#Jane Eyre is a bildungsroman AND a romance because of it

[thesunsethour]

eve eve eve i wanna buy some books do you have any recommendations? anything goes although i'm not a huge fan of young adult/fantasy.. kiss kiss !!

oh ho ho ho ho prepare for me to be VERY annoying about this 😈

Fiction:

• After the Silence by Louise O’Neill (Crime)

• The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult (Psychological Drama/Romance)

• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (Historical/Crime)

• One Day by David Nicholls (Romance)

• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut (Postmodern/Metafiction/War)

• The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis (Play)

• By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept by Elizabeth Smart (Prose Poetry Fiction)

• The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (Queer Autofiction)

• Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (Historical Drama/War)

• To Be A Machine by Mark O’Connell (Non-Fiction)

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (Bildungsroman/Romance)

• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (Literary Realism)

there’s a rather large amalgamation of genres and styles here because a) you can pick and choose what takes your fancy and b) these are all under one very specific umbrella of Books I Could Always Re-Read

[sogno-ao3]

a list of named books in still waters

writing this because it is late and i am going crazy with work and wanted to write this as a diversion--won't include jane eyre and huckleberry finn for spoilery reasons!

--

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair

Ah, the first book we see in Still Waters and one that Mollie wonders if Tommy has read. It is evocative of Tommy's own dirty business; Sinclair writes about the violent and unsanitary meat-packing industry and how the main character is a decent man but his circumstances force him into less-than-moral doings...?

North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell and Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Contributes to the feeling for Mollie's inexperience with romance--Pride and Prejudice is certainly one of the canonical romance greats, North and South in the third tier...?

The History of the Standard Oil Company, Ida Tarbell

Mostly just to be evocative of Tommy's penchant for empire building, and something that he'd probably read.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

To be frank, nothing is really going on here... I suppose one can draw parallels between Heathcliff and Tommy, but that would make this romance rather monstrous...? Hate to disappoint, but revenge plots are not the focus of this story.

House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

Nothing of note, except period accuracy.

A Doctor's Education: a Guide to Medical Schools

A book that I made up.

A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen

I admit, a little too on the nose, but too perfect to resist as a play and its thematic material--Tommy has trapped Mollie in a doll's house; further commentary on how Mollie is circumscribed by her position in society, and whether she can break out of it or not. Further hilarious references when she tries to escape the Shelby family meeting and abandons a child.

The Tempers, William Carlos Williams

Personally, I am a fan of WCW and just about died when I re-read the poem with Grace the cat--and so it was purrfect to include. Another thing I do love about WCW is that many poems can be interpreted from very surface-level to very abstract, from serious to playful--depends on your mood. This dichotomy I also try to illustrate between Tommy and Mollie.

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Can you tell that I hate this book? I'm amazed that it always ends up on the top lists; writing is insipid even without the awful treatment of colonization. Again, a book that inspires differences of opinions between Tommy and Mollie.

Poems, Wilfred Owen

"Written by a war veteran" is how I imagined it was sold in stores, and Tommy just chose it, and then realized he doesn't want to relive any of that, and so neglects to read it, leaving a very chagrined Mollie to pick up the pieces.

The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams

Chosen for the themes of growth and change, but most importantly, it was period appropriate.

Agnes Grey, Anne Brontë

An echo to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Also a bildungsroman for a young woman of a lower class.

Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë

Nothing too important except that it's in the Brontë family.

Poems, Emily Brontë

I don't think Emily Brontë ever published a solo book of poetry (she did publish a book with her sisters), but nonetheless, someone aggregated them and when I visited home, I discovered I had a book of her lesser-known poems. I think I had bought this book when I was in my own e-girl era... uh.... anyway, many great poems to give life to Tommy's own e-boy era.

[devilsskettle]

something something watching ginger snaps with the same framework as reading jane eyre in terms of the mimetic function of jane/bertha and brigette/ginger, with the repressed emotions and desires of the protagonist coming through in the actions of the “madwoman” character. especially brigette’s assertion of “now i am you” when she voluntarily lets ginger turn her into a werewolf. the “madwoman” is portrayed as bestial, hypersexual, intemperate with substances, jealous, vengeful. something something confinement of the “madwoman” character, something something the other women in the movie can be read as potential future paths for brigette, especially with everyone trying to tell her what’s “normal” for women to experience as they grow up. like the women in jane eyre, they’re models of femininity that she rejects but has to navigate because there are no other models for her. not to mention the contentious potential romantic interests (sam fulfilling a rochester-like characterization in both personality and role in the story). keeping all of this in mind, i feel that this movie also straddles several modern genres (coming of age, rom com, horror) in the same way jane eyre does for the victorian period (bildungsroman, romance, gothic). anyway. moral of the story is that not everything is actually about jane eyre but i can usually make it about jane eyre anyway

[gettothestabbing]

Hi im looking for some new books to read I loved Beauty (which was a rec you reblogged). Do you have any good book recs? Thanks!

