#it involves a lot of trauma and some repetitive narratives but in the end the message of the story is all about growth as a person

[erisenyo]

15 people, 15 questions

Thank you @fanfic-gremlin-ft-trauma and @sukiluvvs for the tag!!

1.) Are you named after anyone?

Not really. There was a playboy bunny in the news at the time who had the same name but I'm not sure that seeing the name in gossip magazines counts lol

2.) When was the last time you cried?

The last time I answered one of these lol, back in early July when I was in the process of actively missing my vacation to Iceland because my passport renewal didn't come in time. Fun fact: it came the day I would have gotten back :)

3.) Do you have kids?

Nope and never, is the plan!

4.) What sports do you play/have played?

I played lacrosse and I fenced (sabre)! I did both through college, fencing for 7 years and lacrosse for 14. I also used to powerlift (3 years) and kickbox (6 years, RIP to my gym that closed this summer :/) These days I play pickup basketball and intramural dodgeball when the league can get its act together, and I'm thinking of taking lifting back up again

5.) Do you use sarcasm?

Yes, I'm a sarcastic/dry comment factory

6.) What’s the first thing you notice about people?

...Their height? I don't actually know. I size them up to asses whether I could take them in a fight? But not like consciously, it's just...a thing lol

7.) What’s your eye colour?

Brown!

8.) Scary movies or happy endings?

Happy endings all the way! I am here for the satisfying narrative bow we will never have in our real lives.

9.) Any talents?

Some people know I write a bit, and I think I'm pretty good at that :) I'm also exceptional at packing a trunk/tetrising objects into spaces, and in carrying things in as few trips as possible. (You want me involved in your move) Also very good at data viz but that's getting close to work things and we Will No Talk About Those

10.) Where were you born?

The room my mom was in :)

11.) What are your hobbies?

I like to write, to read, I bake and cook, I spend a lot of time playing with my cat because he is a needy, demanding creature with sharp teeth, all the above-mentioned sports. I also coach, and I've got two regular cook new food/try new restaurant crews and a bookclub that keep me busy

12.) Do you have any pets?

My little creature

13.) How tall are you?

5’3 but this always seems to shock people lol

14.) Favourite subject in school?

History! I was a history and a classics major in college.

15.) Dream job?

Shocker of shockers, I actually really love my current job! If money were no object I would probably continue to do it, but eventually I would want to like...work in a bookstore. I used to in highschool and college and I loved it an I am very well suited to like, repetitive-task-public-interaction environments (I'd also love to be a glassblower or carpenter but only for fun I think. No monetizing my dreams)

Tagging people...who maybe have already been tagged? Lets find out lol

@chitsangenthusiast @haroldtea @ash-and-starlight @petricorah @sukidude @sulkybender @queendollophead-ao3 @bisexuallsokka @chiptrillino @boiiko @ssreeder

[swallowerofdharma]

Hi! Your top 5 characters and top 5 ships?. I'm really curious.

Hello! This is difficult lol because it a very open question. I presume we are talking animanga, so let’s see, because I actually don’t necessarily have charts readily on my mind and I also don’t read that many titles anymore. Some of the most popular manga talked about recently are aimed at a younger audience than me or are very similar to things I have already read, so they don’t hold my interest. And if I think of characters that have meant a lot to me at different times in my life, I probably will end up talking about stories that are quite forgotten now or not exciting for anyone else, because more connected to my own circumstances and life experiences. So if you don’t mind I will give you only three, but I will give an explanation of my choices so that it is easy to see how I could have mentioned other very similar characters from different manga for very similar reasons. But these three I have a visceral and deep connection with, and maybe I also projected a lot, so they stand out to me and came organically to my mind after reading your ask:

Yashiro, from Saezuru Tori wa Habatakanai. Obvious choice to begin with, but I genuinely like characters that can’t conform to other people’s expectations and can’t be “toned down” or “domesticated” because they can’t discard the wild side of their loneliness, rooted in childhood trauma or neglect and lack of basic social support and meaningful connections when it mattered most. And yet, Yashiro faces reality directly because of that. And disillusionment is another trait I like about a character. And I like stories that have darker themes and don’t glimpse over the horrors humanity is capable of, and I like realism too. And Yashiro is a real “queer” character, one that can’t escape “otherness” in a world that isn’t fantastical and where the monstrous isn’t metaphorical.

Griffith, from Berserk. Because he has quite no other choice but to become the monstrous, for the same reasons I indicated above, including queerness, otherness, loneliness and failure to connect or be recognized as human, he can’t exist without provoking a conflict in others, part his own choice of challenging the order seen as “natural”, part because he has to fail in order to set up Guts’s story and fulfill the “destiny of tragic beauty”. This time the world building is very different and the story that starts on the human and historical plane and with a certain amount of realism ends tangled in a bigger picture and bigger narrative threads. He is such an iconic figure, coming to look similar to a whole lot of mythical types and other characters with similar functions in manga and yet avoiding being a simple replacement or repetition and being his own authentically and unique character.

Kikyo, from Inuyasha. I was such an avid reader of Rumiko Takahashi’s stories. I think what I liked most was their settings, the glimpses into a Japanese reality, being the contemporary world of high schoolers involved in quirky adventures or the fantastic past of the Sengoku period full of creatures and specters from a mythical and horror tradition that I got to know this way. Kikyo’s long black hair, her outfit of shrine priestess, with the iconic red and white colors, her ability as an archer: she stands out in my memory, I was in love with her. She was a ghost of herself with only certainty emotions surviving: the fascination with the unresolved. She was angry and vengeful, and yet her love too survived, just darkened. And I like the conflict between her spiritual role and strength and her relationship and connection with Inuyasha, destined both to be outsiders, two loneliness that met, defying the rules. And I think that I quite liked that at the center of her story was learning to let go.

As for shipping… I don’t know if I am even capable of it. I failed repeatedly to commit to it. I see the potential, but sometimes it is more delicious when that potential isn’t fulfilled in the literal sense. Maybe I just enjoy more the tension, than the resolution, the angst more than any “happy ending”: a sense of love as something to bring along and not renounce, even when potentially destructive, but never quite the end goal or only purpose in living. But I like fan theories, fan art and some fanfics, the angsty ones of course. The only pairing I am irrationally committed to might surprise everyone after my little list. But these two characters I have seen together since the beginning and that hasn’t changed and I am still very attached to them as a couple, and my favorite childhood friends becoming lovers proper ship, they are so well suited for each other in my eyes, without being boring together: Kuroo and Kenma from Haikyuu! Surprised?

Sorry for answering so vaguely, but I truly enjoy being open and flexible and I don’t commit truly to some fandom things like lists, ships, or being able to always have a strong opinions about everything. But thank you for asking!

[hanseihere]

https://gofund.me/134dbc93 : this contains the first time writing & since the only way to help self is to help others, if compelled to give & support individuals living with “trauma,” give to Mr. Baker who created a way to prove that care for others is stronger than anything “they” can throw at you.

PLEASE DESCRIBE EACH PICTURE: 

(1) remember to label voice memos. VM allow a way to take a break from writing & confront “audio” triggers. Try to label for easy relocation. I used VM until memory was filled up & then had to use the iCloud, the idea when I was posting & the word LIVE floated above clouds as I stared at a blue sky, green grass with poofs of white & said, “an iCloud is like a real cloud,” & repeated this over & over until I could trust that yes, indeed, whatever I put in the iCloud would remain. NOTE : still not backing up so result of online stalking can be very severe since it has affected me for years, but may not have been so severe without other “tech” triggers.

(2) regarding podcasting. OK.

(3) removing triggers regarding film is next. This requires recognition of r-- culture in media & that will be symbolized by polka dots. Thanking the individual for this since the association is “Stepford Wives.”

(4) entering housing & community as the word that definitely “pulled me in” so why is that so appealing? Also, could not read this letter after the first sentence since boom, everything turned dark, but the last line is what made me aware those who can change their narrative have a deeper, darker ability that if left uncheck will absolutely redo abuses. “They” learn, too.

(5) this company provided a terrible experience, but was “saved” with the better treatment of one of my clients--a homeless guy--so that simple act can remove trauma & enable someone to try again. Still need administrative & press contacts because the question was, “do you want to ensure the hospital who sees people in need of eyewear to know that you take their insurance provided because without sight, it’s very hard to be independent?” The answer was Y, but the follow through hasn’t happened. This can be expanded.

(6) Writing is tactile & YouTube is audio/visual so film could end trauma because the repetition is the prolonged exposure therapy & now, can start comparing & contrasting. Also, let’s discover new filming options. 

(7) the non-response was fierce! The fact property manager was not present in the building was probably the reason & would explain this, so the question asked was, “how many properties do you manage?” Told in the meeting 3, but in email 3, so a low standard for lying is definitely part of trauma. 

(8) must feel safe to share this IG & bits of a poem that I need to write down in a notebook, touching pen[is] to paper [trail]

(9) hashtaggging since every place to write in is a place to practice writing in & sharing the words to end trauma because at some point, it will end, right? Also, more stolen packages & the words, “some of the cameras are dummies,” so I want to know which ones. Upon closer inspection, no missing packages have been recovered, there are employees that sign for them & the board blamed homeless, a lot! Also, recording with video again & dampening those triggers again. Wondering will it ever end?

(10) while in trauma, you make a lot of collages to satisfy the visual input & also hide a bit here & there knowing how the brain will fill it in. I am writing, but not paragraphs. @relentlessredo is on Samsung phone. Dampening face & happy to report today may be the first time, I can see it! Not see what they see which is race play & why after multiple assaults, was unable to stop their “madness.” Wrote out chapters & Dave Michalowski (you again?) I better start writing “Lessons, Sessions & Confessions.” 111 is GrubHub & that’s tech. That’s these fantasies that reveal a certain idea of treatment involving women & men & never fully got it. Everyone needs one friend who can explain...

[asfdhgsdkjhgb]

urg many thoughts head full

[variousqueerthings]

A few things from today’s MASH watch:

1. seeing more Houlihan growth

- when she’s trapped in the supply closet with Trapper and she (despite being attracted to him generally) sets her boundaries and he respects them

- when she protests the way Hawkeye and Trapper are trying to treat a patient with psychosomatic paralysis, because she thinks the therapy is “cruel” and in the same episode when she reads a letter to Radar while he’s getting his rabies shots (and definitely ticks the “adorable” box for him when the letter asks what he looks like)

- when she sets some hard limits with Frank in terms of how he’s treating her (not loaning her money for a gift for her sister’s wedding) (also in that episode she does something really cute with her hair... those called pig’s tails? or is that only when you braid them)

- and in the same episode when she participates in tug of war and they all end up falling in the mud and have a great time (and Hawkeye helps her up when they have to get back to work)

- I notice use of the words “Hot Lips” has been used less and less throughout the season to describe her

- generally getting to see her being very competent in the OR/respected in the OR by Hawkeye, Trapper, and Blake

2. the last few episodes have been overall pretty light (yes I monitor the heavier episodes) with the last really intense episode being “OR” early on in the season, however feel like there’s a general turn towards more and more melancholy in the characters themselves and the narrative -- this could also be the sense of repetition, the more times we get a “dear dad” episode, the more times we hear about Trapper missing his kids, the more times they show a kid coming in with trauma (the one who’s completely silent and just wants to hold his cat, the one with the psychosomatic paralysis, the one who shot himself to get home...) etc. It’s a very effective way of depicting the endlessness of it all

3. I can also feel a countdown towards a Change, both in tone and in some characters leaving (I know Trapper, and I think I’ve heard one more -- my money’s on Henry Blake, they did mention he has arthritis in “OR” + we’ve heard more about his home life this season + he was very depressed in the last episode, with Hawkeye trying to get him involved in things to cheer him up... there’s just a feeling I have...)

4. on the flipside, I also feel like there’s a real sense of Belonging in this story now, as an audience member. There’s about to be some shake-ups, yes (and I’m sure there will be others further along), but the familiarity with the characters and the setting + things like Radar getting a little zoo is such a great touch + the easy ways characters touch each other + scenes I feel have got to be tiny actor breaks (sometimes I think Alan Alda is just genuinely entertaining Loretta Swit and Lawrence Lavon) + lot of wide shots of the unit giving a sense of Place

[bleachbleachbleach]

HELLO.

I just wanted to say that I love, love, love your tags on that character/tool post a lot! Some of my favorite shows/books involve characters that can't keep it together and just barely make it to the end of the story or make it there in an "inconvenient way" and tbh I find that usually the narratives that follow these characters don't really work away from them either--the narrative is just usually more questioning instead of fully formed.

Like, 'what if/how would', y'know? There's less of a clear meaning and more just 'what if they hadn't done that. what if they had done that. what if all that meant nothing. what if that struggle was all there was'.

But oh boy, when they DO work away from the narrative. *chefs kiss*

I mean, most of my favorite Bleach characters are narrative nightmares who either hinder or cut off lines of theme in the story entirely. And, in general, I think there are A LOT of characters in shonen--a genre known for very long narratives that can't possibly complete every thought but also can't just abandon all those characters introduced ESPECIALLY the fan favorites or personal favorites--work in the way you described.

Tbh i think your tags really highlight why so many ppl get drawn to these characters/why they're so fun to play with in fanfiction.

