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And Then It Ends: "The Leftovers"

[This post brought to you with spoilers for HBO's show The Leftovers and full of the blogger’s personal experience!]

Flashback: February 2020 - I had just finished watching the Leftovers, T's favorite show, which I had sprinted to start and finish in the final months of 2019. I was (expectedly, if you've ever seen the show) emotionally wrecked. I, expectedly, cried on my couch and Googled theories about the ending, and thought endlessly about how it all fit together.

What I didn't expect was how relevant it would all feel, in the long run.

Two weeks before I went into quarantine, my city was struck by a natural disaster. It's not an uncommon thing where I live, extreme weather, just like it's not really an uncommon thing anywhere anymore (thanks climate change). But it set the stage for a long, strange year.

The Leftovers centers around (though perhaps "haunts" would be a better word) the Garveys, a deeply dysfunctional family that has miraculously avoided tragedy. Two percent of the world's population disappeared in an instant, a la the biblical Rapture, or the MCU's notorious Snap, and yet their whole family remained.

The years that follow are filled with the chaos of emotional eruption that one would expect: Uncertainty over who went away and why, guilt over the things done before the Sudden Departure, anger, sadness, grief, anxiety that it would all happen again. All acted out in ways that seem ridiculous and... well, human. Whether it's the local preacher, or the even more local cult, the show sets out to prove that everyone has a side of the story in times of tragedy and loss.

Being religious myself, I attended a service only a handful of days after the disaster struck my city, and only a handful of days before the U.S. tucked itself in for a very long year of quarantine.

It felt apocalyptic - rumors of disease on the horizon while streets I frequented looked like ruins. As in the show, the pulpit was alive with attempts at calm, at peace, at comfort, while everyone shifted uneasily in their chairs and tried not to worry and failed. And being the person that I am (i.e. someone who has a hard time paying attention in church), my mind drifted to The Leftovers. That was the moment I began to relate.

A year and change later, 3 million people have died in the real world. It's not 2% of the population. But it's real people, and it feels like so much more. I, like every single, solitary other human being on earth, have experienced my share of grief. Over lost life, lost time, lost connection, lost sense of safety, lost understanding of what I believed the world to be.

Over the course of three months, I understood these characters more than I ever thought I would, and - frankly - way more than I ever wanted to. I understood that what seemed like sudden outbursts of anger or desperation were the buildup of a thousand tiny griefs - I too was angry at something so big and out of my control and desperately to stop pretending life could go on as normal. How many times I had logged off of a Zoom call and immediately began sobbing? Or wished to disappear into another dimension where life was infinitely different than my own reality, as the main character Kevin did. Or had a panic attack because I was scared to be all alone.

In an interview with Variety that was published last September, Carrie Coon, who plays Nora (an understandably distraught main character whose entire family disappeared in an instant) was asked about the show, and its sudden boost in viewership over 2020. And she said:

"Nobody really watched it when it was on. People came around to it years after it went off the air, but it was very prescient about coronavirus, right down to depicting 2% of the population disappearing. There’s a lot of grief right now. Grieving for lost lives and the loss of any sense of normal. I think the show can be comforting because it is ultimately hopeful."

Hopeful. I think I laughed at that back in September. The characters in the Leftovers (or most of them anyway) found some semblance of peace and purpose in the end. They grew, in some strange way, from what they had endured. And in September, that too felt like fiction.

But here we are today.

Today, I received my second vaccine shot. In two weeks, I will supposedly be passably immune to the virus that has stolen the last year of lives across the planet, and for so many even more than that. There is the sense of looking into the void - a future that I truly cannot fathom. Just as there was at the start, there's a lot of emotion. Fear. Uncertainty. A fair share of anger, still, at something I cannot comprehend.

But, for the first time in a long time, there's something else there too. Maybe, just maybe, the smallest flicker of hope that has me wondering just how this story will end.

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2020: A Spaced Out Odyssey

[This post brought to you spoiler free and full of the blogger’s personal experience!]

Back in mid-March, my boyfriend (who we’ll refer to as T in the blog from here on out) and I had dinner with two of his friends who had come into town for a quick trip to see family. They’d pushed tables together to make enough room for all seven of us in a crowded restaurant, where the music was too loud and the food was just okay, and the conversation turned immediately to the oncoming pandemic and didn’t leave the whole evening.

He and I peeled off later that night to see a 10 p.m. showing of “The Hunt,” and as we walked back out to the car afterwards, he said, “Well, what did you think of the last movie we’ll ever see in a theater?”

I groaned, and said something like, “I sure hope that wasn’t it.” (Not because I didn’t like it, but mostly because I spent the whole time distracted, wondering if Betty Gilpin and Sandra Bullock are sisters. Spoiler alert: They are not, they’re just two strangers who resemble each other to an almost eerie extent.)

It’s six months later, and he was proved wrong… but only barely. The week we were scheduled for a socially-distanced rendezvous with the same friends who’d come back to town (sadly postponed because of an ironically non-COVID health risk), we sat down to a showing of “Tenet.”

It was the one movie that we had mutually agreed to “risk our lives for,” when theaters shut down within a few weeks of our last visit. I came prepared with a mask, my own packet of anti-bacterial wipes, a determination to sit in the very back row where no one could breathe on our heads, and a pounding anxiety that was only relieved when we finally rolled out of the theater two-odd hours later.

The movie was fine, it was good. John David Washington is obviously brilliant — my top nomination the next time James Bond is up for grabs — and Robert Pattinson continues to cement himself as T’s celebrity guy crush. The story was convoluted but entertaining, as one can expect from a Christopher Nolan film at this point. The cinematography and choreography were art in and of themselves, and the effects were the emotional equivalent of seeing your first magic show as a small child.

And yet, there I was, mangling my boyfriend’s hand like a crazy person because something that had once felt not only safe but comforting, something we’d done multiple times a week just a year ago, was suddenly this alien experience.

It was only the most recent point of reflection on how stories, and how I’ve consumed them and reacted to them, have changed over the course of… to put it mildly, a long and difficult year.

I consider myself an escapist, both in my consumption of stories and my creation of them. I read, I write, I watch, I listen, I draw to buoy myself as a person easily overwhelmed by the stress of being a real human being. But more and more over the past six months, their purpose has changed, even as I find my interest and ability to focus waning.

I’ve started more books than I can count, and aborted 90 percent of them within the first 100 pages. More often than not, I find myself opting for a meditation track or ASMR video during work time than binging a new TV series. If a movie isn’t emotionally extreme in some direction (hello “Spree,” and most recently “Child’s Play,” which I have spent the last 20 years absolutely terrified to watch), I have a difficult time maintaining attention.  

I suppose this is just part of living through a pandemic, one thing among many that has changed. It’s frustrating, but what isn’t at this point? It’s tiring, but that’s not unique either.

Maybe it’s a natural reaction to a world that most days feels more like fiction anyway. Maybe it’s burnout from the first three months of intense lockdown that we experienced where I live, where there wasn’t much to do but stream stories into your eyeballs and wait to make a bi-weekly trip to the grocery store. Maybe it’s disinterest as a child of grief, the cycle of tangible and intangible loss that I think has plagued most of us this year.

But whatever it is, I think it belongs here.

This is the first in a series of posts about how this year has changed my relationships to stories. I don’t know how many there will be, or when they will be. 

All I know for sure is that it’s been a year, and I think, just maybe, I’m ready to write about it.

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Making a Critical Hit: “Critical Role”

[This post brought to you with major spoilers for campaigns 1 and 2 of Critical Role. Editing and research help for this post by Brady Wallace and John Masserini. ]

“When the livestream begins every Thursday evening, not even many-voiced dungeon master Matthew Mercer (who you may recognize as the voice of Overwatch's McCree, for one) knows precisely where the adventure will go, or if everyone will survive.”

Tyler Wilde, “Permadeath and D&D: The pain of losing a character, and why it can be great”

Nearly every Thursday night since March of 2015, fans of Critical Role have logged onto Twitch to watch the show that bills itself as “a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons.” The show’s first campaign, narrated and run by Dungeon Master Matthew Mercer, followed the adventures of a ragtag (if deeply emotionally damaged) group of misfits calling themselves Vox Machina - played by voice actors Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Ashley Johnson, Liam O’Brien, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, and Travis Willingham - as they defended the mythical realm of Tal’Dorei. For two years, fans watched as the party defeated dragons, traversed other planes and trash whole cities as they thwart evil, and were eager to kick off the second campaign, following The Mighty Nein, in January of 2018. 

To say the show has evolved since it first aired four years ago would be, frankly, understating matters entirely. 

What started off as a tabletop role playing game among friends in LA became a featured show on Geek and Sundry’s multimedia lineup, which in turn became its own studio with Critical Role spin-off shows, parallel programming, and a record-breaking $11.38 million Kickstarter campaign for its own animated series. The Critical Role Youtube channel has, at the time of writing, amassed 37.6 million views on its videos since it launched in May of 2018 and the Twitch channel has more than 277,000 followers. 

But as the community has grown, as the studio introduces more and more exciting projects, and the hype continues to build, two things keep viewers coming back week after week: The compelling story and the people who create it, both of which contribute to Critical Role being an occurrence of “live” narrative that exists in few other contexts. 

It is, quite literally, unpredictable.

The show is purposefully unscripted other than DM Matt Mercer’s world-building and overarching plot, though even these things may change depending on character reactions, which are primarily reliant on character personalities and improvised player decisions. A character is totally within their rights to jump off a cliff and plummet to their doom if they so decide (and they have before), though they all -- to our knowledge and the knowledge of the other players, at least -- have the singular goal of pushing forward with whatever adventure they have been tasked. 

As players have little foresight into what will happen, this means that character action is very frequently reaction. Details in the world which might be informative could go wholly unnoticed by characters, and just because a path exists doesn’t mean the players will take it. At the beginning of Campaign 2, Fjord (played by Travis Willingham) is on his way to study at the Soltryce Academy to further his magical learning when he encounters the other party members for the first time. However, after a kidnapping, a death and plenty of other wild occurrences, by episode 30, he indicates that he has changed his mind and has decided not to find the school. The character motivation changes in reaction to in-game events and, while potentially not unexpected for the audience, this decision snips otherwise yet-to-be-fulfilled ends of the storyline. In a memorable example from the 30th episode of Campaign 1, Scanlan Shorthalt (played by Sam Riegel), improvises a plan to break into a mansion by polymorphing into a triceratops and bursting through the roof. 

All of that to say, Mercer as the DM ultimately has more knowledge about what could happen than what will happen, but is reliant on the actions and reactions of the characters to carry it out.

Not only is there an element of structured improvisation that makes the show unpredictable to the viewer, but the reliance of tabletop gaming on dice rolls to further plot and determine character outcomes can make for quite a surprise. As 20-sided dice rolls modified by character statistics are the primary basis for many actions in Dungeons and Dragons, there is often very little indication ahead of time what dice rolls will be fortunate and which ones will not be.

This is where math comes in. In an odd and cyclical coincidence, one of the most clear mathematical and scientific explanations I’ve found for this actually comes from an article from the National Center for Biotechnology Information database, which, at the end, credits Critical Role for introducing the author to the concept of rolling a D20 with advantage. In “Multiple statistical tests: Lessons from a d20,″ Christopher R. Madan breaks down the likelihood of achieving any number on a 20-sided dice (with a nice chart for my fellow visual learners). 

“In the current (fifth) edition of Dungeons & Dragons, a tabletop game, many in-game events are determined based on the outcome of a d20. However, to make some events more likely, there are times when players roll a d20 ‘with advantage’, meaning that they roll the d20 twice and take the greater value... For d = 20, i.e., a 20-sided die, the probability of obtaining any specific outcome is 120 or .05. If n = 2 dice are rolled, the probability of obtaining at least one 20 is 39400 or .0975. If n = 10 dice are rolled, the probability of obtaining at least one 20 is ≈ .4013. With n = 20 dice, this increases further to ≈ .6415.”

Any player has a  5% chance of rolling any given number on a fair, 20-sided die. (You can do the math on Critical Role’s rolls here and here, thanks to CritRoleStats.) The result of fight scenes (death, near-death, injury) are reliant on these dice rolls, making scripting these major narrative events impossible. Perhaps the most notable recent example of a plot-bending dice roll occurs in the notorious 26th episode of Campaign 2, in which Mollymauk Tealeaf (played by Taliesin Jaffe) knocks himself unconscious after attempting to cast a blood curse on an enemy, who - unaffected - then kills him.