Hmm, I’m getting back into regular reading lately. While I loved Beauty, not everything I recommend below will be similar to it, ok? More variety that way :)

Warbreaker (Brandon Sanderson, fantasy, stand-alone)

I’ve been reblogging lots of fanart for this lately because I just finished it after a year or so of hiatus. Seeing all the plot threads come together (except for the few that reached out into his extended universe Cosmere) was a gloriously cathartic experience. It has an interesting magic system based around color and sensory perception, worldbuilding that really pays off over time, and a cast of characters that all manage to feel fleshed out, even ones that only appear in the reader’s peripheral vision. I recommend this one because it requires no previous knowledge of Cosmere or Sanderson’s work.

The Raven Cycle (Maggie Stiefvater, fantasy, quartet)

Stiefvater’s style is very tactile. She’s excellent at creating the atmosphere of each scene and at using subjective judgments made by her POV-characters to flesh out relationships without making it an exposition dump. It’s more of an exposition sprinkling. The series is set in a small Virginia town that is home to both ley lines and an elite boys-only boarding school. The magic and worldbuilding are done slowly but not too slowly, and the characters (the main cast are mid-teens) are pretty realistically portrayed.

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, BIldungsroman/novel)

Hear me out. Mr. Rochester (Jane’s employer) and the mysterious, Gothic setting she is put into always reminded me of an updated Beauty and the Beast. The romance (both the relationship and the atmosphere of the romance genre) are developed slowly and carefully.

And not enough people have read it nowadays so I can’t talk to anybody about it lol. But seriously, try it on for size.

Followed by Frost (Charlie Holmberg, fantasy, stand-alone)

Holmberg is another excellent contemporary fantasy writer with unique magic systems. I’m totally paranoid about giving too much away, but I couldn’t stop reading it, just like all of Holmberg’s books. This recommendation is most similar to Beauty, because it takes elements of a fairy tale and retells them in a compelling, unpredictable way. For her callous rejection of a marriage proposal, Smitha is cursed. Encased in frost, and turning everything around her to ice and snow no matter where she is, she is exiled from her home and has no idea how to break the curse.

This one actually won a RITA Award for Best Young Adult Romance. (The romance built up slowly enough that I didn’t see it coming until kinda late, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t well-done. I also didn’t get ‘romione’ until like the 6th Harry Potter book, so I might just be slow lol)

I highly recommend this author’s other works too. Her Numina trilogy is excellent, especially if you like urban fantasy, and she has another stand-alone called The Fifth Doll. She’s best known for the Paper Magician series. All or almost all her work is cheaply available on Kindle.

and finally,

The Bridal Wreath (Sigrid Undset, historical fiction, first in a trilogy)

Set in 14th century Norway, and translated from Norwegian, this book never skimps on its historicity. The dialogue is not modernized, there are a few footnotes to explain the setting, and the supernatural element it introduces is sufficiently vague that the story does not become historical fantasy. It’s simply about the life of one woman, the daughter of a knight, who marries a man her father disapproves of.

This was exactly the kind of historical fiction I was looking for last year. I was so sick of girl-who-isn’t-like-other-girls wielding a sword in a dress, and her counterpart, wealthy-medieval-beauty who never has to do anything except be pursued by unreasonably-understanding-and-modernly-sensitive-man. (Not that I haven’t enjoyed these on occasion, but they’ve been done to death.) I love learning about what people actually DID day-to-day in the past. I think the managing of a large household, as expected of noble-born women at the time, is actually complex and interesting. The big downside to this book is that it’s a bit harder to get a physical copy of than the other recommendations. But there is a Kindle edition for all three books.

I hope you or anyone else reading this finds something new to love!

[curiousartemis]

Tagged by @tishinada, thank you so much!!

@kunstpause​ writes:

The idea behind it from last time:

This is me wanting to hear more from my writing friends. Things about process, personal preferences etc. There are a lot of ask lists going around but not everyone always gets the questions that they want. So I thought of a way to ask couple of things to several people, so there is maybe even a bit of dialogue happening. And if people are having fun with it I’ll come up with a bunch of different questions next week.

Feel free to grab this and tag me back, even if I haven’t tagged you.

1. Do you have a preferred genre to write? Do you like to stay within the rough directions of the genre or do you like to mix and match?

2. Are you a writer that has a plot idea an then figures out what character(s) to use for that or are you more set on writing (a) specific character(s) and come up with a plot around them?

3. 1st person, 3rd, 2nd, all knowing narrator or unreliable narrator and so many more choices - do you have a clear preference? Or different ones for different kinds of writing? Do you feel a specific pov works best with a specific setting and if yes, which one?

