#it becomes very funny that so much of the game is then made totally irrelevant

[thestobingirlie]

some ppl do too much w making eddie v traditionally smart/knowledgeable or w having steve say that eddie is one of the smartest people he knows (as though steve's best friends are not robin and dustin). i have also seen ppl make steve say that eddie is the smartest person he knows which,,, okay. sure. we're all a little delusional sometimes ig. then use this as a springboard for him just not trying in school or w/e bc he doesn't care despite him clearly caring enough to repeat senior year three times instead of just getting his ged. this also works against what i find most appealing about eddie - like some ppl want him to be a bad boy played straight who is super smart and competent and i do not understand that. i like that eddie is a drug dealer that just can't graduate high school obsessed w his nerdy interests who is not cool and also not v competent outside of his specific interests, particularly in the intense survival situation he finds himself in. that's what makes eddie fun to me and it's also why any fics or aus that make him hyper successful/famous/competent/badass/etc never feel authentic to him as a character imo. they just rarely let the fact that he is a soft-hearted, nervous person at heart shine and that is what i like most about him. also ppl don't appreciate the way steddie defies expectation enough - like when it comes to dealing w the weird, scary world of the upside down you expect eddie to thrive and steve to flounder when steve is actually the borderline hypercompetent one in those situations, even at the very start. that's what makes the pairing fun and so few ppl appreciate that bc they just want to force them into overplayed archetypes.

oh it pisses me off when people try to make eddie scholarly. boy is on his third attempt of senior year. like, he’s clearly trying to pass, but he can’t. and that speaks to trouble with class more than eddie just not trying, or teachers purposely holding him back, which i’ve also seen in fics and just doesn’t really make sense to me. i feel like a drug dealer is the kinda student you would want to leave high school lmao

eddie is definitely not the smartest person steve’s knows, and that’s not a bad thing! no one has any trouble making steve out to be the biggest idiot alive, but for some reason people have a hard time making eddie seem dumb. like, i think i’ve mentioned this before but i saw one fic that said steve only passed high school because his dad paid the school or something? to try and make it seem like eddie was better in school and it’s so stupid! there’s nothing wrong with being bad at school, but so many people just can’t seem to accept that eddie is bad at school, and steve was slightly better, considering he passed the first time.

and yeah! eddie’s a pathetic loser, and i love that about him! he’s a 19/20 year old still in school, obsessed with d&d. people who take that loserness away from him ruin his character.

you would expect eddie to really find himself in a real life d&d game, become a badass, but instead he flounders. he can’t handle it. which is a fun contrast to our other geeky characters. and people that try to make eddie the saviour and steve the one that totally looks up to him, is weird. the fun of steddie is that eddie starts out expecting steve to be a douchebag, and yet he ends up as someone he wants to emulate and become. eddie finds out steve is the epitome of a hero, rather than an asshole jock. (and though i don’t doubt that eddie has traits that steve would love, he’s not gonna be really looking up to him as a genius. because that’s just not who eddie is)

(also, this is kinda irrelevant, but it made me think about kas!eddie, and how people always make him super badass and brutal, and i think it would be funny if he was just a failure at that too. like, not very good at fighting, just treats this shit like a d&d game. literally just a hinderance to vecna. not on purpose to help the others. he’s just shit at it lol)

[s0ym1lk]

I finished Disco Elysium last night and have come to the conclusion that it is, ironically, about learning how to honor history while also letting it go.

Disco Elysium is set in a world drowning in history. You spend the whole time walking through a bombed-out city, exploring walls where people were lined up and shot, bunkers filled with propaganda, and monuments that were put up and torn down and put up again. The layers upon layers of history that you dig through in every encounter just overwhelms you.

Harry Du Bois is likewise drowning in his own personal history. When you start the game, you literally wake up in the 'ruins' of Harry's own personal country - the room he'd wrecked on his multi-day bender prior to starting the game. He clings to an outdated music style and an outdated celebrity that he models himself after. He worships his ex so much that his brain turns her into a god.

It's no surprise that the most joyful parts of the game are ones in which history is erased or made irrelevant. Harry's relationship with Kim, for example, has no history to it at all. While Kim knows that Harry is a self-destructive asshole, based on the aftermath of Harry's bender that he's able to witness, Kim also begins his relationship with Harry from a point where he's fundamentally a different person, who can and does make different choices than old Harry would havea. Every time Harry's past comes up, Kim is able to relate to him in a different and more positive way, simply because the old Harry and the new Harry are different people. Contrast this with Harry's interactions with his old partner Jean. Those interactions are really depressing, because they're so one-sided - Jean is left to shoulder all of the pain Harry caused to him, but when he tries to lash out, Harry doesn't understand. For example, when Jean tries to pull a mean prank by dressing up as the reporter Harry drove away, the joke goes completely over Harry's head, because Harry doesn't remember his past OR his old partner. Jean is stuck in a cycle of trauma and abuse that he's trying to perpetuate with his actions. Harry literally can't remember enough about himself to be a part of that anymore. That's why his relationship with Kim works so well in comparison - he can leave his past behind and become a better person who has healthier relationships.

Another place you see this quite well is in the storyline for the dance club at the church. The church itself reeks of history, and not in a good way. It's abandoned, worn-out, broken, and it has a giant stained-glass window of a woman who blanketed Elysium in terrible history and destroyed it, then convinced everyone that she was a saint. The history in that stained glass literally towers over you and forces you to cower beneath it. When you help the teens turn the church into a dance club, you disrupt all that. The power and sanctity of the church's history doesn't totally disappear, because the church is still there, but it fades into the background as it's overtaken by a new history. That new history extends to everyone present. It covers the teens, all of whom are either running from a bad past or leaving the people they were behind(you'll notice Disco Elysium has a lot of characters who have become different people than they used to be). It covers Harry, who has struggled to let go of the cool person he was in the days of disco, but ends up not just writing the new anodic music but busting a move to it. It covers Soona the programmer, who's trying to essentially come to terms with her history at Fortress Accident and move on from it. It's a really powerful image, to find the seed of the world's destruction in the church and to be concerned about that, but to then turn it into a bass track and dance to it joyfully anyway. Sure, the end of the world is coming. That kind of sucks. But in this joyful moment, who cares?

Look at Harry's former relationship with Dora. You spend all this time being triggered by things related to her, like chewing gum, the Dolores Dei references, and near the very end of the game finally have a dream where she turns into a god and leaves you. Harry is obviously an obsessive person. He obsesses about Dora and turns her into something larger than life, even though she tells him frankly that she's just a regular woman. Harry tries to cling to that history by getting her back. He gives her figurines that he remembered she would like. He tells her he's a better person and that they can make it work. He can try to kiss her. He can beg her not to go. She leaves anyway. Despite Harry's desperation, you can tell as the player that this is an unhealthy relationship, and that it's good that Dora left him. You can also see how her leaving triggered Harry's descent into brokenness, and how he never truly recovered from it because he couldn't let go. I don't think it's a coincidence that Harry only manages to face this history after he loses his memory. Some of that past had to be scraped away before he could face the truth and overcome it.

Finally, the reveal of the killer absolutely drives this point home. The whole game follows the traditional detective novel arc, where every detail is a Chekhov's gun leading to one big conclusion. The footprints, the eighth Hardie boy, the drugs, the smoker on the balcony, all of it. And the kicker is that it does all come together - but not in the way you want it to. Because most of the clues are smoke and mirrors. The killer is a sad old man you've never met before hiding on an island, clinging to (you guessed it!) the past. He's drowning in history and can't let go of it. If he feels totally irrelevant to the rest of the game, that's because he is. He doesn't matter! The world let go and moved on without him. The game strongly implies that it was this moving on, and not the old man's politics, that cause him to commit the murder. When he pulled the trigger, he wasn't really thinking about moralintern supremacy or being loyal to the communist revolution. He simply couldn't watch two people steeped in history choose to let it go and find happiness together in moving on. So he killed the merc in a fit of jealousy. Everything else you track down in the game is just people trying to mitigate the consequences of that murder by protecting each other.

History is important, and paying attention to it is how we learn from our mistakes. But what Disco Elysium doesn't want people to do is to get so obsessed with the past that we get stuck in it. You can't live in a bombed-out city or a trashed hotel room forever. You have to let it go.

You may ask, what about the pale, and the end of the world? To me, the game is literally manifesting existential dread as a parallel to the player's own understanding of our world and our limited existence. We know the world will end at some point. Elysium knows it literally - it's being slowly swallowed up bit by bit. We as the players know it metaphorically. We know that we get 100 years, give or take, to live. We know that the planet is slowly being destroyed. In a way, that's our history too. And so the game says to you, it doesn't matter. You should care, but don't get so caught up in caring that you forget to live. Ultimately it doesn't really matter that the world is ending. What matters is something smaller and more personal - that you care about the people around you, that you try to help where you can, and that you dance to anodic dance music while you have the chance.

[jerseydeanne]

When I last sat down with Prince Harry for an honest, candid, funny and frank interview, he told me he would use his “privileged position” for “good stuff” for “as long as I can, or until I become boring, or until [Prince] George ends up becoming more interesting.”

Harry, then 31 and one of the most popular royals, seemed aware of his sell-by date. “There’s nothing worse than going through a period in your life where you’re making a massive difference and then suddenly ... you drop off. You want to make a difference but no one’s listening to you.”

Recently it has been almost impossible not to hear Harry, although the jury is out on how much people are still listening. So when he announced last week that at the age of 36 he is writing his “intimate and heartfelt” memoirs, “not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become”, it felt as if Harry thinks his greatest hits are already behind him. After settling in America, why the rush so soon after the soul-baring interview with Oprah Winfrey and a glut of other interventions?

A friend of Harry’s says that while he was still a working royal, he harboured a Prince Andrew complex of slipping down the pecking order and becoming irrelevant: “Harry has always been in such a rush to make an ‘impact’, because he thinks he has a limited shelf-life before the public want to hear more from George and his siblings and he worries that after that, he’ll turn into his uncle.”

Harry now wants to tell us about his “dedication to service” and how he’s “worn many hats over the years”, because “my hope is that in telling my story — the highs and lows, the mistakes, the lessons learnt — I can help show that no matter where we come from, we have more in common than we think.”

The privacy-obsessed prince will let us into his head for a rumoured multimillion-pound advance, with “proceeds” from sales of the book published by Penguin Random House in late 2022, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee year, going to charity. Harry is said to have been working on a manuscript for more than a year with the American ghostwriter JR Moehringer, who worked on Andre Agassi’s memoir. Whatever is — or isn’t — in the book it is certain to outsell Meghan’s The Bench, which has shifted 6,195 copies here. Yesterday, a spokeswoman for Harry denied reports of a four-book deal, with a second book after the Queen’s death, as “factually inaccurate”, confirming “there is only one memoir planned” and “no project co-ordinated around” the monarch’s demise.

We are likely to hear Harry’s take on the very public breakdown of his parents’ marriage, the impact on his childhood and more on the devastating effects of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, when he was 12. He has said he failed to deal with it for years, leading to a period of “total chaos” and a near “total breakdown” in his twenties. Of walking behind his mother’s coffin, Harry has said: “I don’t think any child should be asked to do that, under any circumstances.” Will the book reveal who asked him and what choice, if any, he was given?

How Harry chooses to relay the “party prince” years, when he was living it up in London nightclubs and smoking cannabis at his father’s Highgrove home, leading Charles to arrange a visit to a rehab centre, will be fascinating. Will the period be analysed retrospectively as the reeling aftermath of his mother’s tragic death? Or will there be candour about a young, privileged prince having a blast and doing what many young men in his position would have done?

“I never thought he was out of control then,” says a source who knows Harry well. “In his new Californian guise, I think he’ll tell it honestly, framed in the context of his ‘journey’ towards ‘healing’. I think there will be a lot of the old broken me versus the new fixed me who dealt with the pain, and a lot about Meghan as the woman who liberated me to deal with it all.”

A seasoned royal watcher says they are “looking forward to the Vegas chapter”, one of Harry’s most notorious escapades when he was photographed naked playing strip billiards in a Las Vegas hotel suite in 2012 shortly before being deployed to Afghanistan. “Too much army, not enough prince,” Harry later said, admitting: “I let my family down.”

Having become so outspoken on race and “unconscious bias” after meeting Meghan, the first mixed-race woman to marry into the modern royal family, what will Harry tell us he learnt after calling an Asian army colleague “our little P*** friend” while at Sandhurst military academy in 2006? The incident was widely condemned, a year after he was forced to apologise for wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party. “He’ll be smart enough to know that to gloss over those incidents would undermine the book,” says a royal source who knows him.

Harry’s account of family life will be intriguing — how the triumphant trio of William, Kate and Harry briefly became the “Fab Four” with Meghan, their fairytale wedding with the no-show by Thomas Markle, the father-in-law he has never met, William and Harry’s rift, the painful split from the royal family and their new life in America, right up to the controversy last month surrounding the naming of their new daughter, Lilibet. The Sussexes called in lawyers to dispute a BBC report that the Queen was “not asked” about the intimate nickname. “False and defamatory” said team Sussex. The BBC stood by the story. Buckingham Palace did not dispute it.

What will Harry’s version of life inside and outside the royal goldfish bowl look like? He has pledged total honesty, and is “excited for people to read a first-hand account of my life that’s accurate and wholly truthful”. But as the Queen’s statement following the bombshell Oprah interview in March pointed out, “some recollections may vary”.

In that interview, and in the mental health documentary series Harry made with Winfrey, he claimed talking about mental health with his family was off-limits. Royal life “wasn’t an environment where I was encouraged to talk about it”. His comments left some scratching their heads. After all, Harry, William and Kate championed ending the stigma around mental health for years in their hugely successful Heads Together campaign.

On the Armchair Expert podcast in May, Harry also credited “a conversation I had with my now-wife” for his decision to have therapy. Yet in another podcast in 2017, Harry said he sought professional help “three years ago” encouraged by William, who told him: “You really need to deal with this.” The inconsistencies in some of Harry’s recent recollections have been well documented, leading some to describe him as a “revisionist historian”. Harry’s rumoured ghostwriter has spoken about the importance of honesty.

There is little hope in royal circles that will happen. The Sussexes’ recent outbursts have driven once-loyal aides to despair. “I fear they may sail into the sunset now, convinced they did the right thing by speaking ‘their truth’,” says one. “Now I hope everyone shuts the f*** up.”

Charles has been portrayed as an emotionally and financially stingy parent. A source close to him says: “He has genuinely been so upset by it all. He just doesn’t recognise any of the examples or narrative.” Friends of William and Harry say William, who was forced to publicly defend his family against accusations of racism after the interview with Winfrey, “despairs” of his brother but the shock factor is wearing off.

Harry has done brilliant things in his time. Moving the dial on mental health, serving his country at war and launching the Invictus Games are just a few of his achievements. Nobody should begrudge him wanting to bang the drum there, and if he wants to bare his soul on how he has coped with undeniable adversity and tragedy in his life, fair enough. But if his book becomes the main course of a score-settling feast then he will lose many more hearts and his greatest fear will be realised — “no one is listening”.

[makeusfreefromthisfandom]

Anon asked: Heyyy! Can we have some HC on style 5 as fathers? Thank you

Yes! The boys as fathers have me so soft 🥺

Father Headcanons (Style 5)

I got carried away with these hcs... might have to make a separate post for each later on 😅 long post ahead!

Haru

Personally I imagine Haru with a daughter first

Like can you imagine how cute that would be? 🥺🥺the whole like father like daughter 🥺🥺

Haru doesn’t get this whole babies thing, in fact he’s panicking on the inside, but the moment he holds his child in his arms, it’s like every thought every worry has now become irrelevant

The only thing that matters is the child in his arms❤️

Smiles a lot more now because he is genuinely happy.

Even lets his laughs be heard more often just for his kid lol

When his child grows up a bit more, he definitely wants to teach them how to swim and how to ahem ~be one with the water~

He’s not a pushy father at all tho he won’t ever force his child to go down the swimming path and would rather have them get into something they are passionate about

Nevertheless, he still would like them to know how to swim atleast, it’s not a bad thing to learn

But um...he’s not the best of teachers...

Uncle Makoto here to save the day!

That being said, Haru always wants to be there for his child, be able to go to as much of their competitions/meets/games/etc. as he can even though he’s so busy with his own training schedules

He just wants to be there for them and he wants them to know that too<3

Oh um also...he’s bad at scolding...he’ll try to “scold” his little kid for doing something wrong like picking things off the ground and putting it in their mouth but his child just looks up at him like 😯

Also Haru changing diapers? Haha... “ahh (y/n)! How do I do this?”

He gets better at this tho over time :)

Watch his child not like Mackerel

He’s still confused over this whole father thing, but he knows that he really does want to love and be there for his child<3

Btw how cool would it be to have a dad being a world renowned swimmer? 😱

*haru excitingly watching as you feed your baby daughter (I see him w a daughter ok but it’s your choice) mackerel for the first time*

*baby makes a weird face and spits out mackerel*

“*Haru gasps dramatically* She doesn’t like mackerel.”

Baths with his kid. 🐬

JUST IMAGINE THAT I DONT EVEN NEED TO EXPLAIN IT

How precious 🥺

You sitting on the edge of the bathtub, silently watching Haru as he holds his baby in the bath with a small smile, eyes then slowly drifting up to lock in with yours, his smile a bit wider and everything he feels for you and his child, all shining in his eyes ❤️

There cannot be a more perfect, little, peaceful family <3

Makoto

An amazing father!

We’ve seen him with his little siblings Ren and Ran!

That doesn’t mean he won’t panick from time to time because it’s different when it’s your own child

He’s the type to do the whole baby talk and little cooes with his baby but turns bashful when he catches you quietly standing in the doorway watching 🤣

His cooking skills have improved a bit...

You already work so hard everyday for the baby and the house, he wants to lessen your burdens and give you a little break <3🥺

Family cuddles! With you and Makoto on either side and your child/children in the middle! How precious🥺

I see Makoto’s children being a lot more brave and daring than he is like watching “scary” (like Cartoon Network scary XD) movies and wanting going on adventures in places supposedly paranormal

“Dad stop being such a scaredy cat! I wanna go watch this movie already!”

“Ahh (y/n)!! Help me! 😰”

His kids are mischievous bro always do those puppy dog eyes to get him into their schemes

“AH NO (Y/N)! IT WAS THEIR IDEA I PROMISE!”

He also spoils his kids XD

Don’t think that means he doesn’t know when the boundaries are crossed and when he needs to get a bit strict

He may spoil his kids but spoiled kids are a big no no (there’s a difference)

The kids actually grow up to be sweet and respectful

Aww imagine Makoto teaching his own kids how to swim and sending them to an sc🥺

He’s just such a loving father and SO supportive!

His children love that they can come to him with any of their problems and know that he’s going to listen intently and understand, while also offering any advice he might think suitable <3

As if you alone didn’t make his heart well enough with so much love, his heart practically bursts with his children❤️

Ready to sacrifice everything he has for the happiness and well being of his family ❤️

Nagisa

Excitement is an UNDERSTATEMENT

As if this baby himself wasn’t cute enough, just IMAGINE HIS CHILDREN

omg omg omg cuteness overload

He’s jumping up and down when his baby is about to come, however he calms down when he actually gets a chance to hold them and he’s just in a soft, serene state, looking on at his little one with a small smile~

All his little toddler has to do is slightly tug on his shirt, and Nagisa is in a full gushing frenzy

He cries over how adorable they are

Nagisa baby YOU are adorable

He’s such a funny dad always makes his kids laugh!

