one does not.

***

In 2012, the internet was besotted with its fourth favorite argument: “Is Dear Esther a video game? You know, like really, is it, though?” And David Shute, designer of Small Worlds, a micro-exploration platformer (and maaaaaaaaybe adventure game?), countered this question with a blog post: “Are Videogames [sic] Games?”

Shute invoked the philosophical concept of qualia. A quale is a characteristic, an irreducible somethingness that a thing possesses, very hard to put into words but, once experienced, will be instantly recognizable when it is experienced again. Qualia are what allow us to, having seen a car, recognize other cars when we see them and not confuse them with motorcycles, even if we haven’t sat down to write a definition for either. And if we did try to formalize the distinction - say, “a car has four wheels and fully encloses the operator” - our Socrates might pop in to say, “Well then, friend, is this not a car? Is this not a car?” To which Shute - and, by extension, we - might comment that Socrates is, once again, being a buttface.

“If I remove the wheels from a car, then it no longer provides the basic fundamental functionality I’d expect a car to have. But it’s still a car – Its carness requires some qualification, admittedly, but it hasn’t suddenly become something else, and we don’t need to define a new category of objects for ‘things that are just like cars but can’t be driven.’”

What’s special about qualia is that they’re highly subjective and yet shockingly universal. We wouldn’t be able to function if we needed a three paragraph definition just to know what a car is. Get anywhere on Route 128?, forget about it. These arguments over the definition of “game” or “sandwich” ask us to pretend we don’t recognize what we recognize. Socrates’ whole rhetorical strategy is pretending to believe pizza is a sandwich. And anyone who doesn’t care about gatekeeping their hobby will see Dear Esther among other first-person, 3D, computer experiences and know instantly that they fall under the same umbrella. Certainly putative not-game Dear Esther has more in common with yes-game Half-Life 2 than Half-Life 2 has with, for instance, chess.

Shute goes on, “To me, it’s obvious that Dear Esther is a videogame, because it feels like one. [W]hen I play Dear Esther I’m experiencing and inhabiting that world in exactly the same way I experience and inhabit any videogame world – it has an essential videogameness that’s clearly distinct from the way I experience an architectural simulation, or a DVD menu, or a powerpoint slideshow. I might struggle to explain the distinction between them in words, or construct a diagram that neatly places everything in strict categories, but the distinction is nonetheless clear.”

This is the move from plate to mouth. If you’re trying to define the adventure game and you’re talking only about the game’s features and not what it feels like to inhabit that world, you’re not actually talking about genre.

***

So if we want to locate this adventure experience, and we agree that it can, theoretically, appear in any game, we might look for it where it stands out from the background: in an action game. Let’s see if we can find it in Uncharted. It’s a good touchstone because we know the adventure experience is about narrative gameplay, and Uncharted has always been about recreating Indiana Jones as a video game; converting narrative into gameplay.

When attempting such a conversion, a central question designers ask is, “What are my verbs?” Nathan Drake’s gotta do something in these games, so we look to the source material for inspiration. A good video game verb is something simple and repeatable, easy to map to a face button, and Indiana Jones has them in abundance: punch, shoot, run, jump, climb, swing, take cover. All simple and repeatable; you can get a lot of gameplay out of those.

But that’s not all there is to Indiana Jones, is there? There’s also… well, colonialism, but turns out that translates pretty easily! But... Indy rather famously solves ancient riddles. And he cleverly escapes certain death, and has tense conversations with estranged family members, and finds dramatic solutions to unsolvable problems. And none of these are simple and repeatable; in fact, they’re dramatic because they’re unique, and because they’re complex. And Uncharted renders all of these sequences the same way: with a button remap.

When Drake talks to his long-lost brother, or discovers the existence of Libertalia, his jumpy-shooty buttons turn into a completely different set of mechanics for just this sequence, and then go back to being jumpy-shooty. Where, typically, you have a narrative tailored around a certain set of core mechanics, here, the mechanics tailor themselves around a certain narrative experience. And each of these narrative experiences tailors the mechanics differently.

What if we made a whole genre out of that?

