#it's the point of the fucking game dude you literally have memento mori on the damn fucking intro

[burnthelongnight]

technically it applies but that's so not the point dude everyone dies in this fuckass game even the mc

[lost-kinn]

so i did want to talk a little bit more about what ellina--and even the base game--seems to imply about monomon.

i dunno if you’ve heard, but generally people tend to sort university professors (and universities) into two categories: there's “teaching” professors who can and do teach, with a genuine interest in the welfare of their undergraduate students, and then there's “research” professors who delegate all their teaching responsibilities to their graduate assistants and focus on their research instead.

ellina's wanderer's journal hints that monomon was the researcher kind of professor, which is some Fun Times, because i think most of us were thinking that monomon was the teaching kind of professor.

backtracking a bit, so that we’re all on the same page, i think it's important to mention that the issue on the table is one that hallownest, as a general storyline, comments a lot on, which is the "ozymandias" issue--a human (and bug, apparently) tendency to build great empires and huge stacks of knowledge and piles and piles of achievement, all of which will largely mean nothing whatsoever when we all die, and/or when the empires fall and everyone forgets all of our achievements. the game would like us to become comfortable with the idea that all of our achievements in life won't follow us to the grave. ashes to ashes, more or less.

the project of the seals is to preserve the pale king's great achievements, which is hallownest. (the game goes to great lengths to remind us that the unnatural prolonging of mortal achievements comes at great, prolonged sacrifice of the people who have to bear that weight. in very blunt terms, preserving hallownest instead of letting it decompose is powered by The Hollow Knight's personal suffering. that, more or less, was the hollow knight's purpose.)

so when it comes to "should we try and prolong kingdoms and mortal achievements?" the void comes down on the side of No (partly because they seem to be the embodiment of entropy, or something like that). the radiance comes down on the side of Yes, rather than accepting her death. the pale king comes down on the side of Yes.

figuring out what monomon wanted to use her archives for speaks to that same issue: did she want to prolong her mortal achievements (the accumulation of knowledge), or did she wish for it to be disseminated (with the knowledge's survival being not as important as its dissemination)?

a lot of fandom interpretation has posed monomon as the second case. from the fact that monomon is referred to as "monomon the teacher," and that she had a student she collaborated closely enough with to do something vaguely treasonous (quirrel and the loophole in the dreamer seal), you'd think that she's the "teaching" type of professor, who takes an interest in the welfare of her students, and accumulates knowledge in order to pass that knowledge on.

that's doubly compounded by the fact that the one time we see her doing anything on-screen, she's actively undermining the stasis seal, and there's a whole chunk of deleted dialogue in which monomon talks about how knowledge kept in stasis is useless and ultimately for nothing. it's a pretty damning condemnation of the pale king's actions.

so the picture we've got from that is that monomon saw, ahead of time, that seeking to preserve hallownest would be a foolish endeavor (ashes to ashes, the folly of impermanent mortal glory, memento mori, etc etc), and this is why she did the plan with quirrel, and accordingly this is why she's so pro-seal-breaking when the player knight shows up.

but if what ellina tells us about the archives is true, then the archives are actually primarily a collection of research, gathered all together in one place by a professor who didn't give a fuck about teaching and spent most of her time accumulating research and knowledge. to that end, she would be rather pro-pale-king-stasis-seal, since preserving everything in stasis would also preserve her oh-so-precious stack of accumulated research.

that fits with her plan with quirrel; one of the effects of quirrel making off with her mask is that this ensures she can't be killed even with a dreamnail. so she's doubly sealed to doubly protect her stack of knowledge--and for that matter, it's worth noting that her stack of knowledge is VERY difficult to read, and might be difficult to read because it wasn't intended to be read. the point of monomon's archives, under this reading, is simply to have the knowledge, not to spread or teach that knowledge.

ultimately, she did call quirrel back and undo the seals, but that doesn't seem to be the original point of her sending him out of hallownest with her mask. rather, that would have been a pretty dramatic turnaround from her previous convictions.

overall, in version one, monomon's a clever bitch with enough foresight to, at the very least, seriously consider the possibility that the pale king's plan wouldn't shake out the way he hoped, and her actions during the game events are just her acting out her failsafe. in version two, she's a lot more like the pale king in her wish to accumulate knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and her change in attitude is more or less a complete 180 turn. which isn't a bad thing, mind you--it's actually a rather good thing, because it's a mark of a pretty thorough character arc (the character starts off one way, a series of events happen, they come out transformed).