In a PC Gamer article “Permadeath and D&D: The pain of losing a character, and why it can be great,” Tyler Wilde discusses Mollymauk’s death in the same terms of unpredictability versus other forms of narrative media: 

“A scripted show would probably not have casually rolled Jaffe's character, a carnival performer named Mollymauk and a favorite subject of cosplayers and fan artists, into a shallow grave just 26 episodes in. And neither would that show include a scene in which the actor is told they've been written off.“

This death being permanent (at least up until the time of writing) created an echo of trauma throughout the party, changing attitudes and realigning intentions in surviving members, from Yasha (played by Ashley Johnson) fleeing out of grief to others seeking revenge on Lorenzo (played by Mercer), the villain in question.

 And while both Campaigns of Critical Role take place in a setting where magic has the power to resurrect the dead, this too may have - and frequently does have - some sort of balancing cost. In the 44th episode of Campaign 1, Vex'ahlia (played by Laura Bailey) is killed in an attempt to recover a legendary set of armor from an underwater tomb. With the help of others in the party, her twin brother Vax'ildan (played by Liam O’Brien) manages to revive her, but only after pledging himself to be a Champion of the Raven Queen, a goddess of death. This, in turn, adds a new level of complication and motivation to Vax’s character, which is reflected through the rest of the campaign.

For roughly three and a half hours most weeks (not including breaks), fans of the show are at the mercy of statistical, individual and emotional variance, and have been since 2015. The campaign-based continuity of Critical Role doesn’t have the breaks common in the “season” of other broadcast series media, running year-round with the exception of major American holidays and the occasional rest week. Campaign 1 had 115 episodes in its main continuum airing from 2015-2017 (although the game had gone on for longer than that before broadcasting) and Campaign 2 has racked up 63 episodes at the time of writing since it started in January of 2018. 

On one hand, having a non-traditional “season” format gives Critical Role a lot more temporal wiggle room for building out the narrative and a resulting viewer connection. A show lasting 3.5 hours on average and airing 35 episodes a year for 3 years adds up to about 367.5 hours (or 15 days) of narrative content over those 3 years alone. According to a CritRoleStats count featured in the latest episode of Critical Role commentary show Talks Machina, the show and its one-shot episodes have aired for more than 800 hours total. For comparison, Bingeclock.com estimates that it would take around 3 days to watch all 8 seasons of “Game of Thrones”, 5 days and 1 hour to watch all 10 seasons of Friends, and 18 days to watch all 31 seasons of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. Having such long episodes and long campaigns not only allows for Mercer and the cast to delve deeper into the details of the world and inner workings of each character. As the players’ perspectives and style change in real life, so do the characters themselves and how the audience relates to each in the context of the the overarching narrative. What results is a feeling that the viewer too has been on a journey full of unexpected twists and turns.

On a more minute level (no pun intended), the timing of the game may also contribute to the emotional highs and lows of each episode. While rounds of combat may each last 6 seconds in the world of the game, an involved battle may take more than an hour of play time and particularly tense skirmishes can see audience pressure rise until the last enemy has fallen. Tension is, especially during combat-heavy episodes, unavoidable, but there is some promise that if the heroes make it through, we’ll all be able to breathe a sigh of relief.

From the unpredictability of dice-rolls to the long-term evolution of characters and plot, Critical Role exemplifies the unique draw of live broadcast tabletop gaming: A well-woven narrative with simply too many variables to be truly scripted. From the time that the camera begins to roll to the last seconds of each episode, neither the players nor the audience can predict the twists and turns the characters will encounter. Every skirmish may be someone’s last. Every decision may put our heroes on a new path. And as the story unfolds week by week, all any of us can do is wait patiently for the next Thursday to roll around.

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An Act of Shelf Discovery

[This post brought to you spoiler free and full of the blogger’s personal experience!]

In my third-ever post on this blog on March 23, 2017, I wrote about making the switch from physical books to e-books. For someone who loved (and still loves) the sensory aspect of physical books, it was a daunting challenge, but a necessary one: At the time, I would go on average 6 months between moves, had three shelves at my consistent disposal, and more books than I could count. Books lived in piles next to my bed, were stored in boxes in the closet, were forced upon my brother (who is also an avid supporter of this blog and probably reading this post: In which case, hi!) under the guise of “recommendations” so they could live in his space instead of mine. 

Fast forward two years and that habit has set in hard - I purchase between 85 and 90 percent of my books digitally now, even though some of the circumstances that made it necessary have thankfully expired (For the record, infrequent moving is an absolute joy!). In addition to a more compact, generally cheaper library that I abuse less and finish more, e-books have also contributed strongly to another new book-buying habit I’ve developed: Preordering.

In 2019, I made it a goal to learn more about my own literary consumption by forgoing the majority of traditional book shopping and preordering any new release that piqued my interest. Tracking each of my pre-purchases via color-coded spreadsheet (as one does, and indeed, must), I’ve thrown myself full-force into the new, and learned a lot in the process, both about the function of preorders in the publishing industry and about my own taste in literature.

The Purpose of Preorders

Before this experiment, my main experience with pre-orders had been primarily in relation to video games (I’m a sucker for midnight release downloads directly to my console) or limited edition media that I’m unlikely to procure without being proactive. I didn’t really know much about them beyond the consumer perspective, but being the chronic researcher I (clearly) am, I wanted to know what my new purchasing habit meant in greater context. 

To break it down, preorders serve two main purposes in the publishing industry. They are A) a promotional tool for authors and publishers to build hype for a book before it’s released and B) an indicator for stores to properly respond to a book’s demand.

A preorder’s promotional value could come from a few different avenues. As pre-order sales contribute to the release week sales total for a book (as mentioned in this Parnassus Musings post), they can be valuable fuel for books that rocket to the top of bestseller lists. For first time or less well-known authors, having a preorder page automatically create an additional searchable content and feeling of legitimacy for books in the promotional phase. The more people who pre-order the book are also potentially more people who would share about their pre-order with their friends.

For established authors, preorders often come from existing fans of a series or the author themselves, and serve as an indicator as to the activity of the existing fanbase, efficiency of an author’s platform for communicating with fans, as well as their interest in new work.

In 2016, the written script of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” became Amazon’s No. 1 preorder for the year, according to CNET, and topped Barnes & Noble’s chart as well, according to Rolling Stone. While the exact number of preorders was apparently not released, it makes complete sense that the number would be a big one. Pottermore (which Wikipedia describes as a “digital publishing, e-commerce, entertainment, and news company from J. K. Rowling” not limited to the popular virtual Hogwarts experience) released a bulletin early last year that over 500 million Harry Potter books had been sold in the 20 years since the first book’s release. 

In addition to their promotional function, preorders also serve as an indicator for a book’s popularity upon release. In a 2017 blog post to authors about the importance of pre-orders, Penguin Random House stresses that a high enough preorder number could “lead to retailers increasing their initial orders.” Last November, Barnes & Noble reported former first lady Michelle Obama’s memoir “Becoming” to be the most preordered book of 2018, according to The Washington Post.  This article in particular points out how booksellers prepare for a book’s popularity based on a preorder buzz, “bracing” for enormous numbers of books to fly off the shelves by bulking up their orders ahead of time.

Preorders are a function of marketing in the publishing industry - an opportunity to get readers in the door early, and get them to talk about a book before its release. In return, readers get discounts, bonuses, the satisfaction of knowing they’ll be one of the first members of the public to receive the work, and, very occasionally, some insight into who they are as readers.

Getting Shelf-ish

In the four-ish months (at time of writing), around 22 books have come to me through the preorder method. With 13 books total read so far this year, about 7 of them were preorders, both they and the books between them have plenty to tell about how I read.

My taste is more consistent in concept than it is in practice.

Anyone who’s stuck around String Narratives long enough will know that, across mediums, I’m big on a few genres: Science fiction, horror and satire, primarily. When I started preordering books as a part of this experiment, I thought it pretty safe to assume that if a book fell into one of those categories, there was a good chance I’d enjoy it. Which, for the record, probably still holds true. 

But one thing that I did notice early on in this experiment and didn’t expect at all was that I very, very quickly get bored with my own taste. I can get ahold of too much science fiction at once, too much horror. Both genres can get absolutely exhausting without a break between them - breaks I took naturally when purchasing books in a more traditional fashion without realizing. So, for all of those winter sci-fi reads I was so excited about started losing their appeal, I found myself turning to much different fare as a palate cleanser: YA fiction, books about food, and biography - three genres much lower on my radar which I ended up enjoying just as much.

Access to books is rarely the thing that keeps me from reading.

It is what it says on the tin. Where I’d previously easily blamed “not having anything to read” (a concept laughable to anyone who knows me, much less has lived with me and my books) for a lack of desire to consume printed work, I have to now own up to my truth. As books are on a similar mid-week release schedule as most other popular media, I get at least one book delivered to my e-reader most Tuesdays, which means there is always something to read. If I don’t want to read, it’s simply because I don’t feel like it. (Which is totally okay! Life happens and we roll with it.)

My library is built from recommendations.

Recommendations and reviews are my bread and butter when it comes to choosing what kind of media I want to ingest, and not always in the way you think. I typically rely on others to help discern the true atmosphere of a work when I’m easily caught up in cover art and promotional images. While books in the promotional stage are less likely to have a significant number of reviews, I still rely fairly heavily on Advance Reader Copy (ARC) reviews to estimate how much I’ll enjoy a book before preordering. Adding onto that, I get a lot of my book news from online outlets specifically dedicated to new book releases, including Verge’s monthly round-up of science fiction books and Book Riot’s whole entire site. 

My new release discovery time is anywhere between 1 month and 10 months.

Was I absolutely stoked to find out that my book of the year 2018 - Semiosis by Sue Burke - was getting a sequel? I absolutely was. Did I preorder that sequel nine months and 11 days before it’s projected to come out? I absolutely did. For authors I already know, love and follow, I’m happy to be that fan that lets everyone know I’ve already made the preorder. For authors I’m less familiar with, or who are debuting their first book, that ten month window might actually shrink to something more like ten days. It isn’t a hard and fast rule, but there certainly is something to being in the know when it comes to favorite authors’ upcoming releases - a result of great communication and even better marketing.

The narratives we consume say a lot about us. They speak to our loves, our fears, the places we want to go between the hours of our waking lives. We pass them along to those around us, intentionally or not. 

But as we become consistently more aware of how the stories around us shape our lives and mature in our understanding of how they fit into the world, we must also, I believe, recognize something else: The way we acquire narratives says just as much about us as the stories we choose to slip into. 

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Too Close for Comfort: “The Luminous Dead”

[This post brought to you with major spoilers for Caitlin Starling’s 2019 novel “The Luminous Dead,” which was also featured in “The Yarn” on April 9. This post includes discussion of body horror; reader discretion is advised.]

Claustrophobia holds a special place in my sweet little horror-loving heart. The discombobulating Navidson house’s “Five and a Half Minute Hallway” in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel “House of Leaves,” the spiraling staircase in Jeff Vandermeer’s “Annihilation,”  childhood trips to local caverns where tour guides would plunge visitors into darkness for no more than 30 agonizing seconds as they educated on the space’s historic discovery -- they all stick in my memory as moments that straddle the line between nerve-wracking and exhilarating, the kind of thing to make the imagination run wild.

It perhaps should have been no surprise then that I loved Caitlin Starling’s debut sci-fi horror novel “The Luminous Dead,” which was released on April 2. Strong, curious daredevil main character? Check. Super advanced science fiction technology? Check. Mysterious deaths retroactively investigated? Check. Eccentric, rich, genius expedition funder who doesn’t know when to quit? Check. 

Terror coming from outside AND within? Check and check.

“The Luminous Dead” traces the journey of Gyre Price, a young caver who falsifies her employment records to sign on for a high-paying solo expedition through a private tunnel system on the planet Cassandra-V. What she assumes is a reconnoissance mission for a mining interest turns out to be a personal project for her handler and employer Em, whose parents went missing in the cave years before. With Em as her only help, companionship and connection to the outside world, Gyre soon comes to realize that there are dangerous forces acting on and through the caverns she’s exploring, as well as just how far Em will go to see the mission through to completion. 

A cave system, parts of it unexplored, provides some ideal foundational building blocks for a horror story on its own. An unexplored cave is likely to be dark in a way that almost any above-ground setting (other than space!) would be stretching to manage. An unstable cave might have segments that are cramped or blocked; the risk of a collapse could destroy the entrance and/or exit and trap a character forever. As Dr. Susan Harlan notes in her Lit Hub essay “How to Read Caves,” “Caverns need to be discovered, or at least rediscovered. They are lost things, things hidden in the earth that may or may not be there.” Like an unexplored ocean, a cave’s depth may reveal as of yet undiscovered and dangerous flora and fauna (or some hybrid of both [or duplicates of everyone you’ve ever known]) that a character must contend with. And this is to say nothing of any sort of symbolic affiliation of cavernous descent -- whether that’s a deeper investigation into the self, or a descent to (and, in the best cases, return from) the underworld. The fact that the cave is littered with the bodies of previous explorers is just icing on the proverbial terror cake. 