Adventure games are the haven for all the misfit bits of drama that don’t convert easily into traditional gameplay. In the old games, you’d never ask “what are my verbs,” because they were at the bottom of the screen. Or, if it was a parser game, your list of possible verbs was as broad as the English language; if a designer wanted to, they could, technically, have every valid action in the game involve its own, unique verb. Rather than specialized, the mechanical space of possibility is broad, the verbs open-ended, even vague, meaning different things in different contexts. The idea is that any dramatic beat can be rendered in gameplay provided you can express it with a simple sentence: push statue, talk to Henry, use sword on rope. Nathan Drake shoots upwards of 2000 people in a single game, but he’s not going to solve 2000 ancient riddles, and he shouldn’t. What makes ancient riddles interesting is you’re not going to come across very many in your life. So maybe the mechanics should be as unique as the event itself. And maybe discovering what this event’s unique mechanics are is part of the gameplay.

The best word we have for these moments is “puzzle.”

Adventure games aren’t named after their core mechanics because, by design, adventure games don’t have core mechanics. Puzzles have mechanics, learning them is the game, and they can be whatever you can imagine. Which is not to say they will be; many games over-rely on inventory and jumping peg puzzles. Even in a near-infinite space of possibility, there are paths of least resistance. But many adventure games have neither, and many are built around single mechanics that don’t appear in any other games.

An adventure game puzzle isn’t simply a thing you do to be rewarded with more plot, it is an answer to the game’s repeated question: what happens next? It was literally the prompt in many versions of Colossal Cave. How did The Stranger find the linking book that took them to Channelwood? How did Robert Cath defuse the bomb on the Orient Express? How did Manny Calavera find the florist in the sewers of El Marrow? It is story told through gameplay, and gameplay built for telling stories.

So I would amend my prior definition, “adventure games are about puzzles and plots,” to “adventure games are about puzzles as plots.”

Beyond that, if you want to know what understand the adventure game experience, you may just have to play one (I suggest Full Throttle).

***

Rick Altman argues we too often define genres by their building blocks, and not what gets built out of them. If you want to write science fiction, you have many components to work with: spaceships, time travel, nanomachines. You can make sci-fi out of that. But what if you take the component parts of science fiction and build… a breakup story? Or a tragicomic war novel? Is it still sci-fi? Let me put it to you this way: if somebody asks you to recommend some science fiction to them, and you say "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," how likely are they to say, "yes, this is exactly what I was asking for"?

Blade Runner is what happens when you use science fiction to build film noir. Dark City is what happens when you use film noir to build science fiction. So what defines a genre, the bricks, or the blueprint? Any meaningful discussion should account for both.

Adventure games are mechanically agnostic, all blueprint. You can build one out of almost anything. We took the long road because the ways we’re used to thinking about genre were insufficient.

***

So: from a few steps back, the adventure game isn’t even that weird. Game genres are usually named after their mechanics, and a small handful are left in the cold by that convention. This would have been a much shorter conversation if not for the fact that video games run on a completely different set of rules from every other medium that has genres.

...but do they, though?

What actually is genre for?

Well, Samuel R. Delany - yes! yes, I’m still talking about this guy - describes genre not as a list of ingredients but a recipe. Imagine for me that you’ve just read the following four words: “the horizon does flips.” If this is just a, for lack of a better word, “normal” story - not genre fiction - that’s gotta be some kind of metaphor, maybe for the protagonist feeling dizzy, or when the drugs start to hit. Whatever it is, it can’t be literal; the earth and sky do not change places in naturalistic fiction.

But they can in fantasy. Certainly stranger things have happened. And they can in science fiction, but by a different set of rules: now there’s a “why.” It’s gotta be something to do with gravity or the warping of space; even if the story doesn’t explain it, it has to convince you, within a certain suspension of disbelief, that such a thing is happening in our universe. Whatever it is, it’s not magic.

These four words can mean many things. Genre informs you which of the many possible interpretations is the correct one. (For what it’s worth, they’re Barenaked Ladies lyrics about being in a car crash.) The label “science fiction” isn’t there to tell you whether a story has rayguns, it’s there so you know which mechanism of interpretation you should employ.

Genre not what’s in the book. It’s how you read the book.

The opening chapters of a mystery novel may be, by the standards of any other genre, excruciatingly dull. A lot of descriptions of scenery and a dozen characters introducing themselves. But, because you know it’s a mystery, these first pages are suffused with portent, even dread, because you know someone’s probably gonna die. And some of these mundane details are just that, but some of them are clues as to who committed a crime that hasn’t even happened yet. You are alert where you would otherwise be bored. And you know to watch for clues, because you know you’re reading a mystery. Those are the genre’s mechanics.

Genre dictates the attention to be paid.

Words, sounds, and images don’t mean things on their own. They have to be interpreted. If part of genre is the audience’s experience, it’s an experience that audience co-creates, and it needs clues as to how. I’ve said before that all communication is collaborative. Here’s what results from that: all art is interactive.