1. I pretty much exclusively feel comfortable writing fantasy with a dash of romance! I also lean towards the bildungsroman. I am most interested in characters, and oftentimes the setting and plot simply serve as the background for the main character(s) to grow and develop. The reason I enjoy fantasy as opposed to science fiction or mystery is probably because I grew up reading fantasy, still love fantasy, and can frankly make up whatever I need to suit the story I want to tell. I love populating fantasy worlds and making them feel “real” ... the image of the farmer carrying her goods to the market on the back of her donkey is just as important to me as the council of kings and queens debating on how to defeat the enemy nation or what have you.

2. Character first! Always. In fact I have a huge handful of characters but no story to put them in, so they’re just sort of waiting in the wings. But once I decide which character to write and develop, I then try to figure out his story. What is his background? Who will he fall in love with? (Of course 😋) The story starts to unfold as I learn more about him.

3. Since I favor the bildungsroman it’s not surprising I’m most comfortable and happiest with first person. The thing is... I... love... my characters. I can’t even say how much. But I want so badly to give them a voice, and to allow them the agency of telling their own story. That’s really important to me for some reason--maybe because my characters tend to be somewhat disenfranchised. But I also just love character voice. I feel too removed from my character when I write them in third person, though I can do it, of course. Second person is also fun, but it’s a bit tongue-in-cheek. And if you lose the humor, it can become pretentious. 

Jane Eyre is also my favorite book, and I guess that really shows sometimes.

Tagging: @maraleesquill @alxxiis @silvanils @archesa and anyone else who wants to do it!

[ninja-muse]

Today I would like to rec Jane Eyre! There’s been a string of posts about this on my blog lately but in case you haven’t seen those: this book is great! I put off reading it for years because “gothic” made me think it was nothing but horrific and creepy scenes, and because everyone talked about Jane and Rochester and the romance to the point where I thought that was all it was. (Note: I don’t do horror and I don’t do straight-up romance.)

But Jane Eyre is more of a feminist Bildungsroman, a story about a woman going through life, being true to herself, discovering she’s more worthy than she believes, and essentially taking control of her life. It took me a while to get used to the slowness of the story—Jane and Brontë walk you through everything—and the stuff with Rochester doesn’t come until partway through, but since that isn’t the point of the story, not really, fair enough.

Read this for: women being quietly awesome in the 1800s, a writer who is absolutely done with how women are treated in her society, and to get a sense of where feminist lit and the Vicorian gothic started.

The music today? I don’t know, it felt appropriate somehow…

[innuendostudios]

Superposition, a 25-minute dissection of Life is Strange’s genre fuckery. As ever, you can keep this work coming by supporting me on Patreon. Transcript below the cut.

Maybe you knew this already, but Life is Strange is a weird-ass video game, one that is, by turns, a nakedly honest point-and-clicker about teen girls and a psychosexual freakout on the nature of choice. It doesn’t exactly marry these two themes painlessly and I’m, frankly, unconvinced it’s trying to.

Mechanically, Life is Strange - a game by Dontnod - is a mostly faithful iteration on the Telltale adventure game model: a lot of mid-90’s LucasArts design, several recent innovations, and a heaping dose of Heavy Rain. Like a Telltale game, you navigate a 3D world and interact with your environment using context-sensitive button presses. And, like a Telltale game, play consists of simple adventure game puzzles, plot-branching decisions, and a whole lot of dialogue. Like a Telltale game, it’s released in five episodes, where choices you make in one will alter the contents of episodes down the line, and it has the same notifications that a choice will have consequences, the same frequent autosave to keep you from replaying too much of the game, and the same breakdown at the end of an episode that compares your choices with those of other players. But one hallmark of a Telltale game that is conspicuously absent is the thing that makes Telltale’s choices so meaningful: the timer.

A timer at the bottom of the screen ticking down every time you make a decision enforces a particular type of play. See, Telltale doesn’t want you to deliberate on your choices, Telltale wants you to act on your gut, which sometimes means making a choice you come to regret and having to live with it for the rest of the game. But, in Life is Strange, players are given the ability to rewind time, letting them see the all results of just about every choice, every puzzle, every line of dialogue, before making up their minds and proceeding. Players can deliberate forever. If you were to keep two saves going so you could see all outcomes of your choices, that would be playing against Telltale’s design philosophy, which is about living with your decisions, but, here, save-scumming is a core mechanic.

Now, I dunno what the developers’ thought process was, but I like to imagine them coming up with this idea and then asking, “OK, say a person could actually do this, could see every possible future stemming from their actions and pick the one they think is best; what would the logical endpoint of that story be?”

Hahaaahahaahaahaaa, okay. Okay. Alright.

The plot mechanics of Life is Strange are fucking bizarre. It is, in essence, two entirely different stories rolled up into the same package. These two stories contain all the same characters and all the same plot points, but exist in wildly different genres and have wildly different themes. For the first two-and-a-half-ish episodes, you appear to be playing a tender coming-of-age story, while the second two-and-a-half-ish are a Lynchian psychodrama that seems designed with the express purpose of complicating, then rejecting, and, ultimately, attempting to devour the coming-of-age story and erase all records of its existence. And then, in a truly bugfuck climax, the game point-blank asks you, the player, which of these two stories you want an ending to.