Environment alone in “The Luminous Dead” would provide plenty of fuel for claustrophobic atmospheric tension. But to limit discussion to subterranean setting would be to discredit the science fiction aspects that only serve to heighten the novel’s horror, which Starling runs with from page one.

“The Luminous Dead” is delightfully thorough in its discussion of the tech that makes these expeditions possible and how it has evolved in the book’s recent history. The suit that Gyre sports into the cavern is not just an exoskeleton - shielding her from trauma during impacts, filtering out toxins from the cave air, etc. - but is also surgically integrated to essentially be an extension of her body. Her digestive system is tubed into the suit. She avoids dehydration through the suit’s recycling of her own waste water and, throughout the book, drinks primarily as an act of comfort rather than one of necessity. Her unaided vision - nearly useless in the dark cave - is enhanced with overlays by the mask that she is warned not to take off. Against Gyre’s wishes, Em frequently injects drugs through the suit that begins and ends sleep cycles. 

“The suit was her new skin, filled with sensors and support functions, dampening her heat and strengthening her already powerful muscles with an articulated exoskeleton designed to keep climbing as natural as possible. She wouldn’t even remove her helmet to eat or sleep. Her large intestine had been rerouted to collect waste for easy removal and a feeding tube had been implanted through her abdominal wall ten days ago. A port on the outside of her suit would connect to nutrition canisters. All liquid waste would be recycled by the suit. All solid waste would be compacted and cooled to ambient temperature, then either carried with her or stored in caches to be retrieved on her trip out. Everything was painstakingly, extensively designed to protect her from... elements in the cave.”

The suit, essentially, is her lifeline, her means of managing needs safely and efficiently while she’s in the cave. However, where in many narratives involving a hostile or mysterious environment, the protection offered by an exosuit is a comforting fallback for the character (see: any time in a film someone tells a new team member that a crack in their helmet would cause them to be sucked into the vacuum of space), Gyre’s suit is a double-edged blade, a micro-parallel of the horror of her environment, especially toward the end of the book.

Like the cave itself, the suit carries with it a level of physical risk. If the battery dies, the suit locks and becomes non-functional, turning from shield to coffin in just a few minutes. (This happens once, toward the end of the book.) Without proper nutrition resources, the suit may continue, but Gyre may die inside it. Malfunctions with the sensors or disjointing from Gyre’s body, such as the digestive tubing dislodging after a fall, easily become painful distractions. While it’s suggested that this suit is the top of the line - the latest iteration after dozens of attempts by Em to get a caver to the distant site of her father’s disappearance - there’s still plenty of problems that could arise with the hardware.

Going hand-in-hand with the physical risk, the psychological affects of the suit come to affect Gyre as well. First, Em has the ability to completely control the suit from her remote panel, and she regularly takes advantage of this power. She injects Gyre with drugs against her explicit wishes. She changes visual readouts to keep the true history of the mission from Gyre, and the resulting paranoia only contributes to the overwhelming fear that she seems to experience through the latter half of the book, the inability to trust that which was meant to keep her safe. While it takes care of her needs, it also alienates her from her body; she is unable to sense changes to the environment because of her carbon polymer shield, she is unable to eat in any natural manner or even to feel her own skin.

“In a great rush, she became aware of how dry her mouth was and how her skin prickled inside of her suit, covered in a thin layer of old swear and dead skin beneath the layer of feedback film that clung to her and allowed her suit to respond to and assist in her climbing. The suit ‘cleansed’ internally every twelve hours or so, using body-temperature water recycled from her urine and introduced through her nutrient canisters, but it was a whisper of a sensation in the film, easily forgotten.”

While the cave setting would be enough to inspire feelings of claustrophobia in both character and reader, it is only magnified by the close microcosm of Gyre’s growing discomfort in her suit. The cave may be close, but the suit is always closer, tied into Gyre, simultaneously preserving and her. It is her tie to Em, whom she both hates and relies on, distrusts and wants to connect more deeply with; without the suit, she is truly alone. It is a secondary level of environmental threat, a relationship maintained by paradox.

By the end of the novel, driven to the brink by pain, isolation and paranoia, she begins to tear the suit off and to embrace what she believes to be her doom, guided by the ghosts of the others who had died (assumedly) in the cave before her.

“They’d be together in the blackness. She wanted that. She wanted that more than she’d ever wanted anything, except maybe to feel her skin again, to see her body. She looked down at herself. Her helmet sat beside her, the lamp still on, illuminating the segmented plate of her suit. It wasn’t her. None of it was her... One shin was covered in warped diseased flesh, the blister that had been there now infected, the skin swollen and hot against the cool air. It went numb once it was exposed and the chill seeped in.”

Perhaps this, in itself, is an act of reclamation. Gyre, giving into one terror, still wants to go out on her own terms and does so by shedding the confines of the other, an act of rebellion against the situation that has been leveraged against her at every turn. In turn, Gyre’s release becomes that of the reader; we experience the rush of cavernous air alongside her, aware that we too have been denied the sensory details that might have accompanied a narrative otherwise, though our relief is paired with the shock of what the suit has done to Gyre’s body. We mimic and we empathize, in the same moment that the things we suspected about the cave may actually be true.

There are plenty of things to be scared of in “The Luminous Dead.” Ghosts and bodies, hungry creatures, toxic flora. There are rogue tides and flooded sumps and long drops. There are phantom noises and, sometimes worse, non-phantom noises. There’s the cave itself. But if Caitlin Starling’s debut novel proves one thing, it’s that sometimes the scariest things are closer than you might think.

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Death by Misadventure: “Russian Doll”

[This post brought to you with major spoilers for season 1 of Netflix’s show “Russian Doll” and the 1993 film “Groundhog Day,” as well as minor spoilers the 2011 film “Source Code.” It also includes mentions of suicide and death. “Russian Doll” is rated TV-MA for mature audiences.]

“Thinking about death without, for the moment, actually dying is heady. Humans must surely be the only animals who contemplate doom, and as long as we do so, we are still human—and paradoxically not doomed.“

- Virginia Heffernan, “The Beautiful Benefits of Contemplating Doom”

I’ve written the intro to this blog post five times.

Two of them were placeholders, representing the various iterations the post went through as it was being written. Par for the course, as every blog post shifts directions once or twice in its lifespan. Two of them were vague and disconnected, a little less graceful than I prefer on average. One was far too short, the other winding in its logic in a way that lost sense even to me early on. And the last one? 

The last one was perfect.

It was graceful, it was anecdotal, it was philosophical. I physically got out of bed in the middle of the night to write it. I had dreams about this intro! It was the best in casual pop culture analysis blog-writing introductions that I had produced to date.

And then it was gone. 

Maybe I saved over it, maybe it never saved to begin with, or maybe it really all was just a very weird and vivid and nerdy dream. But when I logged on for final review last night, it was apparent - the intro was gone without a trace. No proof that it had ever existed except for the disappointment of one unfortunate blogger.

Honestly, there are very few narratives more appropriate for an iterative struggle like this one than the one we’re discussing today. Its characters too are given the opportunity to try things over again - whether they want it or not. Only for them, the thing that has them starting over is a little more dramatic than a lost file. 

In fact, it’s death.

“Russian Doll” begins with the 36th birthday party of software engineer Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne), who begins to experience a time loop of repeated deaths - being hit by a car, drowning, tumbling down stairs - that always lands her back at the night of her party. Perplexed (to say the least) by the happenings, Nadia attempts to break out of the cycle through various means to no avail before encountering Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett), a fellow New Yorker and a friend-of-a-friend who is also stuck in a time loop of the night his girlfriend breaks up with him. Together, they discover how to escape the loop, just before it wrecks both of their lives completely. (If you’ve never seen the show, or don’t want to see it, there’s an even more in-depth synopsis of “Russian Doll” over on Refinery29!)

"Time loops” in narratives often (though not exclusively) go one of two ways: They are a vehicle for self improvement or a vehicle for rescue.

On one hand, they create a sand-box of impermanence for moral redirection, forcing the protagonist to right their wrongs before proceeding with their lives. Nobody remembers the awful things done or said during the time loop; they only witness the reformed character that comes out the other side. In perhaps the most famous example of this type, Phil Connors (Bill Murray) relives Groundhog Day until he comes to respect the residents of Punxatawney, Pennsylvania in the 1993 film “Groundhog Day.”

(In literary/cinematography analysis, this is aspect of repetitive moral rebuilding within a time loop is frequently associated with religious symbolism or themes. That’s a whole other rabbit [or should I say...groundhog?] hole that I won’t go down in depth here, other than to say that “Russian Doll” seems to use this typicality as a misdirection for both characters and viewer. Nadia does investigate whether or not the fact that her loop begins in a former Yeshiva school could have something to do with her entrapment, but since Alan also experiences the phenomenon and starts in a different building, this is proven unlikely.)

When time loops aren’t being used to rehabilitate a morally questionable character, they’re often used as a mechanism for rescue. Whether it’s a specific person in danger or the world as a whole, being stuck in a time loop gives a character the opportunity to try and fail to remedy a situation without immediate consequence. Ultimately, the only thing that could prove a substantial or lingering challenge is the question of futility. Is this something that can actually be fixed, or is there a “destiny” that the situation must conform to, no matter their actions? Whereas in the first example, a time loop gave the character a playground to practice functional goodness, heroism-focused time loops give the character the opportunity to perfect a complex good deed when they are vastly underpowered to do so. “Source Code” (2011 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal) is one such of these films; one man relives the last eight minutes of a stranger’s life in order to determine who has bombed a Chicago commuter train, starting with a grand total of zero clues. The time loop is only broken after he has completed his task. (There are some plot twists in there, though, trust me. A fairly satisfying “nothing on TV” Saturday afternoon movie.)

All of that noted to say that “Russian Doll” doesn’t necessarily fit neatly into either of these categories. 

Neither Nadia nor Alan have significant moral wrongs to right (at least that are shared with the viewer). Instead, both are ignoring major turmoil in their lives - their true emotional states. 

Nadia is ignoring childhood trauma that affected both her perception of herself and those around her, opting for self-sabotaging behaviors as an adult. At the opening of “Russian Doll,” she faces her birthday party half-heartedly, expressing more loving affection to her missing cat than the guests who have gathered to celebrate her. It’s later revealed that she ended a long-term relationship because she couldn’t bring herself to meet her partner’s daughter, though she refuses to acknowledge the emotional block.

While we see somewhat less of Alan’s predicament, in our introduction, he contends with his own fastidiousness in day-to-day life and the betrayal of his girlfriend, who leaves him for her college professor on the night Alan planned to propose. This throws him into a spiral - he gets drunk and, in the first loop, at least, commits suicide in his despair then proceeds to block out the action as he lives through future loops. 

Instead of being the termination of all of these personal struggles, dying gives both main characters a wake up call. Whereas death, in most narratives, is a dreaded obstacle, for the majority of the show, it is actually the impetus for the characters’ movement and growth in “Russian Doll.” It is simultaneously an elimination of the worst-case-scenario, giving them the repetitive space and time to probe old wounds, and a paradoxical resuscitation, breaking them from the habits that they had hidden in for so long. 

Nadia, removed from the boundary of death for herself, reckons with the fact that she does care deeply for the people around her, in various ways: She works hard to ensure her foster mother Ruth doesn’t die in a house fire, she attempts to mend her relationship with her ex, and she comes to care about Alan. Little by little, her closed-offedness falls away in layers leaving her emotionally vulnerable enough to actually be reliant on Alan by the end of the show - a huge step from the Nadia visible at the beginning of the season.

Alan, realizing the loops, has alleviated himself from the burden of perfectionism that he seems to be trapped in before meeting Nadia, abandoning his attempts to reengage with his girlfriend, fighting the professor she’d cheated with, and eventually coming to accept the situation. He embraces messiness and in it, finds release.

Does this qualify as an act of self-salvation (and, therefore, a definitive heroism-loop)? I daresay the answer is no. Neither character went into the loop with the goal of saving anyone, though much less themselves. In the end, they escape the loop (assumedly) with the other’s help. But even this could not have been done if internal changes hadn’t occurred first. Without Nadia’s awakening to her emotional attachment to those around her and Alan’s recognition that his perfectionist routines are weak against unyielding time-space phenomena (and, indeed, other major events in life as well), neither would have come to accept help at all.