Like when his child is a baby, he would come over making silly faces that half of the time either made baby laugh or baby cry 😣

Tickle Monster 😏

Finger puppets! I totally see him doing this as a father!

Nagisa won’t tease his kids a whole lot tho, knowing how frustrating it can get having experienced for a good amount of his life by his older sisters

He wants his kids to have fun ALL the time just like him 😁

He shows them his secret sweet stash when he believes it is time

So you’re going to have to be the one implementing the rules and regulations

“Come on, it’s time for bed let’s go, it’s past 11”

“Aww come on (y/n)-chan look at how happy they are! Just give us five more minutes🥺”

The challenging part for you is that you end up having to give in a lot more because now there’s more than 1 who’ve mastered the puppy dog eyes around the house

Another supportive dad! (They all are) he wants to be there for his kids’ firsts! And for all their games and competitions etc.

This is going to be such a fun little family with LOTS of love, support, chocolate, and fun! ❤️

Rei

No theory, no book, no calculations prepared him for the moment his child was placed in his arms

He’s immediately brought to tears and whispers a small “beautiful” 🥺

The type to document EVERY moment of his child

You end up having like 10 albums and tapes of just your kid(s)

ALL of your little ones firsts have all been recorded and documented to reminisce on later in the future🥺

Always nudging you and showing you the cute little things your baby is doing off in the corner🥺

He can be strict

Unlike Nagisa, oh no he is not spoiling his kid’s diet

Their kid is eating their entire rainbow with lots of fruits and vegetables, along with the right amount of protein and milk

However there are times where he chills out and actually bakes cookies and sweets for his children 🥺

And they are *chefs kiss*

However when Uncle Nagisa comes over...those kids know what’s up 😝😋

Wants to show them the beauty of swimming, specifically the butterfly stroke

You don’t have to worry about your kids getting low grades, because Rei will personally take care of that😌

He just wants his children work hard so they can become the best at whatever they choose to do in the future <3

Haha you wanna know what I’m imagining?

Him having a daughter that is an EXACT copy of him

And it will completely leave him speechless at moments XD

“Ahem...Daddy, the way that you pitch the ball is off by approximately 15 degrees according to the direction and pressure of the wind...not beautiful” *pushes glasses up*

Rei is just like 😨😱

Anyways you can forget about having excessive burden on your shoulders from parenting because this man is going to give it his all for you and his children❤️

Rin

The second his baby was delivered, he was already a crying mess, however when they are actually placed in his arms, it’s like all the tears have suddenly stopped, and it’s just a moment for Rin.

However he starts crying again immediately after

He loves his child so much! ❤️

They are a physical embodiment of his love with you! <3

He now understands the sacrifices his own father made for the sake of his family and now Rin is willing to to the same for his own

All his tsundereish tendencies vanish and he just becomes one big softy 😤

Don’t think that means that Rin doesn’t know how to be strict tho

Oh he is a strict dad but he only does is it for his child’s own good

He will shower them in just as much affection after the scolding <3

Like even after he gets a bit harsh on his child and sees their eyes, Rin immediately stops and goes into your shared room and starts sniffling

“H-hey (y-y/n)...w-was I too harsh on them?”

Yes he’s the type of dad to get onto you for brushing your teeth

He’s also that dad helping his kids with math

He has let his emotions show a lot more now.

Like when his baby started taking his first steps...Rin cried, camera in his hand shaking

When his child picked a flower and brought it to him...shark baby cried.

Or when one of his children brought home their essay about Rin being their biggest hero...Rin cried.

A very supportive family!

With you guys going to support him swimming at the world stage, and Rin going to all his children’s events and being their #1 fan <3

I can see Rin owning a “The World’s Best Dad” or “#1 Dad” mug and proudly drinking from it XD <33

He also gets very competitive with his kids! He gets very into the sports and games he plays with them

Teaching them tricks and tips along the way

And swimming? He’s got it in the bag, your child will get the hang of it under a week.

Some days Rin likes to lie with you on the bed, wrapping an arm around you to hold you close and pressing a a soft kiss to your temple, thanking you for being the love of his life and making him the world’s happiest man alive 🥺❤️

A/n: The boys would be such good fathers!They can all have my babies I love the parenting concept! I’m probably going to make separate hcs for them in the future 🥺

[heckyeahepithetswitched]

candaru liveblogs reading her own writing: episode 7

let’s get right to it boys

in my head she’s doing the lame cartoon gag where they cross their arms over each other

IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE IT FITS HER JUST AS WELL AS, IF NOT BETTER THAN, HOWIE

same energy as/swap version of “Listen here, Mr. Police officer—” “It’s Ms.”

I tried to give him a gambling theme to give him SOME sort of different flavor from canon Zora, although apparently it made some of his lines confusing “-_-

listen I really love Yoomtah and Sylvie’s relationship. he pretends not to care but he doesssss

I feel like,,,, I ended up mixing motives a little bit here, but shhhhhh it’s fine

“I am NOT. a KID.” + “I’M NOTTA SQUIRE!!!”

little reference to some more Zora HCs that were later confirmed, regarding her powerset :3

I really liked this bit with the playing card, but oh BOY was the entire ending fight a giant knot to untangle. I spent like an hour trying to sort out one part in particular while my family played cards in the next room

very, very lame throwback to the McHammer reference in the Museum Arc which I regret

THIS WAS THE PART I WAS LOOKING FOR IN THE SCRIPTS WHICH MADE ME GO “I actually don’t remember writing any of this, I should do a reaction reading of my own scripts” BGJASDK

I HC that this is tied to how Ramsey lost his eye in this universe :3c

trying to write Ramsey’s voice was STUPID hard; I kept mixing Zora’s voice + accent and Will’s (Ramsey’s) voice + accent and those REALLY DO NOT MIX

there’s an improv game called “the hardest game in the world” where you have to mix two accents and now I see why it’s called that

this is 9x funnier when you consider the types of commissions Ramsey is known for

1. I am very proud of myself for figuring out a way to swap Zora’s speech

2. I got SO close to making Ramsey call Zora a “Stardew Valley character” but decided against it because I wasn’t sure if SDV was too much of a passing trend that’d become irrelevant. now I kinda regret that decision because it probably would’ve been funnier and it’s not like these were made for posterity

another small jab at Jello for THE INCONSISTENCY OF ERASER CUFFS

ok so

I originally had Percy as Sylvie’s daughter just because 1) I thought for some reason maybe that was a thing in the AU??? I think it was actually people going “haha swap!Sylvie would totally adopt swap!Percy on sight” but then like it turned into an ACTUAL thing in my head, and then 2) it provided a VERY good excuse to get the police into the museum in the museum arc because nobody ever calls the police or trips the fire alarm

but then by the time we hit this part, I was 1) in love with the Ashling-King family unit, and 2) thought that having Percy around really added motivation to Sylvie’s character, and also gave another dynamic to the bond between him and Zora, which is just (chefs kiss)

I had a split-second heart attack about “WAIT HOW DO I GET THE CUFFS OFF ZORA, SHE CAN’T HAVE HER ARM CHOPPED OFF BECAUSE I DON’T THINK SHE COULD REGROW THAT/EVEN IF SHE DID IT’D BE GRAPHIC, AND RAMSEY’S NOT EVEN TRYING TO CUT HER HE’S TRYING TO TURN HER TO GOLD—” before I remembered that gold is soft enough to bite through and I was like aw yes nevermind, I got this

hehehe :3

I knew I wanted a plot twist of some kind during the final battle because people wouldn’t be expecting it, but nothing that would impact the story, and this ended up working perfectly

also you know we had to get Beefton in there somewhere! :D

I, personally, think the gold cracks are a REALLY cool idea

everyone thank goldbricker-ramsey for that one

THE FACT THAT ZORA IS STILL TALLER THAN HIM KILLS ME

I do not remember deciding that the height chart was Zora -> Ramsey -> Sylvester but that’s how it is I guess

we decided (and by “we” I mean Mari) that since canon Zora hates kids, of course swap!Zora must LOVE them, hence her softening up around Sylvie a lot once she learns he has a daughter :’)

the hardest swap of the Museum arc was Mera and Indus because they were TOTAL OPPOSITES

the hardest swap of the Redwood arc was Ramsey and Zora because they were the EXACT SAME ENERGIES

again... I felt there was just a liiiiittle bit missing with canon Percy and Ramsey’s dynamic, and for me personally, this moment fills that missing bit in. but that’s just me and this IS my writing, so XD

so, just as a heads-up, apparently the people who did the audiobooks changed around some of these minor-character (well, “not-yet-revealed character”) swaps

and since they know the AC characters better than me, I’d proooooobably go ahead and use their swaps if this project ever did continue?? hypothetically??? basically these last bits are all still malleable

I wrote this entire scene with Trixie and Phoenicia before someone pointed out that Trixie and Phoenicia already had swaps in this universe

*facedesks*

probably not. but hey!! it was super fun!!! the most fun I’ve had in a LONG time, actually. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a project as much as the Epithet Switched scripts.

Spliinkles thank u for letting me take ur awesome idea and just run wild with it, writer brain went brrrrrr and it was such an absolutely fantastic experience that I can only hope I get to relive :’)

[ganymedesclock]

Dead Cells and the weight of small lives pt.2 (NPCs, the dead and alive)

Continuing from part 1, now that I’m refreshed, rested, and ready to continue this monster post. I finished off last post talking a bit about the way Prisoner acts onto NPCs and interact-able bodies, so this chunk is picking up with that in earnest.

Here is the thing. If you punt the corpse of an executed prisoner, that’s generally a dick move, so this is another place I feel like I can understand why people might get the takeaway Prisoner is kind of a jerk. But I feel like it’s worth examining, in detail, the kind of interactions he has.

The mechanics of Dead Cells are very focused on scavenging, looting, and a limited amount of buying your way forwards- and, spoken as someone starting to dip my toesies in the higher Stem Cell counts- thus, more difficult runs- any random encounter you can get items from is a godsend.

It’s also where you get a lot of the lore of the game, in random events- some of which will show up in multiple areas, others unique- that tell you about the world.

It’s in these interactions, mainly, that I see Prisoner characterized as a fairly compassionate guy with a morbid sense of humor, and I struggle to see him as a total uncaring asshole. To gloss over a large number of interactions, here’s some common threads:

Prisoner is fairly flippant about death / used to seeing corpses. He will also sometimes kick the bodies with his bare feet to make them drop items, which, as a fairly tactile sensitive person, the thought makes my soul depart my body. Kicked bodies are seldom visibly disturbed from their position by this, though they do drop items. 

He is not opposed to looting said corpses / prying useful items out of their hands, though he may comment on riffling through someone’s stuff being a social no-no while doing so.

At the same time, he far more often uses “personlike” language rather than “objectlike” language to describe the bodies (“this guy” “her” “him” “population”) with the main exception being interacting with a bloated, waterlogged corpse.

You can virtually always examine a lot more than what has money or weapons and Prisoner will have salient thoughts about it suggesting he is proving keenly observant and not specifically looking for loot and ignoring all else.

From here, I’ll go into several incidents I think are pretty noteworthy. 

A fair warning that these are quite morbid and discuss/depict the kinds of things people do when everything is falling apart and people are dying all around them, so, not exactly gentle reading.

1. The Flower Loving Prisoner

This is a fairly common encounter you can find in the Prisoners’ Quarters and Promenade, possibly other places. It is a small cell, with several points of interest, mostly being the large number of potted flowers and the small window. Poking around will have Prisoner note that the flowers “have been a bit underwatered recently” and that the fabric of the mattress was torn up and used elsewhere.

Specifically, for a noose- the person occupying this cell hung himself, and his corpse is holding a single flower in its hands.

For the room, Prisoner remarks “looks like this guy loved flowers.” For the body itself,

“Guess he wanted to choose the time of his death. He’s holding a faded flower between his fingers. A moment of silence… NAH! I’ve got better things to do!”

The “nah” is punctuated by him kicking the body, causing it to drop a necklace- but not the flower it’s holding.

So here’s the thing. This is a flippant action. At surface pass, Prisoner is disrespecting this person who is characterized by growing flowers in a prison- and holding onto this small thing of beauty, even in death.

The thing is though, someone who doesn’t care at all wouldn’t, of their own accord, independently air the idea they should have a “moment of silence” for this person, even to veto it a second later. Nobody is here to see or care what Prisoner is doing.

Also to someone who doesn’t care at all, the entire rest of the room would be of no interest; it would be trivial that flowers were important to a dead person.

So this creates an interesting duality. On one hand: Prisoner very clearly doesn’t care much about bodies. This is a repeated pattern. The main time he’s particularly shocked by corpses is when they were someone who was alive the last time he checked (as is the case of the Tutorial Knight). He has a calculated angle and he’s interested in what he can get from them and how it can prevent him from dying, again.

On the other hand... Prisoner equally clearly cares about people. He thinks a lot about what people wanted, felt, what choices they made. He shows a lot of interpersonal intelligence and even to people who he has every reason to not listen to, his responses tend thoughtful and he socks this information away as important in a context where he is, by necessity, otherwise rigidly focused on survival. He hates the King, but will also talk thoughtfully about the way the royals of the island lived.

And of the two elements in this juxtaposition, while survivalism and gallows humor are clearly strong threads in him... it’s clear the caring part is the larger factor of the two. It persists, while his cheerful morbidity sometimes just utterly fails.

2. The Stilt Village family

In the fishing hamlet, you can find a small house featuring a hanged woman. A letter by her feet, that the Prisoner notes are probably her last words, reads:

“The Malaise won’t get us. I’ll protect you… I’ll protect you.”

The Prisoner, our usually quite chatty protagonist, has almost nothing to say here. The closest he gets is, on examining the woman’s body, notes she “opted for the fast method” and aforementioned observation that the note is her last words.

There is also a bed in the room. Two sets of small feet poke out from under the blankets. If you examine it, Prisoner only says “throats slit.” and nothing more.

There is nothing in the room to loot, no jokes made, and the overall attitude is deeply, crushingly somber. There are closed drawers, but there’s no prompt to go through them.

If Prisoner didn’t care, this would just be more of the same, what’s three more bodies, right? But it’s clear that he isn’t just idly curious about the way people live and what they thought and felt- he has a certain amount of compassion, so that faintly nauseous feeling we get as we creep through this room is probably simpatico with our protagonist.

These people are strangers. He never knew them. They’re villagers of a fishing hamlet that was a hotbed of rebellion, and disrespectful of the king; they are small lives. They are “irrelevant people”. Mechanically, you have no gameplay incentive to stand here and look around.

But it’s clear this encounter affects Prisoner a lot emotionally. He doesn’t know who these people were, never met these kids or their presumed mother- but it’s clear he didn’t want this to have happened to them. 

In particular Prisoner seems to be disquieted by young corpses any time he finds them; the closest he comes to joking is finding the executed body that he notes is “either a dwarf, or... no more than seven or eight years old. ...Let’s... say she’s a dwarf.”

Another half-joke, also in the Stilt Village, is he finds a desperate letter to the Alchemist, written by villagers pledging their bodies to his research and begging him to save them. Prisoner notes that it’s partially damaged by water and hard to read, and then frankly follows with “I don’t think I want to understand what I read.”

This is worth noting, in particular, because we find a lot of the Alchemist’s grimoires, and he mentions his “volunteers” often- the kind of things that happen to them in particular tend to be fatal. One setup in High Peak Castle notes that those exposed to the experimental cure became twisted half-plant beings, and then as a near afterthought, notes “the subject failed to survive.”

So Prisoner- who’s just trying to save his own hide at best- is pretty strongly depicted as more upset at what happened to the villagers than the Alchemist who was trying to work on a cure. This is significant, when we happen to know said Alchemist becomes the Collector, who basically spends the entire game using Prisoner to harvest resources from corpses (the titular Cells) in exchange for better equipment. The Collector also makes it quite clear from the start he knows who Prisoner is, but is not interested in disclosing this information.

(And, if you, like me, don’t think Prisoner is the same person as the King given the wild discrepancy of personality and other evidence- when he finally does “fess up” it’s in the form of lying to Prisoner’s face)

3. Moments of anger

This is actually not one moment but several. Part of what Dead Cells does with its dialogue is convey tone and intensity by changing colors. Most text comes in blue boxes- when it’s lit in red, it’s almost always for emphasis. Especially if the textbox shakes slightly and the text scrolls faster than usual, giving it a sense of slamming into place on the screen.

In several areas- the Promenade or the Ramparts- you can find a setup of “live target training” in which a human prisoner was chained to a post, and then shot at by archers. This is at first perhaps a bit morbidly funny, given the wall behind the prisoner is littered with arrows- but, overall, it’s just dark.

In particular, a single arrow has struck the shackled prisoner. When Prisoner observes this, he notes “Only one arrow hit the target.”

Then, in shaking red text, “Right in the head.”

He then turns and faces the empty stand where the guard stood, and flashes a thumbs-up that I struggle to read as not rather scathing in its condemnation. Again- to someone who doesn’t care or thinks of this as funny, that kind of emphasis doesn’t make sense.

But even some things he says calmly seem to suggest Prisoner’s pretty angry about the whole situation- sometimes, upon finding a large gallows section, it will have an order pinned to it:

By order of the King, all persons presenting behavioural disorders or noticeable deteriorations in their appearance... shall be imprisoned, and hanged by the neck until dead. ...(If the prison doctor confirms the diagnosis of infection.)

There is a distinct beat before the last line is read, and then Prisoner’s commentary ensues:

“Glad they added that. For a second there I really thought we were talking about genocide.”

He also at one point responds to a desecrated statue of the King, defaced with “We’ll skin you alive!” by calling it a “brave and courageous statement,” and seems mildly impressed that someone peed on a royal order in the Stilt Village relatively high up. Besides that, a lot of the area flavor text talks about the abuses of the guards, and in particular in High Peak Castle, it’s noted the royal guard were pulled back into the castle when the rest of the island needed them.

In a way, the way that Prisoner uses humor often trivializes his own anger, which again, ties back to what I said in part 1: everything the game says about small lives- about the “irrelevant little people” that suffered in the wake of the plague emphasizes that Prisoner’s perspective is that he is one of those little people. In the sewers, examining a strange cocoon, Prisoner seems to have a full-on crisis about what he is and why he’s here before interrupting himself with a joke.

Someone who thinks they are important and is used to demanding others’ attention and validation doesn’t treat their own genuine anger and revulsion like it’s something to shrug off.