If you have more to add or more thoughts about this you want to lay down I am here, eagerly awaiting and ready to pick them up.

Also, who do you think in Bleach is the most fun characters who sort of drop kicked the story, in your opinion? Who's the one you like the most? And who's the one you dislike the most?

[For posterity the referenced post is this one.]

Aww, thank you! That’s really lovely to hear. I was anxious about even putting it in tags because I don’t think I presently have the capacity to explain it well—and even if I did might still sound bananas to many. Or at least the bit about negotiating with characters and how *they* feel about being subjects in stories. Because as much as that really is my practice saying it out loud takes me back to like… FFN in 2003 where every store was prefaced by extensive chat-form back-and-forths between the fic author and their character "musies" and that is not something I think fandom would benefit from bringing back in force, hahaha. But anyway.

Here’s the part where I disappoint because I don’t think I actually know Bleach well enough to speak to it in this context. WHICH SOUNDS DUMB EVEN AS I TYPE IT BECAUSE LOL WTF IS THE NAME OF THIS BLOG WE ARE CHARLATANS AND POSERS FOR CLAIMING AS OUR NAMESAKE NOT ONE BLEACH BUT THREE BLEACHES but truly, my experience of Bleach has a shallow depth of field. I feel like I have weirdly intimate knowledge of some severe rabbit holes but a non-existent to uneasy sense of the gestalt.

Like idek man, in my "slow re-read where I am actually paying attention" Ichigo hasn’t even met Byakuya and Renji yet. ToT

I'm gonna put this behind a cut because it spidered all over the place, but in summary:

characters and their capacity to produce narrative failure

the charm of longform serialized series and their invitations to imagine stuff

me attempting to talk about Hitsugaya and feeling a fool, as usual

I guess in general terms, I’m really interested in characters and their capacity to produce narrative failure. Not failure as in 'bad' but failure as in things that break form or are circuitous or are actively detrimental to a narrative arc. All my strongest examples of what I’m thinking of are from a different fandom and therefore not relevant to this blog, alas. By comparison I think anyone in Bleach can keep it together better than the characters that are immediately coming to mind, lol. But I think this idea dovetails often with trauma narratives, or depression narratives, because these things are often… non-narrative? Like, there’s no fourth or fifth for minor fall or major lift. Sometimes it’s the same thing over and over again, or maybe nothing. Maybe it’s the exact same self-sabotage narrative dictates could have been avoided. Maybe it’s some act that emanates forth but cannot be explained because it cannot be explained and will never be explained. That’s a version of what I’m talking about, in any case, though not the only version.

Your note about longform shounen definitely resonates with me, too. In my mind I don’t like long things and I prefer series that are more self-contained but whenever I have ever landed in a long-term fandom, with a piece of media I felt obliged to carve out chunks of my life for, and to interact with at that level of creative fannishness, it’s always been something stupid long and serialized by the seat of its pants. I know plot holes or dropped threads bother a lot of people (makes total sense, don’t get me wrong) but I find these things incredibly attractive. I see them as invitations to join in the fun. Especially when it’s so much a part of the form and genre to have this, as you said, lack of real expectation that every thread will be followed to its conclusion (or that it would be worthwhile to do so) and every thought completed.

There’s this piece by David Grann that was published in The New Yorker in 2004 that I really love that speaks to part of this idea, albeit in terms of fictional universes versus fictional characters. But Grann is talking about Sherlock Holmes (Doyle original) and the ways that Sherlockians would like, approach apparent lapses in narrative and then solve them according to the established rules of the universe. I just love that. There’s also the line, "Never had so much been written by so many for so few," which LOL if that ain’t fandom I don’t know what is!!

I feel like I’m actually talking about three distinct but related facets of these thoughts in this post, except all at once and without clear transition, uhhhhh.

Gah, I am broken and now can ONLY think of examples from my not-Bleach fandom, but to try a different tack and add yet another facet to this already funhouse-mirror post, my various attempts to write Hitsugaya often feel like they come up against a version of this. I think Hitsugaya has aggressive side character energy, and I find it difficult to make him the center of a story and have it feel right to me. He feels different to me than writing other minor characters, where they can be the center of their own stories even if their story is not the main story. Like, two of my fave characters in my other fandom have literally like… three lines in 350+ episodes and it feels easier to imagine THEM at the center of their story and I think what it comes down to is that Hitsugaya probably prefers what he not be written. And when he does become more narrative I think he’d prefer that none of it was happening in the fist place. But at the same time he always seems to be…around??? whether there is really a good reason for him to be present or not. XD So while, say, he and Bartleby "would prefer not to" (because THAT'S what this post needs, a Melville reference), Bartleby actually opts out and Hitsugaya out here volunteering.

He also often feels non-narrative to me because he feels very declarative, if that makes sense? Like, the coming-to-decisions or coming-to-realizations parts of existence happen pretty quick, or are approached perfunctorily. I feel like I find narrative in the "coming" part of that equation and instead Hitsugaya will be like, well, I’ve already done that part without you, and/or plan to do that part in the future and it will still be without you, the audience. Anyway, here’s the determination I’ve made, here’s what I’m going to do, and here begins the long and probably tedious process of my doing that thing (off 2 go train in a cave for a bit). I don’t think he actually believes the world is that simple, Tab A into Slot B, but I do think he’s already made that assessment and can see coming to terms with that as a horizon, if that makes sense. So even if he doesn’t know the answer to something, or is completely at a loss of what to do (what to say to Hinamori? how to productively address the number Aizen’s done on him) there’s still not necessarily a story there. Maybe the answer is you grind, and it is repetitive and boring. Maybe you just hold things. There’s not even the act of learning how to hold things, necessarily, just the practice of doing so.

Wow, that probably doesn’t sound good! I feel like I need to suffix this with the assurance that Hitsugaya is my absolute runaway character in the whole series and this was true 15 years ago and it is still true now (truer, even) and everything I just said are reasons why I love him.

[darkest-fluid]

That beautiful writer ask meme: Imagery, Juxtaposition, Symbolism, Allegory, Repetition

This got long, so I’m putting it under a cut.

Imagery: How much do you worldbuild in your current writing project? How do you make your setting seem real and vivid?

I have to admit: world-building is actually not one of my strong suits as a writer. I think I’m better at crafting characters than I am at crafting the worlds they live in. Which makes fanfic pretty great for me, because I can be lazy and piggy-back off of an already established world. 😉 I don’t have to do much world-building for Undertow, since a lot of that is already done for me, but I do have some original projects that involve more creativity on that front. I think when I do world-building I often focus most on cultural things: local beliefs and ideology, art, politics, etc.

As for the setting, I like to highlight sensory/impressionistic details as the character experiences them. The same setting can be experienced very differently depending on a character’s frame of mind and what sorts of things they tend to pay attention to. Specificity is also really helpful in making the world seem real. I like to try and zero in on a few small/specific details when writing my descriptions.

Juxtaposition: Do you include subplots in your writing? How do you balance them alongside your main plots?

I usually do have subplots. A lot of times what I like to do with my stories is focus on an overarching theme, and then find ways to express those ideas on both a macro and micro level, or as both symbolic and literal. With Undertow, that theme is trauma and recovery, specifically how it relates to personal agency and growth. And so I have multiple interwoven plot threads that all deal with that same theme. So it isn’t so much like... separate plots, as it is one big plot tapestry.

Symbolism: What does writing mean to you? How has it impacted your life?

Oof, man. This is a big one. I think growing up I always really struggled to express myself and to have a voice. And writing became my outlet for that. I wasn’t naturally good at it, but I kept working at it, and over time I improved a lot. I think a lot about narrative, and the role it plays in human culture. Both as individuals and as a society, we define our reality through storytelling: the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell to others. I very much want those stories to be as real and true and organic as possible, even when crafting these totally fantastical, fictional realities. Because every story we tell and every story we consume influences our reality... even if it’s just in these subtle, fractional ways.

So there’s the personal, of course: I want to have a voice, I want to be able to reach out to people and show them what I see and feel. I want to be able to point to something and say: “Look at this. This is important. This matters.”

Then there’s the social: knowing that people are engaging with the things I wrote and making it their own.

Then there’s the bigger narrative: I want to make a ripple in our shared reality, even if only a very small one.

But I struggle to do that. Because... well, because of a lot of things. Mental health, physical health, life circumstances, etc. So writing is both this super important thing that I love and a lifelong struggle to overcome massive personal obstacles.

But I genuinely believe that I would not be alive today without it.

Allegory: What is the theme of your current writing project? Is there a message you’d like readers to consider?

I talked about this a bit under Juxtaposition, so I’ll try not to get too repetitive. I also don’t necessarily want to state all of the messages outright, because as a writer I kind of like to just let the subtext speak for itself. But yes, there are definitely themes and messages that I hope readers will pick up on. Some of it involves a bit of meta-criticism over the whole good vs. evil, black and white worldview of D&D and similar fantasy worlds. Which ties into the overarching trauma theme because... hmm, how do I explain this? We cannot as a society take ownership of our sins if we refuse to claim them. People are not inherently good or bad. It’s our actions that matter.

Also, trauma doesn’t have to mean an end to things like love and happiness. Sometimes those things just come to us in unexpected and complicated ways.

Repetition: Is there anything you find you repeat across your witting projects? Symbols, tropes, descriptions, themes? 

Oh gosh, so many things. I use water symbolism a lot. I talk about trauma a lot. Most of my writing is pretty angsty. I also have a penchant for using theories in astrophysics as emotional metaphors. 😏

I love to plant little seeds that end up bearing fruit later on in the story. Like, a character will say something, and then that thing will get repeated later by another character, but with added nuance/weight/irony. I love to connect things. Seemingly disparate characters and stories might all eventually link up in some way.

I tend to use a lot of subtext. The things characters don’t say are often just as important as the things they do. That can also be true of the narrative itself. I convey a lot of things by implication. (I tend to stress a lot over whether any of that is actually clear to readers. Ideally I’d like to be one of those authors who rewards close/repeat reading, but it’s also possible I’m just being way too opaque.)

A lot of my characters have bad relationships with their parents.

A lot of my characters have intense/complicated sexualities.

I use a lot of visceral imagery. I often talk about the body (and the breaking open of it) as a metaphor for emotional intimacy. (Hoo boy is this relevant for my current fic.) Blood isn’t just blood. It’s also feelings.

[mediaeval-muse]

Book Review

Bride By Mistake. By Anne Gracie. New York: Berkley Sensation, 2012.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: historical romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Devil Riders #5

Summary: Eight years ago, Lieutenant Luke Ripton made a hasty wartime marriage-in-name-only to protect a young girl from a forced union and left her protected in a remote mountain convent. Now, Luke is Lord Ripton, but he has been unable to obtain an annulment. Which leaves him no choice but to claim a wife he doesn't want. For nearly a decade, Isabella has waited like a princess locked in a tower, dreaming of her handsome, dark-haired prince. Her dreams are shattered when Luke reveals himself not as a prince, but an autocratic soldier, expecting her unquestioning obedience, which is something Isabella's fiercely independent nature will not tolerate. And while Luke and Isabella's fiery personalities clash at every turn, they remain bound to their vows, never expecting that the passionate fury they share could become passion of a different kind...

***Full review under the cut.***

Content/Trigger Warnings: attempted sexual assault, violence, sexual content, torture

Overview: When I started reading this book, I had the strangest feeling that I had read it before, but I didn’t remember how the plot went, nor could I find any record of a review, so here it is now. Bride By Mistake had the potential for a great story: a fiercely independent heroine, a journey to rescue an abandoned half-sister, love growing between two people who married to prevent one of them from suffering a worse fate, etc. I think I would have been on board if not for the hero, who I found hard to like. I didn’t feel like he respected our heroine at all, even after he opened up about his past, which made it hard for me to root for the relationship. As a result, this book only gets 2 stars from me.

Writing: Gracie’s writing seems to change between the first thirty or so pages and the rest of the book. The first couple chapters seem to rush through the narrative quickly, dumping a bunch of dialogue and a rushed flashback on the reader to set up the situation before getting to the main plot. Once we get to that point, the writing seems to flow a bit better, giving insight into what characters are thinking and feeling. Granted, it’s not a high literary style - Gracie’s prose is simple, and sometimes has a tendency to be repetitive (there’s a lot of observations of what the heroine’s legs and backside look like in her riding pants, for example, and we’re repeatedly told how Isabella isn’t pretty/not conventionally attractive), but I was able to immerse myself in the story, so I feel like it did the job.

Plot: Aside from the romance, the main plot of this novel takes place a number of years following a war. Our heroine, Isabella, and our hero, Luke, married as strangers during the conflict in order to protect Isabella (an heiress) from being forcibly married to her cousin, Ramon, who was after the family fortune. Because Luke was still a soldier, he left Isabella in a monastery for her own protection. Now, eight years later, Luke has been denied an annulment, and so he has come to Spain to collect his wife and return to England. However, before she leaves, Isabella insists on travelling to her family estate to retrieve her abandoned half-sister, who she fears might have been forced into becoming Ramon’s mistress. Meanwhile, Luke’s PTSD makes him anxious, and he constantly fights with her about returning to England so he can arrive in time for his youngest sister’s first come-out.