Video games are not unique in this regard, they are simply at the far end of a spectrum. But if the purpose of genre is to calibrate the audience into creating the correct experience, perhaps it makes sense that the most interactive medium would name its genres after what the player is doing.

So the label “adventure game” is, to the best of its ability, doing the same thing as “adventure novel,” and as “first-person shooter,” if, perhaps, a bit inelegantly. There may be better ways to straddle all these lines, but the shorthand reference to an old text game gets the job done.

So that’s the end of our journey. I really hope we can do this again, and preferably not in another four years, but we’ll see how thing shake out. Regardless, I’m glad you were with me, and I’ll see you in the next one. It’s been an adventure.

[forestwater87]

Would you want Gwen and David to become a couple at the end of CampCamp? And adopt Max as well? Cuz' I do...

Gwenvid becoming canon is one of those things I simultaneously love and feel is unnecessary. The show will never let it be as pure and fluffy (or emo) as the fans will make it, anyway, and there is no force on earth that will stop me from shipping this ship with every ounce of my shriveled little heart, so I’m kinda ambivalent on the whole thing. (Besides, I know at least one of the showrunners is not at all into it, so I don’t see it happening no matter how much we may want it to. As long as they keep giving us little ship nuggets we can read way too much into, I’ll be good.)

Also I’m not convinced CC is the kind of show that needs an end, so “at the end” is one of those things that … eh, whatever. It’s an endless summer existing outside of time. Does it ever have to end, as long as they keep having new ideas?

As for the other part of this question … oh, boy. Anon, you did not ask me to go the fuck off on this question, but I gotta because I’ve been holding all this inside for literal years, and I don’t even care that this will make me hemorrhage followers because I’ve been very good and very quiet about it for a long-ass time and I just gotta –

I fucking hate Dad//vid.

And you know? I didn’t used to. My feelings, much like those regarding Cute Waitress, went from “how cute!” to “eh, not my thing but whatever,” and now we’ve circled all the way around to my entire soul lighting on rage-fire every time it’s mentioned, and just … I hate it so much … it’s just …

I feel like this deserves an explanation. And I think the people who’ve already blocked me or whatever aren’t going to read it, so let’s put it under a cut just for the sake of scrolling. But here’s the cliffs notes version:

1. It’s #NotAllDad//vid. There are some iterations of it I don’t hate, and even quite like.

2. David adopting Max, as a general concept, blows. There are exceptions – see #1 – but 99 times out of 100 I hate it with all of my hate. (The short reasons why: David is baby and Forest has Issues, it’s kiiiiinda racist?, and it’s lazy, boring, and way overdone.) 

3. The fandom will not fucking chill about it – at the expense of all other explorations of David and Max’s relationship. And that makes me highkey annoyed.

That being said, anyone who’s worried my blog will become a cesspool of dad//vid hate, please don’t be concerned. This is like lancing a boil of something (I’m bad at metaphors). All the garbage pours out in one massive textblock, and then I go back to being more or less chill about the whole thing. We’re dealing with years of repression here. Shit’s gonna be a lot more intense than it needs to be, and then we’ll settle back down to our regularly-scheduled CC fluff times.

I’m hoping this doesn’t make the fandom hate me forever … but given #3 up there, I’m pretty dang scared it will.

(And hey, I don’t want Cute Waitress to explode in a pit of fire and snakes anymore, so maybe my opinion on dad//vid will change eventually too. Always hold out hope, right?) 

1. #NotAllDad//vid

Like I said, I didn’t used to totally despise the whole Dad//vid thing. Like, I love the idea of David having been a counselor for so long that he just has ingrained Dad Instincts (see S4E14 for the most recent example of this). David as the Dad Friend? Good shit. David as the mother/father hen of his little cabal of campers? Very good shit. Nonliteral interpretations of dad//vid are usually really cute and fun and have some solid basis in canon, and I’m all about it.

Even some of the more literal David-adopts-Max AUs aren’t … the worst. Some of my friends have written versions of it that are original or at least were at the time and really compelling, and usually they found a way of skirting past the majority of the issues in #2. It can be done well.

It just … usually … isn’t.

And for that we gotta see #2.

2. David-Adopts-Max Sucks as a Concept

There is nothing good about the idea of David adopting Max, at least based on what we’ve currently seen in canon. 

