severeluminaryperfection

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SPOILERS for Outer Wilds

Seriously. If you have not finished it or if you don't know what it is, please don't read this and go play it instead.

I have recently fallen in love with a thing some stories do that I call 'turning my genre expectations against me'. I marvel at writers that can pull it off and I do not really understand how it is done. All I know is that I am obsessed with the effect. There are quite a few stories that have achieved that with me already, but let me talk about my experience with Outer Wilds as an example.

Playing a sizable number of video games I have noticed that, if you pilot a player character, they are usually some sort of hero. I think this is ingrained in the medium - you would want to give your players agency, that is the whole point of a game, and who would have more agency in a story than its hero? That created a bit of a bias in my head towards what to expect from a game and that is exactly where Outer Wilds got me. I unconsciously assumed that I was playing the hero of this story. I assumed I was going to save the world.

It is not necessarily something I absolutely wanted to do or something that I thought I had to, but having played other games, I was trained to expect it. I saw the sun explode and I concluded, instantly, that I was going to stop that from happening. And I clung to that idea, even though Outer Wilds goes out of its way to tell me otherwise. There is Chert, going through all five stages of grief in the face of the supernova, there is the countdown on the Sun Station, spelling it out for me, there is the communications device on the Vessel that shows modern Nomai discussing the imminent death of the universe. This game did not lie to me. It did not pretend at any point, that I could save the world.

And yet, I insisted that I would. I just knew. This is how stories work, after all, right? This is how games work. You build the stakes, you raise them, you make the task seem impossible, all to make the victory feel so much sweeter. I was playing a hero, after all. And Outer Wilds is very good at giving its player agency. I have, in fact, never played a game that made me feel so in control of the story as this one.

It took me finding the functional Warp Core at the Ash Twin Project (one of the very last places that I got to, long after finding the Vessel) to finally realize what was going on. It did not even click for me right away. It had to sink in while I was lying in bed, trying to sleep: the realization that I was, in fact, not playing a hero's journey but a doomed narrative. It was a twist in the story, not build on deception or clever framing but entirely on my notion of what a game should be. It was such a powerful moment. I have never felt anything like that from playing a game.

There is no way the creators of Outer Wilds could have intended that, right? How could they have known that my previous experiences of playing games would lead me to stick so vehemently to this idea in my head? For all they knew, this was the first game I had picked up. Is this all a happy accident? Did I just got lucky that the story they build ended up providing me with such a profound twist, build upon my own preconceptions? I do not think so. I have seen other people talk about a similar experience and the whole thing is executed so smoothly, it is incredible.

This is probably not a thing that works on new enjoyers of art, for their sheer lack of prejudice to leverage, so I wonder how many people have experienced this before and how many pieces of writing are out there whose point I have completely missed because I was not yet able to bring all those biases to the table that were needed for them to function. Is this a thing that exists and is known only to the advanced initiates of storytelling? Is this a secret harbored by the older generation of audiences, an elite circle one can enter only after progressing sufficiently far on the journey of receiving stories? Can I write a story to do exactly this? How would I do that? I want to find out. I shall let you know if I do.

[severeluminaryperfection]

SPOILERS for The Magnus Archives (all of it!)

There is something about the Magnus Archives finale that I struggled to put my finger on, but I finally figured it out, I think.

Martin says he could not kill Jon, yet in the end, he does. Turns out, what he actually cannot do is leave him behind.

Jon says he could not unleash the Entities on an innocent, unsuspecting other dimension, yet in the end, he does. Turns out, what he actually cannot do is see Martin die.

Martin chooses killing Jon (and himself) ((probably)) over being lonely and Jon chooses being guilty over being made to watch. Thus, in this final moment of desperation, they both refuse the Entity that they served.

I am not sure it means much at that point, seeing how they have to compromise their emotional and moral boundaries to do so and seeing how it all serves the Spider in the end. Still, it is a tiny nugget of resistance against their cruel fate, a piece of agency, the smallest of victories.

[severeluminaryperfection]

I loved the Lord of the Rings movies so much as a teenager but I am currently listening to the audiobook and I realized: a truly faithful adaptation would be a musical.

[severeluminaryperfection]

Do you remember the final scene of Avatar - the last Airbender? Aang and Katara stand on that balcony and look at each other. They don't say a word, but a lot is passing between them anyway, in a quiet but visually very expressive manner. Then they hug. There is a wideshot of them, side by side, in front of a panorama view of Ba Sing Se. The music crescendos and prepares to settle. Only it doesn't. It instead transitions into a soft build up to a second crescendo as we watch them, finally, kiss.

As a kid I really disliked this part. It felt manipulative to me, like a fake-out. I was rooting for a kiss, the whole scene made me expect it, only for them to withdraw at the last second and pretend to end the finale instead on a mere friendly hug. I remember distinctly saying out loud something along the line of 'oh, come on!' when I first watched it on TV (as one did back then - gosh, it's been a while, hasn't it).

However, I re-watched ATLA recently and a different interpretation of this scene came to me: Aang and Katara hug first, because that is what their relationship is, first and foremost: a friendship. Their bond is not build upon mutual attraction but on the things they have gone through together and the care they take of each other. It is love, not in a sexual way, but in a family way. That is why the hug comes first. The kiss is almost an afterthought, the cherry on the sundae. It is great, it is important, it concludes the series. But is comes second. First is the hug. And I really like that.