[aanotheruniverse]

Something close to my heart I wrote a few years ago

THE SUICIDE CLINIC 

CIARAN HARDIE 

 The Waiting Room Nobody made eye contact at the Suicide Clinic. Everybody knew why you were there. If you are about to kill yourself, small talk is not really a high priority. As George craned his neck to take in the high ceiling, he was reminded of the similarly high ceilings in airports, and the Suicide Clinic is a sort of an airport - a temporary drop-off point between life and death. The Clinics all looked the same inside: spacious, fashionably modern, with wide white corridors, littered with suicide prevention signs and pretentiously artistic glass panels. They were the type of place where the floor squeaks as you drag your feet across it. To George's left side was a black man, in his fifties, whose short hair had started to turn white. Chancing a glance at him, George couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to him, and how his life had brought him to this moment. On his left, was an elderly woman clutching a kitsch pink handbag. A man sat in the corner of the room, dressed like a rocker, had his head firmly in his hands. Amidst the waiting room, George felt his individuality and personality slip away; he was just another face in the crowd. He felt, and not just in this moment alone, merely an observant to the world, and not a participant. He was simply being. Nothing happens after death, it’s all just biology and chemistry. Life, George thought, my life, maybe life itself is wholly insignificant objectively, so he had stopped bothering to try to add any subjective meaning to his life either. Although everything is, eventually it will not be, so why bother? Before Emma had taken her own life, George had never really given suicide and the means of suicide much thought, which can be cited as a good thing. Carbon monoxide poisoning is pretty painless, and you could even sleep through it, but there’s a bit of a tedious wait. Best to get it over with as quick as possible with something like hanging, but that’s a tad dark and unpleasant. Suicide bombing would be quick, but George didn’t know the first thing about improvising an explosive. Lethal injection lacks the sex appeal of exploding, or setting yourself on fire, or whatever, and a pill overdose would be too painful. At the Clinics, they provide you with the most sought-after method of suicide - although a difficult commodity to come by in England - a handgun. You would think the handgun would be the ultimate solution to a quick and easy suicide, but all sorts can go wrong. People attempt to shoot themselves from funny angles and often, they shoot only their ears off, or their nose, or part of their chin, and some even miss entirely. If a non-fatal shot were to be fired, there are medics waiting on site at the Clinic, but there would only be one bullet per gun at a time, so you only had one chance to get it right. If you were to miss, you would have to get a new ticket and wait all over again. Once you were dead, the Body Disposers would come and take care of your remains. Afterwards, the room is tidied spotless for the next person. As the unattractive glare from the overly-polished floor caught George’s eye, he was stuck by the institution’s obsession with cleanliness; would people really care if the room they were coming to die in were a little dirty? When George had collected his ticket (Number #227) from the annoyingly pretty receptionist, she had explained the procedure and he had to fill out a form, savouring the Clinic from any responsibility over your imminent death. They also let you choose what you hear before you die. George had known this in advance and had brought with him a CD of himself and Emma talking. One night, a couple of years ago now, Emma had interrupted one of his recording sessions, and he had accidentally left the tape running for hours, and recorded their conversation. They laughed about it and listened to the tape back after realising. Now that she was dead, and things had changed so severely, it felt like a tape from another universe, a relic of a time that now it is over, felt like it had never really existed in the first place. You also got to choose what image was projected in front of you as you die too, and he had brought a photograph of Emma from when he first met her. First there were designer handbags, then designer babies, and now, you could even design your own death. They didn’t want people to kill themselves, but local authorities couldn’t deal with the amount of blood and carcass painting their streets. Washing out the high street every morning, before the foggy-eyed, grey-faced consumers came to... consume, became somewhat of a chore. First there was the Super Hose, which lived up to its name only in its size, and not in efficiency. A team of Body Disposers would hose down the streets and it would all be drained down the newly introduced sewer system - the Bloodstream. The larger pieces, too big to be collanderised, would be put in the back of a lorry and driven off to an infirmary. Naturally, people revolted. They didn’t like the Super Hose, they didn’t like the strewn organs down their high street, and they especially didn’t like the Body Disposers, with their threatening red jumpsuits. George, who was fairly up to date with current affairs, remembered how it all had started: a research team in Europe had been controversially investigating if suicide-prone individuals would be more likely to commit suicide if the process was facilitated for them. George could no longer recall the results of the experiment, and it had become irrelevant now anyway, as the English government had leapt onto the idea, and implemented Suicide Clinics in every major town to cope with the epidemic. A place you could go to kill yourself, and not make so much of a mess for everybody left here still existing once you were gone. 24/7, 365, a place to die. Everywhere had a McDonald’s and a Suicide Clinic. It was supply and demand. People still threw themselves off buildings, however. Some people just refuse to conform to committing in the way they are “supposed” to commit. Drowning maintained a popular alternative too, and it handily came without the dreaded stigma of pavement bombing. There was one case, George remembered, in the news, where one lake was deemed such a spot of idyllic beauty that it had to be dredged due to the sheer number of bodies in it. Of course, the biggest concern to the authorities was simply why were so many people suddenly killing themselves? What had happened in order to make suicide rates increase tenfold? Even now, nobody really knows. As George’s mind wandered the history of the Clinics, he ran in to the question that had driven him in to one of them. Why, like all the other hundreds of thousands of people, had Emma killed herself? She was the one who had handled the break-up; she was the one who’d carried on with her life and her degree and seemed unchanged by things. George was the one who had been made redundant; the one who begged for her back; the one whose life had shrivelled up to being no more than an exercise of misery. Yet two weeks ago to the day, George had received the news: Emma, like all the others, had walked in to a Suicide Clinic, collected her ticket, waited her turn, and ended her life. 14 days of looking for answers had driven George to do the same. Still, in this waiting room, as he anticipated his death, George couldn’t help but wonder why? TPs (Technological People) - “Robots” had been deemed a derogatory term - had certainly had something to do with the other suicides. If there was a TP that could do your job, within a few weeks, you would be out of work. That’s what had happened to George, who was once a recruitment consultant for the IT industry, but now there was a computer that could do his job better, and for free. Conglomerates totally replaced the working human race with TPs. As you would conduct your life; shopping, eating, working, living, you were no longer greeted by human faces, but by metallic, dead-eyed, machines. Technology had sucked all the life out of the world, and days and weeks could go by without seeing another human face. Human social interaction all but died out, and friendship can no longer exist in these conditions, unless it is virtual. George wondered all the time, what is everybody doing? The human race has never been so unproductive. After millennia of rapid evolution in the right direction, we have just ceased. We slowed down, and then we stopped altogether. Nobody is doing anything, they are just existing. Observants, and not participants. That’s the fundamental problem, George thought, people’s lives aren’t worth living anymore, and the people are realising it. Shit, he was realising it after all, and now had come to do the same as all the others. A collective air of nihilism is present at every turning. We are opting out of the game; we just don’t want to play any more. Every day, another lieu of faces at the Clinic, another batch of people who won’t play, if they don’t see the point in playing. The cliches about finding yourself, determining your own happiness, and bringing meaning in to your own life don’t stick anymore, and the futility overwhelms. What’s the fucking point? They want an objective answer to that question. George became aware that he had started breathing heavily, and tried to decelerate his thinking, and calm himself down. He realised he had been clutching his right thigh very hard, and let go. He looked around the room once more; everybody shared the same expression of utter resignation. In the 54th minute since George had collected his ticket (#227), the silence in the room reached a no longer bearable decibel, and his fidgeting could no longer oppress his discomfort. Desperately, George wanted to engage the rest of the room in conversation. He had no idea what he wanted to say to all of these strangers, but the urge was definitely there. Feeling an excruciating sensation rise up in to his chest, George found himself on his feet and then over at the annoyingly pretty ticket- giver’s desk. “Hi”, George spoke, with no idea what he was doing. “Hi”, the ticket-giver looked up at him with an ill-disguised look of animosity. “Er, do you reckon I could, like, wait somewhere else? Is there like a private waiting room?” “Does there seem to be a problem with this waiting room?” “No, it’s not that, it’s just, I feel, uncomfortable waiting around with all these strangers”. “Sir, I can assure you that everybody feels the same. Please take your seat”. “Okay, well that doesn’t make anybody feel any better”. “Sir, please take your seat and wait for your number to be called”. George opened his mouth to respond, but found himself heading back to his seat. Across the room, sitting with her legs crossed, was Emma. George blinked in incredulity, but she was still there. She gave him a flirtatious wave. George got to his feet and tentatively walked across the room. “Yes?”, said the girl, and after a beat, “Can I help you?” “No. Sorry. I just thought you were someone else.” Back in his seat, George mentally kicked himself for being so stupid. She’s dead, he told himself, she’s dead. “Seeing me everywhere are you, George?”, Emma’s voice hit his ears, “Can’t get me out of your head?” The black man was no longer sitting to the left of George. Instead, Emma was there, with her perfect legs and tangled brown mane of hair. Laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, George replied, “Can’t get you out of my head? Well that’s why I’m here isn’t it?” “What if it doesn’t work though?”, said Emma, as if the idea gave her great pleasure, “What if after you kill yourself there’s some sort of afterlife based on your living psychology? What if your eternity is me?” “Then I’ll have to find a a way to kill myself again”. “You can only kill yourself once, silly”. “Oh I know, it’s a grand shame, I would have done it loads by now, if I could. I’d wake up every morning any kill myself” “So dramatic”. Even a hallucinatory image of Emma could still get right under George’s skin. “You always call me dramatic, when you’re the one that’s dramatic” “You’re the one who’s speaking to a dead girl”. Anger swelled in George but before he could release a venomous retort, Emma was gone, and the black man was back in her place. “Okay, number 227, you’re up next”, the ticket-giver’s announcement brought George back to reality. “If you’d like to follow me”. Checking his ticket, George got to his feet yet again and followed her out of the waiting room and down a narrow, white corridor. The gravity of the situation hit George at once, and he felt the need to gag. When they reached the menacing black door, George stifled his queasiness. George resented himself for not wanting to embarrass himself in front of the ticket-giver. “Everything in the room will be exactly as you’ve been told”, she said, “The sound will already be playing, and when you enter the room, the image you’ve chosen will be projected in front of you. The gun is on a platform right in the centre of the room, you can’t miss it”. She held the black door open for him, and George entered the last room he would ever enter. The door closed behind him, and he was left alone. The CD of George and Emma was already playing over the sound system, and his stomach continued to churn unpleasantly. But, there was no image being projected. Rather, Emma herself was standing in front of George, looking as she had in the photo George had chosen. Her school uniform brought out her immaturity, and George felt a twinge as this is how she had looked when he had first fallen in love with her. “Of course you chose to have an image of me where I’m in my school uniform. You’re such a perv”, she said, purposefully emphasising her disdain. “This is how you looked when I first met you”. “Yeah, before you knew me. Before you knew you couldn’t control me, and I wasn’t really just a little girl. You put me in this uniform because you want to keep up the charade of me loving you and you controlling me”. How could she still be torturing me, George thought. Even now, after she’s gone, she’s still hellbent on torturing me. “It wasn’t a charade”, George replied, flatly. “I didn’t love you, George. I never did. I was young, I didn’t know”. “That doesn’t mean anything. You still loved me”. He was yelling already; George was always quick to yell at her, as she had liked to point out when she was still alive. “No I didn’t, George”. At times like these, George didn’t know if he loved her or hated her. Clearly, the more obvious feeling was hate, and every single word she said was like a personal calculated insult to him. And yet, he was so willing to get her to submit to him and admit that she loved him. “I wish I could still kill you. I wish you weren’t dead, purely for that reason. I want to bring you back to life just to choke you with my bare fucking hands”. “Well, I’m here. And hey, you don’t even need to use your hands. There’s a gun”. George was totally disoriented, and things had stopped making sense altogether... maybe he was already dead. He didn’t know, but with immense satisfaction, he picked up with gun and pulled the trigger. It was a perfect shot, hitting her square in the temple, and blood that was so dark it was more black than red, began to gush from the wound. She stayed standing. “What the fuck?” George looked around and hit himself in the face, trying to put a stop to the insanity, “Why aren’t you dead?” “George, silly, you think that’s going to kill me. This isn’t what it looks like; you’re still in the waiting room”. The walls around George warped and blurred until he realised he was in fact, still sitting in his chair in the waiting room. Emma was now sitting in the ticket-giver’s chair behind the desk, and she teased George from across the room, “Think you’re going crazy, George? Think you’re losing it yet?” “I have nothing to lose”, he muttered. “Seriously! All the fucking drama all the fucking time!” She seemed to be completely unaware of the fact that she was provoking him. “Shut the fuck up”. He had to end it, and a force comparable to nothing he had felt before flung him to his feet and he made his way over to the desk. He was going to hit her... he was going to hit her so fucking hard... And she vanished again, out of thin air, leaving George trembling on his feet in the middle of the waiting room. Knowing her next move, he turned around and as he expected, saw her sitting in his chair, looking very casual, and very, very happy. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and lit one. “You can’t smoke in here”. Now, standing outside of the Clinic, each puffing on a cigarette, George racked his brain once more for answers. “You didn’t get this done, I don’t believe you. I know there’s something else going on here; this type of shit wouldn’t make sense to you”. “Because you know me so well?” God, why can’t she just turn it off for one second, George thought to himself. “Okay, maybe you’re right, maybe I don’t know you at all. I think that sometimes, that I just had it wrong the whole time. That we were so close and yet at the same time, we really didn’t know each other at all. But we spent 4 years together, Emma, I know for a fact that you did not kill yourself. You wouldn’t go to once of these places”. He was certain of it. “But you would, I know that. You have, after all”. “Only because you did”. “But you just said I didn’t do it!” “Okay, only because you allegedly did it!” “That’s not fun. You’re just gunna give up? You’re not gunna figure it out?” “I can’t figure you out”. “Draaaaaaamaaaaa”. A sigh escaped George. “Come on, George, if I killed myself, I wouldn’t have used this place. I would have just done it, you know, jumped off a bridge or slit my fucking wrists or something. I wouldn’t have come and sat in a queue and all this shit. Come on, you know I wouldn’t have done that”. “I don’t know why I’m here”. This was the truest thing George had said in recent memory. “You would’ve ended up at this place, whether you thought I had or not. This is so George; it’s got your name written all over it. You were always gonna kill yourself.” “I dunno. I guess, although everything is, eventually it will not be... So why bother?” “Come on, George, think. What happened to me?” George furrowed his brow, and concentrated. He visualised Emma, and his memories of Emma, trying to remember every moment they had shared together, in the hope of something somewhere igniting an epiphany. He remembered walking down his old suburban street with her, hand in hand. She would always instinctively take his hand, and not taking her hand would always cue an argument. He remembered how when she had so suddenly fallen out of love with him, how she had flinched when he had tried to touch her. He longed for the days when she would take his hand, without him having to take hers. Deeper memories... he remembered hugging her late one night down the high street after a comment from a tramp had made her cry. How something so stupid like a comment from a tramp could have shattered her, and made her need him. How truly fragile she had been underneath her tough demeanour. He remembered the smell of her hair, the smooth of her legs, and then, he remembered the sensation of her legs pressed against his head, and his tongue inside her vagina. He remembered how she would wither and moan, and clutch at the bedsheets. Was any of it real? Everything is so brief. Everything feels like it wasn’t true, like it was just a delusion, George thought. To him, everything just felt like some fucked up chemical imbalance in his brain. Too many drugs. Too much TV. But her, such a pretty, perfect thing. She had to have been real, the only real thing in a sea of distortion. Although everything is, eventually it will not be... George jolted in his chair in the waiting room. Emma was gone. The elderly woman sitting to George’s right turned to him, and said, “Were you thinking about eating out my pussy?” “What?!” George said, flabbergasted. It took a moment for Emma to take the place of the elderly woman. “I said were you thinking about eating my pussy? You were, weren’t you? Your lip quivers when you think about cunnilingus, George. I’m dead, you know, isn’t that a bit necrophilic?” “You’re not fucking dead!”, George yelled at the top of his lungs, and as he did, all the lights in the Clinic abruptly turned off, and all the people around George and Emma became immobile. Emma erupted in to tears and teared towards the door to the corridor. He couldn’t let her get away, she had to answer for this, so he pelted after her down the long, white corridor, calling after her. “Emma, wait! Emma! Emma! Come back!” She was impossibly quick, quicker than Emma had really been, quicker than anyone had ever been. George reached another door which had no handle, and began banging on it. “Emma, let me in! Emma, let me in, let me in now!” Emma called back from the other side of the door, her voice thick with authentic terror, “Leave me alone! I’m scared.” “I’m nothing to be fucking scared of Emma!” She had always said she was scared. Knowing she wouldn’t submit to persuasion alone at the time being, George kicked down the door which came off with surprising ease. George found himself in his flat kitchen, just as he had left it this morning before heading out. Emma was darting across the flat towards the front door, but he managed to catch up and grab her arm as she tried to negotiate her way around the furniture. “LET GO OF ME!” she squealed, still crying. “Emma, wait!”, there was tremendous force in George’s voice, “Listen to me”. “You’re fucking hurting me, George”. “How could you do that to me?!”, he screamed square in to her face, “How could you fuck those other guys! You’re fucking evil!” “Then let me go! Let me go, George, now!” Without thinking, he punched her and she fell to the floor. She was still fighting back, and with all his strength, he restrained her and, still without thinking, began to strangle her. She gasped and clawed at his face with her nails, but he wasn’t to be stopped. She pressed her thumbs in to his eye sockets, momentarily blinding him, and when he regained his vision, he was back in the waiting room. The lights were still off, the people around were still all in a dead sleep, and Emma was still in the place of the elderly woman. “Oooh, maybe that’s what happened!”, she said with tantalising excitement, “Maybe you killed me! What if you’re crazy? Like, like actually crazy. What if you killed me and you don’t even remember killing me?” “Emma, shut up. This is serious”. “What? Is it not dramatic enough for you?” The anger George had felt had climaxed with the sensation of asphyxiating her, and now he felt nothing but sad. “Were you scared of me, Emma?”, he asked. “Yes”. “Why?” “You’re obsessive, George. It’s too much. It’s scary”. The words instantly drew tears out of George’s eyes, and he wept. “Don’t you care that you hurt me?” Emma exhaled, and sounded more serious than she was normally capable of being. “You stole my childhood, George. You scandalised me”. “What fucking good is a childhood anyway! Hey! Who wants one!”, the notion of a spoilt childhood brought back George’s anger as if it hadn’t gone anywhere. She looked back at him with the same repulse that he recalled vividly from their last ever encounter. She spoke the same words, “I’m gonna go now”. George clutched her shoulder and searched her eyes for the person he once knew. “No, please, please don’t go Emma, not again. Don’t make me do this, please, please don’t leave me”. “See you on the other side, George” “NOOOO!” She had evaporated. The lights to the Clinic turned back on, and the people around came back to life. But George was really screaming this time, and the people around him jumped back in their seats. He wasn’t able to get out any words, he was just wailing at the top of his lungs. The ticket-giver instantly dashed out of her seat and over to George. “Sir, please, calm down, sir, sir, please, if you’d like to come with me”. “Fuck off!”, George mustered and threw his shoulder away from her as she tried to touch it. Two especially muscly Body Disposers with vacant faces barged in to the waiting area and each grabbed one of George’s arms. George was taken aback by their strength, and started flailing his legs around. The people in the waiting room looked in horror as George shouted, “No! This is wrong! This is all wrong!” The Body Disposers dragged George out of the waiting room, down the white corridor, and through yet another door. This time they had entered a much smaller room than any of the others, and the walls all matched the red of the Disposer’s ghastly jumpsuits. Before George could react, one of the Body Disposers was injecting him with a foul-smelling blue liquid. “What the fuck is that?!” George exclaimed. Nobody responded. After he had been injected, the Body Disposers softened their grip on him and he was able to break free, push the ticketgiver out of the way, and he flung open the door and began sprinting for the waiting room. The Disposers and the ticket-giver gave chase, and his feet slipped on the squeaky corridor floor. George felt as though his legs were filling up with concrete, and movement became an increasing struggle. His back hunched and he felt as though something invisible was pulling him down to the floor. Still, he pushed on and reached the waiting room door, and without a second of conscious-decision making, flung himself at the black man’s feet. “Don’t kill yourself. Please. Please, don’t kill yourself”. A few people jumped to their feet, and even the rocker with his head in his hands looked up at the commotion. The man looked back at him as if George had just asked for his hand in marriage. The concrete sensation as now filling his entire body, and he felt like an anchor was forcing him through the ground. “DON’T KILL YOURSELVES”, George screamed at the rest of the waiting room, and before the Body Disposers grabbed him again, he fell to the floor, unconscious.

