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facade · 2 years

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autism analysis of ps2 horror games but MOSTLY haunting ground and some of sh2

slight nsf*w mention just scroll if you're not interested im rambling, mentions of assault but not in depth

This is really long

Psychosexual horror is a very neglected trope I think but also rightfully so for being such a squeamish subject for people. Horror themes relating to sexual encounters is like. not something everyone wants to relive or sit through in games so it's not ideal to come across it. I think about how interesting in SH2, the bubble head nurses in relevance to James are something people are crazy about 1. for their boobs 2. they are relevant to james being that theyre apart of his guilty conscience and cognition of women around him while he's unable to touch and hold mary like he absolutely Should be able to. Ahhhh dying illness pain. Theyre good people. James Wants to be a good man and is desperate to be convinced he Is one, despite silent hill holding him down and persisting the signs that he is an immoral fucked little man.

I liked that. It's guilty. Very guilty and lots of emotion, but he couldnt help it, and all he could do to combat was deny he ever did. Desperate repression and punishing yourself for carrying such awful rancid fantasies about infedelity etc etc and you're still in genuine love with your wife. Not so black and white in a situation like this

Its fun

I guess that might allude to why haunting ground is so fun for me. My favorite theme of horror in games will always be Psychological yes, but psychosexual is very fun with how much variety it can be sometimes. Sex is tied to a lot of emotions and for one person can be the best thing in the eworld and for another the worst.

Haunting ground is very themed with sex seeing as how the protagonist is being chased solely for her womb for reproduction reasons but the motivation most of the stalkers have for fiona is actually infatuation and ambition.

debilitas is innocently chasing after fiona under the impression she's alike to his expensive bisque dolls. she is the princess, she's 'pretty', with fair skin and blonde hair and blue eyes, she's slim >_> the conventional traits of what some random dude would label Pretty- she's "perfect" and clean, like the dolls debilitas carries around the castle - the first Girl he's met! (as daniella is more treated as a failure, "wench", servant, bloodied and unkind woman. she doesn't smile kindly like fiona does, nor does she give off 'innocence'. her eyes look tired, slender - she's cruel and nasty..)

he chases relentlessly after fiona, not for sexual gratification, but out of admiration and infatuation. he thinks fiona is like a doll! his most dangerous attack is picking fiona up and hugging her so tight, he cant control his strength - and therefore she's crushed under his weight. it's only until despite all his chasing that fiona decides to spare him that he realize she's not actually like. some scampering mouse lol. she showed him. mercy! and debilitas suddenly feels incredible guilt. running away, hiding in his shack - he doesn't dare come out while fiona is still roaming the castle, doesnt want to get in her way - and when you confront him, he begs for forgiveness by offering a gift - the way out of the castle!! ( at least in a "new game +" lol)

his AI difficulty is easy to maneuever, too, so i feel like that's why daniella's introudction is such a spike in difficulty and processing.

immediately, daniella pursues fiona with... um. err..

two interpretations of daniella's dinner made for fiona is that she fed fiona bits of her mother, or that daniella drugged her. the former is more popular. weakening down fiona to the point she falls unconscious, just so daniella can observe her - it's.... um.

- i feel like now that i forgot to mention the already reoccuring shots of a person watching fiona from behind, from her side - lots of lingering views on her in haunting ground, it would be best to comment on that now. it's genuine voyuerism at this point. a violation of her privacy - and this is from the start of the game, by the way.

daniella watching over fiona while she sleeps, with this context, it feels a bit. alarming! fiona is obviously freaked when she wakes up, but because daniella has disturbed her, she has a total meltdown and suddenly becomes hostile.

daniella is a very traumatized girl, no matter how you look at her. no one quite knows what she is, but either way, it's sad! her "creator" made her with the intention to make the "perfect" woman, but she cannot feel pain, or pleasure, and she can't taste food, either. she's lacking in humanity. HOWEVER, you learn that daniella has also been kidnapped at a young age. so...

...? is she a homunculus? is she a kidnapping victim who was so traumatized to the point of shutting down?

nevertheless, it comes to light that daniella is also infertile. she can't bare children (how did they... find that out.. i was really squeamish to hear about this part, very nauseating details that are subtle, but sickening when you think about it.)