In terms of setting up a conflict, I feel like this book had potential. I liked the idea of Isabella doing the right thing by her sister, despite having mixed feelings about the favoritism that her father showed towards his illegitimate daughter. It nicely mirrored the family feelings Luke had towards his own sister, and the two protagonists had some good conversations based on those parallels. However, a lot of the middle of the book felt like an uneventful journey. Sure, the protagonists had personal conflicts, but nothing really built the anticipation for their arrival at the family estate. Instead, we get some silly things, like an inn having fleas and causing a whole debacle. I’m not against light, fluffy things like this, but I would have liked to see Isabella and Luke working together more to come up with a plan in anticipation of their showdown with Ramon.

When they finally do encounter Ramon and Isabella’s sister, Perlita, I found the character interactions to be both interesting and silly. I liked how Perlita and Isabella talked about their childhoods and came to respect one another, as well as how Perlita’s desires were quite different from what Isabella expected. It’s complicated and messy and utterly unsatisfying, but in a way that challenges the reader to think about accepting what other people want, even if it’s not “proper.” That being said, Ramon and Luke’s interactions completely transcended the bounds of reality for me. In one scene, Ramon and Luke threaten to kill one another over Isabella, yet once it’s made clear that Ramon would gain nothing by marrying her, everyone settles down and has lunch. Ramon and Perlita then invite the two to stay overnight, which seems preposterous given that the men almost came to blows and, as far as I could tell, still hated one another.

After they leave the estate, Isabella and Luke visit a family friend, and there, they encounter someone from Luke’s traumatic past. I found this part of the plot rather rushed and somewhat sloppy. Despite the trauma supposedly affecting Luke from the beginning, it felt like the details were dumped on the reader with barely 1/3 of the novel left, and so it felt hollow and inserted for a final bit of action. I wish this part of the plot has been more integral to the story, rather than having it all condensed into a few pages near the end.

I will caution readers that early in the book, we are shown a flashback that details how Luke and Isabella meet, and it involves attempted sexual assault. Luke, who is a soldier returning from an errand, happens to hear a girl screaming, so he goes to investigate. He finds a nameless Spanish soldier attempting to rape Isabella, who is 13 and has been stripped naked. While the soldier isn’t successful and his violence against Isabella isn’t overly graphic, we are subject to some descriptions of Isabella’s body, which, in my opinion, had a tendency to be uncomfortable. Descriptions of how she barely has breasts and no hips just shows me that Luke is taking note of these things, which feels icky. Thus, I wouldn’t recommend this book if you’re sensitive to plots involving attempted sexual assault.

I will also say that this book doesn’t do a very good job regarding representing Spanish and Roma culture. Every description of Spain and Spanish life seemed to be banal, from randomly eating churros to taking a siesta. The richness and complexity of Spanish culture isn’t really explored, which is a shame since Isabella’s Spanish heritage mainly seemed to enhance the idea that Isabella = Spanish = passion, contrasting with the frivolousness of English women and society. On top of that, there is a scene where Isabella and Luke are at a market, and they happen to witness some Roma people singing and dancing. Gracie uses the g-slur, though I don’t think it was used in malice. However, the dance is sensual and erotic, which causes Luke and Isabella to become aroused. It further lent credence to the implication that Spain is a land of passion for Luke, and though Spain is not overly exoticized, I do think implying that it is a world where passion can flourish is rather stereotypical.

Characters: Isabella, our heroine, is fairly likable in that she doesn’t let Luke push her around. She’s headstrong and confident, and on top of that, she has a strong sense of duty to her sister. I admired that about her, and loved seeing moments when she would defy expectations and show that she really is capable of handling things herself. The only things I found mildly irritating was her ridiculous innocence regarding sex and her tendency to be overly emotional. Regarding the former, Isabella has cringey moments such as thinking that sex with a man might be like sex between horses or other animals. I dislike it when virgin heroines are that naive because it’s not very realistic. Regarding her emotion, emotion itself isn’t a bad thing, but it didn’t endear me to her when these moods seemed to be connected to her childishness rather than anything substantive. For example, Isabella dramatically flees the scene and cries when she learns Luke requested an annulment, in part because she had been entertaining childish fantasies that he would sweep her away from the monastery like a knight in shining armor. She also gets extremely upset and yells at Luke for not being happy that she is a virgin, which would have been ok if it were mostly about honor, but the scene also involves a discussion about Isabella’s ignorance about sex and what it entails. It just felt like all her passionate moods were in some way framed as juvenile, and I wasn’t really into it.

Luke, our hero, is hard to like because at best, he’s a gruff ex-soldier who expects obedience from his wife, and at worst, a misogynist. I could have been on board with an ex-soldier who approaches marriage as a commanding officer would, but then learns that the two are very different and a partnership is more fulfilling. Luke, however, doesn’t seem to be open to the idea. At least early on, whenever Isabella would do something, he would think things like “He was going to show her tonight who wore the pants in this marriage.” While he never hit or raped her, the idea that he would “show her who is boss” left a bad taste in my mouth. On top of that, Luke would also think about how he despises certain traits in women. He thinks of Isabella’s friends at the convent as mindless and frivolous, he rejects London women because they are shallow, and says a few times that he can’t stand dishonesty in women because of the one time in his past that a woman hurt him. It was honestly tiring and because it takes so long for him to even begin to reexamine himself, I wasn’t convinced that he had any admirable qualities other than being physically attractive.

Like Luke, our main antagonist, Ramon, is also fairly misogynistic. Though he had more complex motivations than we are initially led to believe (which I appreciated), he did use words like “bitch” and “slut,” which killed much of the interest I had in seeing him as a multifaceted character.

Perlita is much more interesting in that she harbors little malice towards her sister and refuses to be rescued. She emphasizes that her living situation is enough for her and does not want others making decisions on her behalf, even if they would raise her to enjoy a more “proper” life. I liked the relationship that she had with Isabella - the two talk at length about how their father treated them differently and how they feel about each other, and I loved that they came to feel real affection for each others’ well-being.

Romance: I’m just going to say it - I wasn’t a fan of Luke and Isabella’s romance. Luke was way too dominating and didn’t seem to value Isabella at all, and it only seemed like he came to value her once he opened up about his past (and even then, he seemed to value her for what she was able to do to comfort him and keep him on his toes, not as a partner in her own right). Some may chalk it up to his anxiety about being in Spain again, where his worst memories took place, but just because a character has trauma, that doesn’t mean he can be a jerk without consequences. The point where this particularly became a big “nope” for me was when the two first had sex. Isabella and Luke are staying the night at an inn, and they start to get it on, as couples in a romance novel will do. However, when he penetrates her, she screams in pain. Instead of stopping to see what’s wrong, Luke keeps going until he is sated, and then they make a big deal about Isabella’s virginity. This lack of caring for her physical and emotional well-being put me off completely, and I gave up hope of Luke ever truly learning how to see his wife as a partner (rather than a subordinate).

Overall, this book suffers from a lack of suspense and an insufferable hero, and while I did like the heroine and enjoyed the interaction between the sisters, it wasn’t enough to overcome the lackluster narrative progression and rapey vibes from Luke’s POV.

[scripttorture]

Torture in Fiction: The Umbrella Academy: Episode 1-6

I tried to start this saying I was only going to review episode 2 which has a prominent torture scene. Several hours later I am… significantly closer to the end of the series. So I thought I may as well include what I’ve watched.

The Umbrella Academy is a Netflix original series based on an independent comic book. With great acting, excellent music and a cast of deeply flawed characters it was (I understand) quite a hit.

I’m enjoying it a lot more then I thought I would. It’s violent but it’s also ridiculous in a way few stories but superhero comics tend to commit to. There’s a 60 year old man stuck in the body of a thirteen year old after travelling to an apocalyptic future and being in a thirty year relationship with a mannequin. And I just- I love comics.

This series feels very much like a superhero comic book on screen. With all the good and the bad that goes with that concept.

But I’m not here to tell you what I think of the superhero genre and it’s relationship with violence. I’m rating the depiction and use of torture, not the series itself. I’m trying to take into account realism (regardless of fantasy or sci fi elements), presence of any apologist arguments, stereotypes and the narrative treatment of victims and torturers.

Umbrella Academy is the story about a group of very damaged people with super powers. Adopted as babies (born in extraordinary circumstances) by a millionaire ‘adventurer’ six of the Hargreeve children were raised to be superheroes. The seventh, apparently without powers, was isolated in a world of talking chimps, robots and extraordinary abilities.

The story starts with Reginald Hargreeve’s death and the five surviving children (including one who’d been living on the moon, apparently for years) meet for the funeral. In the course of this ‘Five’, teleports back from the future.

While the story overall focuses on the way an emotionally abusive and neglectful upbringing effects all of the major characters I’m going to be focusing on the clear instances of torture in and solitary confinement in some of the episodes.

Both Luther and Five are subjected to extreme solitary confinement. Luther is isolated on the moon for four years, Five is isolated as the last person alive for several decades.

Five stops up in a donut shop late at night and sits next to a tow truck driver. They have a brief conversation and the driver leaves. An armed gang then attacks Five. He kills them and two more people (Cha-Cha and Hzael) are sent after him, apparently by the same organisation.

Believing they’re looking for a man in his 50s they go after the tow driver. They torture him and while they eventually believe that he isn’t Five, they continue to torture him to get information on Five. The driver tells them everything that happened the night before.

Later Cha-Cha and Hazel mount a raid on the Hargreeves estate looking for Five. They don’t find him but they manage to capture his brother Klaus.

Klaus is an addict (what he takes is not explicitly defined) and talks to dead people. The two are linked throughout the story with the heavy implication that Klaus avoids sobriety in order to escape his powers.

Klaus is tied to a chair for about a day and a half. He’s beaten, strangled and ‘waterboarded’. (Cha-Cha calls it waterboarding but didn’t actually carry it out properly. I’ve assumed that was for the safety of the actors).

Klaus escapes and shows no mobility problems after being cut off the chair. He then spends several months in 1968 (as you do). On his return his mental health problems seem to be no worse then they were before he was tortured.

I’m giving it 0/10

The Good

The actual forms of torture shown in The Umbrella Academy are reasonably realistic. They’re not always accurate to the time period or place, but when time travel is involved I’m willing to let that slide. The electrical torture shown, with a battery and bulldog clips, could be taken directly from Alleg’s accounts of his experience at the hands of French troops in Algeria. The stress positions and strangulation are shown realistically. And while the waterboarding isn’t shown realistically I think it was done this way to protect the actor and allow him to breathe.

The Bad

I’ve covered solitary confinement before. The estimated safe period for most people is about a week. While both Luther and Five has a strong sense of purpose during their confinement (and this seems to be a protective factor) that wouldn’t help a lot when they’re confined for such an unrealistically long period. At four years Luther should be a complete mental and physical wreck. At several decades including puberty, Five shouldn’t be able to interact normally with people and should be more obviously mentally ill then Klaus. Both of them are shown without symptoms and this downplays the damage of torture that’s routinely depicted as harmless.

Umbrella Academy shows torture ‘working’ with victims giving up accurate information if only you know how to hurt them. This isn’t true. Torture can’t result in accurate information. This kind of misinformation encourages torture in real life.

Klaus’ response to torture is to thank his torturers for inflicted pain with the strong implication that he’s enjoying being tortured. It’s implied that he’s turned on by pain so ‘can’t’ be traumatised or hurt by torture. This is ridiculous and insulting to both the BDSM community and torture survivors. BDSM practitioners don’t stop feeling pain and they aren’t immune to trauma. There is a world of difference between a consensual and non-consensual encounter. Personally I think this kind of portrayal is akin to suggesting that victims can’t be raped because they’ve previous enjoyed sex. It’s unacceptable.

Klaus is held in a stress position for at least a day. This is a survivable time frame but on release he should have significant mobility issues and should have needed help escaping. Instead he’s perfectly capable of making his way out with a heavy time-travel device. He can walk and move his arms freely. This completely ignores that the way he was held is torturous.

Neither Cha-Cha nor Hazel show any of the mental health problems typical of torturers. They’re portrayed as competent and able to investigate effectively, even though they torture. Torturers are not good investigators and torture consistently undermines effective investigation. Realistically a character can be one or the other, not both.

Cha-Cha and Hazel are also depicted as good fighters and generally skilled. In reality torture produces a deskilling effect in torturers, they get worse at what they do.

Cha-Cha and Hazel are shown as obedient to their superiors, only targetting people who have information or are ordered as targets. This isn’t how torturers operate. They disobey orders, ignore superiors and target a wide array of people who usually have nothing to do with anything the torturers are supposed to investigate.

No one in the series so far has shown any long standing mental health problems as a result of torture or isolation.

No one has shown any memory problems as a result of torture or isolation.

The end result is that the series suggests torture doesn’t have any long term effects at all.

Overall

I think this series really highlights something I’ve been saying a lot on the blog: It’s very easy to find realistic depictions of how torture is carried out and it’s very hard to find realistic depictions of the effect it has on people.

These episodes, and I suspect (from what I’ve seen) the series more generally handles torture terribly. It’s unrealistic and it’s parroting a lot of tropes that either excuse torture or belittle survivors.

That didn’t get in the way of me enjoying the series outside of these scenes. There are a lot of great characters and character moments.

But none of that excuses this senseless repetition of torture apologia.  