The characters in “Russian Doll” are neither immoral nor heroic, in any traditional sense. They aren’t seeking to be taught a lesson, nor are they seeking to teach others. They aren’t immortal in any permanent sense. They’re just people - broken, flawed and affected by circumstance, carrying trauma. Little by little, it’s death that helps them to realize that brokenness, and, ultimately, is what brings them back to life again.

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The Yarn 2.0: Return of the Yarn

It’s been a week here at String HQ!

Spring has sprung in earnest now, as have springtime thunderstorms, and gone are the slow and lazy ways of winter. A busy and exciting two months have kicked off at the blogger’s job, with lots of events to attend and lots of work to do. HQ floors have been cleaned to shine, meal boxes menus have been chosen for the next five weeks, and face wash should be arriving by mail before 8 p.m. tomorrow (okay, maybe all the lazy ways of winter haven’t gone away). 

With a little less bandwidth available for research this week, it seemed a prime time to bring an old standby back into the fold here on String Narratives: The Yarn! 

The Yarn was previously a monthly Saturday column about new releases that I was hype for, and, truly, Yarn 2.0 probably won’t be all that different. It’ll tackle what I’m reading, watching, playing and binging every now and then, with a little insight into those things that might not make it onto the blog otherwise, despite my enjoyment. This iteration will also include upcoming releases that I’m stoked to see. Part recommendation, part calendar of new releases, part active rest from the longer research-based posts (*cough, cough* last week’s post *cough, cough*). Instead of posting on Saturdays, it’ll go out on Tuesday. It might be monthly, it might be quarterly, it might be somewhere in between. For now, it will just be. 

Cool? Cool. Let’s jump in.

Currently Reading: “The Luminous Dead” by Caitlin Starling

Feeling under the weather, I read the last 75 percent of Caitlin Starling’s debut novel in bed Sunday morning and it immediately became my top contender for BOTY 2019. Caver Gyre Price descends into a complex system of tunnels that she assumes to be a typical exploration job, but quickly realizes that they’re more haunted than she could have ever imagined. “The Luminous Dead” is a tech-heavy sci-fi body-horror novel (so pretty obviously up my alley) that marries disorientation, claustrophobia and character unreliability for a super creepy thrill ride. i.e. A perfectly relaxing pre-work early morning read!

Looking forward to Reading: “The Binding” by Bridget Collins (4/9/2019)

Currently Playing: "The Occupation”

I’ve taken a little bit of a break from gaming over the past couple of weeks, unfortunately pausing in the middle of a game I really loved: “The Occupation.” Put in the shoes of a journalist in riotous 1980s Britain, the player is tasked with investigating the circumstances around a controversial government act and a terrorist attack blamed on its protesters. One of the coolest aspects of the game is that it happens real time - the player has just as much time as the character to gather information before putting interviewees to the test.

Looking forward to Playing: “Trüberbrook” (4/23/19 for Switch)

Currently Watching: “Us”

If you follow String on Twitter, you’ll likely know that Jordan Peele’s new horror film “Us” is my first repeat-theater experience in years. I walked out of the theater the first time with cramped hamstrings from the tension, and went back the weekend after just to try to connect the dots for that ending. When the Wilson family are confronted with their doubles - out for revenge after living half-lives years underground - a bloody, bay-side horrorfest ensues. It’s twisty and turny with moments of terrifying brilliance and perfectly timed comedic relief that make me stoked to see Peele’s recently released “Twilight Zone” episodes as well.

Looking forward to Watching: “High Life” (4/12/18 for select theaters)

Currently Binging: “Kim’s Convenience” Season 3

Needless to say, a lot of the narrative intake last week was a little heavy. Lightening up the mood (and potentially this post), the third season of “Kim’s Convenience” was added to Netflix US last Thursday! The Canadian sitcom focuses on the Korean Canadian Kim family and their Toronto convenience store. It’s a sweet, heartfelt family comedy with lots of episodes - a great restorative binge for a long week.

Looking forward to Binging: Game of Thrones Seasons 2 - 7 [Yes, I am incredibly behind. No, I’m not going to make it before the final season premieres. Don’t @ me.]

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What You Leave Behind: “Atlantis: The Lost Empire”

[This post brought to you with major spoilers for Disney’s 2001 animated film “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” along with some history and math.]

For many, there’s a sense of magic around Disney films. Whether it’s romantic happily ever afters, selfless anthropomorphic animals, or arcade characters run amuck, most films in the Disney Animated canon achieve some sort of joyous acceptance, even if just in the memories of its viewers. However, as with any perceived rule, even the charm of Disney has its exceptions, and a few films in particular have drawn the short straw when it comes to that fan nostalgia. 

Wedged in-between the Disney Renaissance Era’s last film “Tarzan” in 1999, and “The Princess and the Frog” in 2009 (in 2008, “Bolt”  would would be the transition film leading to our current era, known as the Disney Revival), eleven “Second Dark Age” or “Experimental Era” films were released with on-average lower levels of financial and critical success immediately following the turn of the 21st Century. On Box Office Mojo’s ranking of total gross for every Disney-parented studio film, “Lilo and Stitch” (2002) ranks the highest of this era’s films at #80, and “Treasure Planet” (also 2002) comes in the lowest at #317 (and is also the only of these films to gross less than its total budget). However, while it may rank in the top 100 for Disney overall, the same site reports that “Lilo and Stitch” earned $167,061,223 less in theaters than Disney’s hardest hitter in the traditional animation category, “The Lion King” which came out 8 years before. 

The films produced in this "Second Dark Age” were both transitional and non-traditional for the company, shying away from the Renaissance films’ proclivity for musical numbers, leaning more heavily into computer animation, and exploring new genres of film to pay homage to, including science fiction, buddy comedy and Western. Whether the decade-long dip in popularity was due more to wobbly-leggedness that came with the experimental productions, a greater saturation of competition for animated films in the market, a defiance of the audience’s expectations or a combination of any or all of the above, there seem to be an Internet-full of possibilities. (I recommend researching them yourself, if you’re interested.) The overall consensus is that the majority of Disney films released between 1999 and 2009 are generally less beloved than their Renaissance or Revival counterparts.

While I didn’t realize it at the time, I came to prime movie-watching age in this era. Where I learned language, colors, numbers and animals to the tunes of the Renaissance Era songs, I developed artistic fascination, a sense of humor, and interest in what it takes to actually tell a story alongside the adventures of this Disney dead zone (and, to be entirely fair, some of DreamWorks Animation’s competitive offerings of the same period: “Road to Eldorado” [which apparently also was not considered a commercial success] and “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” [which seems to have done alright]). I spent many summer breaks popping those DVDs in to play one after another, memorizing the exposition of “Treasure Planet,” singing along to Rob Thomas’s closing number in “Meet the Robinsons.” They still make regular appearances on rough, rainy adulthood nights. 

While the “Second Dark Age” films may not have left much of an imprint on the popular consciousness as a whole, they certainly left their mark on me, and one in particular has legacy buried deeply in its DNA. 

“Atlantis: The Lost Empire” -- released in 2001-- centers around a 1914 expedition to find the titular lost city, a technologically advanced island civilization lost to the sea centuries before. Funded by an off-beat millionaire (John Mahoney), and guided by the inherited knowledge of linguist and cartographer Milo Thatch (Michael J. Fox), a team of mercenaries and specialists discover that the lost city is not only still intact below the Earth’s crust, but still inhabited by its long-lived citizens under King Kashekim Nedakh (Leonard Nimoy) and his daughter, Princess Kidagakash Nedakh (Cree Summer). When the mercenaries betray the party, kill the king and kidnap the princess, who has melded with the city’s power- and life-source, the expedition specialists are roused to action to protect the city they had once considered an artifact.

From the beginning, the viewer sees Milo as a man driven by legacy: Between the research of his explorer grandfather, who raised him with stories of Atlantis, and the writings of The Shepherd’s Journal, which serves as a guide to the city, his whole life is dedicated to the pursuit of both personal and ancient history. He both seeks to fill his grandfather’s shoes as a scholar and provide the scientific world with proof that Atlantis isn’t just a fairytale, but a real civilization that once flourished. At the beginning of the film he (like some, but not all adventure archaeologists before him) seeks to return proof of Atlantis to the surface to solidify a legacy for both himself and his grandfather, but abandons this soon upon realizing that the city is still inhabited, opting instead to preserve the legacy of Atlantis’s culture by helping to rebuild after the events of the film.

“Sometimes I get a little carried away. But, hey, you know, that's what this is all about, right? I mean, discovery, teamwork, adventure. Unless, maybe, you're just in it for the money.”

Up to the point that the mercenaries forcibly take Kida, Milo’s attitude is placed in some contrast with that of the other specialists on the crew, who admit flat-out that they joined the expedition to make money, though these perspectives are not without nuance. Soon, the crewmembers open up to Milo about the legacies they carry as well: "Vinny" Santorini's (Don Novello)’s family flower shop, Dr. Joshua Sweet (Phil Morris) following in his father’s footsteps as a physician and maintaining a connection with his mother’s Arapaho culture, Audrey Ramirez (Jacqueline Obradors) taking over her retired father’s machine shop. Later in the film, Milo references back to this conversation, implying that a few had plans to continue their family businesses - investment in their own legacies - with the money they would have received upon returning to the surface.

“You're wiping out an entire civilization, but, hey, you'll be rich. Congratulations, Audrey. Guess you and your dad'll be able to open that second garage after all. And, Vinny, you-you can start a whole chain of flower shops. I'm sure your family's gonna be very proud. But that's what it's all about, right? Money.”

When the crew decides to fight for the Atlanteans and forfeit their payment, they place themselves in direct opposition to the true antagonists of the film, Commander Lyle Rourke (James Garner) and Lieutenant Helga Sinclair (Claudia Christian), who describe themselves as “adventure capitalists,” interested in getting rich at any cost. If they have any legacy that they’re trying to protect, it’s never mentioned in the movie, and the lack of regard they display for the Atlantean legacy set them apart from the rest of the characters in a significant way.

In addition to our explorers’ legacies, the Atlantean characters -- especially Kida. In her 2018 SYFY FANGRRLS article “All Hail Kida Of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Disney’s Forgotten Queen Of Color,” writer and podcaster Afiya Augustine not only describes Kida’s legacy as Disney’s first animated queen of color, but also succinctly describes the history she carries with her, both as a preserver of her people and the heir to historically royal responsibilities, like bonding to the city’s main source of power.

“Turns out, the crystal must bond with a royal host — and Kida, much like her mother, was chosen by the crystal in order to unleash its immense power to protect its world. That’s right — Kida is not only a protector by choice, but she’s been chosen to be such by blood. Like their precious stone, Kida powered the survival of her people.”

Which means that, by the end of the film, Kida is charged with not only restoring her civilization to its former glory, but also carrying the legacy of both her parents, now deceased. It’s a heavy load for a strong character, and one that Kida handles with gravity throughout the film.

And that’s just the character design.

In addition to being the first Disney film to feature a queen of color (rather than the “princess” title that had been utilized in previous films), “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” was also Disney’s first animated science fiction film, launching a jaunt into the genre that would include a other “Experimental Era” films like “Lilo and Stitch” and “Treasure Planet,” leaving its own (generally unacknowledged) mark on the canon itself. It, like many adventurer archaeologist stories before it, pays homage to many a story of lost world before it, from Jules Verne’s depictions in the mid-1800s on through the pulp adventure novels and into the territory of one Indiana Jones. Its art style, with its blocky shadows and angular motifs, pays serious homage to production designer and comic book artist Mike Mignola, an item of his legacy in turn.

“Atlantis” may not be a popular Disney film. It may never have gotten its true sequel or its spin-off television show. Your average casual Disney fan in 2019 might not would have known it existed if it weren’t on Netflix (for now, anyway). But this is not to say that the film didn’t leave its mark, both on the people who did see it and enjoyed it and still enjoy it almost 20 years later, and on the canon in which I truly believe it has rightfully earned its place.

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Stop, Look and Listen: “Return of the Obra Dinn”

[This post brought to you with major spoilers for Lucas Pope’s 2018 game “Return of the Obra Dinn”.]

"Literature makes us better noticers of life; we get to practice on life itself; which in turn makes us better readers of detail in literature; which in turn makes us better readers of life.” 