Why don’t we start at the beginning?

Max Caulfield is a student at the prestigious Blackwell Academy in her hometown of Arcadia Bay. Like a lot of people her age, she’s a little awkward, a little shy. She’s on her own for the first time - several years earlier, she and her family moved to Seattle, and her parents are still there while she’s moved into the Blackwell dorms. Max hasn’t maintained any of her local friendships, and, while she gets along with everyone who doesn’t actively hate her, she doesn’t have a group, or any close friends, except maybe the boy who has a crush on her. She’s also devoted to photography - it’s what she’s here to study - and greatly admires her photography teacher, but she’s too nervous to submit her work to the big photo competition, despite her teacher’s encouragement.

One day, after an intense vision in her photo class, Max bears witness to the school bully pulling a gun and shooting a girl in the bathroom, and, in that moment, she, as if by instinct, discovers that she can reverse time by up to a minute or two. After a bit of trial and error she manages to change history, preventing the girl’s death. And, that strangeness aside, she steps back into her normal life with her newfound abilities.

This is the setup for a very particular genre of story, albeit one with a more fantastical bent than usual. This genre has a name, but I’m only going to say it once, because it’s long, and German, and when American’s start dropping long, German words into their sentences they come off as seriously pretentious and even I have limits. But the word is Bildungsroman.

Now, English-speakers often use this term interchangeably with “coming-of-age story,” but it’s actually a specific genre with specific themes. The novel most often referenced as the first… story of this kind is Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, and other notable examples include Jane Eyre, The Glass Bead Game, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Classically, these are stories about indecision, about a youth, pulled in many directions, trying to decide what kind of adult they’re going to be. The tension is not between protagonist and antagonist - traditionally, there is no real antagonist - but between protagonist and society. The adult world has expectations of the main character, and that character needs to decide to what extent, as a grown-up, they want to satisfy those expectations and to what extent they want to pursue their own happiness. The usual emotional arc of a… German coming-of-age story is accepting that maturity means taking on the world’s demands - shouldering your share of society’s burdens - and learning to fit your happiness around that responsibility: Wilhelm Meister leaves the theater and becomes a doctor, Jane Eyre marries on her own terms, Joseph Knecht leaves Castalia to become a teacher in the larger world (though sometimes the battle between personal happiness and social responsibility is not resolved simply).

The early going of Life is Strange fits snugly into the… genre. There are even subgenres that are “coming into one’s own as a student” and “coming into one’s own as an artist,” which revolve around mentor characters, so tick those off the list as well. After discovering her powers, Max runs into the girl from the bathroom in the parking lot and realizes it’s her best friend from childhood, Chloe, and the two become nearly inseparable. When Max reveals her abilities, Chloe enlists her in the hunt for Rachel Amber, a friend of hers who vanished recently, and what follows is less a traditional plot than, typical of the genre, a string of vignettes, this one loosely structured around a search for the missing girl. These various episodes gives Max many windows into lives she could lead. Stick it to the mean girl, or turn the other cheek? Down-to-earth boyfriend or maybe unpredictable girlfriend? Reach out to the girl being mistreated by a security guard, or take a photo for art? These are all hallmarks of the genre: questions of ethics, the wholesome love vs. the wild love, dedication to others vs. dedication to art.

You might think that the ability to call do-over on any decision would make these choices easier, but you’d be wrong - time travel makes all of them harder! Dedicating yourself to photography means breaking a hurting girl’s heart; kissing the wild love means devastating the wholesome love. At one point, Max changes history so dramatically that she actually visits an alternate timeline, where she’s popular with the girls who had previously mistreated her but isn’t friends with Chloe at all. This only drives home that, no matter what life she leads, there will be a cost. She can’t have everything; there is no one right answer. No matter what she chooses, she’s doing wrong by someone. This sets up the classic arc where she’s going to have to make some big decisions about what maturity means to her, and those decisions will involve sacrifices.

At least, that’s how it works on paper. In practice, the game only sometimes strikes that balance where all options have merits and drawbacks and no one is empirically better than the others. More often it’s like, ok, you’re trying to get into this RV but there’s an angry dog inside: do you distract the dog by throwing a bone into the parking lot, or kill the dog by throwing the bone into traffic? And that’s a fake choice. No one kills the dog. Why would you kill the dog? And then there’s the small mercies, like keeping someone from getting splashed by muddy water, which… ok, that isn’t a sacrifice; there is no reason not to do that.

So let’s say the time travel works as an imperfect metaphor for youthful indecision. And what pleasures can be drawn from this section of the game are to do with how much you enjoy earnestness. There’s a commitment from the designers to tackle subjects that are very uncommon to video games - from teen suicide to euthanasia to budding queer romance - and it’s hard not to respect their willingness to go there. Real effort has been put into addressing these subjects seriously, and these sequences can be very affecting… even as none of them entirely hit the mark. The scene where you talk a suicidal Kate off a rooftop, for all its intensity, is, mechanically, Kate quizzing you on how much flavor text you read in her room earlier; the sequence where alt-universe Chloe wants to die takes great pains to not be ableist towards paraplegics while still being kind of ableist towards paraplegics; and the budding queer romance often seems about two sentences away from turning into a late-night Showtime erotic drama that is obviously written by middle-aged men. But it’s not crass! The game’s heart is on its sleeve, and the writers clearly mean everything they say even when they don’t entirely know what they’re talking about. And if you can appreciate sincerity even as you acknowledge its failings, then you can appreciate the game for what it is: it’s like Max, awkward but well-meaning, naive, possessing a good heart and still kind of ignorant.

And that’s Life is Strange.... until the second half of the game happens.

In this story, time traveling teenager Max Caulfield and her best friend, Chloe Price, hot on the trail of the missing girl, Rachel Amber, discover that her story was not a tragic one of a wayward youth getting in over her head with her drug-dealer boyfriend, but one in which she was sedated, photographed, and murdered in an underground facility straight out of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. In trying to track down the boy they think is responsible, Max suddenly drops to the ground with a needle in her neck and watches helplessly as her best friend dies from a bullet to the head, then wakes up tied to a chair by the real killer: her photography professor, Mr. Jefferson. This is a story about regret, choice, and loyalty, full of serial killer monologues and hallucinatory imagery; a story where people look in the sky and see the moon doubled and the beach fills with the bodies of dead whales.

After two and a half episodes of vignettes, Life is Strange has decided it has an honest-to-goodness plot, one that bears a striking resemblance to, well... the designers want me to say Twin Peaks, but, honestly, the greater debt it owes is to Donnie Darko: Max is guided by an animal figure only she can see and who is probably the spirit of a dead character; Chloe is a teenager who’s only alive due to the interventions of a time traveller and this is causing a number of supernatural events to occur; just before the climax our hero is up on a hill coming to a difficult conclusion after watching her girlfriend die as a curious weather pattern descends on the town below; Chloe realizes that maybe the only way to set things right is to go back in time and die like she was originally fated to and then none of this awfulness will have ever happened; and multiple episodes end with tracking shots of all the major characters montaged together while melancholy pop music plays underneath… it’s not subtle.

As you can imagine, going from Jane Eyre to Donnie Darko is a bit of a tonal shift. In fairness, the game does set all these threads up in the first half, and it’s not like the coming-of-age story disappears (the euthanasia subplot actually happens past the midpoint), it’s just that what used to be background texture have become subjects in their own right, and they make the coming-of-age story look pretty out of place, Like, the love triangle between Chloe, Max, and Warren made sense in a coming-of-age story but it’s just ridiculous when your relationship with Chloe is tearing apart the fabric of reality and Warren is just a dude. In this story, the antagonist is not society but the very literal villain you thought was the mentor figure. The narrative tension is not about Max finding herself but about fixing mistakes, and hopefully not getting murdered in the process. Chloe is not a wild love but the possible instigator of the apocalypse. And Max’s powers are not a metaphor for indecision but a pointed meditation on what it means to be a protagonist, but more on that in a minute.

This half also has some ideas about choice that complicate what choice meant in the first half. There’s a scene where you try to get information from Rachel Amber’s ex-boyfriend, and, thanks to Max’s powers, you can see it play out a lot of different ways, but you start to realize that possibly the only way that nobody gets hurt… is if you killed the dog earlier in the game. Four episodes in Life is Strange decides it actually is a game about living with decisions you can’t undo!

When I started this video talking about Telltale, that wasn’t just an easy point of reference - what originally seemed like an interesting take on the Telltale model now seems as though it has a bone to pick with games of that type. The complaint so often lobbied against Telltale is that it promises your choices will have significant impact on the story; lots of people criticize them for not delivering on that promise, but Life is Strange seems to criticize Telltale for making the promise in the first place. Why, the game asks, should you even want that responsibility?

I mean, let’s look at how Max escapes Mr. Jefferson’s studio. Earlier in the game, Max discovers that she can travel to any point in the past that is captured in a photograph. So, through the photos Jefferson has on hand, she starts leaping back to different points in the game’s continuity adjusting her decisions, trying to tweak the timeline, undo mistakes. She’s looking for a scenario where she is free, Chloe is alive, and, if at all possible, no tornado is bearing down to wipe Arcadia Bay off the map, in case you forgot that’s a thing that’s happening. As when she first used her powers to save Chloe, it takes some trial and error, but she pulls it off - Mr. Jefferson’s in jail, Chloe is safe, and, hey, she even got her photo into that competition, and, what do you know, she won! Instead of tied up in a murderer’s photography studio, she’s in San Francisco with a new and better mentor figure, and her art is up on the wall, and she’s the toast of the show. This is a hyper-idealized ending to the coming-of-age story - after finally making up her mind and taking decisive action, Max has come into her own as a student, an artist, and a young woman.

Then she checks in on Chloe. There is always a cost.

Stories about teenagers who develop superhuman abilities often frame themselves as coming-of-age stories - it’s not a coincidence how many fall back on the puberty metaphor. Even without time travel or gamma rays, growing up means gaining power and independence one didn’t have as a child, so everyone is expected to learn - let’s all say it together - “with great power comes great responsibility.” But, however much superpowers serve as symbols for growing up, they are also wish-fulfillment. We may agree that Peter Parker should use his newfound strength with discretion, but it still feels good to watch him beat up the bully. And we may be saddened by Uncle Ben’s death, but we’re still glad that it turns Peter into Spider-man. Because that’s what we’re here to see. That’s a tension endemic to the genre - that, on the one hand, power is dangerous and must be be used sparingly, and, on the other hand, power is awesome, and we pay money to see characters wield it. And law and order, good and evil, life and death are all present not as subjects deserving of their own films but as means of centering a protagonist in an interesting story, compelling him to use his awesome powers, and teaching a boy how to be a man.

This tension is at the heart of Telltale games, as well, and most games in that model. They may present as being about futility, about being a miniscule player in an enormous, losing game, but the plot still contorts itself to ensure the most dramatic and impactful decisions rest on the protagonist’s shoulders. And however terrible that responsibility is implied to be, players play because they want to make those decisions, and complain when they are not impactful enough.

In Life is Strange, Max comes to realize that all the bizarre occurrences - the moons, the whales, the tornado - have been caused by her leaping through time. That she can’t set things right because trying to set things right has and will only ever make things worse. This isn’t just a false ending; this is an evisceration of the game you thought you were playing for the first two and a half episodes. Max gives up her perfect ending and goes back to the studio in one last effort to save Chloe, while the game stares down the player and says, “How dare you think this was a coming-of-age story. How dare you think time travel was a neat way to work through your indecision. How could you think a power this great could ever be used responsibly? How could you think the consequences for your mistakes would be borne by you and you alone?”

This sets up an arc where Max will have to do what superhero movies almost never do: truly reckon with how dangerous real power can be.

This point gets hammered for the rest of Episode 5. I got rescued by Chloe’s step-dad, and when he learned Chloe was dead he killed Mr. Jefferson, and the game was like, hey, do you want to go back and change that? And I was like, I don’t know anymore. I could, but will changing things just make them go even more wrong? And when I go back and save Chloe, will any of this have even happened? And, fuck, there’s a tornado gonna come kill all of us anyway, so is there any scenario where this choice even matters? Then, above ground, the game still let me perform those small mercies, but, like, great, you’re welcome, hope you enjoy the five minutes I just added to your life cuz you’re still gonna die and it’s all my fault but I want my girlfriend back so I’m gonna jump back one more time and make things just a little bit worse.

Even when you do get Chloe back, the game has made you aware of the horrible cost your entire community will pay for you having used your powers to save her again and again and again. Your only goal has been to fix your mistakes and you’re being punished for having even tried! The game deposits you on a hill to watch as Hell descends on the town below, and then tells you, in so many words, “This is the price you paid for your friend.”

And then it asks, “Would you like a refund?”

Seeing what’s happened to Arcadia Bay, Chloe says that, if there’s a chance it will undo everything that’s occurred, she wants you to go back in time to the bathroom and let her die. Maybe that’s just the way fate wanted things to happen. And it’s up to you to grant or deny her wish.

This final decision is the game offering you two very appropriate endings for the two very different games you have been playing. Per the themes of the… coming-of-age story of the Germanic persuasion, Max’s arc is learning to sacrifice for the greater good. She can’t have it all, she can’t satisfy everyone, and sometimes doing right by your society means giving up something you love. In the battle between personal happiness and responsibility, responsibility wins. Sometimes the wild love is someone you have to let go of - be grateful for your time together and kiss her goodbye. She knows what’s right - it’s better this way.

Per the themes of the Lynchian psychodrama, have you fucking lost it?? What about the last 12-odd hours of gameplay in which trying to change the past universally makes the present worse gave you the idea that going back “one more time” could possibly fix anything? Have you learned nothing? Yes, you fucked up, and all of this is your fault, but in real life people have to live with their fuckups, even the big ones. No one has the right to change history. You can’t keep trying to control this. This is bigger than you and Chloe. You have to let go.

That’s about as incompatible as two endings can be. In one, all the themes of the first half of the game are thrown in a lake and Max never finds her place in society because society gets eaten by a tornado, and in the other the whole psychodrama plotline and all its attendant themes are literally erased from history. Whichever you pick, whichever plot you decide is the right one, a sizable portion of the game will be rendered meaningless. And we should acknowledge that these two themes, Sacrifice For The Greater Good and Learn To Live With Your Mistakes are not, in real life, things we get to choose between. Maturity means doing both.

If you elect to keep Chloe alive, Max and Chloe wordlessly drive out of town. And maybe it’s meant to be an unresolved ending that sticks with you for a while - T2 meets Thelma and Louise - and that might be a pretty bold decision if the game didn’t autosave right before The One Choice You Can’t Make Twice, which means everyone is going to reload 5 minutes after they finish and watch the other ending which is just… is just in all conceivable ways better. The ending where Chloe dies is longer, it has proper closure, there’s this funeral scene that is so cathartic it doesn’t even make sense (you two never even met Chloe in this timeline, why are you here???). And it confirms that, yeah, you didn’t have to live with your mistakes, going back would have fixed everything. Worse, it boils the ending choice down to Who Do You Love More, Chloe or Everyone Else?, the reason fans have dubbed the ending “bay or bae,” but whether or not you love Chloe the mostest isn’t really what all that stuff about fucking up the timeline was getting at. If ever a game needed to pull a Swapper and erase your save after you make the final decision, this was it.

And that’s how Life is Strange ends. I honestly can’t tell you if this game is good, I can’t even tell you if I liked it, but I think… I think I loved it? I mean, that last decision is kind of bullshit, but I got real choked up making it. Now we’ve got word that both a sequel and a prequel are in the works, and, frankly, I’m apprehensive. There is a certain power to starting with an emotionally resonant genre and then ramming it headlong into a weirder, darker, more ambitious genre, and that’s a move that only works when you’re not expecting it. Do I wanna critique how effectively Life is Strange goes off the rails when once I was dumbfounded that it did at all? Life is Strange was like nothing I’d ever played, for good and for ill; a sequel will like at least one thing I’ve played already. And I don’t even know if I should like this game! When people talk shit on it, I don’t even disagree, and yet here we are. Ah, fuck it. I don’t even know. Life is Strange, everyone. Wowser.

[zielenna]

hello I have come to invade your inbox again: 1, 2, 6, 9 for books!

1. a book you loved?

i struggled here - there are books i read & enjoyed a lot, a lot - but i’ve mentioned it here? i mean, winterson’s lighthousekeeping, carson’s autobiography of red, and atwood’s cat’s eye. 

so i’ll go with the mill on the floss by george eliot. it’s a very - proper - novel, a bildungsroman with an instructive streak which is apparent, but not obnoxious, i wouldn’t say. the heart of the book is a conflict between a sister and a brother - to put it crudely, he doesn’t approve of her & she needs his approval. what made it work for me is that maggie is intensely relatable but tom - whom my subject mates hated rather easily - is a character i would admire if he were more self-aware. i spent some time here, writing and writing on characters who are hard-working & disciplined - & tom is, but he’s also horrible. still, i couldn’t just dismiss him & i was following it closely - will they or will they not reconcile? (will he or will he not stay a horrible person?) & it was new, because we are now - i think? - more used to caring intensely about…well, romantic dynamics / relationships more than platonic / familial, so it felt new, to be so invested in a conflict between siblings. 

there are more things there - this book, despite its focus on maggie’s mostly unhappy life, is terribly funny at times. & it’s very skilfull where maggie’s bad choice love interest comes on to scene: you know stephen doesn’t work, you’re conflicted? it uses funny relatable scenes to attach you and then it kicks you in the gut. & finally, as i said, it’s a very moral novel - & i’m still interested in the characters who’re trying to do the right thing. 

2. a book you hated?

i’ve mentioned this, but penelopiad by margaret atwood. i…usually like atwood? i would say so. but penelopiad is the disappointment of this year (well, trk is another but i gave up after 140 pages so). it’s, as the name would suggest, a re-telling of odyssey from penelope’s point of view. & although atwood gave a good lecture on how you should not screw female characters for the sake of other female characters (among other things) she does…the same thing? any sentence she writes on helen is…wrong. also she almost hints that telemachus is somehow queer, only for it to be revealed that he didn’t praise helen’s beauty because he didn’t want to hurt his mum’s delicate feelings. jesus. i deserve - i don’t know, a cup of hot chocolate or whatever we do to comfort people - for every time an author makes me thing a character is queer and then does - this. i like this quote though. 

 6. a book that was super frustrating?

ha…this has to be far from the madding crowd by thomas hardy. i was…reading it just after i finished jane eyre & the difference was…apparent. i hated it intensely when i read it, also because i messed up my reading schedule & had to plow through 280 pages on a single day with a pack of stale biscuits as my only comfort. this was the book i texted in capslock about. but, i came around. i still find the descriptions of sheep breeding / caring excessive, but what bothered me most, which is, misogyny i feel would be more appropriately read as free indirect speech, so the male characters’ views rather than the narrator’s? because at some point, it doesn’t work anymore. you can’t think hardy genuinely means this, considering that he wrote bathsheba, too. so, not only he doesn’t think this, but he also ridicules it? he’s easy to rip on, but i don’t feel it’s fair to take sentence-long quotes out of context & treat it as evidence for his views (which is what i did, ofc. but i needed to cope somehow). i’m still not sold on the romance - i like the, what - the mission statement, but it’s not…engaging? at all. & oak and bathsheba’s dynamic is mostly oak lecturing her, which i’m not too excited about. anyway - an awful read, a bearable book & i loved the secondary reading, so i’m not unhappy i had to read it.

 9. a book you learned from?

so, an unobvious answer would be four quartets by t.s. eliot. i didn’t learn so much from reading but from studying it / writing the essay afterwards. mostly, i learned how much work i can take. 40h in four days is my limit & the week afterward (last week of the term) i spent numb, achieving the absolute minimum & speed-writing a shitty essay because i just didn’t care anymore. eliot though. i felt i didn’t understand him at all? so i needed to do so much more critical reading & close reading & close rereading. he references an awful lot of obscure texts (like, st john of the cross’ ascent of mount carmel. who knows this? i didn’t). i focused on getting the references down first & then went from there. what i also learnt was that i could write, if spiteful enough, an essay with no semi-colons in it. my supervisor, giving me the feedback on the previous one, counted the semi-colons i used by hand (it was thirty seven so. i get it’s a problem. still) so i limited my punctuation to commas and periods. & finally, even though this was the essay i sweated blood over, it was still not great? it was good as an analysis / explanation of what eliot does, but not of how he does it, which. was the point. but, as with every camb essay, i learned ‘good enough’ is…really, really great. also, i think four quartets is a great piece of - can’t say writing because i wouldn’t be able to substantiate that, but - a great piece of thinking? i liked the stuff i wrote about, i mean.

an obvious answer is how to read a poem by terry eagleton. i - didn’t learn how to read a poem, no - but i liked the chapter on the carnation theory / fallacy & it made me think differently. so, the high school mode of analysing poetry, when we did this, was to find as many links between vaguely understood form & content. as in, the speaker says forest leaves grass and the repetition of s gives an impression of a murmur one would hear in the forest, as the leaves and grass move on the wind. and so on. so terry eagleton takes this and says - this is a fallacy. words aren’t their meanings (sign signifier blah). which forced me to look more critically at my responses to poetry - because i used to do that, i used to look for these links, so it felt counterintuitive - not to? also, the fact it’s carnation theory, like incarnation, gives such a religious taste to it - is the word the body? & i can’t say much more than that, because i read the book half a year ago, but i remember intensely enjoying this. 

[rvnxclw]

pic credit

i’ve always wanted to try reading the classics bc a lot of modern lit takes reference from them and idk, sometimes i’m curious when they do that so for a while now, i’ve started uploading the classics to my kindle in hopes that i’d start. and i did, with jane eyre, and boy do i enjoy it. i had read wuthering heights by emily bronte before (for a levels eng lit) and while i do enjoy reading i do not prefer it to jane eyre. the latter’s a great intro to the classics methinks because it’s got the bildungsroman theme rly well + gothic romance & it’s quite forward thinking for something’s that set in the victorian era. 

jane eyre’s formidable character despite her abusive and tragic childhood was impressive and it got even better when she was sent to school where she excelled and became a governess. despite being orphaned and barely getting any love from her aunt’s family, she steadily grew to be a an educated lady that’s full of grace but also someone who’s strong on her own two feet. 

there’s romance in the story too and many a times when i came across some passionate lines, i had to stop a while to gather my emotions (HAHAHHA, very dramatic i know but this book is full of drama ok!!! i am not an unfeeling robot i must let these emotions out!!!) because i felt like i grew together with jane in the course of the book; when she gushed abt her love for John Rochester (her love in this novel), i too gush along with her hahaha... she’s really very sweet and throughout the book, whenever something untoward happened to her, i’d fret and wish that it’d get better. 

there’s a tiiiny bit of supernatural theme going on but nothing too spooky. some of the heavier parts of the book revealed a lot about the characters and illuminated, too, on their backgrounds and history which made the novel hard to put down because you just want to learn more about them. also, a bit of a plot twist in what’s supposed to be the greatest event in jane’s life in the book and i’m still reeling lmaaaooo because i completely didn’t expect it! or maybe i haven’t been paying attention... but still. it’s a great twist and i’m so glad that all was well in the end and i felt that jane did get the good ending that she so deserved. i’d be so sad if it ended on a bad note for her bc she honestly suffered a lot :(

all in all, this has been an enjoyable read and i’d recommend it to someone who’s just started reading the classics (like me)! just the right amount of drama and romance and lets you have a good insight into the class structures etc during the era that this novel is set in.