For a series that works so hard to highlight the effect of childhood emotional abuse it downplays the effects of physical abuse at every turn.  

It uses torture as a short cut in the plot. It portrays torturers as smart and restrained badasses.

It basically does virtually everything I advise writers not to do.

And this comes about simply by repeating the same old genre tropes without bothering to look up the subjects involved.

There are other ways to have your bad guys find out the information they need to know. There are other ways to establish them as terrible people.

There are realistic ways to show people resisting torture, which don’t diminish the pain they suffered.

I think what I want to stress most of all is that this apologia is unnecessary. It doesn’t add anything to the story. The fun stuff, the super heroics, the ridiculous time travel escapades and carefully choreographed fight scenes can all happen without apologia as the background noise.

For once- I’m not really mad. I’m disappointed. That these tropes creep into genre after genre, put down roots and keep coming back up. The mainstay of this story wouldn’t be any different if they took out torture or even used it in a more realistic way.

Five’s isolation in an apocalyptic wasteland doesn’t last. He’s picked up by an agency of time travellers and offered a job. This could have happened more quickly, especially since the time he spends alone and the time he spends with the agency are both poorly defined.

Luther’s trip to the moon functions to build a wall between him and his siblings. And again, that could have happened in a much shorter time frame.

Cha-Cha and Hazel could have just interviewed the tow truck driver for their information. They’re shown conducting successful interviews later.

Klaus’ resistance could have been framed as natural and there are several points in his dialogue already that could have supported that. The story could have used the fact that Klaus genuinely does not know where Five is.

In the end The Umbrella Academy’s use of torture is a waste of narrative space. None of these torture scenes are essential to the plot and every single one of them is handled badly.

It’s an example of a narrative that wasn’t prepared to commit to showing the consequences of torture.

We can all do better.

Edit: I forgot the full title. Oops.

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Disclaimer

[isuzukuretsuki]

Goodbye Odin Sphere, you were fun while it lasted.

But was it really fun? Was the emotional trauma and devastation really worth the fun? I will never know.

Also this is quite literally only my second platinum in a non-otoge so I feel I should celebrate lmao.

This game has given me a newfound appreciation for:

1. frogs

2. HAPPY ENDINGS

3. frogs

Despite my salt for the true end, I really did enjoy this game and it’s probably up there with Fire Emblem Echoes, the Ace Attorney series, and Persona 4/Q as one of my favourite video games ever. At the very least, it’s the first game that ever prompted me to read every fanfiction available on AO3. Maybe that’s not a good thing because that just means the game was unsatisfactory to the point I had to use fanfiction to fill the void, but nevertheless it was still one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played and I will absolutely never forget how much of an emotional wreck I was playing this game.

I don’t think I’ve ever cried this hard over any other video game. Actually, to be more precise, I don’t think I ever cried this hard over any other fictional character because 95% of all my tears were dedicated to Ingway, or some scenario involving Ingway. I fucking spent so many evenings just crying or reading fanfiction while crying and even days after finishing this game, I’m STILL vulnerable to crying if I think too hard about him LMFAO. HE HAD THAT MUCH OF AN IMPACT ON ME AND I WOULD DIE FOR HIM.

Narrative wise, I enjoyed the storybook format of the game because I can then pretend that this entire game is a work of fiction based on the characters and everyone is actually alive and happy but after I got to Oswald/Velvet’s books, the story just became confusing as hell and I struggled to piece together the clusterfuck of a timeline lol. I ended up having to refer to the wiki a lot because I was just so confused and I needed clarification, which unfortunately resulted in me being spoiled in way more than I wanted to :/. Oh well. 

I think the biggest reason it was so confusing is because the Three Wise Men are all off doing different things over the course of the game, but they have the same character design, the same personality, and even their voices sound the same so I constantly struggled to identify who was who and who did what jkbheajktheak.

The art was gorgeous, as usual and I loved the sprite details. Though I will say I wasn’t a huge fan of the ost, which really sucks because I think this game’s presentation would have been perfect if the ost was better :/. I liked a few tracks but none were very impressionable.

Gameplay wise, the game was really fun though it really started to get repetitive afterwards. I don’t mind recycling the same 8 stages between all the characters, but I wish the mid/end bosses would be different for each character! Especially the mid bosses, good lord a lot of them were SO annoying and I absolutely did not enjoy having to fight them 5 times over fucking frost ben. 

ANYWAY I know my original favourite list gameplay wise before the sixth book was Cornelius > Oswald > Velvet > Gwendolyn >>> Mercedes, but you know what, after playing the sixth book, it is time to scrap that. 

My favourite list now is probably Cornelius > Mercedes > Velvet > Gwendolyn > Oswald. 

Sorry Oswald, you were fun to play in your own story but you absolutely suck at aerial combat and hitting a single target which is pretty much all the bosses! I take back everything I said about hating Mercedes’ play style because she is my goddess.  I literally did the boss rush with Mercedes to honor my girl who was done so damn dirty by canon and my thumbs were sore af afterwards.

Anyway now that I’m truly done this game, I’m gonna go mope in a corner from post game depression. But not the typical post game depression that settles in because I’m sad I’m done a game. I am glad to be done Odin Sphere, but I’m gonna be depressed for days because of HOW DIRTY MY GIRL AND HER FROG WERE DONE.

[icharchivist]

I'm really worried about Leorio in this arc. Like he hasn't seen half the shit Kurapika's been through and not even a quarter of half the shit Killua and Gon have been through. And this arc seems like/was stated to be even worse than the chimera ant arc? He's gonna get thrust in the middle of all of it! Thought it might also be his time to shine. Kurapika's def gonna get hurt and while he can heal himself normally he won't be able to if he's passed out/weakened from emperor time.

Yeee definitly agreed. Some shits are going to go down and that’s going to be hard.

I love Kurapika with all my heart but tbh I really wanted this arc to be more Leorio centric. I’m still a bit frustrated we didn’t get much of him, but I think the arc can set up a few things for him now if the storyline takes it.

and if it does? Leorio is going to suffer.

The thing is that, I think the main four are complementary in a sort of way when it comes to their respective trauma. Gon’s was dormant and truly kicked in in the CA arc when everything happened to Kite. He actively tried to confront that trauma and it ended badly. Killua’s was always kinda there and is still there, without exactly being addressed directly by Killua - he’s slowly recovering without exactly realizing it since it’s just by being away from a toxic environment that he’s doing better.Kurapika's trauma is still vivid and active and he’s completely aware of it, and he deals with it with the most unhealthy ways possible, and like Gon he tries to confront him.

If we go by that logic, Leorio’s trauma happened officially pre-canon with the death of his friend, and he had tried to recover as much as possible in the most healthy ways (how he’s becoming a doctor to prevent this loss to happen again). 

Out of the Four, it’s true Leorio is the one who suffered the least, and he’s the one who moved on from the trauma that kickstarted his plotline - as much as we can say, he recovered. 

Which is in itself a good theme when it comes down to it, but since it’s not exactly exploited by the narrative, it’s not exactly obvious and I doubt it was meant to be a point in itself but more a set up.

If it is a set up, we saw already a bit of payoff thus far. The multiple times he worred about Kurapika before the end of the York New Arc and grew concerned was one part, and his direct reaction to almost losing Gon was extremely frightening for him. It’s eventually what led him to ask the Zodiacs if they could find a way to get to Kurapika. 

I think that, at this point of the story, Leorio is more worried for his friends than ever. In the begining of the story he mostly focuses on his goal, becoming a doctor in order to be able to prevent the harm that could happen to people, but he ended up feeling extremely guilty in the Election arc where, after all this studying, he still wasn’t there when his friends were suffering, and he couldn’t have done anything to prevent it - and now again he was powerless.

Even when Gon wakes up Leorio still feels guilty for not having been there when all those troubles with Killua and Gon happened - he mentions it especially when Gon mentions the “horrible things” he said to Killua, which means more than saving his life, Leorio wanted to have been here to prevent all those bad things to happen, to even talk with them if possible.

Which is imo why he tried to reach out for Kurapika a bit more and ended up asking the Zodiac for a favor - because he wasn’t there previously and his friends ended up near death. And it’s all good to be able to help people, but if you’re not there when it happens, what’s the point?

I’m still a little unsure about that because as much as i love Leorio caring for his friends, I would have loved a more “Leorio-centric” narrative, but as the story is going on, I wonder if the catalyst won’t be even more harm happening to his closed ones and eventually re-traumatizing him, and having him try to do something about it.

That’s why I’ve kinda been thinking that Kurapika may not die but will be badly harmed by the end of the arc and it may bring oil on the fire for Leorio. But at the same time i’m still a bit doubtful, because a repetitive narrative can be either extremely clever as parallelism, or downright stupid because it’s basically the same thing. But it’s been in the back of my mind for a while, since it would find a place among Leorio’s themes in general.

Personally, I would wish to see him more involved with the Zodiacs and uses his political position as a means to an end. I would love to see more of his training too, but I don’t have any precise idea of where it could go from that point on in order to explore that.

All i still wish for though, is that - Leorio is supposed to be busy on the lower levels of the ship. Kurapika is dealing with the princes now, but Leorio is down there, far from the political fighting.

Mizai had said that riots started happening on the lower levels, and I want to know if it’s going to bring somewhere, especially with Leorio who’s after all, working in that aera. It would be an opportunity to open up a plot line for him.

If we can’t have a totally centric Leorio arc like I wish, there’s still the fact the Troupe and Hisoka are also on those lower levels. At best, Leorio could get involved because he knows them and can try to come up with ways to limitate the damages (also it could also finally explore why Hisoka took an interest on him in the Hunter Exam by having those two at least having a conversation.). At worst, if it’s not entierely Leorio-centric, he could be worried that learning the Troupe is on board would be of harm for Kurapika and try to deal with it for it.

Regardless, I still believe the arc will be divided in, well, 3 for now. First part was the introduction we saw so far, until the departure of the boat, second would be the Succession War and everything happening on the Boat to the Dark Continent. Lastly, the Exploration of the Dark Continent itself.

I think it may be why the likes of Ging and Pariston hadn’t been seen again since the Succession War sub-arc started. The introduction would have set the players for the following arcs, and the Dark Continent exploration would be a complete different story.

Kurapika’s entiere purpose for participating in that arc is the Succession War (which again is one of the reason I think he’ll be out of commission by the end of this pat). Leorio, however, promised to help alongside Cheadle with every means he could, and I believe it might be that he’ll therefore be a more major player in the Exploration of the Dark Continent itself.

Whenever it would be to further his own storyline, which i really hope for, or to help wounded friends (after all, one of the wonders of the Dark Continent includes a rice that makes you life longer, that would come handy), i think Leorio would have more of a plotline in the Dark Continent Itself.

(especially even more if the Dark Continent would head up into a commentary about collonialism the way the CA arc had a commentary about war, and that I think (really take it with a grain of salt bc it’s something i’ve been thinking to myself for a while) that therefore Nanika’s powers could have been a forshadow of the commentary itself - for your selfish gain you will only get suffering, a suffering the next people involved, regardless of their own intend, will pay even harder, but if you’re there because you want to help, if you work it out of love, either toward the land/the person or toward the people you’re trying to help, you may find a welcome. I think it was stated that the guardian of the DC wouldn’t let a lot of people in, and we saw the scientific team talking about the DC only see horrors from the people who came back - yet apparently Don Freecss, who embrassed and loved the new land, could benefits from its goodness.)(and i’m completely overanalysing so don’t take that part any seriously until we get any confirmation, because for now we don’t know anything.)

Also the Zodiac are planning on letting all the people on the Boat (aside from those who are actively working on the exploration of the dark continent) into an Unknown Continent, I suppose eventually a few stuff could happen there, at least as it would come to organize the people who will be brought there.

I’m really scared for what’s to come though because ye, it seems to be going in a dark path, and things are going to get tense. And I worry too that Leorio’s “lack of drama” (for lack of better word) will eventually backlash on him getting even worse on his head.

The problem is that so far the most I can think about is him reacting to his friends and... While on one way I consider it to be in character, and it’s not a shame for character to be dedicated to their friends (a lot of Killua’s storyline centers a lot more around helping Gon that it does on his own goal, textually so. And Leorio’s goal is, as a mean to an end, a way to help people, among those, his friends.). 

On the other, I would love a storyline that would explore much more about Leorio, first because I really want to see him evolve and see him going through stuff, and second because I don’t want to hear anything about how he’s not interesting or useless or any Bad Word Of The Month people use on him. And the sad truth is that people who’s goal are usually really “caring” centric are often sidelined, both by the narrative and the fandom, more than once.

So in recap, i do think he’ll get involved in the plotline and he will end up getting in danger in one way or another. But I also believe he will be more involved either with the Zodiac or with the Exploration, and maybe with the Riots on the boat, which could be an excellent opportunity to explore much, much more of him. Even if you have to use other people’s suffering to come there, i just wish at least it wouldn’t break him.

I’m still hopeful for Leorio’s involvement and story arc, but ye, there’s no way it will happen without suffering. Brace for it.

All of that being said, there’s still a lot this arc has to offer and Togashi had always managed to surprise us in one way or another, and he always added stuff to the scenario that we couldn’t exactly anticipate. Notice that all I say is my overanalysis of current information that might be completely wrong after a next update because of new elements. I totally believe Togashi can be completely misleading, and that he will bring the story where it has to be brought and that it will be interesting.  But we can’t predict it, even with all the amount of overinterpretation one can use.