the second one is a really interesting story, imo! but it's a fary cry from the fandom monomon that a lot of people have come to like, and i myself have found myself pretty comfortable with the first one (even speaking as someone who's co-written a fic more or less based around the premise that monomon was an imperfect person). plus there's ways to argue that ellina isn't the most reliable of narrators, and further ways to argue that the wanderer's journal wasn't exactly "made" by gibson and pellen's personal four hands (the book is officially credited to Kary Fry and Ryan Novak), which is a fun opening for people to argue about the status of the journal's "canon-ness." and on the other hand, it's got the Team Cherry logo on it, so whatever's in the book must have been signed off by gibson and pellen, no?

i'm not an advocate of losing sleep over the "canon-ness" of extra material, or even any fandom affairs whatsoever. i think the clearest and most objective reading of what the wanderer's journal has to say about monomon's archives HIGHLY implies that she was a research-oriented professor who, ironically, didn't do a lot of teaching.

but also if people, like myself, choose to interpret her in a different way, i really dont think it matters. it's fandom. it's literally fun and games and shits and giggles. YOLO, my dudes.

[theworstbob]

the thing journal, 4.2.2017

scattered thoughts on the things i took in over the last seven days. this week: matt pryor, boyhood, julien baker, literally show me a healthy person, drake i guess, the goldfinch, the discovery, dave chappelle

1) Memento Mori, by Matt Pryor: i mean yeah, it's an album of acoustic folk songs? so i don't. i'm sure there's a lot that can be said about this album? but i'm so not the person to say those things, i could listen to this album again and again and try my best, but i can't be that person. this is no one's fault but my own, i'm not gonna be like "nyeh, this album sucks" because this happens to be something i don't typically dig, because i'm just not the kind of person that listens to folk. (don't you listen to country?) yeah but in country everyone's drunk and heartbroken, this is, i dunno, adult? yeah too adult for me, and i'm comfortable admitting that. (aren't you 27?) listen.

2) Boyhood, dir. Richard Linklater: So it IS possible to be absolutely dazzled by MOVIE-MAKING MAGIC yet be left kind of cold by the finished product. The story of how this film was made is cool, and you can feel the love and passion for this project oozing from the seams, but this is also a film about how a young boy grew up to become a college student with bad facial hair?, and there's a limit to how engaging I find those types of stories. So it's tough, because this is a film completely unlike anything else before it and an absolute treat to watch and think about (gosh, the pains one must have to go through to shoot a film over 14 years and make the finished product look cohesive!), but also a story I could get literally anywhere else. I thought the overall product was fantastic, but enough other people have been waving their flags hard enough and long enough that I'm okay not adding my own to it.

3) Sprained Ankle, by Julien Baker: This week, Bob! attempts to digest three quiet indie things despite not being all that into quiet indie things! For what it's worth, I know I have to give this a more attentive listen, this sort of music would pair better with list-making than it did with Mario Kart 7. I won a race where I had fewer Mario Kart points than all but one other dude in the field. I won the race with a last-turn pass and only by half a second maybe, and once I saw I took 1st, I shouted at my Nintendo 2DS, "REMEMBER THE FUCKING NAME," while alone in my apartment. The Mario Kart 7 headspace is not condusive to an album in which a young woman sings songs about death. I will say: even spending the first listen shouting at Mario Kart 7, I could still tell there was tremendous depth to be plumbed, so at least this thing was able to permeate the mania. Every now and then I'd hear a lyric ("I'm screaming at myself in public/I know I shouldn't act this way in public") and think "oh fuck, that's me, I need more time with this."

4) literally show me a healthy person, by Darcie Wilder: I don't know that any one thing has had a greater influence on my writing, if not my outlook on life, over the last year or so than the 333333333433333 Twitter account. Darcie Wilder is an absolute master of that form. I deleted my Twitter because the website is exhausting and I couldn't handle it (also real talk I'm just a fucking dude in Minneapolis, why do I need to worry about my brand), but hers is one of select few accounts I still visit on a regular basis because the Posts are just that Good, and her voice is perfectly represented in this book. Lesser writers would have published a compendium of tweets. Wilder presents something between a monologue and a short story collection, a recap of the day's thoughts, her mind bouncing from fun thoughts about rats to THIS IS SOMETHING I DID WHICH I DEEPLY REGRET like a mind actually does. It's dope as hell. It's the best thing I've ever read that I was able to knock out in three and a half bus rides. (Also, there's a passage in this book that is just a two-word sentence, "bob died," and it is my favorite instance of my name appearing in a work of art since Undertale.)