- James Wood, How Fiction Works  

And so it begins - it’s finally games industry season, folks, and we are in the thick of it, with conferences, game jams, awards ceremonies and publisher announcements happening even faster than even fans can keep up with. (In the first draft of this post, I listed out just the events that *I* keep up with, and this paragraph was three times as long as it is currently. You’re welcome for the edit.)

It’s a whirlwind, and, with great titles being announced and honored left and right, something will always fall through the cracks. But one thing that I’ve been sure not to miss with all the hubbub is that my personal Game of the Year 2018 is getting plenty of attention, and for good reason.

“Return of the Obra Dinn” -- the latest release by “Papers, Please” creator Lucas Pope -- released in October 2018 to favorable reviews (or Overwhelmingly Positive, if the gamers of Steam have anything to say about it) and has been receiving recognition since. It took home the Independent Games Festival’s Seumas McNally Grand Prize AND the award for Best Narrative at the Game Developers Choice Awards on Wednesday. It’s been nominated in six categories at the 15th British Academy Games Awards (happening April 4). And so far, it seems to be defending its title as the top-ranked indie game on Polygon’s Game of the Year chart (behind “God of War”, of course.

The game is part two-tone logic puzzle, part nautical horror and part historical science/magic fiction. The player is cast in the role of an insurance adjustor sent by the East India Trading Company in 1807 to determine the series of circumstances that turned the Obra Dinn into a veritable ghost ship, damaged and devoid of crew after being lost to the open sea for five years. 

Using the Memento Mortem, a magical little device that allows the player to travel back and explore vignettes anchored to the deaths of crew members, one must collect data to determine the identity, title, cause of death (if they are indeed dead) and nefarious actions of each person who’d been aboard the ship when it set sail in 1802. The visual scenes are centered around the exact moment of death, giving the player a look into the fate of each person aboard the ship, as well as the immediate circumstances of their demise. Ultimately, it’s discovered that the Obra Dinn was ravaged by not only the common misfortunes of the sea - mutiny, illness, in-fighting among the crew - but also far more monstrous forces of nature: Giant crabs, a kraken, vengeful mermaids... The kinds of things one might expect a cursed crew to go up against.

It’s a game played in “past present” tense, where the player simultaneously feels like a part of the action and knows that they are only observing it from a point in the future, and it isn’t necessarily easy. One must rely on visual references in death scenes, an unattached list of names, two drawings of the crew and seconds-long audio clips at the investigation of each new corpse to make judgements on each person’s fate. Sometimes the clue that makes an identity clear is an accent. Sometimes it’s an identifier posted obscurely somewhere in the environment. Sometimes it’s just the process of elimination. But almost always, it’s driven by the detail of the scenes the player is examining.

Because it relies so heavily on specifically captured snapshots, “Return of the Obra Dinn” doesn’t have the privilege of skimping on detail. Whereas in many games, Easter Eggs and environmental detail are considered a bonus for players who carefully examine the game’s setting instead of blazing through, Return of the Obra Dinn relies on more methodical playthrough. Its environments are meant to be combed through, to be examined from all angles, even going so far as to hide a vital corpse inside one of the ship’s walls in one portion of the game. 

A lack of narration (apart from the short snippets of conversational audio accompanying each scene) lends the ship both a sense of haunted quiet, and the opportunity for the story to unfold solely based on the findings of the player. This contrasts it to other “post-mortem”-style investigation games like Fullbright’s “Tacoma,” where we see the story unfold with the help of the crew’s movement and dialogue records in addition to detailed props. Instead, what we have is an information driven plot, organized in by the tools the player is given at the beginning of the game.

On a sensory level, blood splatters, raindrops, expressions and distinctive character traits (outfits, appearance, accents, responsibilities aboard the ship) must also be rendered in enough detail that we, as an adjustor stepping into the situation for the first time, can successfully determine most, if not all, that happened. It doesn’t just matter who killed whom, but also how, and when, and where, and why. And with 60 passengers aboard the ship (and 58 solvable fates in the main portion of the game) the differences between them can be the difference between completing the game and leaving it unfinished. It’s here that Return of the Obra Dinn intentionally approaches a “thisness” - a concept originating back to the 13th Century that denotes a sense of specificity in a thing rather than its universal qualities - that many games don’t. Rather than focusing on a specific few crew members to investigate and creating stock folks to quietly inhabit the scenes, each person aboard the Obra Dinn has a specific identity and fate, unique to them, that affects how the story of the ship as a whole plays out.

What results is a feeling of completion and quality in the game, but also a strange sense of realism. In the assumed role of insurance investigator - a title that is purposely made to feel very official at the game’s beginning - there is a completed circuit of logic in every person having a face, a name, a role, and ultimately a fact to report back about. The role feels thorough rather than ironic, and with that comes a sense of pride at discovering even the smallest fate. 

In “How Fiction Works”, writer and professor James Wood reminds us that great literature, full of just the right detail to set a scene and enhance a story, makes us better observers. Where the characters notice details in their world, we too notice details in ours. In gaming, we take that role further, stepping into the shoes of the character in a way that lets us not only observe but move through a scene with ease. In “Return of the Obra Dinn,” it’s the details that allow us to do that. It’s the details that convince us that we are the only thing standing between the Obra Dinn and obscurity, the only thing tethering it to shore and letting it succumb to its ghosts entirely.

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Ghost of a Chance: “Luigi’s Mansion”

[This post brought to you with spoilers for the 2001 GameCube game “Luigi’s Mansion” and its 2018 remake for the 3DS. Research support for this post by Brady Wallace.]

“Luigi’s Mansion” was the first game to ever scare the living daylights out of me.

I’m not sure how old I was the first time I played (though it was solidly in the “E for Everyone” range), stopping halfway through because I was simply too overwhelmed to finish. I remember having nightmares about it, hiding under my covers because I imagined ghosts leaping from my belongings and every dark shadow in my room... and, I’ll admit, writing a particularly long fan fiction for it for a class assignment once.

It was probably 10 years before I would return to it in any meaningful way and brave through to the end, but in the interim created by fear, it had become one of my favorite gaming experiences ever, and remains so to this day.

“Luigi’s Mansion” released for the GameCube in 2001, and starts with Luigi, the younger brother of Mario Brothers fame, receiving word that he is the winner of an enormous mansion. When he arrives at his supposed prize with the intent of meeting his brother there, he instead finds a dump overrun by ghosts who have seized his sibling and imprisoned him in a painting. Aided by an eccentric scientist and inventor who has been studying the property and arms him with an enhanced vacuum cleaner, Luigi is tasked with capturing the ghosts of the mansion and freeing his brother (while also simultaneously receiving boatloads of cash).

The game is the Mario franchise’s first foray into something approaching horror (and was even closer to horror in its beta stage), a fact that in and of itself is interesting to explore. The environmental storytelling is cute but unnerving, the music even more so. However, perhaps even more powerful to explore than the game’s aesthetic or world-building is the choice to make Luigi the star of this particular adventure.

Prior to “Luigi’s Mansion”, Luigi had been the main character of only one other game: “Mario Is Missing!”, a 1993 multi-platform edutainment game in which Luigi travels the globe collecting “artifacts” to rescue Mario from Bowser’s clutches. The game features various, real-world international locales, with Luigi and Yoshi responsible for clearing the Koopas from the streets and returning parts of major landmarks. (It was Nintendo’s offering to a culture recently enamored with the “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” franchise, which began in 1985. I could go down the rabbit hole with the zeitgeist that empowered the games, but will direct you to this 2008 critique of the game by Levi Buchanan instead.) 

However, despite the fact that “Mario is Missing!” does have platformer play methods, they seem to include only the ability to run and jump on the heads of Koopas that disappear immediately, lacking any combative complexity, enemy variety or - really - substantial threat displayed in prior games featuring Mario.

This means that when we entered into the world of “Luigi’s Mansion” in 2001, we are presented with a main character that:

A) Has always played second fiddle in the presence of other franchise characters (publicly so, as his character description in almost everything points out)

B) Has never had a major solo combat role in a game, as it was commonly recognized at the time

C) Is demonstrably scared to be in the situation

It’s a canny move for the Mario franchise’s first game that has consistent moments of building, tension and fear. In order to heighten the level of pressure on the player, ask them to play a character that they would have been set up to have less confidence in, and put them in a situation that seems to immediately break the expectations previously established for the world in which the franchise is set (that is to say, the challenge of platforming over the dread of jump scares). The aid he is presented with is nominal: Professor E. Gadd provides tech, training and tips, but never steps into the mansion himself, while the toads scattered throughout the decaying house are save points and emotional tension-breakers (who can resist their cute little faces?).

This has two effects on the player at different points through the game. At its outset, the recognition of Luigi’s lower-powered abilities instills a scare-quintessential feeling of the possibility of failure. In a traditional franchise platformer, one starts the game with the inherent knowledge that of course Mario will be able to stoically bounce some baddies into another plane - he’s done it before and he’ll do it again. Presented with a character that has not been independently empowered before and seems to doubt his own abilities instills the player with their own anxiety, which feeds into the game’s overall atmosphere.

And ultimately, it also feeds into a heightened feeling of accomplishment at the game’s end. The narrative catharsis that comes with success/survival in horror (or horror-esque) is often one of overcoming, whether that’s overcoming fear, overcoming an enemy, or overcoming entrapment. If a player finishes Luigi’s Mansion, not only does Luigi as a character overcome his fear of the house’s ghosts and save his brother, but the player also overcomes their initial doubt of Luigi’s capabilities. The longer a person plays, the easier it is to go blazing through jump-scare infested hallways, or to plow back through the entirety of the mansion when the power is cut out roughly 3/4 of the way through the game. Confidence is built. By the end, one almost feels as though they’ve survived something alongside the mustachioed younger Mario brother -- something that rarely, if ever, happens with his older sibling.

“Luigi’s Mansion” is no longer a standalone in its branch of the Mario franchise, with one sequel released in 2013 (12 years after the original), a port to the Nintendo 3DS last year, and another sequel on the way. And as the game has risen in popularity, so has the popularity of its main character: Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata declared 2013 the “Year of Luigi,” 30 years after the character’s first appearance in a Mario game. In the end, “Luigi’s Mansion” created an underdog hero, a character about which people can truly believe that courage is not being unafraid, but progressing in spite of fear.

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Good In Tension: “Jane the Virgin”

[This post brought to you with major spoilers for the CW show “Jane the Virgin” up to season 3, episode 10: “Chapter Fifty-Four.” I know, I know... I’m catching up as fast as I can!]

There’s something to be said for a show that successfully bends genre, melding two complicated concepts into one cohesive plot. There’s even more to be said when that show can seamlessly melt three together, inspiring emotional reaction from its viewers with a snap of its fingers.

 Which means there’s a lot to be said for rom-com-dram “Jane the Virgin.”

Loosely based on a Venezuelan telenovela, “Jane the Virgin” begins with the accidental artificial insemination of 23-year-old Jane Gloriana Villanueva (Gina Rodriguez), a conscientious, religious Venezuelan-American woman living with her single mother Xiomara (Andrea Navedo) and widowed grandmother Alba (Ivonne Coll) in modern-day Miami. The resulting pregnancy leads her to connect with the baby’s father, Rafael Solano (Justin Baldoni), his sister Louisa (Yara Martinez) and his wife Petra (Yael Grobglas), owners of a local luxury hotel; complicates her relationship with fiancé Detective Michael Cordero (Brett Dier); and introduces her to her father, telenovela star Rogelio de la Vega (Jaime Camil). There is truly no succinct way to summarize all that happens next: The show takes the common themes and characteristics of different telenovela genres-- long lost romance reignited, the revelation that estranged relatives are drug lords, and murders under mysterious circumstances -- and satirically stacks the deck with them over the course of its existing 4 seasons, with the fifth and final season premiering later this month. 

But where other shows may have difficulty managing so many different characters and plot lines, “Jane the Virgin” uses them to build an emotionally-balanced story infrastructure that engages consistently by playing upon its own cycles of drama and relief.

First, for every significant action (and frequently for seemingly less significant ones) in “Jane the Virgin,” there is an equal and opposite emotional reaction. The joy of the birth of Jane’s son Mateo is counterbalanced by his kidnapping. The fun of Jane’s bachelorette party is disrupted by her worry that a voicemail sent to her professor would cost her job. The closer she gets to either Michael or Rafael, the more the tension grows with the other. Virtually nothing goes unremembered, un-overheard by an outside party, or unrevealed at a crucial moment. 

That is to say that for every good moment, we can expect an emotionally uncomfortable one, and for every uncomfortable moment, we can expect a catharsis.