Take care!!

[scriptscribbles]

I know you didn't reblog it but I saw an ask post on my dash about "5 things you'd change about a TV show/book/fandom if you could" and it seemed like something you may like doing sooooo (1/2)

I give you: Davies Who, Moffat Who, Sherlock, Game of Thrones, ASoIaF (as a separate 5 things to the show), Star Wars, aaaaand Class for good measure. Have fun! 😉

Thanks, anon! This sounds fun!

Davies Who 

Donna remembers. I don’t care how. Just, not this violation of her agency.

Use Donna to call Ten’s hubris out.

Kill Queen Victoria. It was the original plan for series 2, and it works far better for the story arc. The whole thing is about consequences for Ten and Rose and their behavior, them creating Torchwood through their irresponsibility, but as is I think it lacks the sting.

Have Rose not end up with the Doctor. I know, they’ve got star-crossed true love and all that. But I think part of what made them compelling was that they were so gleefully, ignorantly doomed. They were grinning and laughing and flirting from battlefield to battlefield and there’s a wonderful contrast in that. But they also need to face the consequences. I think something like Hell Bent for them would be better, something pushing Rose to realize that it’s in her best interest to leave him even as it breaks her own heart. I think the parallel world stuff is good, though, particularly since Jackie ends happy.

Give Mickey and Martha their own stories in their episodes. Let them be appreciated more for their own strength rather than sidelined by the Doctor’s dismissive attitude. And, uh, don’t have them randomly in a relationship out of nowhere. Build it up or don’t do it. Also, have Martha remain a Doctor rather than a soldier.

Moffat Who

I hate calling for monster returns, but a story of something like the Mara for Amy in series 7A or 6B. Something to suggest the trauma she’s had and the abandonment through surreal imagery. Stuff like Asylum of the Daleks or The God Complex acknowledges it well, but I want more. It’d be even better if she realizes she’s being taken over early but struggles to tell the Doctor or Rory because she’s afraid of them dismissing her. Moffat’s really good at inside head stories so it’d work well I think, particularly if they got Hurran in for it like so many in that era did.

Show us River’s wives. Clara and Jane Austen. Canton’s husband. I know these things are incidental to the plot, but the representation means so much more when you can see it. I love it as it is but I do think more is called for and is a reasonable request.

Cast something other than white people in The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People. Like, I think it’s a really underrated script, but a story about the plight of the oppressed needs a diverse cast, and it just utterly fails that.

Paternoster spinoff. Let it be the SJA to Class’ Torchwood, eh? They lend themselves so much to silly adventures, and they provide amazing representation. Only hurdle I could see is in their heavy makeup work, but I’m sure there’s ways around it, like Strax wearing the Sontaran helmet or Vastra her veil.

Get Davies back for an episode. I know Moffat’s tried, but, like, try harder. Please?

Sherlock

Make the nature of Irene’s sexuality and her attraction to Sherlock clearer because that discourse is hell

Reduce the quantity of not-gay jokes. They do make sense in acknowledging a long history of speculation and I don’t think they need to be excised entirely, but there is a bit too much

Kill John instead of Mary. It’d change up the shape of series 4 a fair bit, particularly given Mary has far less aversion to killing and would probably make quicker work of Eurus’ puzzles, but there’s gotta be stuff to be done with that. Perhaps her not being willing to kill anymore after seeing John shot? That could be interesting. I dunno. I just feel like, good as series 4 was, there’s a better version where John takes Mary’s place and Mary John’s.

More Sally. I know the actress was unavailable for series 3, but it’s a huge blow in diversity to a show that has basically none.

Cut The Blind Banker.

Game of Thrones

Get rid of all straight white men in the writing staff. Let me be clear, there is nothing inherently bad about someone being straight, white, or a man. But as there is so much ignorance towards intersectional issues in a text that needs to be aware of and critiquing them (something Martin generally does well in the books and is sort of a main point of the series), that needs to be shaken up.

Stannis would never burn Shireen and that was the dumbest plotting decision ever. No. Just no. Now, his wife, she would. Melisandre would. His soldiers would. But he wouldn’t. Seeing him pressured to burn his daughter or else the troops will leave him for not being sufficiently devoted to the red god could be a good way of keeping the beat while removing the out-of-character side to it. But as it is it just does not function. At all.

More of Sam’s book scenes. The show gets a bit too fixated on the upsetting material, upping torture and violence to extreme levels, when some of the strongest material is in the quieter character work. Sam and Gilly taking the boat south is one of those.

A different direction for Sansa. I’m not saying keep her in the Vale and out of the plot, I get why that’s an issue. But don’t subject her to Ramsay. Or to rape. Actually, too much Ramsay is easily one of the show’s biggest problems. They seem to think he’s compelling because he’s awful, but instead he’s just awful.

Make Dorne the planners like they are in the books. The show has gotten so much drama out of the likes of Littlefinger and Varys, surely the plotting of Dorne like in the books could make for excellent television. I’m not saying it needs to be the same as it was in the books, there are changes for a reason. But they were changed in the show to the most ridiculous and incoherent thing yet.

ASoIaF

Cut characters/plotlines. Yes, they all have thematic points to make. No, that does not make them all good storytelling. Many of the strands could be condensced, combined, or cut entirely. Not to say the show is the best example of that, just that there is sound logic in changing it because it just doesn’t flow as a story.

If you have to keep alluding to the sexual violence and critiquing it, please muster more sympathy for the victims. Would it hurt, for example, to have a PoV chapter for Shae, right at the end, so we know who she is? Or for Jeyne to get some agency rather than focusing just on Theon?

Have some victories. So many of the plotlines are subversions of classic narratives, like with Robb or Quentyn or Ned’s downfalls. But there comes a point when it gets too repetitive. There’s other twists stories can take that also build in the drama of the world. And if they’re so important to subvert, a standalone novella might be a better approach. For now the amount of these dead-end plots clutters an already chaotic series to make the pacing turgid and the overall scope confusing. Plus, the basic pleasure of telling a story involves victories as well as twists and horrific fates. I know this series is about subverting those pleasures, but it should do that by also finding new pleasures in unexpected places.

Deliver on teased developments. I know a lot of that’s a problem because A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons are transitional pieces to get the characters in the right place after the climactic events of A Storm of Swords, but it means after five very long books we are still reading setup for things we have been expecting for literal thousands of pages, with new characters dropping in for even more setup. It makes the books frustrating to read at times. And saving all the shocking twists in all the storylines for the end of each of the books just makes it even tougher going.

More of the original cast. The series keeps adding in new characters, and while many of them are indeed interesting, it’s frustrating when Sansa, Jon, Daenerys, and Arya’s arcs are all grinding to a halt and their chapters become increasingly spread out. At the very least, if you’re going to keep adding PoV characters, do it like, say, Brienne was done. Have them expand from a prominent character’s storyline and then branch off into their own. Like, I love Jon Connington, but the man is utterly disconnected from basically everything. And there are so many disconnected plotlines now that many of them barely move at all.

Star Wars

Erase every racial stereotype alien

Poe kisses Finn on the forehead or something while he’s unconscious in The Force Awakens. Maybe an “I love you.” I need it for reasons.

No kid!Anakin or kid!Anakin flirting with Padme.

Either make Padme or Obi-Wan the main character of the prequel trilogy. Padme is a more interesting angle to see Anakin lose it from I think, and has better access to the political storyline Lucas clearly wants to tell. And Obi-Wan gets a lot of the most compelling material, his plot in Attack of the Clones in particular feeling like a hint of a far better film.

Cut the Bodhi interrogation stuff toward the beginning of Rogue One. Just have the pilot talked about a lot like they do and have them not actually meet him until the cell. Because as is, he breaks up the first act’s pacing quite badly and distracts too long from Jyn’s story.

Class

Less dialogue. I love a lot of the dialogue, but the show really needs more showing and letting the actors emote.

Make the two-parter one part. As it is the pacing just does not work at all.

Put Detained before the heart stuff. At the moment, the characters take too long to come into focus, not really doing so until Detained. It’s a good opportunity to take an already dysfunctional group, identify their flaws and tensions, and make that a focus of the series earlier on.

A different approach to the Shadowkin. Commit to an approach. Are they comedically rubbish? Terrifying menaces? A parody of toxic masculinity? An othered evil species? They don’t quite hit right and that hurts the plot arc. Also, their voices are edited poorly and that makes them hard to hear.

Promote the damn thing. Air it in a reasonable way in a reasonable hour when people will actually see it. Don’t just cut it loose and expect the Doctor Who brand will save it. If it utterly fails to get renewed, it’s down to how poorly it was promoted.

[scriptshrink]

Critique of a Certain Cracked Article - The Bad

Oh boy.  So we’ve seen the myths about mental illness that Cracked got right, and the ones that were partially correct but mostly wrong. Now we’ve reached the ones that legitimately reduced the Shrink to incoherent screaming.

Lock and load, Shrinky-dinks. I’m taking no prisoners.

[Gif: The Winter Soldier loads a grenade into an attachment on his assault rifle while murderstrutting.]

[Cracked image: The charming psychopath is everywhere // Pictures of Negan, Walter White, Dexter, and Loki // They won’t stay charming for long. So many TV and movie villains are portrayed as charming ladies’ men. Even Walter White’s sex life improves after he starts cooking meth. There’s Negan, The Joker, Dexter, Patrick Bateman, Billy Loomis. The truth is, antisocial personality disorder causes a laundry list of symptoms that make a person impossible to be in a relationship with. // source is from the mayo clinic]

...Why is Loki up there? I am confused.

Anyways, people with antisocial personality disorder are very good at manipulating people. They can be very fucking charming, and very fucking good at it.

And I hate the phrase “laundry list”.  Guess what?  You don’t have to have ALL THOSE SYMPTOMS LISTED to get diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder.

You just need three.  Let’s pull three from the list of criteria, shall we?

They lie, manipulate and con others for their own personal gain.

They’re impulsive and don’t plan ahead.

They are consistently irresponsible, don’t fulfill things expected of them, and / or can’t hold down a steady job.

I mean, that certainly describes an asshole, but “a person impossible to be in a relationship with”? Hardly.

[Cracked image - Adrian Monk suffers from OCD. // picture of Adrian Monk hiding behind his turtleneck // Actually, no, he really doesn’t. It’s easier to remember what Monk is not afraid of than what he is. He lists germs, needles, milk, death, snakes, mushrooms, heights, crowds, elevators, public speaking, and airplanes, to name a few. The thing is, that’s not obsessive-compulsive disorder. Those are phobic disorders, which are not related to OCD at all. Actual OCD involves a crippling dependence on repetition and rituals.// source is chicago tribune]

OKAY.  First off. A fear of public speaking IS NOT A PHOBIA. It is a part of Social Anxiety Disorder (Performance Only).

Also, OCD does not fucking REQUIRE compulsions. YOU CAN HAVE ONLY OBSESSIONS AND STILL HAVE OCD. (See my demystifying post here!)

AND GUESS WHAT?  ADRIAN MONK HAS COMPULSIONS.

Performing a ritual because of a fear (such as excessive cleaning / handwashing due to a fear of germs) is a COMPULSION.

Look at literally the first time you see Monk IN THE FUCKING OPENING CREDITS OF THE SHOW.

[Gif - Adrian Monk is walking down a street, and touches a parking meter without looking at it.]

You’d think, because he’s so germophobic, that he would avoid touching those things. NOPE. He has a compulsion to TOUCH ALL THE POLES that he passes when he’s walking.

Sure, he has phobias.  BUT HE HAS OCD TOO.

One last note. 

Those are phobic disorders, which are not related to OCD at all.

Hmm. Yes, that’s correct. Phobias are anxiety disorders, and OCD has its own category. I’m not sure why this is sticking out to me so much. But I’m sure it’ll be important later.

[Cracked picture - In Fight Club, the narrator has a split personality. // image of the narrator and Tyler Durden // That’s not how multiple personalities work. Those with disassociative identity disorder don’t just wake up and realize they’ve been living as another person. They don’t always know about the other personalities, and don’t black out and live as another person. Amnesia and fugue states do happen, but what you see in movies is writers combining them to suit their narrative.// Source is from mayo clinic.]

[Gif of Hades nearly being literally consumed with fiery rage, but calming himself down saying “Okay, fine, fine. I’m cool. I’m fine.]

It’s “dissociative”, not “disassociative”. We’ve had this talk in the last part, Cracked. Do a single goddamn google search so you know how to spell the goddamn names of things.

This part of the takedown comes courtesy of Maxx, one of @dinosaursindisarray’s alters:

DID isn't personalities, multiple or split or anything. That’s not just outdated terminology, it's also an incorrect description, because the alters aren't personalities at all, they're functionally other people.

“Those with DID don't just wake up and realize they've been living as another person.”

k, well, sometimes, they do.

Like, the person might not realize it as it goes on, but then something triggers an 'aha' moment (for some people) that make the symptoms more overt and noticeable, either to the person experiencing them or other people.