[spamzineglasgow]

(REVIEW) All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone, by Joe Dunthorne

Is it fiction, is it poetry, is it truth — what are the rules here? Kirsty Dunlop tackles the difficult, yet illustrious art of the poet bio in this review of Joe Dunthorne’s All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone (Rough Trade Editions, 2018).

Whenever I read a poetry anthology - I hope I’m not the only one - I go to the bios at the back before I read the poems…it’s also a really strange thing when you publish a poem…you brag about yourself in a text that is supposed to sound distant and academic but is actually you carefully calculating how you’ll present yourself.

> It’s the middle of a night in 2019 and I’m listening to a podcast recording from Rough Trade Editions’ first birthday party at the London Review Bookshop, and this is Dunthorne’s intro to the reading from his pamphlet All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything To Everyone (2018). As I lie there in that strange limbo space of my own insomnia, Dunthorne’s side-note to his work feels comfortingly intimate because it rings so true (the kind of thing you might admit to a friend over a drink after a poetry reading rather than in the performative space of the reading itself). Like Joe, and yes surely many others, I am also fascinated by bios - particularly because I find them so awkward to write/it makes me cringe writing my own/this is definitely the kind of thing you overthink late at night. Bios also function as this alternative narrative on the margins of the central creative work and they do tell a story: take any bio out of context and it can be read as a piece of flash fiction. When we are asked to write bios, there is this unspoken expectation that we follow certain rules in our use of language, tone and content. Side note: how weird would it be if we actually spoke about ourselves in this pompous third person perspective irl?! Bios themselves are limbo spaces (another kind of side note!) where there is much left unsaid and often the unsaid and the little that is said reveals a lot. Of course, some bios are also very, very long. Dunthorne’s pamphlet plays with this limbo space as a site of narrative and poetic potential: prior to All The Poems, I had never read a short story actually written through the framework of a list of poet bios. The result is an incredibly funny, honest and playful piece of meta poetic prose that teases out all the subtle aspects of the poet bio-sphere and ever since that first listen, I can’t stop myself re-reading.

> This work is an exciting example of how formal constraints in writing can actually create an exhilarating sense of narrative liberation. I see this really playful, fluid Oulipo quality to the writing, where the process of using the bio as constraint is what makes the rollercoaster reading experience so satisfying as well as revealing a theatrical stage for language to have its fun, where the reality of our own calculated self performance can be teased out bio by bio. The re-reading opens up a new level of comedy each time often at the level of wordplay. I’ll maybe reveal some more of that in a wee bit.

> It’s a winding road that Dunthorne takes us on in his narrative journey where the micro and the macro continually fall inside each other. So perhaps this review will also be quite winding. Here is another entry into the text: we begin reading about the protagonist Adam Lorral from the opening sentence, who we realise fairly quickly is struggling to put together a ground-breaking landmark poetry anthology. His bio crops up repeatedly in varying forms:

‘Adam Lorral, born 1985 is a playwright, translator and the editor-publisher of this anthology.’

‘Adam Lorral is a playwright, translator and the man who, morning after morning, stood barefoot on his front doorstep […]’

‘Adam Lorral is a playwright, translator and someone for whom the date Monday, October 14th, 2017 has enormous meaning. Firstly Adam’s son started smiling.’

The driving circularity of this repetition pushes the narrative onwards, whilst the language is never bogged down: it hopscotches along and we can’t help but join in the game. Amidst a growing list of other characters/poets- that Adam may or may not include in this collection he seems to be pouring/ draining his energy into, with just a little help from his wife’s family money- tension begins to build.  

> Although Adam is overtly the protagonist in the story, to my mind it is, in fact, Adam’s four-week-old son who is the real heroic figure. Of course this baby doesn’t have a bio of his own but he does continually creep into Adam’s (he’s another side note!). He comes off as the only genuine character: there is no performance, no judgement, he just is. Adam is continually amazed by his son’s mental and physical development which is far more impressive than the growth of this questionable anthology. The baby is this god-like figure, continually present during Adam’s struggles, with the seemingly small moments of its development taking on monumental significance. Adam might try to immerse himself fully in this creative work but the reality of his family surroundings will constantly interrupt. This self-deprecating, reflective tone led me to think about how Dunthorne expansively explores the idea of the contemporary poet and artist identity through metanarrative. In Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016), he writes ‘There is embarrassment for the poet – couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?’ In a recent online interview with the poet Will Harris[1], when asked about his own development as a writer, he spoke about how the career trajectory of a poet is a confusing phenomenon and I’ve heard many other poets speak of this too: there are perhaps milestones to pass but they are not rigid or obvious and, of course, they are set apart from the milestones of more ‘adult’, professional pursuits. I think Dunthorne’s short story accurately captures this confusion around artistic, personal and intellectual growth and the navigation of the poetry community, through these minute, telling observations and the rejection of a simplistic narrative linearity. The story doesn’t make any hard or fast judgements: like the character of the baby, the observations just are. Sometimes, it feels like this project could be one of the most important aspects of Adam’s life (it might even make or break it) and we are there with him and at other moments it seems quite irrelevant to the bigger picture, particularly as the bios get more ridiculous. Here, I just have to highlight one of the bios which perfectly evokes this heightened sense of a poet’s importance:

Peter Daniels’ seventh collection The Animatronic Tyrannosaurus of Guadalajara, is forthcoming with Welt Press. He will not let anyone forget that he edited Unpersoned, a prize-winning book of creative transcriptions of immigration interviews obtained by the Freedom of Information Act, even though it was published nearly two decades ago. His poetry has been overlooked for all previous generational anthologies and it is only thanks to the fine-tuned sensibilities of this book’s editor that has he finally become one of the chosen. You would expect him to be grateful.

> Okay…so I said above that there weren’t hard or fast judgements; maybe I should retract that slightly. The text definitely doesn’t feel like a cruel critique of poets generally (its comedy is too clever for that) but, yes, there are a fair few judgements from Adam creeping into those bios. I am so impressed with the way in which Dunthorne is able to expertly navigate Adam’s perspective through all these fragments to create this growing humour, as the character can’t help inserting his own opinions into other poets’ bios. Of course, we are also able to make our own judgements about Adam and his endearing naivety: shout out here to my fave character in the story, Joy Goold (‘exhilaratingly Scottish’) who has submitted the poem, Fake Lake, to the anthology. Hopefully if you’re Scottish, you can appreciate the comedy of this title. Adam Googles her and cannot find any trace of her, which feels perfect…almost too good to be true.

> Dunthorne plays with cliché overtly throughout the text. You could say all the poets in this story are exaggerated clichés but that certainly doesn’t make them boring: it just adds to the knowing intimacy that, yes, feels slightly gossipy (which I can’t help but enjoy). For example, there is the poet who has:

[…] won every major UK poetry prize and long ago dispensed with modesty […] Though he does not need the money he teaches on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His latest collection is Internal Flight (Faber/FSG). He divides his time between London and New York because they are both lovely.

I am leaving out a fair bit of this bio because I don’t want to take away some of the joy of simply reading this text in its entirety but it is one of many tongue-in-cheek observations that feels very accurate and over-the-top at the same time (I feel like everyone in the poetry community knows this person). It is also even more knowing when you consider that Dunthorne actually has published a collection with Faber, O Positive (2019), a totally immersive read that also doesn’t shy away from poking fun at its speaker throughout. I always like seeing the ideas that repeatedly crop up in a writer’s work and explorations of calculation and cliché are at the forefront of this collection. I keep thinking of this line from the poem ‘Workshop Dream’:

We stepped onto the beach. The water made the sound: cliché, cliché, cliché.

Interestingly, there is this hypnotising dream-like quality to O Positive - with shape shifting figures, balloonists, owls-in-law – in contrast to the hyper realism I experienced in the Rough Trade pamphlet. However, like All the Poems, in O Positive, we’re always one step inside the writing, one step outside, watching the poem/short story being written. It’s this continual sensation of being very close to failure and embarrassment/cringe. (I can also draw parallels here between Dunthorne’s exploration of this theme and the poet Colin Herd who speaks so brilliantly about the relation between poetry and embarrassment- see our SPAM interview.) Failure is just inevitable in this narrative set up. It makes the turning point of the narrative- when it arrives- all the funnier:

As Adam typed, he hummed the chorus to the Avril Lavigne song–why d’you have to go and make things so complicated?–and smiled to himself because he was keeping things simple. Avril Lavigne. Adam Lorral. Their names were a bit similar. He was looking for a sign and here one was.

> If it isn’t clear already, this is a story that I could continually quote from but to truly appreciate the work, you should read it in its beautiful slim pamphlet format created by Rough Trade Editions. For me, the presentation of this work is as important as the form: this story would have a different effect and tone if it was nestled inside a short story collection. I think a lot of the most exciting creative writing right now is being published by the innovative small indie presses springing up around the UK. Recently I listened to a great podcast by Influx Press, featuring the writer Isabel Waidner: they spoke about both the value of small presses taking risks with writers and the importance of recognising prose as an experimental field, rightly recognising that experimental work often seems to begin with, or be connected to, the poetry community. Waidner’s observation felt like something I had been waiting to hear…and a change that I had noticed in writing being published in the last few years in the UK. I could mention so many examples alongside the work of Rough Trade Books: Waidners’s We are Made of Diamond Stuff (2019), published by Manchester-based Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Eley William’s brilliant Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx Press, 2017), the many exciting hybrid works put out by Prototype Publishing, to name just a few. There is also a growing interest in multimedia work, for example Visual Editions, who publish texts designed to be read on your phone through their series Editions at Play (Joe Dunthorne did a brilliant digital-born collaborative text with Sam Riviere in 2016, The Truth About Cats & Dogs, I would highly recommend!). But this concept of combining the short story with a pamphlet format, created by Rough Trade Books as part of their Rough Trade Editions’ twelve pamphlet series, feels particularly exciting to me and is a reminder of why I love the expansive possibilities of shorter prose pieces. Through its physical format, we are reminded that this is a prose work you can read like a series of poems without losing the narrative tension that is so central to fiction. The expansiveness of the reading possibilities of Dunthorne’s short story also reminds me of Lydia Davis’s short-short stories. Here’s one I love taken from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Penguin Books, 2009):

They take turns using a word they like

“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman. “It is extraordinary,” says the other.

You could read this as a sound bite, an extract from an article, a writing exercise or a short story, the possibilities go on; there is a space created for the reader and consequently it encourages the unravelling of re-reading (which feels like a very poetic mode to me). Like Davis, Dunthorne’s work also highlights how seemingly simple language can be very powerful and take on many subtle faces and tones. I think short forms are so difficult to get right but when you encounter all the elements of language, tone, pacing, style, space, tension brought together effectively (or calculatingly as Dunthorne might say), it can create this immersive, highly intimate back-and-forth play with the reader.

> All The Poems Contained Within Will Mean Everything to Everyone. The title tells us there is a collection of poems here that are hidden: the central work has disappeared leaving behind the shadowy remains of the editor’s frustration and the marginalia of the bios. We feel the presence of the poems despite not actually reading them. The pamphlet’s blurb states that this: ‘is the story of the epiphanies that come with extreme tiredness; that maybe, just maybe the greatest poetry book of all is one that contains no poems.’ The narrative, as well as making fun of itself, also recognises that poetry exists beyond the containment of the poems themselves: it can be found in the readings, the performances, the politics, the drafts, the difficulties, the funding, the collaboration, the collectivity, the bios.

> A friend of mine recently asked me: Where are all the prose parties?…And what might a prose party look like? We were chatting about how a poetry party sounds much cooler (that’s maybe why there’s more of them). I think prose is often aligned with more conventional literary forms, maybe closed off in a way that poetry is seen to be able to liberate, but I think Dunthorne breaks down these preconceptions and binaries around form and modes of reading in All The Poems. I want to be at whatever prose party he’s throwing.

[1] University of Glasgow’s Creative Conversations, Sophie Collins interviewing Will Harris, Monday 4th May 2020 (via Zoom)

~

Text: Kirsty Dunlop Published: 10/7/20

[nadziejastar]

I completely agree. A lot of fans didn't appreciate the complexity they were attempting with Axel as a character. And that's why so many fans actually came away with the genuine belief that he was "dumb" or an uncomplicated happy-go-lucky guy, whose entire existence revolved around a 15-year-old boy he couldn’t have a serious conversation with. Or a heartless sociopath. I will use quotes from this forum topic since I found the opinions there to be so interesting.

First of all, I don't dislike Axel. I like his type of character, but I could never really connect with him because his rash development always kinda irritated me. In Re:Com, we get to see him as cunning, smart-mouthed, manipulative and cold-blooded. He kills Vexen without a second thought, taunts and fights Sora, plays Marluxia and gets Replicu to kill Zexion who didn't even need to die. 

Days is trying to sell me that this man who seemed hardly much different from Marluxia and Larxene (which is why they accepted him quickly) would actually try to befriend someone who can't even talk. And it's not just handing him an ice cream once after a job, but Axel actually does make an effort to keep this friendship up. He later states that Roxas made him feel like he had a heart, but that was way after he started caring about Roxas (a job he complained to have, actually).

It's not that I dismiss the idea of Axel befriended someone like Roxas entirely - but RAX is the trio that sold its friendship to me the least. There's is this jarring difference between Re:Com Axel and Days Axel and also KH2 Axel and KH3 Axel. Re:Com Axel is, like I already said, cunning and manipulative, but acts like a playful, "I'll explain the world to you" nice uncle in Days when he isn't currently out there killing people (this transition obviously doesn't bother him one bit) and after he jumps between two extremes, he is rather straightforward in KH2, being quite clear with Roxas. In KH3 he turned into a joke, sadly and I can't even see why he had to..

When I see opinions like these, it’s SO clear that Axel was supposed to get an actual fleshed out backstory. Not a 2 minute exposition dump primarily functioning as sequel-bait. That’s NOT a backstory. A lot of people think Days "ruined" him because he acted so differently compared to CoM. Like you said, he was a Slytherin in CoM. Lea was probably more of a Ravenclaw. Axel acted more like that around Roxas and Xion. 

Many didn't see that Axel was hiding so much of himself with them. In many ways, he was putting on a performance. It just made him that much more interesting and realistic to me. Real people act differently in different situations. Axel was smart enough to know that he can't show certain aspects of himself to certain people. So he wore a mask with the kiddies and of course hid his sentimental side from everyone else. He was still the same character, though. I can totally see Axel befriending someone who can’t talk if he and his best friend were used as a human guinea pigs in the past, and his best friend was left unable to talk afterwards (which is what I think happened). That makes perfect sense.

Days was the fallout, and any shred of nuance his character had was gone. There's like, a tiny bit of it when he has to go to Castle Oblivion and has a "don't ask me about my job" vibe with Roxas, but that's not enough to make up for the rest of the game in which he's this sad puppy trying to befriend other sad puppies.

You bring up a fantastic point by saying he could've been friends with other members: one of my gripes with Days is that from the outside Roxas, Axel and Xion seem like this snob trio that doesn't even try to give other people a chance. Axel ditches possible companionship with people he's known for years and that are much closer to his age and possible interests because as soon as he sees this mute and unresponsive kid he's like, completely in awe. (Axel truly was the first "must protect precious cinnamon roll" person). And you can FEEL how much Roxas wants to get away from every single person who isn't Axel or Xion.

It’s sad that it was never shown that Axel was not in the organization by choice. It was obvious that he had a tragic past, but it still should have been shown. He never wanted to be an assassin. The Subject X retcon totally contradicts all of Axel’s past behavior from every single game. It blows my mind that a large portion of the fandom can uncritically accept that Axel was simply looking for a random girl for the last ten years. I can see how Roxas seemed like a “precious cinnamon roll” to Axel. The fandom certainly treats their relationship that way, which I find cringeworthy. But I don’t think that was supposed to be the idea. Axel seemed "in awe" of Roxas because he had a heart. He didn't act like a sociopath. The organization chews people up and spits them out. That’s what happened to Lea. Axel saw his past self in Roxas, so he felt compelled to protect him. 

BBS only shows him in an irrelevant scene (sorry, it was completely unrelevant and unnecessary, but ok), and it start to try to change it into someone who cares about sad puppies and want to "be remembered forever". Well, Axel always kind of like to work in the shadows, but he likes to show of too. Alright. He seems to pet the dog when he can, even if he is also willing to kick it, too. Whatever. Not really adds nothing to me.

How is his scene in BBS irrelevant? It showed that he used to be a totally normal kid. Ya know, like Hayner's group? Not someone who is going to join Xehanort by choice. After I played BBS, I understood that after he snuck into the castle, he was kidnapped and forced to spend the last 10 years of his life in a cult surrounded by heartless criminals. Of course he would be drawn to two innocent children. He can vicariously relive his lost childhood through them. It just made him seem that much more complex.

Axel got turned into this caricature of himself because I think the series lacked the skillful writing to keep him around as one of the good guys while also mantaining his character intact.

So as soon as he started to become a positive figure he was turned into yet another acolyte of the Church of Friendship and Every Good Thing. Kingdom Hearts has too much black and white philosophy to handle a grey character like OG Axel without having to rethink and retell a lot of events. And he became the comic relief because I guess someone had to be when Donald wasn't around.

So much of what we saw of Axel was a persona---a facade. Including him talking about friendship. He was a multifaceted character. He was smart enough to fool not only the other organization members, but a large portion of the fandom, I guess. In my opinion, it wasn’t that the series wasn’t capable of making Axel a good guy while keeping his character intact. It’s that KH3 was catering to what fans wanted. KH3 went with the superficial facade version of his personality because the fandom has too much trouble with black-and-white thinking. 

I never thought his character change worked either. I thought it was funny that people didn't want Isa to be redeemed despite all the horrible things Axel himself had done in CoM and KH2. 

I had a pretty long discussion with someone who said Lea didn't seem concerned with Isa at all in KH3D. He only cared about Roxas. I didn't understand how anyone could play KH3D and come to that conclusion. I could tell Lea cared about Isa long before I ever read the novels. I guess a lot of people just don't do well with subtlety in storytelling. Apparently a lot of people didn’t even want Isa to be redeemed, despite being Norted as a child. I have no idea why. Because Saïx was an asshole? Because they didn't come right out and tell you Isa was a Nort? Isa jokingly called Lea a loser, so clearly that meant he was always evil (an opinion I have seen). If you ask me, Axel got turned into a caricature of himself because of the fandom, not because Nomura was incapable of pulling it off. Not the fans in that topic necessarily, just in general. The fans that KH3 was pandering to. Nomura could have easily pulled it off, lol. He almost did.

And while we're on the subject of Axel's intelligence, this is why I genuinely cannot fathom how people interpreted Axel as having romantic interest in Roxas. Even ignoring the age difference and amnesia, you really would have to dumb Axel down a LOT if you wanted him to look at Roxas like that, lol. Roxas was simply not in the same league as Axel when it came to intelligence, amnesiac or not. Axel could run circles around him on his worst day. Teenage Lea seemed a LOT more intelligent and mature than Ventus, too. I always felt like Roxas, a relatively simple teenager, was the protagonist for the target demographic of KH. But Axel, a complicated adult, was the "protagonist" for Nomura. He was able to put a lot more of himself into Axel, and probably related to things from his perspective far more than Roxas's. It's why I liked that game's story so much.