5) More Life, by Drake: I took an Intro to Film course at community college, because I like film AND I liked taking classes to help fill the art credit requirement! I took this class in 2008, so naturally, people were abuzz about some of the classics that had been released late in 2007, like There Will Be Blood. The professor DID NOT like There Will Be Blood. When pressed, he said something along the lines of: "There's no story! Daniel Plainview begins the movie as a monster, and he ends the movie as a monster. What changed? What did we spend two hours of our lives watching?" And while I don't agree with his assessment of the film, his perspective has stayed with me. Why do I bring that up? Who knows! Anyway this is the same album Drake has been making for nearly a decade and listening to it didn't enrich my life in any meaningful way because I already listened to other Drake albums. Also this was fucking 80 minutes long and even if I enjoyed Drake's whole thing, there is no excuse for a feature-film-length album, like calm down, just who the fuck do you think you are even? I spent less time reading literally show me a healthy person than I did listening to More Life. That's stupid and I hate it.

6) The Goldfinch, by Donna Tratt: This was recommended to me by a friend, so that's how I read this story about a young man who gets big into antiquing, and now I'm offering a review where, not only am I out of depth trying to proffer literary criticism, it's not even the sort of book that I'd come to on my own, so now I'm HELLA out of depth. This book is written in this elegant, austere way, and I loved the moments in the book where the author was just describing things, this book is at its best when no one is talking, but it was always somewhat jarring when a reference to modern technology was made. It felt odd and out-of-step with the rest of the novel, to have the odd reference to video games or iPods, like what's technology doing here, get out of here, I wanna read about the chairs this dude's been selling. But overall, I dug this book. It's about grief and the power of art and how decisions you make when you're 13 still influence the rest of your life, all things I’m into, and it was a welcome change of pace from what I usually read. (You mean nothing?) Again, listen:

7) The Discovery, dir. Charlie McDowell: ah just what i need a cloudy-day movie about suicide So like, I remember watching The Happening for a Bad Movie Night and thinking that the worst thing the movie did was squander an intriguing premise. There was a good movie somewhere inside The Happening, a movie about how to keep yourself believing life is still worth living, and it's not a perfect one-to-one translation of course, but The Discovery is pretty danged close to being the film I thought The Happening could be. Maybe it's a matter of scale: it takes this concept, "What would happen if science proved the existence of an afterlife?" and applies it to this small family drama, the son of the man who found the proof and their efforts to find out what the afterlife is. It has an offbeat sense of humor (I never realized how much I needed to see Jason Segel and Jesse Plemmons just hangin' out), and I appreciated the hell out of the final twist (even if I could have done without the Usual Suspectsy montage of moments from earlier which presaged the twist; "Look at all the foreshadowing we did! Aren't we such clever boys?" ugh i mean as someone who once paid enough attention to game of thrones to be able to identify every single white dude with a beard, i find that kind of shit annoying, i KNOW he said those things, i was WATCHING your FILM). I found much to enjoy about this film, even if "enjoy" is a weird word to apply to a film where a suicide counter figures prominently in the background.

8) Deep in the Heart of Texas, Dave Chappelle: I think a lot of what I said about his other Netflix thing applies here. The focus was a bit tighter, but ESPECIALLY here, it felt at times like he was telling jokes he wrote a few years ago that he just really wanted to get on television. He did a run on "Wait (The Whisper Song)." I didn't know people were still talking about that. He attributed "Wait (The Whisper Song)" to 50 Cent. One, you think people are gonna remember "Wait (The Whisper Song)," but won't remember The Yin Yang Twins? Two, you're gonna attribute it to 50 Cent? Come on, man. Say Lil' Jon. Lil' Jon is as current a reference as 50 Cent (moreso, actually, given "Turn Down for What"), that name is at least in the ballpark, and it's an easy applause line for you, like dude, shape up, I know it's not that simple but I'm pretty sure I've nailed it. But this was still more good than bad, and it still provided exquisite shots of white people in the front row who somehow didn't know who they had paid to see. Gosh, you could just smell the "well, actually" on some of those bros. That's the best part of these specials.