There could be a trigger that suddenly floods the person with enough memories to realize what's going on - memories of trauma, or bleedthrough from other alters, memories of that alter being out, etc, and then the person has enough to do research and be like 'something is /wrong/'

[For us], it was like, one day after a lot of stressful shit built up over a couple of weeks, I came out instead of Month and because I was tired and cranky. Her friends noticed and asked about it, I told the truth, and after she came back, her friends were like 'so this thing happened, what the fuck' and Month's blackouts and dissociation started making more sense and she was able to contact a professional to be like 'what the fuck is going on'.

The initial realization did happen sort of at once, which isn't entirely uncommon, especially with psych knowledge more readily available to people. (that can lead to people mistaking shit and thinking they have DID when they don't, cause misinfo, but it's still easier for people who do have it to figure out what the fuck is up and seek help than it was before).

“They always know about the other personalities"

The entire point of DID and OSDD is to keep shit hidden. Keep trauma memories hidden from the everyday life of the kid so they can function and not fucking die. Keep symptoms away from others around the kid so that they aren't abused worse. So this shit is supposed to be kept separate, and if you always know about what's going on, then it’s not happening.

"and don't black out and live as another person"

Yeah. Some people do. Like, full memory blackouts while another alter is out might not happen all the time or with every alter, but it can totally happen with DID. Not OSDD as much, I think, but still.

There are certain alters that Month has NO memory overlap from. Others that she only gets one or two things, others she remembers most of it like watching a movie, others that she remembers it like she was there but really out of it, etc. It's not necessary for every alter every time to be DID, but if there's any amnesia and blackouts between alters (and with trauma memories) then it's DID criteria.

"Amnesia and fugue states do happen"

Yeah, amnesia is that blackout thing you just said didn't happen. Might not be a full blackout but like, amnesia. not remembering. sometimes that means blackouts.

And fugue states are dissociative, but that's a separate thing from DID. Can it happen to someone with DID? Yeah. Does someone have to have DID for it to happen? Nah.

Writers do combine and add shit and dramatize the fuck out of the wrong things (see: m. night) to suit their needs rather than maintaining fact, but yeah. everything else is p much wrong

Thanks again to Maxx from @dinosaursindisarray for taking over for that one. That gave me a nice little respite! Now let’s take a look at the last one, surely it can’t be THAT bad...

[Cracked image - In Black Swan, Nina suffers from a host of conditions. // image of Nina // Real people don’t have them all at once. The film gave Nina the ballerina a cocktail of disorders, including anorexia, bulimia, cutting, and obsessive compulsive disorder, then had her descend into psychosis. The problem is that they’re incompatible conditions. People with psychosis lose touch with reality. Those with anxiety disorders like OCD and anorexia are too in touch with reality. // source is abc news]

[Gif of the only thing that can adequately convey my rage: Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever created, exploding and forming a gigantic mushroom cloud]

Okay okay okAY OKAY OKAY.

The only way I can get through this is to go from minor things to major ones. 

You are right about one single thing here, Cracked. You can’t be diagnosed with anorexia and bulimia at the same time. Congratulations. If someone has symptoms of both disorders, it’s either Anorexia with the Binge Eating / Purging subtype, or OSFED (other specified feeding/eating disorder, formally known as EDNOS - eating disorder not otherwise specified).

Okay. Next up. Unless you’re counting when Nina stabs herself with the glass shard at the very end of the movie, Nina never cuts herself. She scratches herself. But I’ll give you the smallest amount of the smoking ashes left of my benefit of the doubt and say you meant “self-mutilation” here, not cutting.

Those with anxiety disorders like OCD and anorexia

OCD AND ANOREXIA ARE NOT ANXIETY DISORDERS.

Besides, you just fucking said with the Monk one that phobias are completely unrelated to OCD!! PHOBIAS ARE AN ANXIETY DISORDER!!! AT THE VERY LEAST KEEP YOUR FUCKING BULLSHIT LIES CONSISTENT!!!!!!!

On that note, where the fuck did you get OCD from in the first place??? There’s only two things I can think of that even vaguely qualify. 

Nina’s compulsive scratching. But guess what???  THAT’S NOT OCD. THAT’S EXCORIATION (AKA SKIN PICKING) DISORDER.

Nina’s compulsive exercising. HELLO WHY YES THIS IS A SYMPTOM OF ANOREXIA.

People with psychosis lose touch with reality. Those with anxiety disorders like OCD and anorexia are too in touch with reality.

yhghgtfrrghyujuhnukjfgdcghgtfyughyhhjnyh

Sorry about that. I repeatedly smashed my head into the keyboard.

But oh my fucking god.

THE WHOLE GODDAMN PROBLEM WITH OCD AND ANOREXIA IS THAT THEY’RE NOT CONNECTED TO REALITY.

One of the fucking specifiers for OCD is WITH ABSENT INSIGHT OR DELUSIONAL BELIEFS, which means the person in question fully believes that their illogical obsessions are true, you fuckwads!

[[Shrink’s edit - a “specifier” is a possible subcategory of a mental illness. The DSM-5 also two other possible specifiers for OCD: “With good to fair insight”, meaning the individual recognizes that their disordered beliefs are definitely or probably not true; and “With poor insight”, where the individual thinks their disordered beliefs are probably true. It is a grading of severity, not a requirement.]]

Let’s look at a some fucking case studies here. Go ahead. Read them. I’ll wait.

Tell me, Cracked. Do these sound like people who are MORE IN TOUCH with reality?! Will a person really be transported into a mirror dimension if they turn on a light switch??? If they touch something, will their ‘power’ be stolen unless they touch it again multiple times??

Also, is someone with severe anorexia who still thinks they aren’t thin enough even as they’re FUCKING STARVING THEMSELVES TO ACTUAL, LITERAL DEATH “too in touch with reality,” Cracked???

[[Another edit: most people with OCD and anorexia are not at this extreme. But it is far more accurate to say that these disorders involve losing some touch with reality than saying that they are ‘too in touch’ with reality. Seriously though, what the fuck does “too in touch” with reality even mean???]]

Oh, and it’s not like there have been studies that don’t just say that eating disorders and psychosis can co-occur, but that they might be FUCKING LINKED TO EACH OTHER!!!

And now, my esteemed Shrinky-dinks, we come to the most horrendous part of this absolutely atrocious dumpster fire of an article. 

Real people don’t have them all at once.

Real people don’t have them all at once.

Real people don’t have them all at once.

ARE YOU FUCKING SHITTING ME?!?!?!?!? 

Guess what, fuckfaces?  

COMORBIDITY IS EXTREMELY COMMON.  

Let’s look at this one study of almost 2,500 women with severe eating disorders. Guess what they fucking found?

97% had more than one fucking mental illness.

Ninety fucking seven percent.

[Image: “I made a chart since Cracked writers apparently can’t fucking read.” // a pie chart with a very small portion labeled Only ED, and the overwhelming majority labeled More than one mental disorder.]

Schizophrenia and eating disorders may not be a super common combination, BUT IT FUCKING EXISTS.  

PEOPLE CAN FUCKING HAVE MORE THAN ONE MENTAL ILLNESS!! 

BUT I GUESS IT DOESN’T MATTER TO YOU SINCE THEY’RE SO CRAZY THEY’RE NOT REAL PEOPLE, YOU ABLEIST FUCKING SACKS OF FUCKING SHIT.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGHHHH

[Gif - The Hulk fucking annihilating Loki by repeatedly smashing him into the ground, which is what I wish I could be doing to the writers.]

Concluding Thoughts

If I seem calmer at this point, it’s because I wrote it before the rest of this article. I have no doubt future Shrink will still be screaming into the void long after the queue finally gets to this post.

Let’s take a look at how Cracked introduced this article.

It's a losing fight, going up against the myths pop culture perpetuates. But, dammit, someone has to do it.

That someone is obviously not you. Your writers are willfully ignorant and unable to do even a simple google search of the names of the things they’re writing about to make sure they got the spelling right. 

You have failed to do the fucking most basic research possible. 

A monkey in a library could do a better job than you, as there’s an actual chance that in randomly throwing pieces of its own shit, a book might be knocked off a shelf and the monkey might fucking glance in its direction.

Because left unchecked, people go around spewing every dumb thing they learn from clickbait articles movies and shows that are really just using mental illnesses to advance a plot and make a buck from pageviews, instead of teach us anything useful.

You made a few typos. I fixed them for you.

So, dig in, because it's time drop a knowledge bomb on your ass.

How fucking dare you. 

You are not “dropping a knowledge bomb” on us. This article is nothing more than a fucking whoopie cushion. We sit down, all excited to see myths about mental illness being exploded, but are instead given a bunch of hot air that sounds like people’s ass cheeks flapping together.

Fuck you, @cracked.

I hope your pageviews tank. I hope you have to take on so many advertisers that your readers can’t even see your content anymore. I hope no one ever submits to your ‘contests’ again, forcing you to have a staff member make up all the entries for you. I hope your heads get so stuck up your own asses that you don’t even notice that your website has been spreading malware to your readers like the cancerous bullshit your content truly is.

Oh. Wait. 

Like my torment and suffering? Support me on Patreon.

[project-two-five-zero-one]

Games I Played in 2016 - Batman: The Telltale Series (PS4)

I am what could maybe - generously - be called a modest Batfan. I don’t have any powerful childhood attachment to the character and mythos; I’ve only read a couple of the more iconic graphic novels; I hated the Christopher Nolan movies; even my exposure to the DCAU is mostly by way of sporadically catching Batman Beyond and Justice League on Toonami. But I do like Batman - if anything my appreciation for Batman is growing with age, and with appreciation for its symbolism. Of late I’ve developed a real fondness for the kind of tragic archetype epitomized by the darker, more ambivalent portrayals of Bruce Wayne: these romantic pop-cultural portrayals of tortured, duty-bound masculine identities borne out of trauma, individualist personae built in response to a world of random violence and chaos antithetical to their very existence. (see also: my resurgent fondness for Berserk, my crankish stubborn insistence that Death Wish is a misunderstood masterpiece about violence and grief.) Batman’s appeal taken at face value may be as some kind of quasi-fascist power fantasy, but his longevity comes from tapping into this deeper narrative of tragic masculinity. Also, he has cool gadgets. So it’s no surprise that demand is high for a video game that truly encapsulates the Batman Experience. 

According to The Internet, if I want the definitive Batman game experience I can do no better than the Batman Arkham (hereafter “BamHam”) series. Having played all of the first game, a bit of the second one and a large portion of the handheld spinoff, I can answer this recommendation with a resounding “fuck that”. BamHam Asylum is one of the dullest, most uninspired games I’ve ever played. The design is a hodgepodge of second-rate elements (combat, stealth, puzzle-solving, backtracking, skill tree progression) laid out with minimal cohesion across an endless series of gray industrial corridors. Rocksteady Studios almost certainly designed the game by coming up with a checklist of “stuff Batman can do”, developing a stultifyingly literal-minded mechanical representation of each bullet point, and shoving it arbitrarily into a likely pre-designated number of relevant points in the game. You have the Scan Visor from Metroid Prime, but with less diverse environments or interesting interactions; the environment-manipulating tools from Zelda, but with only the most superficial lock-and-key mechanics from those games (“there’s an X here, so use Y”); stealth like Splinter Cell or MGS, but without the deep toolbox of possible NPC and environment interactions that make those games interesting; storytelling via (*yaaaaawn*) audio logs because after BioShock came out every AAA action game on the planet was obsessed with audio logs; big stagey setpiece boss fights like Metal Gear, only again with far less mechanical depth and also less narrative depth too, because instead of developing any of the characters with interesting dialogue or a coherent narrative structure the game relies on the audience’s prior knowledge of these characters to fill in the dramatic gaps and takes near-constant narrative detours to force in one more iconic villain with a truckload of backtracking-based fetch quests to pad out the game length. The game’s most fleshed out and widely praised mechanic is its “free flow” combat system, and it’s a sham: one button to attack, mostly automated character movement, and a maddening facade of “difficulty” imposed by punishing the player for zoning out and mashing that one attack button eight times in a row instead of seven, or what have you - you know, the thing every beat-em-up constantly encourages you to do. Yes, it’s a truly masterful combat mechanic whose difficulty hinges on whether the player can resist becoming too mindlessly ensconced in its own repetitiveness to pay attention to their every move.   

I’m convinced that the widespread praise for Arkham Asylum, and thus the ensuing Arkham franchise, came from comic book fans so gleeful that a licensed Batman game - with Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill in it and everything! - was merely MEDIOCRE rather than ATROCIOUS that they were ready to praise it on high as something it fundamentally was not. What makes this especially painful is that, narratively, the game doesn’t feel like a good encapsulation of Batman either, or at least any Batman stories that are actually good. Stripped of the five zillion pointless detours mentioned above, the basic plot is: Joker springs a trap. Joker has an eeeeevil plan in the works. Batman beats up a lot of guys. Batman beats up the Joker. The Joker’s plot is foiled. The End. No character development. No social commentary, subtle or otherwise. No deeper exploration of Bruce or Joker’s psychology. No philosophizing about law versus chaos. No zesty one-liners, even; the dialogue fizzles at every turn, and while it’s been too long since I’ve played to recall a specific example (suffice to say it’s not memorable) you can always go and watch the cutscenes on Youtube if you want proof. The writing equates “dark and gritty” with characters saying “bitch” and “hell” and Batman beating the shit out of people in slow motion and a bunch of nameless NPCs being slaughtered. The characterizations are trite to the point of being stereotypical: the thugs you beat up all talk with the same cartoonish Brooklyn patois and indicate no motivation beyond being “evil” and “criminal” in some intangible, essential, and - evidently - irrelevant way.   