The inevitability of reaction creates a driving tension through the show: When things go well, the viewer holds their breath waiting for something to go wrong, and when things go badly, they continue to watch for the sake of resolution. It happens on both a micro and a macro scale, for things as simple as a conversation between Janes and her graduate advisor and as complex as Xiomara and Rogelio’s sometimes-tumultuous relationship.

Each character brings their own baggage, their own perspectives and their own emotional roller coasters. As each of their plot lines move through minor and major tensions, they overlap intentionally with those of the other characters to create a continuum that keeps viewers engaged, landing emotional punches at intentional points in the story.

Perhaps the most poignant moments are when one character’s happiness directly causes another’s unhappiness (see: Jane’s wedding to Michael, and Rafael’s consequential heartbreak) or aligns circumstances against another character’s situation (see: Michael surviving a gunshot on his and Jane’s wedding night distracting the security guard in Petra’s hospital room long enough for her to be re-injected with paralytic by her twin sister Anežka. [Whew.]). While a season may end with one character satisfied with their situation, it may also see another in imminent danger, suspending the viewers and characters between points of gratification and grief.

In a way, it may feel like the story itself pits characters against one another, as though not everyone will win in the end and there is no circumstance that can accommodate everyone. And while we have no way of truly knowing who ends up happy at the end of the show (as of March 11, 2019, that is), it’s exactly this pattern of tension and relief that gives us hope. Hope that things will end up well, that it will work out for everyone, in some way. Hope that, like Jane, we can believe in a happy ending, no matter what it takes to get there.

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The Unexpected Virtue of Losing Touch With Reality: “Birdman”

[I wrote the below essay on “Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance” just after its wider theatrical release in 2014, two weeks before the film was awarded Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Written for an art criticism class, it’s ironically less academic than most of the articles I post to the blog -- a little less analysis and a little more review -- but I still find myself going back to read it around Oscar’s season, and thought I’d share it this evening. Spoilers ahead for this and a handful of other films. Enjoy.] 

I was under the impression that Alejandro González Iñárritu’s newest film, Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance starring Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, and Ed Norton, was a “dramady,” an amusing-enough film with a fair amount of emotional impact. A feel-good film, perhaps. A little off-beat, but nothing too deep or too sinister to be categorized as anything that I would think about longer than until the end of the night.

Fortunately, I was very wrong.

The dramatic film, which has been nominated for nine Academy Awards this year, focuses on washed up action film superstar Riggan Thomson as he struggles to direct a successful Broadway play, breathe life back into his acting career, rekindle a relationship with his formerly drug-addicted daughter, and reconcile a past that has left him a legend with a future that has found him a virtual nobody. Taunted constantly and sometimes violently by his own alter ego— the titular superhero he once played on-screen and who he still, in his mind, could be— he bumbles through each challenge with a strange brand of dignity, a craving for acceptance but a stubbornness that dictates that he must have it on his own terms.

Birdman and reality have a strange and sometimes uncomfortable relationship in the same way Fight Club did, in the same way the Matrix did, and—in some aspects— the same way that Inception did. It’s a heavy film, but one so interspersed with the “meta,” the subconscious thoughts of a man who we as viewers really only follow through the film, that the heaviness takes on the swirling lights of lunacy almost as much as the sharp clarity of some painful reality. We are left wondering what is real, what is only in Riggan’s mind. Overall, we can not be entirely sure what will happen to Riggan Thomson, nor what has happened to him in the past. We can only live in the quickly-moving present.

The artistry behind pulling us into this shadowy and fluid world is brilliantly calculated, taking our world and placing it in the fictional, reflecting it back at us in a way that is strange and distorted, though familiar. Most of—if not all of— the music in the movie is strategically diegetic, and occasionally the camera pans over to show a street performer, to give us context to the world in which we have been placed. Throughout Birdman, we are reminded, in purposeful irony, of the world of the real-life action stars, the blockbuster screens where capes and explosive special effects still dazzle audiences, including, maybe even ourselves.

And then we are reminded that this is not one of those movies, but perhaps the unmade sequel, “the fourth movie” referenced several times during the film. This is the story of what happens after Captain America or Batman or Spiderman ends. This is the story of a man who was once a hero, is remembered as a hero, but who is no longer, who is catapulted back onto the artistic scene after years in the shadows.

That man is as much Michael Keaton (the artist formerly known as Batman) as it is Riggan Thomson.

Whether it was some sort of self-fulfilled prophecy, an uncanny self-awareness, or an abundance of confidence on behalf of both Michael Keaton and the team behind the film, we cannot say for sure, though other casting decisions may persuade us to say that it was no mistake. Who else, for example, knows more about a movie about yielding to the advice of a violent alter ego than Edward Norton, the star of the 1999 film Fight Club? And Emma Stone, fresh from the most recent Amazing Spiderman franchise due to her character’s death, surely knows something about getting the boot from the action film industry.

The filming of the movie is reminiscent of that in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Rope, a seamlessly edited string of shots that gives the impression that the whole thing was filmed in one long take. This in particular lends to the whole film a feeling of stage-production, of watching a play, with actors coming on and off stage, the action typically focusing on whatever character has the most dialogue at the time. With it comes a level of dramatic irony not usually present within film: in one particular scene, Stone’s character Sam Thomson is just off-screen, hiding in the dressing room while another character degrades her her to Norton’s Mike Shiner. We are present for an odd little subplot in which two of the actresses in Riggan’s show discuss him and then make out backstage. That kind of detail, even in the strange little diversions, gives the audience a certain presence in the movie.

The typical three-shot shooting process is also, for the most part, absent from the fabric of the film; we are not presented only with a person, a thing, and the person’s reaction to the thing. Rather, we are left several times to focus on one character’s reaction to whatever is happening outside of our view. For example, after an explosive argument between Sam and Riggan, the camera lingers on Sam’s face instead of cutting to Riggan’s, watching her expression fall from tension and anger to something very near regret. The strategy works poignantly in the study of character in the film and even goes so far as to contribute to the very symbolic— though highly ambiguous— ending.

The characters themselves serve an important role (no pun intended) in making the film the artistic statement that it is. Their emotions, the fluid way that the actors interact with the camera, make them seem a part of our reality in an almost high definition way. Emma Stone’s pale, fragile-looking physique, her wide, wild eyes and her withdrawn, timid demeanor make her role as a recovering addict believable. Michael Keaton’s tiredness, his very real connection with his character, add to the Riggan Thomson that the audience sees on screen. Even Edward Norton’s theatrical range, his capacity to be both amusing and, at times, frightening in his intensity, works for the betterment of Birdman. But at the same time, even the characters are both very literally and figuratively acting, feigning happiness or health, playing for an audience of their peers and those they wish to impress.

Keaton’s character obviously suffers from some breed of depression; schizophrenia, in some interpretations of his very talkative alter ego, may not even be a far-off diagnosis. Stone’s character continues to have issues with addiction and dealing with a broken family. Norton is addicted to grandeur, but is unable to function when he is not onstage or preparing to be on stage. They are all only striving to achieve the flimsy appearance of normality, all of them fighting the nagging concept of their own “Birdman,” their pasts and the consequences that have resulted from the decisions they have made.

For all of these things, though, for better or for worse, there was no battle scene. The bad guy was never slayed; there was no bad guy to slay. There was no enormous and cathartic climax for the viewer to rely on, only a single tense event that leads us further down the rabbit hole in the two-hour-long game of real-or-not-real. Which, in true form to its being poised as the anti-hero movie, the film may have benefitted from in some literary way. While it progressed fine without the hero moment, the movie had a subtly intense plot that may leave the viewer feeling stressed and unfulfilled, especially since this plot ended fairly vaguely. Leaving the theater, one might not know what to think, may be overwhelmed by the little knots of tension that dotted the film.

But, at least, you leave the theater feeling something.

From start to finish, Birdman is a film filled with distorted reflections of our own reality, our world seen from a funhouse mirror. While it may not be the cup of tea of those looking for a thrill ride, for an action film, for something more than, simply, a weird study of humanity and the theater, it was a film that can be commended for its daring technical aspects and its attempts to reach out towards a deeper meaning. Keaton, Stone, and Norton made the film a success, and it is likely that they will reap the rewards of their hard work during the upcoming awards season. But, in the end, it is the work of a whole team to produce a film such as this, with detailed artistry, unorthodox approaches to modern philosophy and just overall cleverness giving Birdman, or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance its wings.

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Year One

Long time, no see, everybody! 

It’s been a while since there’s been a new post on String, and I hope that the change of season (whatever season that may be) has been kind to each of you. I know that it’s been a busy, busy, busy transition from winter to spring here at String HQ, with lots of plan-making, connection-building and future-considering on behalf of both blog and blogger. The whole process has frequently straddled a fine line between excitement and anxiety and, while I wish I hadn’t spent so much time away, it was necessary to take a step back as those things took center stage. Just as work-life balance is real, so is hobby-life balance, and it’s important to respect those things as they come. 

In this little gap time, however, we passed an important milestone that I thought would be a great place to jump back in: On Monday of this week, String Narratives turned one year old! 

That’s right - it was March 19, 2017 when I made my “Thesis Statement” post, starting this whole blogging adventure with a passion for stories and how they’re told, and I’m happy to report that that passion has only grown in the year since. 

So, before we slide back into our regular content schedule (there’s some super cool stuff coming up), I thought I might take a post to reflect on how far String has come in the past year, and share how I hope it grows into the future. 

I created String Narratives a year ago in response to a period of unbalance. I had recently stepped back from a stressful job at an organization I loved in order to address growing needs elsewhere in my life, and was questioning whether I’d made the right decision. I was learning a lot in my day-to-day, but didn’t necessarily know how to put into practice the skills and knowledge that I was gaining in a way that felt creative and satisfying. Long-standing relationships were changing with the circumstances of life, and I felt the shift of presences and absences very keenly, especially in the interests I shared or once shared with those close to me.

I responded to this unbalance by consuming as many stories as I could, devouring them end-over-end as a means of alleviating stress, analyzing them as distraction. When I realized I wanted to document and share these analyses, String Narratives was born. 

In the year since the blog began, we’ve tripped through close to 60 narratives together, expanded onto Twitter and made plans for much more along the way. It’s been a great first year, better than I ever could have asked for, and I’m proud of what my weird little hobby has turned into. 

And I am most certainly looking forward to continuing. 

That being said, things are not concrete moving forward; as I referenced in the post intro, both I and this blog are quickly approaching a place of change. Right now, I hope (and suspect) that this will allow me to be even more involved in String Narratives come the next chapter. But truthfully, I don’t know - we may have to adjust the posting schedule, or posting frequency, depending on how things pan out. The blog is a living thing, a growing thing, and I can only do my best to keep up with it. Any changes will be communicated ahead of time, here and on social media, and I thank you in advance for your patience as we move into String’s second year of existence. 

Your support has meant the world to me, and I can’t wait to see what we explore together from here on out.

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The Yarn: Feel It Out

Now we set into the weird in-between time. 

It’s February - the shortest month of the whole year, but one that arguably feels the most in limbo - the holidays are now long over, the cold has set in with an unrelenting grip until spring, and at any given time on any given day, nothing sounds better than a nap. 

In other words, it is prime hibernation time, and trust me when I say that your blogger is feeling it, with a coffee-to-water ratio that is unadvisedly off-balance  and nightly dreams that star never-ending quantities of hot soup and buttered bread. But while feeling in my fingers and toes has been harder to come by, there have been plenty of stories around to put my heart through the ringer. 

Here are just a few that have kept me company over the last month:

“The Red Strings Club”

Set in what feels like a “Bladerunner”-esque universe, Deconstructeam’s “The Red Strings Club” is game that literally centers on emotions and makes manipulating them a strategy for success - an approach that they call “psychological bartending.” You play a bartender and information-broker who finds himself at the heart of corporate domination and the rebellion that seeks to stop it. With a nifty steampunk vibe and a neat premise for exploring gameplay dialogue, the result is an immersive and thoughtful sci-fi experience. I haven’t yet finished the game yet, but a few spoilers I’ve seen online assure me that the end of it will be gut-wrenching, and honestly? I’m excited for it.

“Elmet” by Fiona Mozley 

Every once in a while, I read a book I like so much that, for a while after I finish, I can’t even imagine starting a new one. That’s exactly what I went through (or, honestly, am still going through) with “Elmet.” In her debut novel, Mozley builds a mesmerizing, mystical wood in which the narrator, Daniel, and his family make their home, and - when that secluded home is threatened - alternates between vignettes of lyrical beauty and visceral horror to tell the tale. It’s one of the most well-knotted stories I’ve encountered in a while, with no detail going to waste by its end, which left me both desperately breathless and terribly pleased, unable to stop thinking about it even weeks later.