Saïx was very smart, but to be fair, we don’t know how much of that can be attributed to Xehanort’s influence. We do know Isa liked to make witty quips. I think he and Lea were likely in the same ballpark, which is why they had so much chemistry together. Speaking of Isa's intelligence, you bring up Axel's eidetic memory. He has an amazing ability to recall things. I think these two things are related. The imagery of the sunset is so important to Axel because Isa told him why the sun sets red. Isa was probably a know-it-all who knew a lot of random facts like that. He probably liked to act smug in a playful and charming way. I am doing a post on why that is such an important memory. 

Now that I think about it, it would have been the exact opposite of his dynamic with Roxas and Xion. Axel had to explain everything to them, like you would with a small child. Axel longed for the companionship of someone who could challenge him and who knew things he didn't. Someone who could understand his complexity. My headcanon is that Isa must have been incredibly smart, and that's why he struggled to make friends. He went to the Realm of Sleep a long time ago. Once he was revived, he was still going to be Lea's BFF. Lea and Isa are now adults. That's probably why Jiminy's Journal described him as mature beyond his years. And that's why Lea liked him.

[xenodile]

A while back I mentioned I had it in me to give a long sorta discourse-y post about Blizzard Entertainment, well here it is.

Blizzard, as a company, suffers primarily from 2 major issues:

1) It’s totally creatively bankrupt

2) It is actively racist/homophobic.

The two issues are closely linked but it’s caught in a “chicken or the egg” situation.  Are they so racist because they have no original ideas and racial stereotypes are easy to use, or are they so lacking in creativity because they’re racist at their core and don’t care about coming up with better ideas?

I’ve been playing Blizzard games for just about half my life now.

I started with WoW back in 2004, which then got me into Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Diablo 3, Overwatch, etc.

I’m going to start with Warcraft since it is Blizzard’s biggest and longest-running IP.

Warcraft is built on insensitive racist caricatures and recycled ideas.  The humans in Warcraft are all predominantly white and themed after medieval Britain.  Dwarves and gnomes, the other human-like races, are also white, with Dwarves being modeled after Ireland/Scotland and gnomes being a joke race that never get taken seriously ever.

I don’t think Warcraft had any black people in it at all until World of Warcraft because the inability to make a black person would have set off some red flags.

Every non-white ethnicity is instead represented as non-human, monstrous races.

Caribbean/African nationalities are all blanket covered by the trolls, lanky tusked cannibals that practice bastardized Hollywood voodoo, worship loa, speak with stereotypical Jamaican accents, and wear wooden masks, lead by their high king Rastakhan.

First Nation/Native Americans are covered by the Tauren, hulking cow people that carve totems, wear eagle feathers, and worship the Earth Mother.

The Chinese are literally just bipedal panda bears.  They’re always fat, love to drink, and all know kung fu.

Mongolians and Huns are represented by the centaur, who are consistently described in universe as “the bastard children of a demigod” and are stupid, smelly, and barbarous, to the point of having a cloud of swarming flies baked into their character models.

At least until Blizzard forgot about the centaur and replaced them with the Yaungol, subtle I know, a variant of Tauren that are based on yaks instead of cows, but just as rapacious and violent as the aforementioned centaur.

Orcs were originally Always Chaotic Evil savages stolen wholesale from Tolkien and Warhammer, but after Blizzard retconned them to justify having playable Good Orcs, they were modeled to somewhat evoke South American nations and Australian aborigines, living in mud/clay buildings, having brown(ish) skin, and wearing face paints.  At least until Blizzard decided to make orcs always evil again and threw that idea out the window in favor of being bloodthirsty savages all the time.

Inuit people are depicted as fat, mono-gendered walrus people called tuskarr.

And I’d like to give special mention to the Draenei, Warcraft’s stand-ins for Eastern European Jews/Romani.  Sporting comedic slavic accents, the Draenei are the exiled members of an alien species that goes on to become the primary antagonist and source of all problems in the Warcraft timeline.  They even had their own clumsy version of the Holocaust at the hands of the orcs and evil members of their own race.

That’s right!  The “good” Draenei, that suffered the from their Fantasy Holocaust and talk with funny accents, make up only 10% of their race!  The remaining 90% of their race are literal demons and the source of all evil in the universe.

And in an alternate universe, those good Draenei turn into an ethnic cleansing facist empire if they’re not actively oppressed!  I wish I was making this up!

The unifying trend here is that all of these “other” races, with the exception of the draenei, are uniformly depicted as being stupid and primitive.  Despite being culturally older than the humans, dwarves, and gnomes, they are consistently shown as being afraid or intimidated of the superior technology of the humans and their human-like allies, and easily cowed when their “primitive” idols and gods are defeated.

In addition to this, humans have been the de facto heroes of Warcraft since its inception.  Human protagonists are always core to the plot and have the most agency.

Meanwhile, non-human characters are not allowed to be anything other than a stereotypical example of whatever culture they’re a parody of.  Tauren can’t be anything other than a mystical Native American that helps the hero go on a spirit journey to learn something.  Trolls can’t be anything besides the wily and savage fighter that the hero is never sure they can really trust.  Draenei are not allowed to be relevant at all unless they’re fighting against their evil counterparts or dying heroically.

In addition to that, I cannot think of a single canonically gay character in the Warcraft franchise.  Not a one.

This is what brings me to Overwatch.  The very first thing I ever heard about Overwatch was “It has an LGBT+ cast”.  Before I even heard what the gameplay was, the fact that it had a “progressive” cast was a selling point.

And then it took Blizzard, what, a year and a half of the game being out for them to actually follow up and say which character is gay?

Think about it.  Everyone that liked Overwatch touted it as being this inclusive win for LGBT representation yet for the longest time, none of the characters were actually LGBT.  The community did Blizzard’s work for them and just made up who they wanted to be gay and/or trans, until Blizzard finally settled on Tracer and 76.

It also dips slightly in Warcraft’s niche of “foreign nationalities can’t stop reminding you how foreign they are”.  Every non-American character cannot STOP peppering words or phrases of their home language into their english dialogue.  

When I directly compare it to its most obvious competitor, Team Fortress 2, which also sported a multi-ethnic cast, I can’t ignore how much of Overwatch’s roster uses their ethnicity as the core of their personality.

When I look at Overwatch, I can’t help but see it as insincere.  I’ve seen Blizzard blatantly and shamelessly turn non-white cultures into literal monsters for the past 15 years, and I’m supposed to just believe that they suddenly turned over a new leaf?

Their second biggest IP, Starcraft, has a grand total of 3 black named characters, and they are respectively:

An eldritch monster in disguise that promptly changes to a white guy disguise

A mentally disturbed assassin with a caribbean accent and plays with voodoo dolls that becomes totally irrelevant after his personal story arc ends.

A stereotypical General Army Man that dies in the first set of missions of Heart of the Swarm.

So yeah.  For as much as I love Warcraft, and Blizzard games as a whole, the whole thing is undeniably built on a core of American/European ethnocentrism, with Overwatch being what I can only call a marketing experiment.

[stevenuniversallyreviews]

Episode 94: Greg the Babysitter

“We all gotta grow up sometime, right?”

Right off the bat, this episode’s greatest weakness is that we don’t see Baby Buck and the Baby Pizza Twins as we do in Lamar Abrams’s promo art. How dare we not have more baby teens?

Lack of infant variety notwithstanding, this is a great episode, if not a subtle one. Greg is no stranger to hammering out the lesson of a story, but here it’s made so explicit so often that it threatens to weaken the actual plot. Fortunately the plot does a good enough job of showing that it makes up for all the telling, but still, it’s so on the nose that Vidalia calls Greg out when he belatedly repeats the moral it in response to an unrelated statement. 

(But to be clear, this is a story about growing up. Growing up is what this episode about. Gaining maturity is valuable. Emotional development is important. Taking responsibility as you age: good. Staying a kid forever: bad!)

As with Annoying Steven early in the series, this lesson is achieved by presenting us with Douchebag Greg. Douchebag Greg slums around and mooches off a single working mother, depriving her of her own food and taunting her for working to feed her child. When tasked with babysitting, he does what he wants instead of focusing on what a baby might need, and when the kid goes missing, his search includes a pit stop to the arcade to play video games.

This is the second episode where Greg is awful for the bulk of the runtime, and the first, House Guest, was so bad that it earned my inaugural “No Thanks!” rating (a brutal assessment, I know). By that metric you might think I’d dislike Greg the Babysitter as well, because boy oh boy is Douchebag Greg unlikable. But the key difference is the level of intent: even looking past the age and maturity gap between these two Gregs, the Greg of House Guest chooses to lie to his son despite seeing how hard Steven takes it, while Douchebag Greg’s actions stem from sincere cluelessness. Neither is great, and younger Greg is still old enough to know better, but ignorance is far more digestible than purposeful shadiness from this character.

Both House Guest and Greg the Babysitter stay somewhat true to Regular Greg by making him driven by love, whether it’s paternal or romantic. The problem of House Guest is that this emotional core is tainted by him wronging Steven in a way we’ve never seen before or since (compare his feigning of an injury to his negligence in Maximum Capacity, where he instead makes a mistake and is immediately regretful). Nothing in Greg the Babysitter diminishes any sense of authenticity about Greg’s feelings for Rose, because for all his flaws, he doesn’t take advantage of Rose or their relationship.

Moreover, I appreciate that his flaws come from the same character traits that kicked off this relationship, which so far has dominated his flashbacks: Greg is a dreamer and a romantic, which works great in Story for Steven, and he takes the relationship seriously, so he matures on that front in We Need to Talk, but now we see that he’s so focused on Rose that he’s ignoring every other element of life as a functioning adult. 

This episode works because Greg is realistically irresponsible. His head has always been in the clouds, and now he’s in a relationship with someone that’s literally magic, so he has no incentive to reflect on himself barring a dire situation. But this episode excels because Greg’s decision to grow up has nothing to do with Steven. We get the groundwork for Rose wanting a kid, but Greg getting his act together is something he does for himself. It would’ve been so easy for this shift to be prompted by impending fatherhood, but it’s far more satisfying to see a character improve himself because he wants to, rather than out of obligation to others. It allows the moment he takes agency to be triumphant without being mixed up in a sense of begrudging acceptance of his duties.

Finally, while I still think it’s ridiculous that the Crystal Gems treat him like a total flake in Laser Light Cannon given his clear improvement since the Douchebag Greg days, it does make a little sense that beings unaccustomed to change would have a hard time getting past this first impression. If you go back and watch the second season of the series after Greg the Babysitter, it’s not hard to imagine which Greg they’re talking about. It’s a stretch, because they’ve seen plenty of evidence to contradict this impression, but if you’re looking to explain their behavior then it’s the best reason I’ve got.

Greg the Babysitter marks an unspoken milestone in the series: this is the last time we’ll ever see Rose Quartz before her web of duplicity begins to unravel. In just four episodes, we’ll learn that she bubbled Bismuth away and lied about it to everyone. In another three, we’ll hear that she shattered Pink Diamond. The veracity of that second part is irrelevant, because the truth only further proves her capacity for deceit. We’ve seen already that Rose wasn’t perfect, but this is her final appearance before the dominoes begin to fall. One last happy memory that directly leads to the creation of our show’s title character, in an episode that emphasizes how dreaming is nice, but reality will always force people to make a change.

We see way more of Rose in this swan song than we did in Story for Steven or We Need to Talk, and like Greg, her mistakes here can be attributed to cluelessness. She admits how confusing humans can be for her, particularly babies, so it’s hard to blame her for not taking good care of Sour Cream. It’s especially hard to blame her considering how excited she is for him to exhibit independence. And it’s impossible to blame her, at least for me, when she references one of my favorite dumb Simpsons jokes in regards to watching him.

The Pink Diamond revelation adds new layers to her explanation that Gems are made for specific purposes, but the funny thing is, it doesn’t add that many new layers: even before learning just how high up Rose was, we still knew she was rebelling against what she was made to do. I think the more interesting aspect of her speech is how it lines up with Bismuth’s repetition of her insistence that Gems could break away from their intended roles. Seeing Rose talk about it here, less than twenty years ago, is made fascinating by knowing she was saying the same thing thousands of years ago. For a Gem that’s interested in change, she hasn’t really changed that much. It’s one thing for her to know that and talk about it, but it’s another for us to see it in action.

I love how an episode that’s this unsubtle (about being a story about growing up, in case you didn’t catch it) manages to quietly explain why Steven exists. We see a baby, and we see Rose loves babies, and we see Rose admires the human capacity to change, and we’ll soon see that Rose herself stagnated there a little bit, but we leave it at that. Judging by the age difference between Sour Cream and Steven, it’s a few years until she and Greg make an actual decision, so it makes sense to not reference it too explicitly this early, but it’s still a direction the episode could’ve taken and I’m very glad it didn’t.

I’ve made no secret about how much I love Brian Posehn voicing Sour Cream with his regular grown man voice, so obviously the best part of this episode is his further use of that voice for Baby Cream. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, and by itself ensures that Greg’s dickishness can’t pull the episode too far down. As with Onion Friend, the strange connection between Sour Cream and Steven is left unspoken, but it’s wild to consider that this side character is a big reason why our protagonist exists. While I’d be fine with this continuing to be a quiet part of the backstory, I can’t say I wouldn’t be interested in seeing Steven and Sour Cream talk about it one day, even as a small gag. 

Onion Friend was also the last time we spent any meaningful amount of time with Vidalia, and it’s neat to fill in some gaps between her debut cameo in Story for Steven and her modern iteration. Marty’s flakiness is further proven by her being a single mother from the start, but she’s clearly risen to the occasion and loves the hell out of her kid. Her patience with Greg is tested by his awfulness (and honestly makes said awfulness hard to watch, given how much is on her plate), but it speaks volumes that she’s so welcoming to the ex-friend of her ex. She’s probably the only human Greg knows in Beach City at this point, and I honestly wish we saw more of their modern relationship when we have such a vivid image of their history.

I Think I Need a Little Change might not reach the rocking heights of Comet or What Can I Do For You, but it’s catchier than either and has that wonderful twist on the double meaning of “change.” The wordplay speaks for itself, but it’s a cool trick to reveal that this musical montage is as diegetic as the other two songs: this is something he’s actually singing to people. We get a hefty break from songs after Mr. Greg, so that might be meddling with my opinions, but I think this is my favorite of the three. Puns beat electric guitar, and the song crystalizes Greg’s similarity to Steven come Change Your Mind.

And so we end Season 3, Act 2. We’ve had the aftermath of the Cluster, and we’ve had a series of slice of life episodes from this particularly magical life, but we’ll soon be back to the high-octane plotting of the Cluster Arc. It’s a bit strange that Greg the Babysitter comes between Alone at Sea and Gem Hunt, considering the Jasper of it all, but it’s nice to have this respite before we barrel towards the pivotal moment of Steven’s series-wide arc, especially when this respite tells us a lesson that’s about to become a lot more obvious in the coming storm:

Steven Universe is a story about growing up.

Future Vision!

Good thing nothing bad happened to Sour Cream, or else Greg would’ve had to pray that his space goddess's magic could bring people back from the dead. That would be a ridiculous power!

If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn’t have inconsistencies…

Vidalia got this top from the T-Shirt Shop where she works. This top has a collar. T-shirts do not have collars. It’s unresearched nonsense like this that makes Cartoon Network put this show on hiatus so often, come on people.

We’re the one, we’re the ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR!

While I do enjoy this episode and stand by it being great, I don’t necessarily love things that I critically find great. Greg the Babysitter doesn’t do quite enough on the emotional level to make me truly love it, considering how much time we have to spend with Douchebag Greg. I appreciate the importance of his douchebaggery, and the importance of this episode as a whole, but this isn’t an something I go out of my way to rewatch. Sorry, Baby Cream. I still like it!

Top Fifteen

Steven and the Stevens

Hit the Diamond

Mirror Gem

Lion 3: Straight to Video

Alone Together

The Return

Jailbreak

The Answer

Sworn to the Sword

Rose’s Scabbard

Mr. Greg

Coach Steven

Giant Woman

Beach City Drift

Winter Forecast

Love ‘em

Laser Light Cannon

Bubble Buddies

Tiger Millionaire

Lion 2: The Movie

Rose’s Room

An Indirect Kiss

Ocean Gem

Space Race

Garnet’s Universe

Warp Tour

The Test

Future Vision

On the Run

Maximum Capacity

Marble Madness

Political Power

Full Disclosure

Joy Ride

Keeping It Together

We Need to Talk

Chille Tid

Cry for Help

Keystone Motel

Catch and Release

When It Rains

Back to the Barn

Steven’s Birthday

It Could’ve Been Great

Message Received

Log Date 7 15 2

Same Old World

The New Lars

Monster Reunion

Alone at Sea

Like ‘em

Gem Glow

Frybo

Arcade Mania

So Many Birthdays

Lars and the Cool Kids

Onion Trade

Steven the Sword Fighter

Beach Party

Monster Buddies

Keep Beach City Weird

Watermelon Steven

The Message

Open Book

Story for Steven

Shirt Club

Love Letters

Reformed

Rising Tides, Crashing Tides

Onion Friend

Historical Friction

Friend Ship

Nightmare Hospital

Too Far

Barn Mates

Steven Floats

Drop Beat Dad

Too Short to Ride

Restaurant Wars

Kiki’s Pizza Delivery Service

Greg the Babysitter

Enh

Cheeseburger Backpack

Together Breakfast

Cat Fingers

Serious Steven

Steven’s Lion

Joking Victim

Secret Team

Say Uncle

Super Watermelon Island

Gem Drill

No Thanks!

     5. Horror Club      4. Fusion Cuisine      3. House Guest      2. Sadie’s Song      1. Island Adventure

[listoriented]

Burnout: Paradise

1. Burnout. Spinning wheels without moving. Antipodean slang. The smell of burned rubber.

The blank word document is another rounded bend. A few cars here and there loaded in. Driving these virtual streets is seeing ideas, tangents, discourse, thoughts spill off. In front is always nothingness. An inability to grasp on to anything coherent. Yes this is synecdoche, yes this is consumerism, a shiny shell of petromodernity – an actual critical theory term that I now take seriously - yes this is me, my life, my phd in miniature, the imperfect totalising open-world game, or yes this is a microcosm of the entirety of trying to play through the letter “B” of my steam library, stop-start, hopeful then despairing, takes longer than it should, yes this game is a magnum opus and I wish so hard to fill my lungs and release until my fingers are pinching some inflated balloon perfectly full of a graspable idea, or yes this game is fundamentally empty, a comment on a comment; at the bottom of all searches for purpose we find searches for purpose, etc. 

So I start and I start and I start again. I drive I drive I drive. Event after event ticks down, my license goes from learner to D to B to A and then I hit my goal, “Burnout license”, and still I don’t know what I’ll write. Something about driving, in general; driving as notionally relaxing, driving while thinking about other things. How do people write? Write things? My PhD is in pieces on the floor and in the computer and in my head. I drive around Paradise City and terrible emo from the mid-noughties plays, interspersed with long bouts of classical. Days pass, and in the game the day turns into night and back again, and I adjust the clock to make this happen slower, and the weather changes in Paradise City, a little – cycles of rain and cloud and sun - and here in Melbourne the weather changes too. It was the tail end of summer when I started, and we’ve been through the surprising highs and lows of autumn, now settling into winter, doing it all again. There are no roads leading in or out of Paradise City, and it’s a long drive back from the hills.