Riccardo is seriously fucked for his impact on debilitas and especially Daniella + fiona. he’s not as fleshed out as the first two stalkers, but he serves his purpose. he’s controlling, violently misogynistic, and terribly cruel. kidnapping daniella at her young age, traumatizing her just for her to serve as fiona’s maid for the rest of her life — how could daniella Not resent fiona? the girl she was groomed to serve and she never consented to any of it.

riccardo will ruin the life of anyone else’s and throw it all away if it means it’ll benefit him— so it’s no surprise that when he comes across fiona, she’s nothing more than a prize or an object. he literally believes that fiona belongs to Him.

But that’s really all there is to it. It’s interesting, at least, that the person stalking Fiona throughout the game is revealed to be lorenzo— a man who swears he only intends to help Fiona and nothing more than that. but he quite literally just. has the same intentions as Riccardo

I feel personally.. that while it is probably necessary to explore every variety of infatuation and obsession — all these characters desire fiona in one way or another . Whether it be sexually, out of ambition, out of objectification or all three. it’s just that the first half, debilitas and daniella serve so much more complexity than the latter half.

i feel like that’s why, when you talk to any haunting ground fan— their favorite always happens to be one of the early stalkers, most likely daniella. she’s a fan favorite for a reason, but it’s also because she serves so much interesting potential and is such a fun character to think about— you do have people still making theories about whether she’s believed to be human or a homunculus.

I dunno. I like haunting ground a lot. My brother got this game when it came out and he adored it. he’s more of a fan of like. girl characters running away from action/intense situations in ridiculous revealing outfits (fiona’s figure is especially sexualized) but he’s some gay guy who likes playing pretty women in gta online LOL. he loooves girls in horror or action media. even if it’s sometimes for weird reasons i don’t get. he’s really funny to me. i asked him if he still had his copy, because i remember him looking on ign for walkthroughs trying to figure things out — he sold it LOL he couldn’t beat the game…

But I Remember Playing A Lot of It. As a 7 Year Old Girl

Haha

bye

#zach and alex iknowyou just followeed mee im sorry ignoree this 32k r32i4 rejdwe3249 32940934 9032490 32I havee uautism

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wafflebloggies · 9 months

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the long con - part 4/7

a Don't Feed The Muse/Captain Disillusion crossover story. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

“I’m sorry, Alan.”

Alan stared at the Captain. He looked like a person who was seriously doubting the input of their own ears, and, in the dim cabin, the bright neons of the control panels and lights around them turning every speck of luminance into sharp glimmering point, his astonished expression wobbled. He did not actually burst into tears, but for just a moment he looked as if he might.

Only for a moment, though. It passed, and his expression sobered and settled, and he slowly sat back in his seat and leaned his head back against the worn leather, staring into the night.

“I… don’t believe you,” he said.

Blinking, almost as if the words were a question he was asking himself. Shaking his head, a numb little motion that grew as he spoke.

The Captain reacted sharply enough for both of them, flinching as if shot, turning towards him with an astonished, stung-to-the-core look.

“Alan!”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Alan, calmly. He sounded more like he was talking to himself than the Captain, telling himself something important, with quiet, bewildered conviction. “There’s something you need me to do, or… something you’re not telling me, another temporal emergency that means you have to make me feel positive emotions, or- or something. There’s no other reason why you’d ever say that.”

The Captain bridled. “Alan, I don’t lie! This is me we’re talking about! I’m basically- thematically incapable of it! I literally spend most of my time telling people on the Internet not to lie because it freakin'- pisses me off so much!”

“Just back there, you told that ticket booth guy that vehicles of extra-terrestrial origin aren’t liable for parking tariffs under U.N law.”

“Come on, that was an exaggeration at most- and sixty dollars for a weekend? That is blatant extortion!” The Captain grimaced. “Okay, not the point. I wouldn’t lie to you!”

“You also tell people on the Internet not to accept claims without evidence,” said Alan, doggedly. “Sir.”

He sighed, glancing down, tucking his phone away behind him. “Captain… you’ve been acting strangely since Friday. Iknowyou. You gotta at least give me that, right? I know when something’s wrong, or- something’s upwith you, even if I can’t understand it because I’m just a dumb human, you could maybe at least just… tell me what’s really going on. Maybe-” He shrugged, looking away through the glass. “Maybe you’d feel better, at least.”

Feel better. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate from the tired undercurrent of apathy in Alan’s voice that what he really meant was stop acting weird. Quite easy, to go further and hear because, whatever this is, I don’t trust it, I don’t want to deal with it, and it’s making me uncomfortable. I’d just like it to stop.

