#they knew whatever they'd do would feel a bit forced and artificial and suspiciously Fun and GamesTM after shb/ew

[unionizedwizard]

ok ok ok. trying to put together thoughts and feelings about dawntrail. hmmm. my general idea is that the whole thing felt artificial but in a purposeful way because it was just, like, seven layers of metagaming & self-referentiality in a... maybe not trenchcoat. poncho?

something to say perhaps about how artificial a lot of the writing/scenario felt (as far as wuk lamat's WoL Journey Speedrun Masterclass was concerned, so pretty much the whole thing) wrt living memory in itself. living memory is an artificial creation meant to entertain and please the endless, but in truth it functioned as Baby's First Existential Horror And Moral Quandary (and as a mirror to emet-selch's amaurot, of course). something about the fact the rite of succession was in truth a game (a very serious and involved one but still). the difference being of course that while it's presented as a treasure hunt with trials, the rite of succession was meant to have the claimants meet the various turali people and their customs and culture and history so it was deeply grounded in the real world. a gamified lesson with a very likely chance to Die For Real In The Real World for the claimants. on the other hand, living memory is as far removed from the real world as possible.

so it was sort of like, a treasure hunt with pedagogical purposes (rite of succession) VS a very involved powered-by-AI virtual reality center that's using up more electricity than all of south america combined (alexandria). but like. in a way wuk lamat's experience (and koana's as well, but less so) was sort of like.... what i imagine those mogstation MSQ skip/level boosts are like in-universe. VERY intensive and involved Wol Seminar Month

so the result is a sort of general metagaming aspect. and very obviously self-referential since not only did the MSQ as a whole mirror the wol's journey from ARR to EW (but somehow Less Serious, as i said), but the genre was very strongly re-established too (you Travel Somewhere Cool. you learn new fighting styles. you explore ruins and go on a treasure hunt and uncover secrets. all that) as the action/adventure/exploration one, like very traditional Video Game stuff. everything is a game, artificial and planned and directed to some extent, in different ways and with various levels of Worrying ConsequencesTM

i think it was a good idea overall because they had pretty obviously established several instances of 4th wall breaking/genre awareness before and it would have been weird to just let it go completely (ironically enough i think it would have resulted in something more artificial), and then it allows the new writing team to have an elegant explanation for the more heavily scripted parts of the plot too. the whole point is that it was meant to be a game-within-a-game since the very beginning, and even when things stopped going to plan (after the rite of succession) the writing got noticeably less artificial but we quickly fell back on another layer of metagaming (for instance, technically cahciua is sort of using that robot as a controlled avatar to interact with an environment that's virtual for her, right) (except it's the other way round because SHE'S a virtual avatar from videogame land while we are alive and real)

and obviously living memory in particular was MEANT as a Not Fully Rendered Video Game Map which was a direct callback to amaurot (notable instance of metagaming with the idea that it IS meant to be an unfinished video game map). metametametagaming momence