“Loving Vincent”

"Loving Vincent” is a fully hand-painted film. If that’s not enough to strike curiosity into your heart, then the fact that it’s also a semi-biopic mystery should do the trick. Set in the days after the death of now-renown painted Vincent Van Gogh in 1890, “Loving Vincent” follows Armand Roulin, the son of one of a local postmaster (and, in real life, a three-time subject for the painted), charged with taking a letter to Vincent’s brother Theo. In the process of doing so, he also begins to question the circumstances surrounding Vincent’s death, and conducts a series of interviews with those who knew him in his final days. The result is a film that marries facts and art to depict the sadness and isolation that led up to Van Gogh’s suicide.

“Steven Universe,” season 5

I remember binging the whole first (and maybe second) seasons of “Steven Universe” in just a couple of days one summer, and since then, I’ve been a fan in quick bursts, catching up a season at a time every now and then with long sessions of the show. Season 5′s opener finds our titular half-gem, half-human character stuck somewhere he’s never been before, and from there expands outward to explore more of the show’s complex lore, much of which has not been explicitly explained up to this point. From the excellent characterizations provided by its cast to its unwillingness to setting into a plot-free status quo, the show generally bounces between nostalgic and heartwarming, and I look forward to the next “Steven bomb” episode-sets to round out the season.

“Garbage Night” by Jen Lee

Jen Lee’s comics “Garbage Night” and “Vacancy” tell the story of Simon, an anthropomorphic dog who has been abandoned by his owners - and, mysteriously enough, the whole town in which he lived. Teaming up with a raccoon named Cliff and a deer named Reynard, he must learn to survive on his own in the wild as the trio find a place where they can live safely. It’s a cute story - sometimes heartbreaking, as stories with dogs often are - with snarky, clever characters and absolutely beautiful coloring to boot.

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Living Space: “Tacoma”

[This post brought to you with major spoilers for Fullbright’s 2017 game “Tacoma.”]

I could write so many blog posts about “Tacoma.” 

Honestly, it could be a series.

I could write about how the major narrative is observed, rather than experienced, and how subtle details bring us into the characters’ mindscapes despite that possibility of distance. I could write (as many have already!) about the thoughtful reality the game establishes by using representative personal belongings as fuel for the crew’s development throughout the story. I could write about the subversions of genre that lead to the ever-lovin’ plot twist that marks the game’s end. 

In just a few hours, Fullbright’s sci-fi exploration offering maps out a character-driven speculative fiction story that capitalizes on the natural strengths of the walking simulator genre, while simultaneously introducing new techniques and tools that encourage thorough exploration and keen attention to even the smallest clues. 

I could write about any of that; I could write about all of that. But we’ve got one life to live and one blog to write, so, instead, I’m going to tackle one of my very, very favorite things about “Tacoma” - and, indeed, probably the thing about it that first caught my attention in Game Informer magazine two years before it was actually released: 

“Tacoma” weaves the threads of an abandoned spaceship narrative to not only tell a story about the crew that once inhabited it, but also a story about the universe outside its hull. 

In “Tacoma,” the player acts as Amitjyoti Ferrier - known throughout the narrative as Amy - a contractor who boards the abandoned Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma in order to retrieve the vessel’s AI “ODIN” for its corporate owner Venturis.  Exploring the quiet ship in the year 2088, Amy and the player are able to review the events leading up to its abandonment using AR technology that allows recordings of the crew’s dialogue and movements to play out in their original spaces, giving context to the array of personal belongings they left behind. Following the actions of crew members E.V. St. James, Clive Siddiqi, Natali Kuroshenko, Roberta "Bert" Williams, Sareh Hasmadi, Andrew Dagyab and  ODIN in what - for all we know - might be their last days, we discover a complex mystery and problems within the much much wider world beyond the Tacoma station.

The inside of the station itself offers more than a few clues about the departure. Things are messy - livably messy. Personal belongings are still in their places: Toothbrushes on sink-sides, clothes in the floor, music queued up to play. Food containers have been strewn through the living space. It’s clear that the crew either left in a hurry or were distracted in their final days about the Tacoma. (Later we find out that both are true.) Yet, the whole place is abandoned, eery in its quietness when the proof of previous life is right in front of the player at all time. As information is presented throughout the game’s beginning, it’s suggested to the player that there was an accident - a meteoric impact - that caused oxygen to be drained from the ship. Meanwhile, popular science fiction tropes might lead the player to make assumptions that any AI left alone about a ship had to have had a hand in getting rid of its human counterparts. Either way, the “interior plot” featured in “Tacoma”’ is one that’s based somewhat on the nervousness of unexplained absence (rooted in the fear that whatever happened will happen to us as well) and a kind of nostalgic sadness that pervades as we get to know the crew through AR recordings and begin to interpret the things they left behind. It’s par for the course, a mix of characteristics that exemplify why abandoned spaceship narratives work so well at instilling suspense.

As the player draws nearer to the ending of the game, however, it becomes more apparent that the isolation of the ship was only a small factor to the sense of unease in comparison to the things that were happening outside of it. 

“Tacoma” doesn’t play out in a vacuum. As an outside entity exploring the ship at the request of a corporation, we ourselves are proof of this, after all. Every time we travel to a new area of the ship, we’re presented with a new advertisement for space bungalow development, reminding us that we still exist as a part of this world. Every time we check a newsclipping in the game, the game indicates that other bases and planets are moving at breakneck speed towards the future. And every time we check a computer terminal, we’re reminded of the characters’ responsibilities to the outside world - and indeed, how much brand loyalty means in that outside world. 

Because that’s the world that “Tacoma” takes place in: A world in which brand loyalty is a defining feature of a person’s life. Brand loyalty - whether to Venturis, Carnival, Amazon or another major player in this speculative world - determines where a person lives, where a person pursues higher education, where a person works. Capitalism has overtaken humanity, and ultimately, you realize that it may have cost the crew of Tacoma their lives. As David Roberts put it in his gamesradar.com review of the game: “The elegantly designed lines of Tacoma's corridors belie a very bleak idea of what the future holds: privacy is all but abolished, company Loyalty (with a capital L) is literal currency, and unions have to fight to keep people valued in a society on the cusp of complete automation.”

While the game begins with tension rising from the things the player assumes they’ll find inside the isolated ship, what becomes even more nerve-wracking is the influence the outside world, and how interspersed it is with the personal details inside the ship. Banners from corporate-owned universities hang on the walls of our crew members, and more than a couple of times we hear conversations about how the loyalty programs play out in their own lives. At first, these seem like cheeky world design quirks from the Fullbright team, but when we realize the impact that the loyalty has on the plot as a whole - that the Venturis Corporation had attempted to kill the crew and make an example of the tragedy in an attempt to gain support for overturning industry legislation - they become grim symbols of a system that is perilous to participants that it deems insignificant, faceless and replaceable. 

Which also begs a question of us as players: Had we not been able to access the AR overlay - which shares bittersweet and often intimate moments in the crew’s final days aboard the ship - would we, too, assign more weight to those corporate loyalties than to the humanity of the characters? Would we be less nervous for them as we investigated this derelict ship; would we be less less confident or less hopeful that they made it off alive?

What happens instead is a give-and-take between the abandoned space ship narrative that happens on-board the Tacoma Lunar Transfer Station and the speculative (almost dystopian, though I don’t know that I would necessarily go that far) fiction that happens in the world outside of it. The former transmits a kind of microscopic sense of personality and a ghost of homeyness, contrasted with isolation and unease. The latter provides a wider context of manipulation and powers beyond out control and beyond the control of the characters. Together, they build a story that carries the player through an arc of emotion, that echoes off the walls of the quiet Tacoma with a genuine sense of mystery and concern, and that posits that perhaps what we should really be afraid of was the last thing we expected.

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Setting the Table

[This post brought to you with spoilers for the video games “Fallout 4” and “Horizon Zero Dawn,” as well as the television adaption of “The Walking Dead” (as well as the long-running comic on which it’s based, most likely) and Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road.”]

“I have come to believe that food is a history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice -- and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium.” - Robin Sloan, “Sourdough”

I love food.

Like, a lot. 

I love eating food, I love cooking food, I love shopping for food. And I really, really like writing about food. 

The thing is, food doesn’t usually take front-and-center focus in narrative, unless the narrative is explicitly about food. Most of the time, what or how or when a character’s eating feels like extra detail thrown in for realism; sharing a meal has been traditionally seen as a narrative method for showing how characters are bonding or becoming more intimate. 

What we fail to realize, however, is that food can be much more than that when used correctly in a narrative context. Food can be a subtle reminder of things we might otherwise forget in a story. It can be part of the environment, a great indicator of a story’s setting and of the state of the world at large. Even if the world at large has ended. 

Looking at a list of consumable items available in Bethesda’s 2015 game “Fallout 4,″  one might notice that food (we won’t talk about drinks for now) tends to fall into one of three categories: Processed and packaged foods like Sugarbombs and InstaMash, plants and produce such as fresh carrots and melons, and "protein” products including rad-rat steak and squirrel bits. 

Each of these food sources tells us a lot about the universe in which “Fallout 4″ is set, as well as the apocalyptic event that overcame it (in this case, nuclear bombardment and the radioactive meteorological events that follow). The presence of the first plays into what we’ll think of as a kind of two-factor balance of time and population. On one side of that equation, the closer that a narrative happens to an apocalyptic event, the more commercially-produced food sources will still be available for consumption, because people have had less time to drain the resource and make it unavailable. On the other side of the equation, a vastly reduced population could also result in a high saturation of commercially produced goods, because there simply haven’t been enough people around to use them. “Fallout 4″ canonically takes place 210 years after the nuclear destruction occurs, so in this case, we can rule out the former factor and focus on the latter, assuming that few people survived the... well, fallout... making the canned goods that the player character collects and eats during the game available to be consumed in the first place. 

Meanwhile, the produce and “protein” products that the player encounters for the rest of the game goes even further in placing the story in its contextual setting. Most of the crops that one can forage in the world of “Fallout 4″ are very mutated, like the tato, which is a genetic mutation combining a potato and a tomato, both of which are extinct. “Proteins” on the other hand, frequently come from the monsters that the player fights in the wasteland, many of which may share characteristics of animals from before the nuclear bombardment, but ultimately seem to have evolved different mechanisms to survive in the world that’s left. On one hand, these are constant reminders of the apocalyptic event, while on the other, they are crucial signs that what’s left of humanity is moving on, craving to reestablish themselves at the top of the food chain, adapting and learning to find new nutritional value from the weird life that is left to them. This being said, most foods in “Fallout 4″ also cause radioactivity damage to the player, reflecting the fact that despite the fact that the food’s shelf life may not be so far past that it kills you immediately, exposure to the game’s setting has taken its toll and that it too was destroyed when humans leveled everything. 

In comparison to all of the options we have for meals in “Fallout 4,” we have very few in Guerilla Games’s 2017 offering “Horizon Zero Dawn,” limiting us mostly to meat we’ve hunted and various plant products we’ve foraged. Some of the various human tribes the player encounters over the course of the game grow crops, but that’s really as far as the food situation goes. And all of this seems to make sense for the setting with which we are presented at the game’s start- one in which humanity has reverted to a somewhat more primitive state after violently exiting a highly-technological one. There are no canned goods to collect, no packaged sweets. Which makes sense. If we take the Wikia timeline as accurate, the majority of human life died out around 2066 during the Faro Plague, while the first events that the player really participates in occur in 3027. This places almost a thousand years between the main character Aloy’s existence and the events of the game and the apocalyptic "moment” which ultimately caused them.

All of these things actually play well with the narrative technique that the game uses to build a mystery about the past that also haunts Aloy. The player actually knows little about the apocalyptic event that occurred to create this tribalist system until later in the plot; the food we encounter throughout the game is very basic, possibly causing us to believe that the extinction event that occurred did not affect the Earth, which is obviously still able to support plants and animals. However, the farther we go, the more we come to realize that the planet actually had to restart from zero after the technological calamity struck, and that what we see is the result of the rebuilding effort. 

We can also see the trend of food as an indicator of setting in post-apocalyptic stories of other mediums. 

In perhaps the most popular post-apocalyptic television show to be on television ever, “The Walking Dead” also features a lot of processed and canned products that have a long shelf-life, like S’Getti Rings, chocolate pudding, and Crazy Cheese. Considering the temporal proximity of the show’s events to the initial outbreak, it makes sense that there would still be commercially-produced consumable goods available. Even if there were a rush on those foods right after "walkers” began to appear, the number of undead that appear on the show in comparison to the number of living characters we encounter (SourceFedNERD made an interesting video on this a couple of years ago), would mean that any food goods owned by those people would likely enter back into circulation through looting or adoption of those goods by other people in their parties. Assuming that many people owned at least some canned goods before the event occurred, that adds even more food to the running total available for survivors to find and consume.