2.      Burnout. A series of arcade-style racers made for various platforms by Criterion Games [official site] between 2001 and 2011.

It’s a little uncanny, this pocket of 2008. It just looks real good to my rusty, unfussy eyes, like in visual terms it hasn’t aged in ways other games from that year age (though my friend James vehemently disagreed). It does the trick. It does lots of tricks. And it seems rare too, to say of a 2008 game that it’s a masterpiece, that it’s the best of its class, though of Paradise this is surely true, if all reports are to be believed with regards to all other open-world arcade driving games that have come since, including everything else made by Criterion.

Any doubts about its age are firmly put to bed by the soundtrack, though, which despite prominently featuring that Guns N’ Roses song from 1987 just screams mid-2000s at me, abundant “rock” guitars, masc whine and all, very of its time, salvaged by one timeless Avril Lavigne banger, a chunk of classical, and (to a certain extent) personal nostalgia for a time when this sort of soundtrack just seemed vaguely synonymous with “driving game”. There’s also the dated blemish of inane unmutable advice-slider DJ A(u)tomica, who at least has the good grace to (somehow) avoid repeating himself, even after seventeen hours of driving, at a clip of one quip every few minutes or so. There’s also the very 2008 nod to renewable energy via Paradise’s wind farm, harking back to that post- An Inconvenient Truth moment of progressive euphoria when we really all believed we could build towards a sustainable future that would also accommodate our oily desires, before another decade of resource-industry funded filibustering hadn’t proven this, again, impossible.

And yet Paradise stands up in ways that surpass the non-ironic soundtrack of fragile masculinity and the very 00’s DJ Atomica, despite or because of the people-less world, the flat and drab urban interior, the hardly even tokenistic ways of engaging with the city as function rather than form. I particularly like how B:P has not even the faintest hint of story, how even in terms of progression it purely becomes a game of exploration, winning events, checking boxes. It melds (excuse me for a second) form and function and manages not to get in the way of itself – the story is what the player does in the game, where the player goes. It’s kind of breathtaking, rare for any game before or since. (Hopefully it’s clear that I’m not advocating for the dissolution of narrative in games, only that the lack of narrative pretence here is very suited to this particular game, and very preferable to the kinds of irrelevant and bloated narratives that are thrown over e.g. other driving games).

Ah, 2008. It was just there! And yet so far. I played Burnout Paradise for a running total of seventeen hours over nearly three months. During this time, I also played forty-two hours of Tetris99. Everything in its place. Criterion recently announced they’ll shut down the Burnout Paradise’s online servers in August, though Paradise lives on in Remastered (2018) glory, Origin only. 

3. Burnout. The act of refuelling the boost capacity of an engine by running out of boost.

Despite the time I’ve spent with it, the fact that I managed to complete its main in-game objective, and the running thoughts on time and place and representation of cultural norms, I feel I’m struggling to say much of definition about Paradise that fits easily into the scrapbook nature of this blog. Perhaps in some ways it's too close to life; a series of arbitrary checklists through which feeling happens (nebulously) around. I "liked" it but do not feel moved to thought, and I'm aware that that is the point – it’s a game that allows you to drive, endlessly, if you want to, think and do whatever. It won’t get in the way (barring DJ Automica butting in every couple of minutes – he literally cannot be switched off).

I do not drive much these days. Last year when Lauren and I moved to Canberra, we drove nearly 4000 kilometres across the country. The landscapes wound by, at the time fleetingly, but they piled on and left deep rivulets in my head, and though it was just five days and nothing really happened – we leant on the accelerator, stopped every hour, listened to music, stayed in nothing-motels quite literally hundreds of kms from anywhere else and ate forgettable takeaway - it feels immense, now. Driving is funny like that - you are never quite in a place, separated from it by machine noise and windows and infrastructure, the one activity you can do to facilitate thinking about something else. Still, impressions, motion, the sense of having moved, of having journeyed. Here in Australia, the fossil fuel lobby has won its third straight election in a row. Hope is eroding into nothing.

Probably my favourite hour or two in Paradise City was spent mucking around in the online section with Roy and James, trying to check off a few of the game's multiplayer challenges. These involved such serious exercises as trying to do barrel a series of barrel rolls, or try and land on top of each other, or smash into each in mid-air, or drive on top of a parking lot to jump a ramp onto a shopping centre. It was very good, if a little eerie and dystopic, strewn with outdated real-and-paid-for advertising billboards, branded vehicles, quaint echoes of paused time and uncanny dilapidation.

The mill of the game I could never quite settle on - I “liked” it, I think, but it wasn’t without problems. I found the single-player events to be mindlessly enjoyable, ploughing other cars into crash barriers, or effortlessly holding down "boost" to accelerate down a straight and into a finish line, celebratory cutaway shot ensuing. Sometimes I crashed into too many grey girders that my eyes hadn't picked out and got frustrated, or sometimes I missed a critical turnoff and got frustrated. Sometimes they just felt like chores, and it was certainly sometimes annoying to not be able to restart events that I had botched, and it took me ten hours to learn you could opt out of races, stunt runs etc just by letting the car idle for a few seconds. And knowing this probably would have saved me a lot of time in the early game, because like I said it’s a long way back from the hills, where like three out of eight events end up at, and committing to staying in a race which after a couple of botched turns and unseen barriers you’re definitely not going to win, whose distant finish line is going to land you a long way from the nearest event (once you finally get there) can feel pretty dire, really, though there was also part of me that admired how Burnout refused to let you jump around the map, forced you to drive, take your time, see the city, see the sights.

I did appreciate the cracky coloured collectms of Paradise City, how they brought the city to life, sort of, or gave it the impression of being a well designed and thought-through playground, though I never got too completionist about them, the core exercise of the whole thing. Both John Walker of RPS and Chris Donlan of Eurogamer have written about Paradise’s fluoro crash gates, the impulse to reinstall the game every year and knock them all down from scratch. Along the way to getting my “Burnout license” I unlocked 36 of the 75 vehicles, jumped 35 of the 50 super jumps, broke 79 of 120 neon red billboards, and smashed through 353 of 400 aforementioned glowing yellow crash barriers. The game puts me at 55% completed. No steam achievements (woulda been nice, perhaps, given that Burnout Paradise is fundamentally a collectmup; nothing but metres and percentages). I’ve driven a little over 1000 miles, supposedly, which is certainly more than I’ve IRL driven over the past few months.

4.  Burnout. noun Physical and emotional exhaustion; breakdown caused by overwork. Commonly associated with “crunch”, “the video game industry”.

But here there is also pure hesitation. Procrastination. The fear of moving on, even at the end of this little step of what has ballooned into an impossible project. I can see the next letter waiting there, a new chapter, a chance for renewal. The one disappearing behind us has drawn out so far, encompassed a few years and a fair bit of change, and now almost petered into nothing at the final gate. I want to hit the ground running but I'm not sure I'm ready, and in the meantime various other deadlines swirl around, make it difficult to see the clear path ahead that I crave. And so it is that the temptation has been there to keep driving the streets of Paradise, its anonymous suburbs and abstract goals, continue delaying the inevitable, or the nearly inevitable, or the not-inevitable-at-all of writing this post and moving on to the next chapter, because it turns out this is a project I once made a choice to begin, and could at one point choose to stop.

There are nagging questions, of course. Who blogs, anymore? Who reads blogs anymore? How does one find a blog they like and then continue to follow it for the span of its natural life? Does anyone use “bookmarks”? What’s an RSS feed? I'm not even sure, in a broader sense, that I know where to find the kinds of writing about games that I want to read at the moment, at least not reliably, outside of say the occasional check-through of Critical Distance or Unwinnable. I look at the slate of games coming out and find it hard to be excited by anything much, the hype and the saturation. It is bountiful until it is not. The guilt element of playing games – something inherited from childhood that I’ve never been entirely able to dissociate - has become more and more prominent. I've increasingly used games as a tool for procrastination and a coping mechanism, a distraction from various (work/study and other) anxieties. I've also been aware of myself doing this, and in turn the kinds of gaming experiences I've relied on have been more focused on short term, low-investment distraction (hence the sudden unyielding devotion to Tetris, which really was just filling the hole left by an earlier act of self-discipline AKA uninstalling Rocket League; more recently, as I’ve managed to put the Switch away for longer periods, I’ve turned back to another simple but deceptive time-filler in Mini Metro. Choose your poison, basically). For a while it seemed Burnout would not only fill this role but do it responsibly: it seemed great for dropping into in short bursts - win a race or two, unlock a new car maybe – without quite the same dangerously addictive pull for me as those other games. But then I heard the GnR song "Paradise City" one too many times (it's mandatory with startup), or got sick of the menu loading times, and it lost this specific part of its appeal.

And then there's the subjective nature of this particular Sisyphean project - the knowledge that here I am pushing a rock up a mountain of my own making, one that exists only for me, entirely built out of and defined by the games and bundles I chose and continue to choose to buy, the rules I chose to set. Life is short, this task is absurd, and at the moment it's not even a joke I feel particularly happy about sharing. Sometimes I get to play great games here, games I may never have gotten around to; at other times I am playing shit games for this blog, and in the process there are inevitably other things I'm not doing. One choice erases another. Increasingly it feels like an isolated pursuit - playing games in general, not just the writing and making of this here blog. It seems like I know fewer people who play games these days, between falling out of touch with friends, seeing lots of other old friends give up games in one way or another, and playing games less frequently with those who I still know. I’ve accidentally become something of a game hermit. For years I've loved the camaraderie and easy familiarity of social gaming experiences even when I haven't loved the games that conduct them - the feeling of being connected to people even in a transient, shallow, goal-oriented sense, but even these I'm not sure I believe in anymore, or I find myself less and less willing to invest in the "right" titles to facilitate it.

I’m into my thirties now, and maybe this is just a feeling of age, life, I dunno, priorities finally shifting to where people told me they should’ve years ago. One of my oldest friends is about to have a baby, though he more or less quit video games over a year ago now. I'm extremely happy for him. Two of my younger cousins just had children, several hours away by plane – my uncle, a new grandfather to two babies, makes posts on facebook claiming climate change is a socialist hoax, and I can’t help but think of the kind of world his grandchildren are going to inherit. I'm mulling over a missed deadline that's been a thorn in my brain now for months, the single-largest hitherto unsaid reason why this post has taken so long to dig its way to the surface. This month marks the five year anniversary of another cousin’s sudden/unexpected passing; he was five years older than me, and though I’ll never be able to make sense of it, I feel like I get that there’s something sort of vulnerable about this age, when the things you want don’t quite work out, or when you’re a bit aimless and stuck in your patterns and feel like things aren’t going to change. He was so kind and gentle, a beautiful soul and a terrible Zerg, and I miss him so much. And one year ago I drove from Canberra to Melbourne and slept on the floor of this house I now call home while I waited for a truck with rest of my stuff to arrive. I’m very aware of the calendar, of change and inertia, of patterns and decay, of newness sprouting underfoot, but I don’t know how games fit at the moment, or I’ve lost the thread of feeling like they’re actually important, or why, amongst all the noise.

Burnout: Paradise is at the start, in the middle, and right at the end of all these things. It's a great game, part of me feels, or wants to say I feel. Playful, irreverent, childishly violent, simultaneously full of stuff and empty of matter. I'm happy I've played it, happy I can say that I've played it, happy to understand on an experiential level most of what it offers, happy I'll be able to remember it later, nod in some hypothetical conversation where someone brings up Burnout: Paradise and say I know what they mean, yeah. I get it. When we were playing it online together briefly, a couple of months back now, Roy told me that Burnout Paradise is the only game he ever one hundred percented twice - once on 360, once on PC - and that it was almost three times, because the first time he was almost done with it, someone broke into his house and stole his Xbox and all his games, and that Paradise was the only game that he re-bought with the insurance money, so determined he was to tick every box the game left open to tick, even if it meant doing it all again.

But maybe – counterpoint - I don’t get it. I’m finding it harder and harder to make good sense of this kind of experience, or feel like this kind of thing is (in some arbitrary way) a net positive, or that it’s okay to keep glossing over the emulation of destruction that games of so many different kinds fundamentally rely on. Outside there is so much suffering, so much to be upset about, and I no longer feel like there is time enough to sink into mindless (rather than meaningful, perhaps?) distraction. Or I’m finding it harder to get beyond the thought that this is an extension of the distraction/avoidance behaviour that I realised might actually be a problem in my life.

“Burnout” is, you’ll know, here in the great mess of the year 2019, a buzz word, particularly in the games industry. Games company employees have perpetually been expected to work unsustainable hours out of some sort of devotion to the industry, creating a cycle of talent depletion and toxic work cultures. But as is often the case with games, it’s a tip-off of what happens elsewhere, across the board. The mass casualisation of careers across all industries, the gig economy, pressures caused by un- and under- employment, the dissipation of viable faith, social-media and political stresses: all of these are leading to burnout, everyone has burnout, we are inundated with burnout. There is something ripe about the words or the idea of Burnout: Paradise, the very conceptual juxtaposition that seems to be two sides of the same coin, that feels very reflective of this moment, what we are all experiencing versus what we were promised. But what does this have to do with Burnout: Paradise, the game in which you pretend drive fake person-less cars around a virtual city, have horrific, visceral crashes from which you immediately respawn and “beat” by achieving a long series of arbitrary victories, collecting all there is to collect? Something, nothing, I don’t know.

“Burnout” means a lot of things, and the meaning of “burnout” the game adopts isn’t the other ones I’d associate with cars – a burnt out engine, or the smell of burning rubber - but one that exists only for the series, so far as I can tell: getting to keep using your boost because you’ve been continually using your boost. Keep going at all cylinders or bust, basically – except not, because the consequences for interrupting the boost are slim even on the relative scale of things that can go right or wrong, in this game where there is never really all that much on the line for the player anyway.

Paradise. n. Heaven. A place to await judgement. An enclosed park. Eden.

In Paradise City the grass is trim; the girls (all humans actually) are non-existent, unless you happen to be riding a motorcycle, presumably because a motorcycle without a rider would look very weird.

In Paradise City the cars are peopleless and drive themselves, so maybe it is an early vision of the tech bro version of Paradise. Or maybe the cars are driven by people who can only exist on the outside of the world of Paradise City, looking in across the matrix. Or maybe in Paradise City the people are the cars. This is Cars, the movie, sans dialogue.

In Paradise City all the cars emulate brands and models that exist in "the real world" but are called by names that exist only in the Burnout franchise.

In Paradise City all the cars ostensibly run on petrol, which is infinite but unnecessary, because going through a petrol station merely refills the car's boost capacity, whatever that is, rather than imply that your car would stop running if you at some point failed to “fill up”. It's very important that you know, though, that the cars run on petrol, because otherwise it wouldn't be a realistic representation of cars. Even in Paradise.

In Paradise City cars exist and then don't exist.

In Paradise City a lot more cars suddenly exists if someone decides they want to flip their car over and see how much monetary damage they can cause.

In Paradise City cars crash and crumple in a hyper-realistic way, but it's okay because the cars have no drivers and anyway all cars are all miraculously fine again after a few moments.

In Paradise City the railway has been shut down to give cars more places to hang out. 

In Paradise City the whole city runs on wind energy, because it's important to care about the environment too, because you can have both, promises the radio, though seeing as there's nobody there in all of Paradise's buildings it's unclear, anyway, what such energy would actually be running.

onward to Caesar 3

[picsofsannyas]

Interview with Indivar. Osho Darshan Diary. The Great Nothing. Monday 4.October 1976.

Maneesha: How did you come to hear about Osho?

Indivar: I can tell you about the actual event that happened, but really it seems as if all that has happened up to this time has been a preparation for coming here.  And looking back it seems that everything was necessary-even those things which were difficult or painful at the time.

But specifically I was having lunch with a woman-she’s a lecturer in psychology and she’d been to India and just returned. She said, “You should read this,” and put this book into my hand and I felt this current going up my  arm, and I said, “What’s this?”  That was “No Water, No   Moon‘.  And of course I was gone….that was it.  Anyway, I read the book-and that was the first explosion.  Prior to this it’s been quite a long story.

Maneesha: Can you briefly outline the things that you see as having been major points in bringing you here?  Did you have any spiritual inclinations or see your self  as a seeker? Your a psychiatrist  aren’t you?

Indivar: A clinical psychologist.

Well, it’s been there for as long as I can remember, even as a small boy.  

I trained as a clinical psychologist and after five years out of post-graduate school, I suddenly became aware that I knew nothing about what I was supposed to be doing. So I began to look into the nature of anxiety and discovered that there   are two different sorts: pathological anxiety-which is at once or at the same time, protective-and then the existential anxiety: the anxiety of death, the anxiety of feeling meaninglessness, the anxiety of guilt-that life demands something of you.

This led straight into existential philosophy, which led directly into Zen, because existential philosophy says that you must commit  yourself totally and do totally what you think and believe and then learn from the experience.  So it is total commitment to depression, anxiety and all these things.

Then it just exploded and took off from their.

Maneesha: So your coming here seemed to be just a  natural step in going deeper Into psychology, or were you also seeking something for yourself?

Indivar: Well, I never at any time wanted to be a psychologist. As long as I can remember it was always, “What is it all about?”  And this was just naturally the next move and the thing to do.  I just followed it.

Maneesha: So having become interested in Zen, what happened then?

Indivar: My first long service leave came up seven years with this particular employer, so I thought, well, theirs only one thing to do-three months in Zazen.

I did it and it was exhausting! I  stuck half an hours  Zazen, half an hour working or walking or chopping wood, and then back to Zazen-for three months.

Then I went back to work and this Indian appeared from nowhere through this woman, and he told what I’d been doing had been making too much effort, too much aggression, that I’d been making too much effort, trying to attack it.  He more or less became my teacher-Chaitanya  Nitya Yetti.  Whenever I came across any difficulty, I would write to him and he would know  the story. I’d never at any time thought of him as my guru, though I loved him very much.

Then I met Maharshi-such a beautiful man. His main thing was to ask “Who am I?”-which I simply became  aware was irrelevant. What you have to focus on is the feeling of what you call “I” or “me“. So I began to do that, and I was doing that until I came here.

I keep a picture of him in my room.  I keep meditating on that all the time, and it does exactly the same thing that Osho’s picture does-it goes blue, interestingly enough.  I always keep it above me in the room in the clinic where I work and whenever I’m in doubt, I stop and just sit and look at it, and people to start to cry and to roll on the floor and just do so many things.

Maneesha: Were you keeping up meditating regularly all this time?

Indivar: Yes, I was.  Every morning at five o’clock I’d get up, meditate for an hour and then go to the clinic.

Maneesha: Can you say something more about the changes in your work?  You were becoming more passive, less of a  doer?

Indivar: Yes.  When I went into the study of anxiety and then into existential approach, this led to a whole great outpouring of what I call ”therapy by repetition“.  What I would do was to take whatsoever  was presented and just get a person to repeat that.  Doing that would reinforce the thing they were trying to avoid.  A great explosion of emotions used to come out and it was miraculous.

Maneesha: Had you any experience of encounter groups and that approach?

Indivar: Well, any therapy you like to name I’d used. Eventually I reached the point where I did nothing, because more and more you realize that unless this whatever it is-this force of grace-is there, everything else is irrelevant.  So you simply allow the person to get in contact with this grace-what Perls calls the wisdom of the organism … simply allow that to take over-and that’s it.  It just all fall’s into place.