(Yes, I am aware that I should couch statements like that with “in my opinion” and “with exceptions” and the like, but that’s a lot of work for this and a bunch of the stuff I’m gonna say in a second, so please just assume for the purposes of everything I put on this blog that it’s in my opinion. I’m not out here dropping Cold Hard Facts about Camp Camp of all things; I’m just spewing my feelings. 

I have lots of feelings.)

I don’t really have a cute little opening segment for this, so let’s skip the hors d’oeuvres and hop right into the meat of it:

David is Way Too Young to be a Father (According to Forest, Who Has Massive Emotional Baggage About These Things)

David is 24 goddamn years old. You know who shouldn’t be put in constant legal charge of a 10-year-old? Someone who is only 14 years older than him. If he’d had Max the old-fashioned way he would be too young to go on 16 and Pregnant. 

That is too fucking young.

I know that some people become parents that young, and even younger. I’m not saying your experiences are bad or invalid. I’m just saying, from the standpoint of being 26, that if one of my two-years-younger friends told me they were adopting a kid they knew from work, I would tell them they were fucking bonkers and to hand that child over to a grown-up immediately. This is especially true of David, who has remarkable emotional maturity but is also mentally about 8 years old. Gwen is the adult at that camp, and David is such a baby. 

Please don’t give the baby a baby.

Also, I’m terrified of having children. I never plan to, I’ve only recently accepted the fact that I don’t have to (grew up religious; it was kinda a whole thing), and get knee-jerk defensive over the idea of anyone my age or younger having children. It freaks me out, and that’s not a good or right emotional reaction to have but it’s mine, and I lowkey panic every time I think of David having children because if he should have a child at 24 then I’m already late.

Yes, I get the feeling that I’m running behind. For something I don’t actually want, ever. In comparison to a fictional character. Whose fatherhood decisions are not even remotely canon.

TL;DR I have issues and my other arguments are decidedly more valid than this one

So How About That Racism, Huh?

I know this has been a matter of some debate in the CC fandom for a while now … but you know what? It’s not nearly enough of a debate. People should absolutely be talking more about the potential problematique aspects of having a way too young white kid take a child from his immigrant parents on some pretty shoddy evidence (which I’ll address in the next section). There’s some White Savior stuff going on there, some negatively-stereotyping-poc-and-immigrant parents going on there … I’m not saying these should completely disqualify any dad//vid AUs or speculation or anything, but it should absolutely be much more of a conversation than it currently is.

(This is why one of the few David-adopts-Max concepts I like is one in which his parents have died. Not only is it more interesting – again, see the next bit – but it neatly sidesteps some potential gross stereotyping, and that’s just always rad.)

I feel like the common counterargument to this is that there are not-great parents of color and not-great immigrant parents IRL, so wouldn’t it be dishonest not to portray that in fiction as well? 

I mean … I dunno. 

I’m not here to tell anyone how to write the One Pure Dad//vid AU or anything. But I will say that I don’t think most people in love with this concept have done anything resembling due diligence in considering how best to sensitively portray the complicated familial, racial, and other implications of this particular AU or concept.

Besides, it’s not real life. It’s fiction, which means any decisions are being made deliberately. It’s a choice to depict Max’s parents as abusive and neglectful monsters who immigrated to America to give their son a better life but that’s for the next section, and it’s not inherently a bad choice, but it’s one that should be made thoughtfully, with an eye to the history of negative stereotypes that already run rampant in fiction. That’s just part of the writing process, and not one that should be shunted aside because it’s more work and less dramatic than creating the biggest of big bads for David to make grand speeches at and/or punch in the face.

Just Not Very Interesting (And Done to Death)

Regarding the overdone thing: Reading a David-adopts-Max AU most of the time is just like reading every other David-adopts-Max AU; I’m pretty sure I could put all these fics on transparencies, overlay them on top of one another, and still have a legible story because they differ so little.

Now to be clear: This – along with the rest of my points in this section – are about personal taste. Some people love reading the same story over and over again, and it brings immense comfort to them. That’s okay, and you shouldn’t feel bad about reading (or writing) these stories and not wanting to break your back trying to find a new angle for it. Cringe culture is canceled, and my personal tastes should not dictate the fandom. You do you.

That being said, I’m also allowed to be so bored by almost all of these fics that I nearly fall asleep scrolling the AO3 feed.