So, alternating from the lack of processed foods available in “Horizon Zero Dawn,” we can infer some detail about how relatively short a time has passed since the apocalyptic event, as well as what society looked like beforehand and, generally, how many people died during the event.

Of these goods, Goo Goo Clusters, especially, also lends a special detail to the show with their appearance in season 5, episode 8 of the show. Made for more than a hundred years in Nashville, Tennessee  - a little less than 250 miles from where the story began in Atlanta, Georgia -, the candy is a small reminder of the region where the show takes place, even when things have fallen into such ruin that other icons might be hard to distinguish.  

However, in addition to processed foods, there is also a lot of foraging and farming that occurs within the televised world of “The Walking Dead.” A recap of the season 4 premiere by the Washington Post, reminds us that at one point, the group was living within the fenced-in confines of a prison, where they had essentially started their own small farm, complete with a garden and animals. A little ways down the road in season 6, episode 12, we’re also introduced to Carol’s acorn and beet cookies - a delightful, weird take on food in the show, that was also recreated on Binging with Babish not long ago and are now also in The Walking Dead cook book - while the group is in Alexandria. While both of these instances occur while the group is in a place of relative security and safety, the fact that they are able to still tease some sort of nutrition from the earth post apocalypse also serves as a subtle reminder that this particular event is human-driven and human-affected, rather than environmental. 

For our final example - our literary example - we might explore the world of Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel “The Road” - a story about a father and son attempting survival after some sort of extinction event in the U.S.

While we’re not specifically made aware of how old The Boy in “The Road” is meant to be, it’s inferred by his father’s actions that he was born right before or right after the apocalyptic event. Given the boy’s apparently cognitive abilities throughout the book - as well as the fact that, in a 2008 interview with Oprah Winfrey after the book’s release, McCarthy says that many of the conversations in the book were based on those with his own son (who, they mention, would have been around 8 at the time the book was published) - we might infer that between 6 and 10 years had passed since that event occurred. While we’re not really given much information about the character of the apocalypse that occurred, we can derive some thoughts from the attitudes towards food in the story.

For example, while The Boy and The Man encounter several instances of cannibalism as the story progresses, they also stumble into a bunker that has plentiful canned goods available for consumption, as well as a machine that still contains a soda at the story’s beginning. In several of the narratives we’ve discussed in this post, a kind of random stumble-upon situation for canned goods makes sense. However, upon closer inspection, the longer temporal distance between the apocalyptic event and plot of the story makes this somewhat more unsettling. There are, as we see in the book, lots of people around, in roving bands; what are the chances that no parties actively seeking food like The Boy and The Man were ever checked the same places and discovered those food sources in the decade or almost-decade following the apocalypse? Was it because cannibalism was a more reliable source of nutrition, that it was easier to shed the skin of pre-apocalyptic decency than it was to search without confirmation that sustenance would ever be found?  This raises more questions and, arguably, connections to McCarthy’s messages about maintaining humanity even in the face of uncertainty and likely failure. 

In these narratives, food goes farther than just character development and bonding. It’s an indicator of the real state of things, the attitudes and terrors that haunt the wastelands. In a way, food becomes its own technique for world-building, for sliding subtle hints to the “listener” about the the universe in which the stories take place, leaving us, in many cases, hungry for more. 

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Violent Delights?: “The End of the F***ing World”

[This post brought to you with major spoilers for the show “The End of the F***ing World” and possibly the comic series by Charles S. Forsman on which it is based. (It’s on my reading list, so cannot yet confirm.) It also contains spoilers for several works by William Shakespeare.]

Every once in a while, everybody I know will recommend the same story to me all at once. It’s like they’ve planned it - some sort of narrative ambush designed to convince me to binge-watch a show/gulp down a book/splurge on tickets for a movie in mere hours. 

Two weeks ago, it was Netflix’s new show “The End of the F***ing World.” 

And boy, did I fall for it. I think I watched the whole season in a day, riding the weird emotional rollercoaster that the dark comedy presented me. I laughed, I cringed, and by the end I was in tears. 

It was only after I’d had some time to recover that I realized elements of the show felt oddly familiar, and even later that I realized the comparison happening in my mind was something old.

 I mean years old. 

High school English class old.  William Shakespeare old. 

(We’ll be examining the plot of “End of the F***ing World” season 1 as if it is the only season of the show and where the story begins and ends. My reasoning here is two-fold in that I can’t find any proof that there will be a second season of the show other than a few hopeful articles and an open-ended date frame on IMDB and that the story is fairly nicely contained within the first season anyway. It goes something like this:)

“The End of the F***ing World” follows 17-year-olds James (Alex Lawther), a self-proclaimed psychopath who was a witness to his mother’s suicide as a child and is interested in making his first human kill, and Alyssa (Jessica Barden), a strong-emotioned and strong-willed young woman who recently started at James’s school after her mother Gwen (Christine Bottomley) remarries an abusive man named Tony (Navin Chowdhry). The two set out on a road trip to track down Alyssa’s long-estranged father Leslie (Barry Ward), and, though James initially plans to murder Alyssa on the journey, the two warm to one another just in time to fall into some dangerous situations along the way. 

It’s a story about some messed up characters who learn a lot about how the world around them is even more messed up than they are. By the end of the season, they’ve learned a lot about themselves and what they’re really capable of. But how does this story at all reflect the stories told by William Shakespeare more than 400 years ago? To answer that question, we’ll jump into a few sources that are seeking to define what makes a Shakespearean tragedy in the first place. 

From a CliffsNotes essay on the subject (which leads with an investigation of “Othello” but gets a little more general later on), a tragic flaw that is the ultimate end of the protagonist at the forefront of the drama, and a five-part structure that includes an expositional period, the development of complication, a period of climax and crisis, developments toward the inevitable and the final resolution. 

When examining the characters that star in “The End of the F***ing World,” we certainly can identify that they are flawed figures, but might be tempted to attest their tragic flaws to be their individual emotional states. However, what might be more prudent is to dig into what they do with (or even despite) those emotional states, and for both characters that seems to be over-confidence. James places so much confidence in himself as an unfeeling killer that when he does begin to have feelings for Alyssa, he is shaken to his core by them. And Alyssa has so much faith in her father and the idea that things will be better with him that she has nothing left when that proves untrue.

It’s these flaws that help contribute to that overarching five-part structure that’s also visible within the show. In the first episodes, we meet the pair, who transition quickly into actually committing a murder and having to flee - our development of complication. After bring briefly separated, they reach Alyssa’s father and, after a confrontation (the climax and approach of the inevitable), James is presumably shot by the police who had been tracking them as Alyssa is arrested in the final resolution.

Meanwhile, from Muhammad Rafiq’s letterpile.com essay “Definition and Characteristics of Shakespearean Tragedy”, we can add to our literary grocery list the sense that the hero was doomed from the start of the narrative, a conflict between good and evil within the plot or character, the “tragic waste” of characters who represent the “good” in the struggle, comic relief and supernatural elements.

While we might not get the sense outrightly that James is necessarily doomed from the start, we actually start out the show with plans for Alyssa’s death by his hand. However, that would also be too simple in the course of the narrative, and we can - by the end of the first episode - safely assume that James will not carry out the murder he intends, resulting in the conflict between good and evil within our character. The fact that the good in him eventually wins out right before he is shot is a fairly accurate representation of a waste in the course of the struggle. It’s really the sometimes dryly absurd parts of the journey that it takes for him and Alyssa to get to that point that offer the comic relief, whether that looks like a car exploding right after they decide that kind of thing doesn’t happen or a rogue gas station attendant named Frodo taking revenge on his boss. 

While no supernatural elements are really present in the narrative (that might have just pushed it past being too weird for modern audiences), we do get a fairly satisfying substitute. If it’s Shakespeare’s ghosts that haunt castle halls and visit grieving princes and cause general mayhem in the lives of the plays’ characters, we can get a fairly satisfying similar “haunting” from the pair’s individual pasts, which come to them in brief flashbacks and affect their internal mentalscapes as well as influence their external behaviors throughout the season.

Moving right along, in Colin Burrow’s “What is a Shakespearean tragedy?,” featured in “The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy”, we are warned against trying to ultimately box the Shakespearean tragedies into too narrow a categorization because of their “eclectic origins,” which ultimately lend to their aesthetic power, Burrow asserts. However, we are given a few additional characteristics which we may ascribe to at least a few of Shakespeare’s tragic works.

Burrow asserts that in later tragedies, characters “tend to be just slightly out of place, or not quite as socially elevated as they want to think of themselves,” reflecting Christopher Marlowe’s characters “on the edge of society.” Perhaps just as relevantly, Burrow also points out that Shakespeare’s tragic characters spend a good amount of time in deliberation of their acts before performing them:

“Picking up a sword and killing a king is an uncomplicated matter in the heat of battle, but deliberating beforehand, imagining a dagger, rehearsing the role, putting on the borrowed robes of Senecan rhetoric in order to persuade yourself to do it: these are the theatrical and mental spaces explored in ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth’ in particular.” 

In “The End of the F***ing World,” it’s fairly clear that both James and Alyssa are slightly outside the realm in which their peers exist, especially in a series of shots at the beginning of the first episode that occur in their school cafeteria. Enraged by her friends’ addiction to their phones and ignorance of real-life interaction, Alyssa smashes her cell phone, then insults James, who is sitting despite the full room. Later, he reveals to her that he also does not own a cell phone, and the two bond over their periphery to what they see as a flaw in their social circles.

As for the moments of deliberation, this once again plays heavily into the development of James’s character overall. Frequently towards the beginning of the show, he plays through imagined scenarios of how he will kill Alyssa. In fact, he does it over and over, especially when he senses within himself a shred of doubt about it. It’s only after he actually stabs and kills someone that those imaginings turn to flashbacks, and instead add to the “substitution for the supernatural” mentioned above.

Finally, in “The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy,” Tzachi Zamir’s paper “Ethics and the Shakespearean Tragedy” dives more into the moralistic side of things. Zamir points out that experiencing (reading or watching) a Shakespearean tragic narrative will not make you more ethical. None of the stories seem to have moral messages that they’re attempting to enforce upon the audience, or even really represent in the actions of their characters over the course of their events. 

In this chapter, Zamir also offers up some more common characteristics of the Shakespearean tragic protagonist. These characters are often designed to fail by Shakespeare himself, Zamir says, as they are often “unable to experience meaning” and have a “tendency to sabotage their own existing or potential happiness” as they experience change. They also frequently experience severe grief and loss - whether loss of something they value, loss of their prior situation or loss of their own lives - and are frequently unable to recover.

“Loss is a useful entry point into Shakespearean tragedy in particular. While characterizing tragedy is a notoriously difficult matter, and situating Shakespeare’s tragedies within existing accounts of tragedy is even more awkward (not least because of Shakespeare’s own loose adherence to the genre), serious loss and lament over such loss features in all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and makes up one of the features (if not the salient feature) that infuses them with their distinct tragic quality.”

I wouldn’t argue that “The End of the F***ing World” has any distinct moral lesson. If it did, what would it be? Don’t go on a road trip with a self-proclaimed psychopath? Communicate better with the people around you? Being a teenager is super weird? If anything, I think that the most beneficial lesson of “The End of the F***ing World” would center on communicating and confronting trauma in our lives, but even that seems slight off-kilter for a running moral theme.

That being said, Zamir’s description of the Shakespearean protagonist does seem to align with James and Alyssa’s behavior, as well. They’re both searching for something that will make them happy, though one doesn’t believe he’s capable of happiness and the other confesses that she always feels as though she’s messing things up. Both are suffering from un-dealt-with grief and loss, the dissolution of both of their families, and it’s into that situation that we as the viewer are introduced as well. 

“The End of the F***ing World” will likely not be around for the next 400 years, and it may never be taught in a class as a major work of dramatic art. Frankly, we don’t even have confirmation at the moment that it will be picked up for a second season. But while it might not be a work to the scope of William Shakespeare’s many, many plays both tragic and otherwise, it’s important to note when modern works reflect elements of those that we revere as “classics,” as “literature” and as great contributions to the world at large. It’s important to consider and to discuss, as we move forward and take in and put more art out into the world. For, as Shakespeare wrote in “Hamlet,” “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”