Maneesha: What were your impressions, your feelings, on reading Osho’s books, about the person who had written them?

Indivar: As if I’d known him for thousands of years. It was incredible.  I’ve fallen In love with four women in my life and really gone into this madness. Osho was the fifth!  [Laughter] It was incredible.  Just to read something: Ooohhh…too much!  Put it down!  It was like that.  It’s the only way I can describe it.  The same feeling exactly as falling in love.  It’s almost just too painful stay with.

Maneesha: So how did you finally make the decision to come here?  

Indivar: There was really no decision.  It was a question of when I could arrange it.  This long service leave came up and I made arrangements and got in a housekeeper to help my wife-which is interesting because Osho has been talking about the femininity in people and I am very much aware of the feminine me.

Maneesha: How have your family been reacting to your moving into meditation?  Have they been quite receptive?

Indivar: Well, of course my wife thinks I’m mad. She’s a  doctor, and being trained in the rational   mode of medicines he finds it difficult it to enter the  sphere, which of course has made quite a  rift. I’ve found meditation extremely helpful in dealing with the reactions that come. But the children surprisingly enough have been brought much closer to me.  In fact when I meditate they come and sit here [indicating  his lap].They stay there-not talking, just sitting,  particularly the younger one-she just sits….just sits.  The older ones not so much.  I was just thinking about that.  Perhaps they were too old to experience whatever it was. Maneesha: Can you describe your first feelings on seeing Osho?

Indivar: I just felt so….well, like coming home…as if I wasn’t  meeting him for the first time. It seemed quite normal: there he was and it was an “Oh, we meet again” sort of thing.

And when he asked whether I wanted to take sannyas I thought, “Well, that’s ridiculous!  Why is he playing this game?  Of course he knows I’m a sannyasin !I mean-how absurd! ”Because you know, it didn’t matter because he obviously knew what the score was and it just seemed to be a game really.

Then the groups started. That was an experience in itself.

Maneesha: They’ve been very powerful for you?

Indivar: I only lasted twelve hours in the Enlightenment Intensive. I became aware of just what a full vessel I’d brought with me.

Maneesha: What do you mean by a full vessel?

Indivar: Well, full of ideas, expectations, and also the realization that I’d been very much of a monk in the world, been strenuously striving not to strive. I could hardly speak or move or do anything, and I was completely devastated.  I spent about three days recovering before I went into the Tao group.  It was like recovering from a long illness.

Maneesha: And how was Tao?

Indivar: Well, for the first two days I found myself reacting almost automatically-doing the things I’ve been doing for the past twenty years without thinking about it.  Then on the third day Prasad became filled by this energy-I didn’t know  at the time. He was saying, “Indivar!  Indivar!  Touch my foot!  Touch my foot!”  And I thought, “Well, that’s a funny thing to say.  Why does he want me to touch Is foot!  Well, I’ll touch his foot If he wants me to.“ So I touched his foot with my hand and aaahhhh!!!  This great scream came out of my body…as if it wasn’t me.  I knew that something  was making it, and it just came-a great scream.  So I sank to the floor  and fell back. It was so beautiful.  I didn’t know where I was.  I was just nailed to  the floor.

They tell me people were coming and touching the body and having abreactions….screaming.  There was one  girl on the foot, weeping.  I was  spaced out completely. And that was the end!  I’ve never been the same since.  That was another explosion.  There have been many more since, but that perhaps was the one thing which just went beyond reason because here was something unbelievable, but it happened and what it was I haven’t the faintest idea. It happened and I experienced it.  And it happened three times in the same group.

Maneesha: Do you have any sort of energy experiences when you’re near Osho?

Indivar: Only in Darshan-Not in the lecture. I do in my room-when I’m doing Zazen, or when I’m running: running is beautiful. In fact that was the first way I discovered what centering was.

For many years I’ve been running about six miles every day.  One day, going beyond the point of exhaustion, I suddenly began to float and I thought, ”This is strange.  What is it?”  I started weeping.  I wasn’t running-I was floating and tears streaming down my face! I thought, “I’m going mad!” It only happens when you’re absolutely exhausted and just pushed beyond that exhaustion. It only lasted about two hundred yards and then I collapsed; that was it. It wasn’t until I read “The Book Of The Secrets” that I found out what it was: Your thrown to the center.

Maneesha: Of what about Tathata.

Indivar: What became apparent in Tathata was the reconciliation of the opposites. I would be directed to a passage in a book and it would open up on the opposites and about having to experience  everything from one end to another. So taking these and reconciling them was the key thing that came up in Tathata.

Osho told me to read Lao Tzu.  I couldn’t get a copy of him so I got Chuang Tzu instead. So I go fishing with Chuang Tzu. He’s crazy!  He doesn’t even have a rod. Going fishing without a rod!  What fisherman goes fishing without a rod? I ask you.

And you know what he does? He just sits on the river and looks at the river and he doesn’t do anything.  So I sat there and then I said, “Listen mate, your enlightened and all this stuff, but tell me, what about these fish?”

He said, “You want fish?  You sit there and watch!”  And suddenly all these fish start jumping out at me-big ones, small ones, pink ones, thin ones saying, ”Take me!  Take me!” I thought, “This is fantastic!  I have to try this!”

The next morning I get up really early and I sneak off to the river leaving Chuang Tzu behind. I go and sit on the river and I sit in his seat the way he was sitting.  I sit there and become very still and then what happens?  The whole river falls in on me and everything else disappears…just falling.  It was incredible. I don’t know how long it lasted.

I wrote a letter to Osho telling him about this, I put it in my pocket and of I marched, and you know what happened?  The first thing he said when he came in the lecture was, “Do not  hang on to any spiritual experience, no matter how ecstatic or blissful. ”So how about that?

But then of course the principle of  non striving, which has been perhaps the greatest single thing coming here, came up in the hypno- therapy.  If I was running and everybody else had stopped running, I’ve always been the last to give in, which of course has its positive side.  And this non-effort-which is not of course, not doing anything, but dealing with what comes along….And its most strange because what you seem to need comes along without your doing anything. And I find that in a way I’m back to where I started but the difference is that now I can do  Zazen without  effort.  

One of the single greatest experience is also came in Hypnotherapy, when under hypnosis. Santosh said that I would only have an hour to live. It was almost as if it was true-I believed this.  So I went up on top of Krishna House on the roof and began to write in a notebook what I would have to clear away and then suddenly, ”This is ridiculous!  What does it matter?  In fifteen minutes I’m going to be a dead man! Nothing matters!!”  Suddenly the heavens sort of opened up.  It was impossible to do anything.

Then I said, “Well, I’d like to say goodbye to Prasad. We said goodbye. Then I thought “Well, what will I do now?  “I said, “Where’s the best place to wait?  Of course,  at the gate! ”[of Osho’s residents.]

So I just went and sat by the gate. I sat there and there was no future because I was going to die and the past didn’t matter. Suddenly I was just being in the here and now. And I knew what he meant-just to be there….the sun shining, the birds, the trees, the ground. It was all so beautiful….so beautiful and peaceful and still, I could have died then it was so beautiful.

So there was this awareness of no effort, no future, no past-only now, If you’re there, there’s no striving, no striving for the future.

Maneesha: And the quality of your Zazen is of less effort now?

Indivar: Yes, well, it’s not really Zazen anymore.  It is watching these thoughts coming up.  It’s like going to the pictures: I’m just sitting there and watching all these things coming.

And also I’m getting these feelings or commands or whatever they are-being told to go to such and such place, to be here, to do this and to do that; so I just do them. Simple things-I sit in my room alone and the voice says, “Put on your best gown and go down to the coffee shop.”  I think, “All right-I’ll do that.”  Then someone comes up to me and says, “I want to talk about Rajneesh,” so I sit and talk about Osho with them.

 Yesterday someone came up-a movie maker from Australia who wants to make a movie about Osho-so I brought him to the lecture this morning. The day before that, it was an industrialist from Bombay who has this world interest in advertising-I brought him along to the lecture.  And all the waiters in the Blue Diamond, and the housekeeper, they stop me and say, ”What about this Osho?”  So I stop and talk to them about him, and they ask for books….Very strange.  

Maneesha: So this having  directives from inside is something that’s quite new?

Indivar: Yes!

Maneesha: And the lectures…. Are they an intellectual stimulus for you or do you find you go into a meditative space during them?

Indivar: I just go into some kind of space. But always if there’s a question to be answered, the answer always comes up in the lecture-like the letter I told you about. Just comes.

Maneesha: You described how you got here as being a natural evolution of your work. Do you see that it must be everybody’s next-everybody who is involved in therapy, in psychology, psychiatry, the human potential movement?  Do you see this realm as being a  natural follow On?

Indivar: I think that which therapy has done is all right up to a point, but once you’ve reach that point you then have to jump into the abyss.

Their are two quite different journeys as you probably know.  There’s the outward journey-you have to acquire an ego-there’s no other way.  Like Osho says, if God didn’t want man to have knowledge he wouldn’t tell him about the tree; Man would still be wandering around in nowhere, not even aware of the tree of knowledge.

So there’s this outward journey-there’s this acquiring of the ego-and all these so-called humanistic therapies are concerned with ego fulfillment-which is more or less conventional psychotherapeutic treatment.  You know-”OK will fix you up,” and so on and so forth.  Its okay, but it’s only the outward journey. Then we must return back to the source

When I see that a person needs prompting or pushing on the outward journey…always with people now it’s trying to see whether that point of readiness is there, to begin the return journey.  And my own journey into myself has shown me that the more open we are, the more open we become-that openness is your gift to others.  So I’m not concerned with all this psychology and everything.

Maneesha: So you could say that these therapies bring you’re ego to a crystallization; to a point where it’s fulfilled and so naturally starts to rebound?

Indivar: Well, you reach a point where you think, “What the hell?  Here I am and I’ve got all these things of life, but it’s still meaningless.  I’ve achieved everything-but so what?  I’m still exactly the same.  “You have to reach the point of seeing the nonsense, the emptiness of all achievement.  But it depends…Some people become much more ready even before this.

And that’s interesting because for some of the most seriously disturbed people I’ve worked with-even some schizophrenics-this in itself has been sufficient. They have become very spiritual. It’s quite extraordinary One alcoholic, for example, who had been an alcoholic of very long-standing and had thrown himself of a seven-story building to commit suicide and had crippled himself -he came along.  He just went straight into self-observation or the self remembering of Gurdjieff, just like a duck takes to  water. He was just ready for it, and all I did was to be a catalyst.  This has been happening more and more.

Maneesha: What were your first impressions of the ashram?

Indivar: Well I came with conceptions or ideas of what it would be and was rudely shattered when I found it was nothing like that at all.  The thing which was most noticeable was the indifference of people. I was surprised about that. I thought, “stone the crows!” [Australian for, “Good heavens!] What’s the matter?-so serious. Not interested in each other. I couldn’t care less, you know, it doesn’t make any difference to me, but I could see that it would for someone else.  Since I’ve been here so many people have come to me and I just sit and listen and I wonder that perhaps there is a need for this-for a person to whom people can go because  their are always people in a crisis or with problems. Maybe this happens-I don’t know.  But it was just a thought today that this could be quite valuable.

But I see this indifference as a kind of selective device. Particularly for people with expectations or any ideas that they’re special-which we all feel sometimes. As long as there is an ego, one thinks one is special.  So I see it as the first hurdle-a selective device.

Maneesha: what does Osho mean to you?  Do you experience him as a personality or as an energy force.?

Indivar: It’s almost as if he’s throwing me back on myself.  He sort of took hold of me and gave me one hell of a shake and then he said, “All right mate!  Back you go now.”  And I know what you need is within your self. I still have a tremendous feeling for him but if I were to leave now, it would be quite all right.

Maneesha: So he’s more of a reflection for you rather than an entity in himself?

Indivar: Yes.  What he is, is within me, and wherever I go, whatever I do, there is no separation.  What ever he is-that energy-is always there, always has been.  But coming here was absolutely necessary

                                              

[rhythmic-idealist]

Something I think about a lot, and may have posted already, but there’s no harm in rewriting:

Beforus as the metaphorical Garden of Eden in the creation story of Homestuck.

On the one hand: Beforus is upheld by the Signless in his teachings - whether intentionally skewed, or (more likely) looking at it from the outside and only able to lament what’s lost, as a paradise. I’m not going to pull a Kankri here. Beforus was better. People weren’t regularly killed for being hatched the way they were, at least not to our knowledge under this empress. No matter what else is happening, the lack of genocide is a clear step up. But it’s romanticized, idealized, Paradise couched in the strong Biblical allusions of the Signless.

And on the other hand - Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden because they ate from the Tree of Knowledge.

Beforus was stifling. It doesn’t appear so, at first! It appears to be a pretty fantastic place with some troubling minor complaints that Kankri harps on too much, or Porrim cares about but aren’t urgent, or Rufioh was involved in but not, like, in a WEIRD way, that’s weird.

In the story of Eden, essentially, there was exactly one rule in Paradise: you can eat the fruit of any tree but that one.

But at the end of the story, when they’ve left and eaten the fruit: they have free will. That says a lot about what that one rule was doing.

(Humans existing with free will is one of the major things we, often, consider to make us human, especially in the contexts of (some) Christianity. I say that as a Catholic, with my whole Sunday School background in these ideas. Free will and causality, too, are major themes in Homestuck: timelines, character agency, Doom and Time, the ability to be Unstuck, how can you stop him when he’s already here, how can you prevent this when it’s already done.)

So free will, the tree of knowledge, and Beforus. Right.

I don’t know if the Beforan kids knew, when they started the game, that they were going to be leaving the planet, or if they even had the vaguest, most abstract notion that they would be given the opportunity to “leave here” or “create something better” (purposes, ultimately, of the game, at least as presented to the players once they know about universe creation).

But whether they knew or not, whether the way the game’s goal of creating a new universe coincides with their character motivations or not, there’s one theme in common, one reason these kids are the kids who - whether choosing to themselves or chosen by causality believing it would be poetic - ate our Apple from the Tree of Knowledge, opened our Pandora’s Box.

They’re all running away from something.

Meenah -  leadership. Meenah doesn’t want to be the Empress, she’s running away from Beforan ideas about her need to nurture and “mother” (/guide in that fashion) and rule in a way she’s never wanted to, from rules and responsibility, and she physically runs away all the way to the moon.

Porrim - the caverns. Porrim refuses to tend to the Mother Grub or to the grubs and eggs in the caverns, and makes it her loud, proud activism to announce that no one, by virtue of her caste or gender, should have to.

Rufioh - mainstream West Beforan society, and, though never referenced directly, culling. This, likely, is why he wound up with the Lost Weaboos to begin with - he ran away from mainstream society to lead a society of outcasts and (presumably) children, spending life pulling pranks and hijinks on highbloods. It’s very, very easily presumable that he would have been culled, or even that he at some point was, if he didn’t run away quickly enough after his wings showed themselves - which happened, if Mindfang was correct in the way she predicted his post-Scratch life, with his pupation.

Kankri - culling, and I would argue, silence/irrelevance. This is getting into personal headcanon now, but without the game, and without some kind of revolution, I find it very difficult to believe Kankri would have been allowed to become much of anything on Beforus, because the way he talks about culling, it sounds incredibly unlikely he ever would have been given much agency if he wasn’t supernaturally good at fighting for it, and even then, lucky. Personally, in all of my headcanoned no-game AUs and some of my pre-game timeline headcanons, he winds up running away. But to give you something more concretely provable: Kankri is running away from what he is supposed to be, and that is obedient, unintelligent, and quiet.

Latula - forgettably enough, culling. According to Aranea, Latula would have had to hide her lack of smell on Beforus, or else risk being culled, and the way she talked about it made it fairly apparent/implicit, if admittedly not outright stated, that the injury happened while they were on Beforus.

Horuss - the Void inside him. Horuss’s entire character motivation is that he is characterized by the feeling, as well as tangible and real presence, of a massive Void inside himself. Instead of doing any soul-searching or learning to be comfortable to himself, he takes this as a motivation to fill it in, cover it up, and find external things to define him. Becoming a player in this game gives him something, anything, that is outside himself and extra and extraordinary. I wish I could explain this in a way that did justice to the character.

And this is the point where we get less clear. I’m going to start filling in with headcanon, instead:

Mituna - Doom. The game is the way the timeline needed to go, and like the Helmsman racing to prevent the Vast Glub, he knows when to give for a force he doesn’t like for the sake of something grander.

Aranea - Aranea’s an outlier. She didn’t express the remote notion of wanting to run away or having anything to run away from during the entirety of her life. Instead, her status as a runaway comes post death, to complete her part in the theme: running away from death, sure, but mostly running away from the role of NPC and guide to that of the hero/protagonist. 

Damara - I think she was minimalized a lot, on Beforus. She was a sweet, innocent girl, and that’s…. all anyone, ever, has to say about her, before she snapped. I think even before she was angry, something in her needed to have something more than that. It’s more the universe and the story running away for her than her conscious effort to run away from the things confining her.

Cronus - we…. don’t know enough about him pre-game.

Meulin - we…. don’t know enough about her pre-game.

Kurloz - irrelevant. His motivations are separate, and he is aware, to some extent, that this game will eventually be crucial to bringing about the twin messiahs.

….So maybe I lied, and only about ¾ of them are provably running away from something. But that still marks a damn strong theme. Like the alpha kids’ theme is isolation, the alpha trolls’ theme is that they are running away from something.

In the story of Adam and Eve, Eve is often ridiculed for being tempted by the snake and eating the fruit because of the pain it caused. Humans must go out into a world with evil now, humans have free will and can hurt each other now, humans are painfully aware of social rules and boundary lines and things that make life so much more complicated.

But on the other hand…. Eve couldn’t possibly have stayed there. Even God wasn’t angry, in the story I’m told, when she ate the apple: they weren’t allowed to eat it because they couldn’t have this Paradise once they had touched Knowledge. He lamented for them.

Kankri, too, couldn’t have stayed there, that planet would have suffocated him. It would have tolerated Porrim until she wasn’t funny anymore, it would have let Meenah be a successful runaway and live out, what, millennia on the moon alone, it would have suffocated Latula, and Rufioh, and Damara. It would have made strict, rule-bound personalities or total nothings out of them, and it would have crushed them, and ultimately, they were runaways.

Homestuck is a story about people who need revolutions, and the game, deletion of Beforus… it was ill advised, it had all kinds of fallout, they could have stayed and maybe fixed something, but that was the revolution that the timeline would give them- and ultimately the one it mandated. And they made the choice to get into it, however much they knew, whether causality wanted it or not. Maybe they would have been allowed to stay on Beforus if it wasn’t suffocating. It would have been better than Alternia. They couldn’t.

Beforus required compromise, and if that compromise wasn't met- Beforus was impermanent.

The Signless can lament it, Karkat can resent his dancestor ever leaving, but really, the game designed it that way.

[yourknightingale]

Late Night Talk (Sleep Deprivation)

Summary: Set after PP1 and before PP2 - One random night, Beca and Chloe found themselves chatting about flirting, feelings, and friendship. This might be how it began for them. 

"Beale, you know your eyes are blue."

Chloe looked up from the book she was trying to read as she conveniently laid herself atop Fat Amy's bed. She furrowed her brows towards the brunette's direction. "Is that- what is- thanks, Becs! I guess?"

When the quiet didn't break, she continued, "Your eyes are blue, too, Beca. It's not a competition." She followed this up with one of those infamous Chloe winks.