And the frustrating thing is, it would take so little to make it different. All it would take is asking: what if it wasn’t that simple? What if his parents aren’t all bad? What if they’re trying their best, but aren’t able for whatever reason to care for Max the way he needs to be? (I’m thinking Deja’s mom from This Is Us, for a cool example.) What if they later come to regret whatever behavior is making them so sucky, and reconcile in some fashion with their son? What if David and/or Max have fundamentally misread the situation, due to being on the outside and a kid, respectively, and it turns out his parents are actually making the best decisions they can in this situation and David doesn’t need to literally become Max’s dad, but integrates into the family in another way? (Seriously, even “what if they’re dead instead of evil?” would blow my mind in terms of originality. It’s been done, but not nearly enough.)

So that’s the overdone thing out of the way. What about lazy and boring?

It just seems to me that, based on the evidence we’ve been given in the show, there are infinitely more nuanced and creative alternatives to “Max’s parents are canonically abusive and neglectful and deserve to have their child ripped away from them by the guy who sees him at his job like 2-3 months out of the year.” I, in fact, refuse to believe Max’s parents are bad people based on the current evidence, and won’t do so unless canon forces me to see no other option.

Because as of right now, I just don’t buy it.

Didn’t show up to Parents’ Day: Well, we know they immigrated from India to escape “menial labor” (S1E4), and we know capitalism stomps all over the kind of people stuck doing menial labor, so what if they were unable to get away from work or they’d be fired? Hell, what if they couldn’t afford it for whatever reason – car broke down, they don’t have a phone or were out of data, they got hurt or sick or something came up that was interpreted by a small child as a lack of interest because he’s been shown that he doesn’t fully understand either adults’ motivations (all of S1) or the complexities of living in adult society, though he thinks he does (S1E4)?

Didn’t give him an activity: What if their grasp of English isn’t great? It’s a damn hard language to learn, and I sure as hell couldn’t pick up a second language if I was working to the bone to support my family. I’m exhausted trying to get through my 5 minutes of French on Duolingo, and I have a relatively cushy job and the benefit of an owl harassing me every few hours. Maybe they looked at the absurd camp activities and assumed they were misreading something, so they handed it over to their son (who is clearly fluent) to pick something he likes. Maybe they wanted to give him some responsibility and a sense of autonomy in deciding what he wanted to do for the summer, and he was so annoyed at being sent off to camp that he refused to do it and interpreted their hands-off nature as not caring. Maybe they were tired and just told him to pick something and it’s as simple as that, because parents are allowed to be exhausted sometimes. Just strikes me as pretty bizarre that they’d bother sending their son to a summer camp (and those things aren’t cheap, even one as not-awesome as Camp Campbell) but not be invested enough to give him the activity. Saving all year to scrape together enough money for a summer camp, sure, but filling out one line on a piece of paper? Pfft, who has time for that bullshit? 

(I recognize that assuming they’re poor based on a single line about “menial labor” might seem like a bit of a stretch to some people. But honestly, to me it’s no more of a stretch than assuming that they hate or don’t care about their son, or any of the other wild theories thrown around about Max’s parents all the dang time. At least this one is relatively new.) 

Sent him a sweatshirt and a short note: Again, maybe their written English isn’t great. Some people are better at a spoken language than a written one. Or maybe they didn’t have enough time to write a long note, or they knew Max wouldn’t read it (he doesn’t seem like the type to be all that into long emotional letters). Regardless, they knew to send him something he’d like that would likely be worn down by constant wear at camp. And sweatshirts aren’t cheap. Neither is mailing a package. Just seems like a surprising amount of effort to go to if they don’t care about or love him.

Sent him to Camp Campbell for the summer: Let’s say they’re poor, based on the evidence we have. It makes sense to assume that they work relatively “unskilled” jobs, or are in school, or both. Because those jobs don’t offer benefits or a lot of money, we can also reasonably assume that they either work multiple jobs, long hours, or both. They probably don’t have family in the area or even the country, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect neighbors or friends to take their son in all day, every day, all summer so he’s not home alone while they’re at work (especially considering he’s not all that easy to get along with). He’s familiar with the city (S3E11), so we can assume he’s grown up in an urban environment, which means he’s probably to some extent a latchkey kid. Sending him to a summer camp would get him out of the city, around people his own age, where he’d be supervised and kept busy while his parents are at work until school starts. Camps are expensive, but I imagine Camp Campbell might be the best they can afford, and they’d assume it’s better than him sitting in an empty apartment all day.