Am I asking too much from a video game plot? Have I been spoiled by my exposure to the Batman mythos coming predominantly from Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Tim Burton, and the writers in the DCAU who aren’t Paul Dini? Gliding off of rooftops and punching people repeatedly are prime examples of video game actions that can and should be fun - and there are plenty of other games to show us that (Just Cause and God Hand, respectively). But I’m pretty sure what draws people to Batman, as opposed to just any dime-a-dozen superhero, is the characters, the dialogue. There’s a reason, say, Joker is practically obligated to show up in each and every one of Batman’s myriad adaptations, and a reason those adaptations have ranged in style, tone and medium from the Technicolor Adam West camp sagas to last year’s R-rated cartoon adaptation of The Killing Joke (which I thought got more hate than it deserved, but that’s another discussion altogether). A video game defined primarily by traversing empty rooftops and beating indistinct hobos will only ever capture a small fraction of what Batman has to offer. So it’s been long overdue that someone should make a Batman game where narrative is the primary focus, dialogue and abstract choice-making the primary interaction, and the long legacy of Batman films and graphic novels the primary template. And it’s highly fitting that the developer for such a game should be Telltale.   

I’ve been a fan of Telltale and their reinvented brand of “adventure games” ever since I tried the first season of their Walking Dead series on a whim (it came bundled with my PS Vita) and got instantly hooked. I’ve heard frequent allegations that their titles aren’t “real adventure games”, that they’re mechanically shallow, that their much-vaunted systems of choice are illusory since the player can more often determine only HOW plot events happen and not IF they happen. Some of these criticisms likely carry some weight, but I can’t really bring myself to care. I’ve always been attracted to games with a strong narrative component (I’m juuuust old enough to remember when people’s choices for a narrative-driven game experience on consoles were JRPGs or bust) and I’m thrilled that there’s a successful subgenre now of games molded entirely around interactive storytelling, where the writing is actually the selling point, the developer’s most fleshed-out resource in the game, and not just secondary to the mechanics. More importantly - the writing IS the mechanics. This isn’t one of those David Cage abominations, where “cinematic” events play out on screen in accordance with one pretentious manchild’s stunted idea of quality screenwriting, and you occasionally get to press a button. Telltale games constantly bombard the player with active choices - they demand the player’s involvement - and if the majority of those choices are inconsequential, the cleverness of the games’ design lies in the fact that distinguishing the choices with long-term consequences from the ones that are mainly filler is often not an easy task, even in retrospect. (Assuming you play on Minimal Interface mode, as any true roleplayer should.) I played through their Game of Thrones series for the second time last year, and between in-game experimentation and looking in guides I found myself repeatedly surprised by discovering which plot points I could or couldn’t change, and how. Telltale’s products could be compared to Japanese visual novels (a genre that rarely attracts the same kind of backlash in the West, perhaps due to its niche audience), but really they’re more like Choose Your Own Adventure books by way of premium cable dramas - and as someone who has enjoyed the former as a kid and the latter right now, I’m not shy about embracing this inventive synthesis.   

Likely thanks to the lucrative backing of DC Comics and Warner Brothers Entertainment, Batman is Telltale’s most elaborate and polished effort to date. Up to now, even their big-label games have tended to be plagued with technical problems - choppy framerates, graphical glitches, shoddy animations and textures, outright bugs and crashes. Playing on PS4 in 1080p, for the first time I can see a Telltale running smoothly and looking… good. The cel-shaded graphics wear their comic book inspirations on their sleeves, with bold lines and saturated colors that actually look good in motion, and - at least compared with Telltale’s previous work - they’re not overly hampered by framerate problems and glitches. No more of those washed-out flat backgrounds used in Game of Thrones, that look like someone took a still-wet oil painting and splashed it with their own urine. Much is owed here, narratively and mechanically, to Telltale’s previous comic book-based effort The Wolf Among Us, also an easy contender for their best game so far.   

Mechanically, Telltale predictably don’t stray far from their Walking Dead template, but with each new project they take on they find new ways to expand and experiment within the confines of that formula, and Batman hints at some exciting new directions their work might take in future. New “detective” segments are light puzzle challenges which task the player with sussing out clues from a crime scene to reconstruct offscreen events, CSI-style; while they’re a bit lacking in flexibility and occasionally descend into monotonous pixel hunts, it’s a decent idea for a new kind of mechanic that might enable substantive game interaction beyond dialogue choices and QTEs. (Next time, Telltale, include multiple solutions.) QTEs also have some kind of grading system now, where optimal executions charge up a glowing blue meter that does… something. Seriously, I played all the way through the game and never figured out what this actually did. I like the idea, though! Again, if these games are already structured so that different dialogue choices can open up branching paths, what could be the harm in fleshing out the occasional action and puzzle sequences to enable similar flexibility? Any step toward making QTEs an inconsequential gesture meant only to facilitate the illusion of action is another step forward for Telltale’s design model. Already they seem to be pushing ever forward with the flexibility of their narrative structures, with choices in this game seemingly leading to far more diverse outcomes than previous titles - even if this occasionally leads to strange inconsistencies in character (I went out of my way to treat Harvey Dent like a friend, but when the inevitable happens Bruce’s attitude towards him seems to shift irrevocably on a dime). Every new project is another baby step forward for the Telltale crew, and I fully believe that the perfection of the narrative game subgenre they (re)invented is yet to come. The best idea for now: at the very end, the game evaluates not merely your key choices, but the overall tenor and characterization of “your” Bruce Wayne; “honest” or “cunning”, “collaborative” or “individual”, and more. The core exercise of the Telltale model - narratively, mechanically - is roleplaying, the way the player chooses to embody and express their assigned character given the options available. The more attention Telltale pays to reading and deepening this aspect of their games, the better they’ll be. Read how I roleplay, and respond. Evolve the story along the narrative trajectory I’ve chosen to see. Be a good dungeon master.   

So what about the actual story? Telltale takes a curious tack, distancing it as much as possible from previous Batman media and starting from square one in much the same manner as a Hollywood adaptation (from back in the days before the Marvel Cinematic Universe turned every superhero film into a stultifying morass of cross-brand continuity and pandering to comic readers). None of the characters are voiced by actors involved in any previous adaptation - the cast is led by a trio of Funimation veterans (Travis Willingham, Laura Bailey, and the ubiquitous Troy Baker) which can make certain scenes feel more like some kind of Fullmetal Alchemist reunion special than the DCAU. A stable of familiar cast members - Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth, Selina Kyle, Harvey Dent, Oswald Cobblepot - are introduced as though the audience had never met them before, in newer, younger forms freed from the strictures of any existing canon. Bruce and Harvey are best friends (or can be, if you think it makes for a more interesting story); Harvey and Selina are romantically involved; characters may take on roles or become privy to knowledge that directly defies DC tradition. Without giving too much away - since making choices without full knowledge of their possible implications is such a large part of the fun - certain sacrosanct elements of the Batman mythos are fundamentally altered for the purposes of this story in this universe, which has no obligation to tie itself to any other piece of media but itself. Bruce is of the more talkative, emotionally balanced variety than I like him - Telltale goes for dark and gritty, but not to the extent of diving head-on into the Batworld’s central metaphor of fractured identity and trauma - but everything is carefully considered and deliberately placed within the particular vision of the Batcanon Telltale has imagined. Hell, the Joker doesn’t even show up outside of a minor role in the last two episodes, with only limited opportunities to truly ham it up, and if that’s not an indicator of writerly restraint in a Batman adaptation I don’t know what is.   

The overall tone and narrative arc is most clearly influenced by the Nolan films, but the script blessedly has numerous advantages of not being written by the Nolans and/or David S. Goyer. There’s humor, wit and a modicum of self-awareness, for starters (you can crack jokes about the Batsuit and flirt with reporters); verbal exposition and speechifying are kept to reasonable levels, and there’s none of that horrible tendency to try and pass off meaninglessly vague pronouncements delivered in ominous tones as freshman-level “deep” dialogue - thank the fuck Christ. (“Sometimes… the hero… has to be… the villain… to be… our hero…” *BWAAAAAAAM*) Characters are allowed to have personalities - even female characters! Yes, Catwoman has motives and personally traits in this one, personality traits that are clearly identifiable and run deeper than “sexy”, “duplicitous”, and “butt”. (And “Batdick”.) She’s not even the only woman with a speaking role! How about that! So it’s like… if Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy were actually fun to watch, instead of a set of movies about a man in a bat suit punching a man in a clown suit that carry themselves with the portentous dourness of a fucking Bresson flick.   

Ironically, despite nailing tone far better than Nolan and Rocksteady, Telltale has miraculously been granted the freedom to go far grittier than previous adaptations. Some of the crime scenes are outstandingly gruesome; major decisions can result in characters being permanently maimed; Batman can brutalize his enemies to the extreme, if you so choose; and Bruce Wayne spends as much time navigating through seedy political entanglements as chases and brawls. In this monent of American fear and unrest, the mad crucible of Gotham feels like an especially cathartic funhouse mirror in which to gaze (no matter how little sense it makes that Batman’s America seems to have no state or federal government). With the episodic format and TV-like presentation, Telltale has taken the opportunity to fold the Batverse into its obvious match in the gritty crime procedural; no one will mistake it for The Wire or even Sherlock, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find video games doing this particular brand of genre fiction any real justice.   

There’s one more element to the game that I didn’t try, but I wish I did: a new “party mode”, where people can sync a mobile app with the game on console and vote for dialogue choices as a group. It seems like it would either be a dumb, hilarious clusterfuck or a fun and engaging group game, and a totally unique experience either way. For what little my praise is worth, I will always applaud a game for seeking out new ways to facilitate a social experience, capitalizing and expanding upon the inherently participatory nature of games that electrifies people such that millions of people are even willing to watch others play on Youtube (something I’ll never personally understand). The more I can share the act of playing a game, the better.   

So… what are the best Batman books? I’m taking recommendations.

[ckcker]

Spit-Take’s Last Squirt

I look down at the parking lot of the apartment complex, I briefly think the back of a woman’s head walking away from me is the front of a hot guy walking towards me.  I hear a deadbolt unlock and turn and am invited inside.  Crossing the threshold of Rob’s apartment door sinks a throttled prick through my body akin to stumbling into a rusty and bubble-wrapped metal spike apparently for sale in an antique store.  Even as the top door hinge passes by my temple as a snubbed showbiz air kiss there is a flash in my mind of something, unrelated to the physical apartment and also a thing I will never be able to remove, that asks to keep my focus in two places at once.  Between these two places, the feet and the head spitroast me with their perverse negotiations.  My initial trauma is at this point overused as a topic and let’s agree boring to think about; my mind starts to suggest trauma spinoffs instead.  I am given a glass of water by Rob but then ask for a beer as, without asking, my memory gifts me excruciating yet kinkily edited content of my attempts to recover.  One of the best ways to come back from a nervous breakdown, I decided in the aftermath of that notable moment, is to do it very very quickly, ‘few solutions are as correct as speed-processing a massive landmark shift in the perception of reality,’ I had soothed myself in the aftermath.  I was hoping for something shittier than an IPA, I drink the IPA and turn, I notice the back of what I believe is an old woman’s head and body resting on the couch.  

After my  ˹survivable event˼  it was typical for all of the dying to retire inward. I believed I could bring back my life in the same way that people made jokes about being dead inside to prepare for the end of the world.  Alright, the remodeling of total defeat into pragmatic quarantine.  Enough disaster movies had passed, everyone notices catastrophes have entertainment value, I would walk past and look in the glass reflection of a recently opened Thai street food spot run by white ex-skaters, I evaluated my drilled in face and greyed out options, my de-emphasized terror: maybe even I could be entertaining. My original twist on the concept of recovering was to imagine my strength and ability as limitless. To decide I could pre-understand the well-flung implications of my situation, of a mind unable to cope with learning all of the things that are possible.  I wanted to turbo-ravel a lights out unraveling; the poet who wanted to be a cop.  I turn to Rob and say nothing about the apparently older woman, he also says nothing about her, asks, “what kind of music do you like?” before playing an Ace of Base song and I don’t have to answer.  The woman seems to be activated.  Her limbs slide against her torso and she turns to look around the room, then briefly at us but again at the room, then one certain spot on the wall to the right of where we are standing where she settles and says “hi” in a warble expelled as a foehn.    

I return the hi and am introduced to Gail.  I thought of all my failed solutions.  For instance, attending several satellite Occupy Wall Street protests, where discussions of income inequality and widespread mobilization were annotated with shouts, why is there fluoride in our water and end the fed.  One important takeaway involved a large man yelling along to the song being played on the sound system, “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me,” for two repetitions of the lyric before realizing no one else would join him and vanishing into embarrassed aerosol.  A successful protest fixates on a way for everyone to feel more or less the same emotion at a coordinated moment.  A successful protest is very sharply art directed and does not relish the display of rehearsed outrage.  The foot I thought I’d taken out of my ass and put through the door had somehow ended up in some other ass.  Feel it for the first time again.  Though people will regularly re-watch movies only waiting for their favorite lines to be said, it seems they rarely stop to consider protest tactics they have seen before.  I thought I had the patience, the dedication for such things, I tapped out naturally and in gas form. “She needed a place to stay for a bit,” Rob tells me, Gail says nothing but smiles lightly, looking at us in some awesome combo of salivating for a response and indifferent to the fact of being trapped behind twenty successive panes of stained glass.  Tchah, the experience of watching an ancient demon fail an eight week long beginner’s course on improv. “I see,” I conclude, Gail’s expression remains the same.  “Wow…’Beautiful Life’ is such a good song,” Rob says. The song moves to the front. I say, “Yes, I do love ‘Beautiful Life.’”