The small girl sighed and closed her laptop. She was supposed to be working on a new mix but eventually, she gave in. She took off her headphones and put them aside. The four-beat loop she was listening to for almost an hour now still lingered. She could still hear it. Her hands ruffled her hair as she tried to brush the track away.

It was already 1:30 in the morning but neither one of them could really sleep.

Beca was somehow grateful that her roommate was out with not-Bumper (totally Bumper) on this night where she just needed a break from everything else. She had been captain for two years, a junior in college, and a Bella housemate for 26 months. The other girls saw her as this very reserved person who couldn't be broken but they all witnessed the change when she became fast friends with the one and only Chloe Beale. She herself noticed the change and honestly, she didn't seem to mind.

"You know, that's not what I meant. I just feel like I should let you know my favourite colour is blue. And your eyes are blue. So, my point is, I like them." The DJ wasn't quite aware of how a blush started to show in her cheeks. She'd like to blame it on a sleep-deprived state she was currently in and the hour where most people say things they usually don't.

"Aww, Beca! Your inner sweetness is showing," the redhead settled on a sitting position and smiled at the younger girl, "and just so you know, I also like blue. But definitely, strictly, just Beca-Mitchell's-eyes blue."

Innocent flirting was the word they used. Chloe Beale was known for being touchy-feely and very forward (especially towards Beca). She would say whatever that comes to her mind (especially towards Beca). She herself couldn't tell if she had crossed the line with her relationship with Beca. Or if there was even a line to begin with. She was very fond of the little alt girl ever since the fair and everybody knew that. Beca knew that. That made it easy for this to become a flirting game of two.

"Alright, Chlo. Tone it down." She faced the other woman and mirrored her sitting position. "I'm just being sincere and trying to compliment you but if this is what I get, expect no sugar from me, Red. You've been warned."

Chloe just grinned but as soon as she noticed Beca with her head down, looking at her fingers, she had to ask, "Okay. What's going on?"

"Uhm, well – it's uh, I realized how you grew on me, I guess. I'm having one of those nights where I do a reality-check self-examination kind of thing and I am not one to talk about feelings and stuff but you're here right now and that helps, kinda, so I'm being deep maybe but I can't help it." Beca drew a long breath and exhaled after releasing those strings of words. She arranged her pillows and propped herself up with her back on the wall, changing her position. "I told my Dad I wanted to leave Barden as soon as I can and before I knew it, I'm a junior and currently handling a group of girls I never thought I'd ever even be friends with. I think – and I don't want to sound like a terrible friend here – I'm a little glad you stayed behind. I never would have lasted this long if it weren't for you, Chlo." She dared to see what Chloe was up to and was rewarded with two blue orbs intently staring at her with a little hint of something playing on her lips. Not that she was looking at her mouth or anything. "Trust me, Beale. You have this effect on me."

Chloe took this as a chance to also open up to her best friend. If there was a word the Bellas would use to describe her, it would be confident. Somehow though, she would hold back around Beca. Now that Beca learned how to open up to her, she also managed to freely let go and be true to herself and respond to the DJ.

"I saw you first at the activities fair. I just had that sudden feeling of wanting to get to know you, Becs. I was very fond of you –"

"- so I've heard."

"Shut up, Mitchell! It's my turn to be sappy."

Beca raised both her arms in the air, indicating for the other girl to carry on.

"Seriously though, I meant it when I told you that I think we're gonna be fast friends. True, I failed my Russian Lit twice now but I don't regret it one bit. Maybe a little. But being a Bella makes it worth it. Being here with you, too, if I'm being completely honest. I'm rubbing on you so well, look at you talking about how much I mean to you."

Beca rolled her eyes but found herself nodding in agreement to Chloe's last statement. "Okay, Chloe. I haven't even started yet on how much you mean to me so keep it in your pants, maybe."

"Mitchell, no one's talking about pants here! But I won't say no to you, just so you know." Chloe let out a small giggle and winked which made the brunette throw a little pillow in her direction. "Ow! I didn't think you'd be an aggressive partner," she said, feigning hurt as she rubbed the area in her thigh where the pillow landed.

Beca chuckled to herself and thought, "I can play this game, too." She sat up and faced the older girl.

"I have to learn how to be aggressive in case I get ambushed again in my shower."

"So you're expecting another shower moment, huh? That's good to know." Chloe wriggled her eyebrows which didn't escape Beca's attention.

"Man, Chloe! How are you so good at this?" She let out a pretend frustrated grunt. "Just when I thought I was winning."

They were both silent for a few minutes with the occasional glances they shared with each other. Chloe was back to lying down and reading her book while Beca was just quietly humming to herself, staring at the ceiling. The dead air between them was comfortable, much like how they grew to be with one another's presence.

"Do you think it's weird? Us, I mean. Whatever this is." The brunette's voice was softer than usual as if she didn't mean to say that out loud.

Unfortunately, Chloe heard every word and replied, "You've got to be more specific than that, Beca. As far as I'm concerned, we're both weird in our own way. You're broody most of the time and I'm just here hugging everybody which confuses me because hugging isn't a quirky quality. I've been told I cling a lot though."

"No way," Beca gasped sarcastically. "I wouldn't have known."

Chloe ignored that reply with a shy smile and pressed on, "What is this about?"

The brunette took her time and carefully threaded her words. "Your eyes are blue," she could literally hear Chloe's eye-rolling, "and the reason I'm saying this is because I don't usually look people in the eye. I can't even hold a stare for five seconds! Yet, when we sang Titanium together, remember that? I found myself drowning in your eyes. Was that cheesy? Ew! I mean, I was drawn to you somehow and what could've been an awkward situation suddenly wasn't that awkward at all. You know, until pizza guy showed up."

"Tom."

"Irrelevant." Beca sat up crossed-legged in the middle of her bed. "I like you, Chloe. I don't mean that in a weird way. I just, uhm, you saw me at my worst moments before ICCAs – you know, leaving you guys – during parties when I have too much to drink, after a call with my dad which usually ends up with me being in a bad mood, and other examples which I don't have the time to bring up now. You stick to me though. Knowing that you want to get to know me, as you said so earlier, makes me, I don't know, happy. Happy, yes, is the word I'm looking for. So, thanks."

"Alright, I've been trying to read the same page over and over again. I give up. You have my full attention now." Chloe found a comfortable space between two huge pillows and turned to the other girl. "Beca, I'm sure you know I like you a lot but nothing is weird between us, okay? Remember that one Treble party we went to last year? You drank a little more than you should and practically released your inner beast."

"Oh, no! The one where I said I could walk a tightrope across their pool? In my defence, I made it halfway through before the rope started swaying and I fell."

"Exactly that. I have to leave that party early to help you get home."

"Sorry?"

"No, not really. You were actually funny."

"I'm glad I amuse you, Beale."

"You were also bold at that time. I don't know if you remember but I was helping you get out of your wet clothes and you stopped me. I told you it's nothing I haven't seen before but you just kinda stared back at me."

"Yes, now the memories are flooding back. Thank you so much."

"Do you remember what happened next?"

"I uh," Beca was fumbling with her words, unsure on how to phrase it, "I held your face with both my hands and uhm, I kissed you, uh, on your cheek and said, well I said, maybe next time?"

"That kiss was dangerously close to my mouth. I thought you were gonna go for it."

"Dude, I was drunk! That would have been awful for our first kiss."

"I wouldn't care."

"Dude, just no. Besides, at that time you were with pizza guy. I don't do cheating. My parents divorced because my dad met another woman. I'm so against cheating, just so you know."

"Tom and I were just a thing for like a semester. We weren't together anymore before our ICCA performance."

Beca scratched her temple and flopped back down on her bed. "Oh! I didn't know that."

"Oh is right. Well, maybe you were just thinking of Jesse? Such a loyal girlfriend you are." Chloe tried to be as nonchalant about it as possible but deep inside, she felt that bee sting.

"Jesse? Jesse and I –", she trailed off. She and Jesse shared that kiss after the Bellas performance and she thought they would work out for a while. They tried for 6 months but both of them eventually just accepted the fact that they could only be best friends and not lovers. They have an understanding but sometimes, Beca would forget and still kiss Jesse platonically on the mouth. She got that under control now but she didn't really tell anyone about her status quo with Jesse. She was a free agent but a busy one, with her mixes and her girls. That treble party helped her loosen up a bit.

It would be a great idea to not just tell anyone, including Chloe, that she wasn't seeing anyone at the moment. Right?

Beca was brought out of her reverie when she heard Chloe snap her fingers in front of her. "Whatever. It's not Jesse. Wait, wait a minute. Let me backtrack. You said you wouldn't care."

"Uh-huh." Chloe jumped up and placed herself next to Beca, attacking her gently on the double bed. She leant in and whispered in the DJ's ear, "It's just a kiss, Beca. I wouldn't hold that against you. What if we graduate and be on our separate ways and you realize you regret not having a taste of this?" The redhead puckered her lips and made a smacking sound with her lips. "That's a lot of years bottling up your emotions. We could just start now."

Beca rolled over and faced Chloe. She squinted her eyes towards the older girl and knitted her brows. "You're so weird."

"Thanks." Chloe pushed herself closer to the smaller girl and placed a quick kiss on her forehead. "Goodnight, Beca."

The brunette buried her face under Chloe's chin and smiled. She was really content with how this night turned out to be. It was just a talk between the two of them but a lot has been said. She didn't think she could say those words again when she wakes up but being sleep-deprived was better than being drunk. Albeit, they seemed to have similar symptoms such as saying things you don't usually say and doing things you usually don't do.

Before she drifted off, she heard Chloe say, "I'm glad we had this conversation."

"Me, too."

[koishia-blog]

So many ded games...

So for many people that has been around the moba community in the last weeks you’ll know it hasn’t been a very good time due to 2 of the mobas that, at least for me, had a great potential, closing in the following months: Paragon and Gigantic.

I wasn’t very invested in Paragon to be honest, but I really really liked Gigantic. The thing is I wanted to be a person that supported games that I felt had potential and, in part my idea of making youtube videos would be to do reviews of these lesser known mobas to raise awareness since these games were closed because their respective publishers pulled the plug due to a lack of a player base. I know, I know that I’m a new blog and barely anyone knows of my existence but everybody starts somewhere.

Anyway, I’m giving up on the youtube idea, after seeing so many games with potential, that I like, and feel like they deserve the effort not being able to make it to full release or being closed 4-6 months after their release. I don’t think I should put the effort into learning how to make videos, recording and editing things that are going to become irrelevant in less than a year.

In fact, I’m getting burned out of the moba genre lately, I don’t feel like playing the mainstream ones and I don’t feel like investing time in the small ones due to these previous reasons so that’s why I’m thinking of jumping straight into streaming. I have been running some tests lately, in fact, but more on that later on a new post.

For now, I want to write a memorial and pay respects (F) to these mobas that could have been great but publishers didn’t give them a chance

Dawngate

First we have Dawngate, a game developed by Waystone Games and published by EA, I mean, just seeing the publisher’s name already doomed them.

I remember finding this game by pure chance and seeing that the character design was interesting, and that they even had an artist support!

So I went to download it only to find that the servers were closing on that same day. Okaaay...

I went onto learn more about the game and everybody looked so crushed about it closing and they had so much praise for the game that made me feel sad that I couldn’t try it, but hey! I guess EA wanted to make a LoL killer and since this game couldn’t pull millions of players during beta they decided it wasn’t even worth trying. However, there seems to be some people trying to revive it so it’s something. We’ll see if EA allows it once they manage to release their own version.

Master x Master

Developed and published by NCSoft, Master x Master (MXM) was their attempt at doing a moba like Blizzard did with Heroes of the Storm, by grabbing characters from their other games along with some new ones.

While it’s true that I had some nostalgia feelings, especially with Kat the Cat as I was a human warlock back when I played Lineage 2, they can’t compare with characters created by Blizzard, characters that have been part of most gamers’ life while they grew up and that they’re even still relevant now.

Now the game itself had some interesting features. To start with, it was a mix of pve mmo and pvp and its main feature was that you chose 2 characters and could switch between them strategically to keep yourself alive. Pair a DPS assassin with a tank, for example, and you could deal damage to others then switch to tank if things went rough.

But of course, NCSoft had to get greedy, for a game that needed not one but 2 characters to play the game, and even more if you wanted to stay competitive, the price of them was very high. If you didn’t want to spend real money the only ways to obtain SOL (the ingame currency to buy characters) were: To level up your account, which gave 1 SOL per level, that being more and more difficult as your level was higher. Pve missions on the highest difficulty that had a chance of giving 1 SOL as a reward (but cost 1 SOL to go in) and login events. With most characters costing 7 or more SOL, along with the unstability of the servers and lag, led the community to complain and eventually start leaving the game. NCSoft didn’t do anything to fix their problems and 4 months after launch they decided to shut down the game and invest large quantities of money into paying Twitch streamers to promote their new Lineage 2 version for phones.

Paragon

As I said I don’t know much about Paragon. I played a bit against bots and that’s it, but I did read a bit on what happened to it and how it ended up dying.

Paragon, developed and published by Epic Games and released in 2016 was a take on a 3rd person moba, similar to Smite but with amazing realistic graphics. The map, designed to take advance of verticality made up for interesting gameplay compared to Smite, but also, said map design made for very long games (40 minutes average). In a time where people wanted to spend less time playing a match, and mobas like Heroes of the Storm were doing very well with their 20 minute average matches, Epic tried very hard to reduce the time of their matches, which led to a change of the map that the more hardcore part of the gamer base, that came from other long time match mobas such as LoL or Dota, didn’t like.

New players found the game very difficult to get into, especially its card system, and getting matched with and against a player base of hardcore gamers was very rough. At the same time, the attempts of Epic to make the game more casual for these new players angered the hardcore player base as it led the game to become more of a brawl than an strategic moba with, for example, towers not being a threat at all and becoming totally pointless. In short, Epic was trying to appease to a small amount of new players that weren’t staying, while not hearing the complains from their loyal veteran ones.

Eventually, Epic released Fortnite, a pve tower defense game that didn’t do very well until they decided to turn it into a battle royale and make it free, unlike Player Unknown Battlegrounds, another battle royale that was one of the most successful games at the moment. The incredible success of Fortnite made Epic start to shift the team of Paragon towards Fortnite, as Paragon wasn’t getting any revenue while Fortnite was getting plenty.

Epic, unable to keep changing a game in attempts to make everyone happy and the fact that their new game was making them rich, decided it was time to let the “old” Paragon game rest in peace and focus all the efforts on Fortnite. Only time will tell if betting everything on Fortnite is a good idea or if it will die once the battle royale trend ends.

Gigantic

To me, Gigantic is the saddest story of them all, and it hurts me deeply to see it go. The art style, the character design, the tiny bits of lore, the gameplay, the smoothnes and funny animations were amazing. As someone that can’t get into Overwatch, since I don’t like the first person view in competitive games, Gigantic was perfect. So what went wrong with a game that had so many good things? Everything.

Gigantic was developed by Motiga, a small indie studio. Wanting to make the game something big they looked for investors and made a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft just released Windows 10 and took Gigantic as one of their exclusive release games. Most gamers interested during that time forgot about Gigantic since they didn’t own an Xbox or didn’t want to change to Windows 10 (myself included) which reduced the potential player base by a lot.

Eventually, they could drop the Microsoft deal and got Perfect World Entertainment (PWE) as their new publisher, which opened the game for all PC gamers and not only those with Windows 10, even though the 6 GB minimum of RAM required made a lot of interested players unable to play.

The game had almost no advertisement during launch, most of the people that could have been interested didn’t get into the game thinking it still was a Microsoft and Windows 10 exclusive. There was also bugs and features that Motiga’s developers, still a relatively small studio, couldn’t solve, as well as not being able to reduce the RAM requirements to 4 GB to open accessibility to more players. Motiga started becoming smaller and smaller until they sold the game completely to PWE. PWE did nothing to promote, advertise or support their newly acquired game and only kept a handful of developers to sustain it. 2 months after acquiring Gigantic they announced they were closing it.

A game with truly a lot of potential, dying because of a greedy publisher that did nothing to advertise it and a small studio that couldn’t solve the technical issues and bugs that the game had.

While there are many mobas around I don’t find anything close to what Gigantic was. It makes me sad just to think I won’t be able to play anymore characters like Pakko, a cute and playful giant,

 or Aisling, a little girl that summoned the ghost of her father to fight along her, to name a couple favourites of mine.

Also the fact that, unlike most mobas, where you defend a nexus or core that is just a structure, on Gigantic you defended a guardian that was either a giant griffon or a serpent, and seeing them flying over the battleground during the match and attack each other during rampage mode always gave me the chills.

Goodbye Gigantic...I wish you would have lasted long enough for me to be able to play with my boyfriend that couldn’t play because of the RAM requirements...

Special mention: Hyper Universe

This game is not dead yet but after all these disappointments I can see the signs leading into it.

Hyper Universe is being published by Nexon, a company with a very bad reputation and known for dropping other games, so to start with, that’s not good.

The game was released as a paid early access on autumn 2017. The player base was very small, as not many people wanted to pay for early access on a really not well known game. Sure, that access included a pack of heroes and their respective equipment but people were hesitant to spend money on a moba that’s going to be free to play in the future and with lots of negative reviews due to the censorship.

Ah...the censorship, that alone would make for pages of discussion but I’m going to keep it simple. Hyper Universe has a very sexualized female design on most of their characters so the Korean branch, worried about how the western audience would take it, they censored the splash art of most females and got rid of the jiggle physics in game. As for how bad the censorship is? Judge yourselves:

Yeah...The thing is that no one didn’t even notice the censorship until someone pointed it out and then a storm of complaints started with people demanding to go back to the original art, thing that Nexon didn’t want to and in fact, “censored” the Korean version of the game as well so no one could say that there was differences between both versions.

What I think about all this? An awful PR move, the censorship is so meaningless they might as well have kept the original art in and avoided all the negative reviews and players leaving because “the company doesn’t listen to what the community wants”, and if someone was offended by the non-censored version they were still going to be offended by the censored one. Personally, I like the censored version better as it seems slightly more realistic but that’s personal preference. What I really look for in a game is its gameplay even though character design, as someone that likes art, matters a lot. It’s true that a game that is centered on making all women sexy doesn’t tell me much but I can say that the art itself, as in technique and beauty appeal is great. Anyway enough of that, let’s move into the gameplay.

The gameplay is a 2D side scrolling moba, even though they want to call it “action brawler” where you have a base, several towers, minions, and a jungle. Its defining factor is that the map is vertical and you move through lanes and the jungle by using ladders. The controls are very similar to a fighting game and can be played by using a controller as well.

Overall, innovative gameplay and ideas in a game that’s going to die because the publisher is going to shut it down due to a lack of player base. With an average of 20 people online during early access, 2 thousand people when it became free to play on January 17th 2018 and less than 1 thousand nowadays, it’s going to be a matter of time when Nexon decides it’s not profitable anymore. I wish I was wrong, but I’ve seen this pattern too many times, and the fact that they’ve started firing a lot of employees that were in charge of the community isn’t a good sign either.

So here you go, my opinion of all these dead (almost dead) games, and how I’m more and more disappointed about the videogame, or online videogame industry in general. Maybe I got some facts wrong or not entirely right, if you want to discuss about it you can do so with replies, or send messages to my inbox which, if I’m not mistaken, should be opened to everybody.

See ya!