Max’s insistence they don’t care: He’s … ten years old. Not only has he made it clear that he assumes the worst of most people, including adults, but it’s also relatively common for kids whose parents worked a lot while they were growing up to interpret that busyness as a lack of interest in them. It’s hard to understand things like expenses or financial security as a kid and view it as “my parents are never around and so they don’t love me.” Hopefully when he’s older he’d appreciate everything they’ve sacrificed for him, but at 10 years old it’s expected he’d feel neglected.

I’m just saying, maybe a borderline emotionally unstable child isn’t the most reliable source, is all.

This isn’t rock solid, I realize; I’ve made a lot of leaps of logic and assumptions extrapolating from what we’ve been given. But I don’t see it as any less plausible than his parents hating him or whatever the prevailing fan theories are, and more importantly: it’s a fuck of a lot more interesting (yes, yes, in my opinion). I think adding nuance and sympathy to Max’s parents will always end up more interesting than “good David vs evil parents.”

Of course, we’re in a bit of a limbo since we don’t know necessarily where RT is going to take this. There is every chance they’re going to drop the bomb that Max’s parents are literally as bad as everyone has made them out to be – and worse. Maybe they’re actually Xemug. Fuck if I know. And if that happens, I’m gonna call it out for being the cheapest and least-interesting of the possible options. Bad, lazy writing that pits pure good against pure evil is always gonna suck, even if it comes from the writers of one of my favorite shows.

I really, really hope they don’t go with that (to finally, I guess, answer Anon’s question fully). And I’m pretty forgiving when it comes to things people hate CC for: Dolph doesn’t bother me, most of the problematic episodes don’t bother me (that pee one is still pretty rough though), but if they go the “Max’s parents are the devil and that is why Max is the way he is” route, I’m gonna … well, just be so profoundly disappointed that the showrunners could’ve done something interesting and decided instead to go for the lowest-hanging fruit, that’s all.

FINALLY:

3. This Fucking Fandom

So here’s the thing. Dad//vid is unique among the “ships” in the fandom in that it is deliberately placed as “the anti-Max//vid.” And I understand why that was done, and I appreciate it holding up that particular vanguard; max//vid has no place in dad//vid, and vice versa. 

But the problem with dad//vid being set up as the not-max//vid is that everything that isn’t dad//vid is suddenly viewed as “max//vid-lite.” Even when that makes literally zero sense.

See, even when I was briefly into dad//vid in its very literal “David adopts Max from Max’s evil parents” form, what I was really drawn to was the idea of David being Max’s older brother. Back when the fandom was like 100 fics on AO3, I had started planning out this long plot involving David taking on a brotherly role to this kid I thought really needed one. Admittedly I’m just a sucker for sibling relationships, but from the beginning I’ve been all about this brotherly bond, and so when a popular artist came up with the term “bro//vid” and it started gaining traction, I was all over that noise. There was finally a version of this relationship that wasn’t either “Max and David fucking” or “David literally adopts Max and becomes his literal father,” and I couldn’t be more excited.

And then … I found out that apparently “bro//vid” was becoming synonymous with “max//vid but secretly.” And … man, it really sucked to suddenly be treated like I was supporting pedophilia because I didn’t like the idea of David-adopts-Max as much as the whole big brother thing. I can’t even imagine how much it must suck if your favorite iteration of Max and David is something along the lines of mentor/friendship, without some sort of buffer of “well they’re basically (or literally) related.” Because if “these two as brothers” is max//vid-lite, then I can’t fucking imagine what that would be called.

And even when it’s not specifically about max//vid, it just keeps cropping up. I posted about the Season 4 premiere and expressed how much I saw a cute, brotherly relationship between David and Max, and someone immediately replied saying that they thought it was more like father-son. Which … yeah, fine, I don’t care if you see it like father-son, go nuts, but I am getting really sick of the fact that father-son is the only acceptable “ship” and everything must lean in that direction, no exceptions. (I know, it’s not a ship technically, but I don’t know what else to call it. Don’t read anything weird into me calling it that.)

I don’t think “please just let me enjoy these two and their relationship dynamic without making it pedophilia or insisting David adopt Max from his terrible evil parents” is that tough an ask. 

Or at least, it really shouldn’t be. But somehow it … kind of is.

And that sucks.

(Also, I hate the whole “Max is David’s favorite camper” thing. It’s not technically tied to dad//vid, but it does often come hand-in-hand with that and it just irks me to no end. If David has such blatant favorites, he is terrible at his job and kind of a douchebag. I think he gravitates towards the camper(s) who need attention the most, because he likes feeling like he’s made a difference, but I don’t think David would just straight-up pick a favorite like that, not when he has a full camp of kids who need him. Just saying.)