#Abusers are manipulators first and foremost who can draw you into a narrative

[imperfectmind]

sorry if this makes me an evil bigot but people arent entitled to mindlessly follow your beliefs or tolerate bad behaviour/attitudes just because you have more oppressed lables than them.

People should be able to lable idiocy and cruelty when they they see it and being a minority doesnt make it so you cant use your hardships to be manipulative, spout vile horrible things or say things that are simply not true

Its honestly why sj tumblr is such a toxic mess. Its ran by crybullies who despise honest communication and constructive community building. Its just 'im automatically right when i tell someone ~less oppressed~ than me anything and they cant question me. If they do theyre speaking over me and oppressing me by disagreeing"

'Listen to x voices' should mean not automatically disregarding a female, gay, black, asian etc persons views, and not that people should grovel and defer to others because they said so.

[alluring-skull]

sweet requiem

So, like I closed out mentioning last time, I’m very interested in game stories which try to manipulate the player. And really, I’d have to say that a lot of people are, with titles like Bioshock and Spec Ops: The Line from the previous console generation drawing enormous amounts of attention from players and critics for their efforts in this regard. I’m not terribly fond of either one, personally, and in some ways I don’t know how to feel about the way audiences seem to treat highly self-referential narratives as more profound. But I suppose I’ve done this just as much as anyone, particularly when it comes to Christine Love’s visual novel duology, Analogue: A Hate Story and Hate Plus.

(Once again, there are spoilers.)

The main character of Analogue is a literal anime girl, who introduces herself to you as *Hyun-ae (the asterisk acting as shorthand denoting an AI). She and the game’s second most important character, *Mute, are diegetically 2-dimensional illustrations appearing on computer screens. (Specifically, the game uses a “remote terminal” conceit, similar to what I described last time.) The player is tasked with discovering the history of a ghost ship in space, and it’s by the end of the first act, *Hyun-ae reveals that that history is first and foremost her own backstory. Even as she acts cute and affectionate toward the player character (who it’s difficult not to treat as synonymous with the player themself, particularly in Hate Plus), it becomes clear that she unambiguously killed a whole lot of people. The final act of her route is essentially her defense, revealing her appalling abuse and mistreatment in the ship’s final years (and Hate Plus all but says outright that the society at that point was already well past Super Fucked). Ultimately, the player is given the choice as to whether or not to actually download the AI whose route they were on, which could be treated as an actual endorsement or rejection of each character’s faults, of which there are many. But obviously leaving them in grim solitude forever doesn’t leave much room for the sequel.

*Mute’s story is the anchor of Hate Plus, in much the same way that Analogue is about *Hyun-ae (likely even more so), and as a result, almost every “serious” interpretation of the game I’ve seen focuses on it. Personally, having expected that it was the “real” game, I played it first, and I was completely wrecked emotionally for a week after finishing it. (In a different way from the normal way that I’m wrecked all the time, of course.) It took me a lot longer to appreciate *Hyun-ae’s path, which, particularly because of the extremely unusual and meta sequence opening the third day, seems to be commonly viewed as something of a joke in comparison. (Though, if nothing else, the dialing back of her obsessive attachment to the player is greatly appreciated, as understandable as it perhaps was in Analogue.)

A lot of science fiction has a tendency to focus on questions of “what it means to be human”, generally by contrasting people with aliens, computers, or robots, who are written to be mostly like people, but not quite. The most famous examples may be from Star Trek, with characters like Data and Spock who struggle with being, essentially, “partly human.” And while this was a central premise of the AI characters even in Analogue’s predecessor Digital: A Love Story, the early revelation that *Hyun-ae was once a living human who now exists solely as a techromantic ghost skips Hate Plus right past all the weird philosophizing about humans being somehow extra special.

At the very beginning of the game, before getting into pretty much any of the actual story, there’s a message replying to an unseen inquiry, akin to how all of the conversations in Digital worked. (This is quite possibly the most interesting and loaded part of the entire story for me, to the point that I could probably write another entire essay on it alone. Definitely not promising that one, though.) It is, essentially, an ad, pitched toward a human seeking a mechanical body to house an AI. Despite a brief mention of the company’s promised “95% of Standard Human Resolution” sensory functions, it’s heavily centered on the qualitative benefits of having a body. In other words, it’s selling the idea of being able to share human joys with a companion previously restricted to incorporeal existence in a computer.

Through the game, *Hyun-ae’s occasional side dialogues imply in several ways that this is a concept that she holds very dear, especially because, long before even the backstory events in Analogue, she too was a human girl with a loving family. Both the second and third “days” of the game feature food-based rituals, and her 2D graphic mimes drinking soup and eating cake during these scenes.

Eventually, during the game’s ending sequence, *Hyun-ae asks if you’ll be able to get her a new body (she can’t read the message from earlier, since she’s nominally running on a virtual machine one layer lower). You can lie (ok, yes, there’s a very reasonable argument to be made that this is best for everyone’s safety, though during the course of the game another email message comes from an AI therapist offering to help), giving an ending where she’s displayed trapped in a cyberbirdcage. The other option, of course, is to agree to get her one, which then appears in both of the other endings. Throughout her dialogues, *Hyun-ae certainly seems most enthusiastic about being able to eat again, but that enthusiasm is inextricably tied to her memories of family. It’s less the food itself than the ways it’s symbolic of everything she’s lost.

*Hyun-ae isn’t looking for some elusive quality that makes her a human; she knows she already is one. What she wants, ultimately, is just to live again: to share old joys, have new experiences, and feel togetherness. After centuries having been denied all those things, it couldn’t be simpler. Perhaps it’s not the most profound statement about life, but it’s one I’ve felt is incredibly affirming on its own, and deeply appreciated as closure to what is overall a very heavy and overwhelmingly tragic narrative. And you get cake, too, while you’re at it. What a great game.