I had tried walks and not just sometimes but many walks.  Down the city cul-de-sac at a certain time.  Listening to wordless music, this one some sort of ambient dramatization of Eurydice’s botched escape from the underworld, a repetitive melancholy chunnel.  Then a rotation: it becomes Britney from an era when pop turned us around an axis both blingy and higgedly-piggedly-nigh-fucky-wucky, gently increasing the healing concept with each exacting flail, that there may be a consolation for all problems leading up to and including the end of the world.  The consolation was dancing all night.  Of course the time of my walks was twilight.  Fried mindsets gave the music much power as a narrative soundtrack; as I looked at a single branch of a very tall tree overhead and caught in sunset and streetlight, jiggled evocatively by wind, and heard a sort of coincidental despair-organized belch from the buckled gut of the mp3, I attempted to speed things up by trying to lose my mind all of the way.  This did not work, I had to stay somewhere in between.  

I went on more walks alone but never too far from my amazing bed.  It was crucial to be within 30 walking minutes of somewhere unsurveilled where I could lay down and catalogue mysterious headaches, as mysterious headaches had rightfully been selected as the center of my world.  The speed of losing a mind is incredibly hard to measure.  Gail also listens to ‘Beautiful Life’ and clearly does not know what it is, I don’t feel familiar enough with Rob to confront the question of how they know each other, I try:

“Are you two related?”

“No no no, haha,” Rob’s voice enters an excited tone. Gail emerges a glacial grin that, even as it forms one of the most approachable configurations able to be realized on a face, still seems misdirected from the hook of a comforting social cue, “no, I met Gail at a bar last night.  At Tina’s.  She just needs a place to stay for a little.  She just moved back here.”  “I spent many years in Lawrence, with my family,” Gail says.  

“I see.”  

Context clues point to homeless, I ache to know much more, Rob twirls around with unbridled pizazz.  He puts his two arms straight out towards me, “what would — ohhh!!”  He retracts his arms. “I was going to ask if you wanted something to drink.” Gail rests, “but you already have a beer,” and here he must have felt the panic to entertain away a social gaffe by immediately giving a clear-cut logical explanation, “my mind has been wiped away this week.  So much molly…           Well…   good.”  

“Yes.”  

“Yes INDEED hunny. This past weekend just about mummified me, I’ve been in a sarcophagus all WEEK, did you do anything fun?”

“Umm.”

I remembered then I was trying to stop using umm. I was coaching myself to be quite fearless and brave when entering sentences.  The CEO of a major newspaper-then-media company once said, before filming a segment for an in-house spot on the company’s approach to advertising its newly launched free weekly targeting 23-35 y/o young professionals, ‘I’m not an umm guy.’  This dialogue, delivered to the video director who was reminding the CEO to look straight in the camera and avoid using expressions like “umm” and “uhh” since they communicated unpreparedness, nerves or insecurity, revealed in its choppy severity a set of verbal and body language constraints that likely this man thought of all the time in order to conjure his short and long term goals.  Likely he thought of them almost as much as I thought about mysterious headaches.  I had been hired to help craft services for the shoot and spent much of the time sitting against a wall print of a famous basketball player, staring at the glass-walled office and elevators meant to enhance, via the perspective of ‘more space’ given by such architecture, a tech-oriented workplace for the media-damaged graduates.  See-thru offices offer more natural light, the young people of the era seem to enjoy a certain kind of light.  Another two-day job to float me, and an opportunity to rebuild a stomach for being outside of my incredible room.  “I stayed in on Saturday,” then I pause before continuing, “I watched a movie.  A documentary,” which I had watched for 17 minutes before moving to my window to observe the parking lot for 45 minutes, followed by bed.  

Rob seems uncomfortable with this idea, “you should come out with us this weekend. There’s some stuff going on.  Maybe you can come to this super fun party, it’s a queer party.  In fact it’s a conspiracy theory-themed queer party.”  Gail moves her left forefinger a splanch.  “It’s really funny! And good music, people dress up, it’s called……….Femmetrails” there is a pause of expectation which I do not know how to meet and which is ignored “it’s really funny and lots of dancing. My friend Blake hosts it. But in drag.  And, guess what his drag name is” I try to remember: was it a parking lot I observed, or a man in his early 40s masturbating within a fingerprint-shrouded computer screen “Georgia SORROWS.  Gail’s going to come!”  Gail has stopped grinning and seems to be unreachable for the length of a square breath before a small shift in her sitting style punctures the proto-gargoyle droop. “Yes I am going to come” she confirms.  “Yes and you should too,” it appears Rob is attached to the idea.  I clean out my lower mouth with my tongue, with mouth closed.  “That would be, maybe” this seems to be enough of an answer for everyone.  

Rob sits on the ground, I begin to prepare my body to also sit on the ground.  It had been a meat lover’s pizza approach to self-healing.  Kava tea from the pharmacy chain, sugar abstinence, performative meditation, I slipped into nonsensical jogging regimens, coffee abstinence, I walked gently in frozen empty parking lots, I didn’t touch anyone for a full year, “my balls are lost halls,” short term CBT and do-it-yourself biofeedback, waiting for hyperventilation so I could write about it, and all this supported by typical means: substantial daily hard alcohol acceptances and fearless ibuprofen stuffings.  And to heal oneself completely, one must never enlighten others to the full extent of the problem and the drenched map of half-solutions being applied, regularly, in secret.  Yes, I had as much spiritual discipline as a teen in an Intro to Photo class taking b&w photos of homeless people on the street.  I sit down at least four feet away from Rob and twelve from Gail, who in the meantime it has been discovered does not know the story of Amanda Bynes’ breakdown.  She also does not know who Amanda Bynes is.  Neither Rob nor I have any interest in making that clear.  The super gonorrheic minutiae that line and then bedazzle the mental process of a terrified person do not enter conversations as smoothly as quotes from 23 year old cult TV shows canceled after two seasons.  Not a shock, only a condition that makes the thoughts turn ever more crunched, ever more specific and internally bound, glowing with unpopular culture.

[swipestream]

Uncanny Game Feel(ings)

I’m really interested in the types of ways games make me FEEL. In general, I’m less concerned with the plot of a game session, the world it’s in, or even the types of characters I might be able to play, and more invested in whatever kinds of feelings it allows me to play with and analyze after the fact. I interact with most media this way! I feel the same way about movies, tv shows, music, fine art, theater… the most impactful art is the stuff that makes me feel things. Arguably, I think its the most important art.

So how do you design a game toward the feels? Almost all my games have this agenda in them somewhere, but my most recent game that is currently on Kickstarter (til Oct 4th) Something Is Wrong Here is specifically designed to create an emotion based experienced. How did I do this, I know I know you’re on the edge of your seat. Well let me tell you a few tricks I’ve learned along the way, as well as some touchstones for emotional play I’ve experienced in the past.

Emo Games

I’ve played a lot of games in the past ten years or so that have delivered amazing emotional experiences. When I say emotional, I truly mean the full range of emotions, from joy to love to sadness. An obvious one is Monsterhearts! Monsterhearts doesn’t have specific emotional mechanics that go “feel this thing!” but they do encourage emotional play by mimicking the emotional behaviors that arise from those feelings. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you might try to Run Away, or Lash Out, two move options in the game.

 The unspoken thing these moves encourage you to do is roleplay the emotions first, prompting the move.  

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The unspoken thing these moves encourage you to do is roleplay the emotions first, prompting the move. I find that even on this level of emotional roleplaying, if play is focusing on feelings, and my character is feeling them, I tend to feel them too!

A LARP I played a long time ago called Mad About The Boy encouraged emotional play by pairing personality types of the player with the character. This causes a fair bit of bleed, because when roleplaying your character you’re thinking a lot like you’d normally think in everyday life. It’s also an incredibly emotional game, and the most emotional moments tended to arise through guided meditation sequences, where they would ask you to imagine what you would do in the real world if all the men were gone from your life. The concept of this game itself drives emotional experiences… it’s a fantastical feminist thought experiment that posits, what would the world look like without patriarchy? (There’s some gender issues with this thought experiment but that’s already been thoroughly covered elsewhere). It made me look at the world differently after I left. Sometimes all it takes is engagement with a heavy concept.

Most recently, a LARP I played by Brodie Atwater called Here Is My Power Button has an incredible emotional impact on everyone who plays it! Almost everyone cries at the end of the game, and there’s a lot of psychological tools at work in the game to make that happen. Specifically the use of sad music at key moments in the game, the fact that it moves between group scenes of about five people to one on one scenes with individuals, and the specific scenario of giving someone power and then taking it away. It’s brilliantly emotionally manipulative, in the way a good movie can push and pull your feelings toward a sad scene.

Mechanics Of Emotions

I took what I learned from these emotional game experiences (and even more I’m not mentioning here!) and tried to utilize my favorite ones in Something Is Wrong Here. The main techniques that create the most emotion in the game are:

Intentional Bleed. You’re encouraged to play close to home, the facilitator will sometimes switch between calling you your real name and your character name, and before the game begins you’re asked to think about things you’re afraid of in your own life and dreams. What this does is make thin the veil between your character’s experiences in the game, and your own. While it’s up to each player how deep they want to dive into this emotional playing field, the option is there to correlate the character’s feelings with your own.

Emotional Music. I curated the game’s soundtrack to be particularly manipulative at different times in the game. The music plays in the background at key times, sometimes repetitive, sometimes grating, to enhance the feelings those scenes are about. David Lynch famously has done the entire musical landscapes of many of his films, and I’m incredibly influenced by music in the media I watch! I sometimes joke that I like something at least 50% based on the excellence of it’s music.

Safety Mechanics. There’s an emphasis on safety both before and after the game. This is a trick that’s used in kink play as well, where basically, if you create a space that is safer to explore a certain type of vulnerability, people are more likely to explore! If you know that at any time you can stop a scene if it gets too intense, ask for support, or remove a specific topic that’s personally difficult for you, you’re going to trust the environment a little more and get emotionally heavy if you want to. Saying “this is a space to talk about heavy emotions if you want to, and we’re gonna be here for that and you” is a powerful statement that allows people to play more emotionally than they normally would.

Character Connection. While each character is an archetype of something in a David Lynch type uncanny Americana world, there’s room for each player to inject ownership of that character on the character sheet. Specifically, the player determines what past trauma they’re trying to deal with, and naming which other character they think can help them. In creating the trauma, a player can easily insert themes that are important to them, consciously or subconsciously, therefore playing through issues with their character they care more about.

Emotional Cues. Each scene is literally focused around the goal that players have to portray a specific emotion associated with that scene. Since emotions are the goal of each scene, that becomes more the focus of play than whatever the literal plot is.

Uncanny Feels

The second goal though was to communicate an Uncanny Game Feel. So similar to the uncanny feel you’d get watching a David Lynch gig, but more like something you’d feel in game media. Where does this feeling happen? How do we encourage it to happen? I looked at the tools that horror games used, and plugged em in, as well as some similar inspiration from other uncanny media, specifically film.

Disturbing Music. Half of what gets ya in a horror film is the sound scape. Having the right sounds to create tension, discomfort, or suspense are key to invoking that sense of the uncanny. I got some great electrical sounds for the most uncanny parts of the game.

Pacing. Pacing is KEY, KEY!!!! You have to build suspense to something scary, and waiting, not seeing the monster, knowing that… something is wrong here, can be the most potent tool in creating an uncanny or scary feeling. I deliberately paced both acts and the scenes within them, creating repetition, making sure the timing is all meticulously kept by the facilitator, creating rituals that are later to be broken in the second act… these all have subtle impacts on us as we experience a narrative.

Buy in. In any horror game, the most important thing is to get everyone involved to COMMIT to being scared. Really, no matter what the game is doing, the commitment to being scared is what’s gonna scare people the most. They have to be ready to have fun being scared, like they’re walking into a haunted house, or sitting down with a scary movie. I tell the facilitator to just outright ask players to commit to this! No side talking, try to stay in character and immerse as much as possible. This will get you the scariest experience.

Atmosphere. Creating the room feeling is essential to uncanny game feel. Lower the lights, start with some moody music, add a few freaky in game props. Ask people to costume if they want to. With roleplaying games, we have the unique ability to influence the space around our play.

  These might seem like simple mechanics, and in a sense, they are! It’s all how they’re remixed and utilized that makes the most impact in a game. Since my design goals for Something Is Wrong Here were to create an emotional, uncanny experience, I’ve leaned heavily on the ones that make that impact the most. Have you ever experienced these mechanics in a game before? Do you love experiencing emotional game play as much as I do? Let me know in the comments!

  Uncanny Game Feel(ings) published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames