#and I’m so used to putting up a mask irl expect to a select few

[honeykaes]

…2 years today

[legionofpotatoes]

Okay then, since both of y’all are just delving in I’ll try to keep things (relatively) spoiler-free and stick to story sense and semiotics! Few caveats:

Have not had prior experience with Kojima’s body of work and if that’s a prerequisite in how I “should feel” about it then yike on a bike (just getting this out of the way based on what I’ve had talked at me)

My read excludes the entire context of moment-to-moment gameplay; I basically watched chronological story cutscenes stitched together with NPC interaction vignettes sprinkled in-between. 9 or so hours in total. 

I did this because the gameplay does not interest me at all - and not in protest of chill social games (I adore both No Man’s Sky and thatgamecompany stuff, for example, and try to champion anything without Gun in it), but because the setting and length did not align with my expectations for something to invest so much time into. Still, I was super intrigued by the story, and, to a lesser extent, the plot.

also I have a hard time writing in condensed English, so this may run quite long. I’ll put the rest under a break. Second language, sorry!

I’m trying to think of a good way to start this. Like I said, the story, or what the thing was ABOUT, was infinitely more interesting to me than whatever wacko packaging Kojima thought up for the narrative. Which was a complicated, thought-out piece of fiction shattered into many disparate pieces and fed to us in a mystery-box-filmmaker kind of way, making us reverse-engineer what essentially was a rather simple interpersonal uhh. family tragedy, I guess. 

But to its credit the lore is visibly built solely to support whatever thematic messaging Kojima would want to weave in there - something I can respect. Meaning it gets as wacky and as nonsensical as it needs to be in order to reflect the high-concept allegories at play, aaand then it does so to a fault. I adore works of fiction that don’t give a shit about “tone” - I hate that word more than anything in modern media - but effective symbolism in storytelling, IN MY OPINION, requires a deft hand, nuance, strong authorial position, and a good grasp of social context. 

I want to like, go through these four points individually and nitpick my problems with the game in their lens, because I think they cover pretty much everything I feel like saying:

1. A deft hand - to me means to selectively dramatize correct themes and plot points as you go so that shit makes sense in the end. I felt this was incredibly lacking here. It was like a symphony going for hours without a crescendo. The absolute wrong bits of soulless exposition would be reiterated THRICE within a single cutscene while necessary context of, hell, character motives or even plot geography would be left vague. Intentionally vague, some would argue, but their later function would never arrive. Other times, what would visibly be conceived as wink-and-you’ll-miss-it foreshadowing could overstay its welcome to the point of inadvertently spoiling a later plot point. My girlfriend sniped the (arguably) most important reveal of the game, which is left for the tail end of the final epilogue (!), in the first hours of watching. The symbolics and allusions were just too plentiful where they should have been more subdued. I am DYING to provide examples here but I’m keeping it spoiler-free. Again, if this is a Kojima-ism, too bad; but it’s not a catastrophic failure of storytelling by any means. There are very few masters of this thing working today. But what can be easier to navigate, I think, is...

2. Nuance - this kinda goes hand-in-hand with the upper point but is a bit more important to me and applies to what SPECIFICALLY you decide to heighten in order to slap us across the face with your deeper meanings. Certain characters - not all of them - feel like caricatures. The silly names and overt metaphors (wearing a mask means hiding something! connected cities all have ‘knot’ in their name!) are honestly, genuinely FINE as long as their function isn’t betrayed, but the lean into metaphor worship can sometimes wade into SERIOUSLY shitty territory as contemporary implications are ignored altogether, and that ties into my fourth point, which I’ll address before looping back to the third; needless to say, approaching sensitive subjects with broad strokes is not exactly the way to go. But broad strokes is almost exclusively what this game does, forgetting to incorporate...

3. Social context - and I feel like avoiding examples here will be difficult lest I end up sounding like a dogmatic asshole; but there is a right thing and a wrong thing to do when co-opting IRL concepts to fit fictional messaging/storytelling. I feel that a character “curing” themselves of a phobia by experiencing emotional growth that vaguely corresponds to what the disorder could have symbolized is a wrong thing. And I don’t even want to get into all the wacky revisionism the lore ended up twisting into, which was mostly honestly entertaining (the ammonite will be a good hint to those who’ve played it), until it decided to, again, lean a bit too hard into painting today’s reality as a crisis of human connection and imply some questionable things about why, uh, asexual people exist, for example. Yes it makes some sense within the context of the lore and what’s happening in the plot, but it’s completely lacking in social know-how of the here and now. In other words: a Bad Look. To me, this type of wayward ignorance is a much more serious issue that can historically snowball any piece of writing into a witless disaster. I don’t know if it quite does it here, but it’s not really my place to say. Still, you can have wacky worldbuilding that has no sense of dramatic tension, nuance, or awareness towards the audience, and yet containing one last vital glue holding it all together, and that would be...

4. Strong authorial position - or intent I guess, to speak in literary terms - and I still have trouble pinpointing how and where this exists in this game. A bullshit stance you say, and I hear ya; cause this here is a video game very pronounced in its pro-human-connection messaging, painting the opposite outcome as an apocalyptic end to our species. And as I understand the gameplay is all about connections too - leaning into that theme so hard it even renders itself unapproachable to most capital-g Gamers. I honestly respect the balls of that. But really, as an author who headlined the creation of this thing, what was it really about? What were you trying to say?

And beyond “human connection is real important to beat apathy” I got nothing, and I think that’s because of points 1 and 2 failing in succession, and then point 3 souring the taste. It just had to be apparent the moment the curtain fell, is what I find. You just have to “get” it immediately, get what it was trying to say, but that will happen only if it’s been articulated incredibly well up to that point. Maybe the entire punch of that message REALLY depends on you spending dozens of hours ruminating on the crushing cost of loneliness as you haul cargo across countries on foot and connect people to your weird not-internet? If so, I’ve missed a vital piece of context, and with this being a videogame and all, it’s honestly a fair assumption. But otherwise.. it felt like a hell of a lot of twisting and turning and plot affectations that only led to more plot affectations and sometimes character growth (which had its own bag of issues from point 3) and not a hell of a lot to say about human connection beyond the fact that it is. good and useful. It felt like a repeated statement instead of being an argument. Does that make sense? I understand the story optics here are zoomed waay out and set on targeting the human condition as a whole, but like.. if you’re committing to a message, you have to stand by it.

Why is connection good? it’s a dumb question without a DOUBT but since the game has set out to answer it then it.. should? Did I miss the answer? I may have, I honestly can’t exclude the possibility. My lens was warped and my framework of consuming storytelling is a bit rigid in its requirements (the four points I mentioned), so maybe I’m just too grouchy and old to understand. 

I just think Pacific Rim did it better and took about 7 hours less to do it! And yet, it, too, involved Guillermo Del Toro. Curious.

If you made it this far and are interested in my thoughts on the technical execution of it all as well, uhm, it’s pretty much spotless? Decima is utilized beautifully, the Hideo vanity squad of celebrities all do their very best with the often clunky dialogue, the music is great, the aesthetic and visual design is immediately arresting, and it certainly does an all-around great job at standing out from the rest of the flock. I fell in love with the BB a little bit. It is also a game that is incredibly horny for Mads Mikkelsen, which almost fully supplants the expected real estate for run-of-the-mill male gaze bullshit. It is. A change.

That’s all I got folks

[ildivine]

all of my mindset has been focused in how i felt as a younger sam, and it makes sense, but i suppose it’s its own kind of frustrating? i’ve grown up with a select few forms that really stuck, and it all feels more like... moods to me, i suppose, shifting and forms and the like- but this is more of a sticky mindset, but it’s one that i don’t actually have now and that’s the more annoying feeling. people around me have active dysmorphia and the like, and while i understand that, it’s mostly in my ears/tail/wings and maybe whiskers and mostly gender dysphoria. or perhaps a combination, because i’m close, i’m a young human “male” and always feel aspects of my features that aren’t related to gender as much, like wanting to be taller or having my face a certain way-- badou gave me a lot of similar feelings when i was in that shift for a while, but the aloofness of attitude i had then made me not care so much.

as a teenage winchester i’d folded out everything neatly ahead of me, even though we were always moving and the family dynamic was rocky and when i got to settle down for college and found a gf, it was probably the best thing that’d ever happened to me. like things were finally in a place i could handle. i knew what i wanted to do, what i wanted to be, and lawschool is a whole nother can of worms but it proved i can do anything if i put my mind to it. but i also had the brain for it, and i suppose that’s the most frustrating thing. i said to dean that i’m not as smart now and so i feel like i can do less; he replied saying, of course i’m still intelligent. i didn’t have anything to say after that because i’m still gonna disagree, at least for a while. until things fit into place again.

i’ve grown up in this time through a few shifts and mindsets but again, it’s more like moods. and they all fit for the time that i needed them -- remembering tavros got me through a time when that anxiety and etc was actually helpful to me, or yuki’s calmness, or lelouch’s willpower, and i feel like i’m starting to sound like people that just ‘cope with characters’ but really it’s just that while i don’t know who i am i take on these ‘masks’ and i’m better about not doing it so much now, but it’s much less conscious than it used to be. i don’t have trouble differentiating myself and how i am now to how i was as sam, but they blend, perhaps because it’s relevant or closer to what i’m dealing with, i don’t know? for a long time i thought it had to do with dean, since forms shift depending on who i’m around, but since my awakening sam has often ‘come back’ to me and i’m not surprised it’s sticking at all, but... well, this was a lot less jumbled in my head.

i should find it helpful, is the short of it, but that’s the most trying thing. it doesn’t feel natural because i feel like my expectations are different. my attitude and personality is much more solid now than it was a few months ago or over the past years growing up, but i’m also missing the pieces that weren’t -- i’m a silly, exuberant person irl and i’ve lost a lot of that since my breakup, and i feel like that... sam-ness just tries to fill in for that, lol. which is fine i guess, if i need it to survive, but it doesn’t feel practical, especially as i was way too emotionally shielded back then to properly handle anything? i feel like i’m always bouncing between both, sheltered and stunted or over-emotional and reactive, all over the place.

i suppose in short if i believe i’m here for any reason it’s to make up for what i couldn’t do in my past lives, and for a time i’ve felt like sam was most..recent. for a while i thought i might have died right before i was born into this body but i don’t think it works quite like that, since we grew up in an era just a couple decades ago, but timelines don’t make sense anyway considering i spent some in the future just the same. but, i don’t know. i was yanked away from doing everything i wanted to do -- living a ‘normal’ life -- because of dean and the whole thing with demons and all and while i don’t...mind that (it did kind of suck but that’s besides the point) i still feel like there’s opportunities here that i missed. but i can’t get a grasp of them and i can’t put that mind to use when my memory, focus, and stability is so shoddy?

i guess i just feel less responsible, and there’s part of me that wants to hammer down on that. i used to hold so much information and be able to apply it tactfully at almost any point and now i’m like haha why can’t i do that??? well i’m not sam winchester anymore is why, buddy. teenager or not.