The shuttle hummed, the systems purred and clicked. The Captain gazed out of the rain-streaked glass, shoulders slumped, following the faint smudges of lighter cloud scudding by above and below with his eyes. He looked wretched.

“You didn’t even remind me.” He swiped his sleeve quickly across under his nose, with a sharp sniff and a struggle into something more like his usual confident, upright posture. “About your talk. I... I’ve had a lot of other things to think about, you know. I’ve had a lot on my mind!”

“I know,” said Alan.

There were probably a lot of other things he could have said, but none that would have been so effective. Without meaning to, without meaning anything beyond just a simple agreement, he didn’t know how quietly, flatly damning he sounded.

I know. I’ve had a lot on my mind too. With everything we do, and everything it needs from me, everything you need from me. I know what it’s like, to have a lot to think about.

The Captain swallowed again, as if it hurt, flicking a couple of switches overhead as he stared through the windshield, the bright overlays and the HUD blinking between them. At last, like every word was a pulled tooth, he said,

“Fine. Listen, when I was on stage, I… I don’t know what happened. I’ve never felt anything like it before, or at least I…” He hesitated. “I… I just looked at some random guy in the audience, and the next thing I knew, I felt… it was like, I felt seen. Not in a good way, it-” He stopped again, his mouth pulled into a moue of discomfort and distress, gazing a hole through the clouds ahead as he struggled to explain. “It felt like... the tiniest part of something really, unfathomably big was looking straight at me and… it could see way more than you people can.”

“More?”

The Captain huffed. “Humans don’t exactly see a lot, Alan. Visual acuity isn’t really your species’ thing, you know? Your basic three dimensions, barely a million colours… well, you know, we made a whole video about it. But this, I felt like it could see… everything. Like it- it could...” He stumbled, stopped.

“It... wasn’t a great feeling.”

Alan frowned. “You said you were looking at someone in the audience, when it happened. Do you think it was anything to do with them?” He watched the Captain’s face, but saw only confusion, and that strange edge of fear- a mix of emotions which looked so out-of-place there that he felt pushed to try to help, to clarify, say anything if only to stop the Captain looking so frighteningly lost.

“What were they like? Maybe I would’ve noticed-”

“I hardly think that’s likely, Alan,” snorted the Captain. It was a relief for Alan, to hear him taking refuge in impatience. At least it was normal. “There’s no way you would’ve seen him from the booth, anyway. Some kid, hair all slicked back like George McFly, grey sweater, he was sitting in like centre-G with another guy- red check jacket, band shirt- that French prog rock thing-”

“Escalier,” said Alan. The Captain blinked.

“You saw them?”

“Not then. They- they were sitting at the same table I was at, after my talk, you literally just miss- sir, please maybe sometimes, um, actually look where we’re flying, you’re making me really nervous.”

The Captain finally returned his eyes to the windshield, where the low lights of early evening were gleaming through the soft rain, glinting across the dim landscape below. In grids and in tangles, towns and highways and the huge blackout zones of the Everglades, the state slipped through the rainy night under a blanket of cloud.

“I don’t like this, Alan,” he said. “I feel things, like my whole... vibe thing? Like when I say I’ve gotta go, because someone’s aunt in Des Moines is thinking of investing in crypto, that thing. You know?”

Alan blinked. “I… kind of always thought that was a bit?”

The Captain went to put his head in his hands, remembered he was supposed to be flying a shuttle, straightened up again. “No. Sometimes, people get all lined up to make exceptionally poor decisions- particularly ones involving the Internet- and wherever they are, I feel it. It’s like... someone sticking a Q-tip so far up my nose it tickles my brain. Ughh.” He shuddered, as if his silver skin was crawling from the inside out. “But it’s never been a two-way thing before. This time, it was. Like… like some super-terrible, super-toxic, life-altering decision, but- with eyes.”

Alan thought about this. He thought about Mark’s flat, hurried voice, how even in the middle of his pitch he’d sounded kind of frantic, more like a hostage with a gun to their head than someone nervous and eager at the chance to work with a favourite channel. He thought about the sinking feeling the whole thing had left him with, the anxious funk he’d been stuck with ever since.

“I don’t think I… understand exactly, but it sounds bad.”

“It is bad. I haven’t been able to stop- thinking about it, and...” The Captain trailed off, rubbed his forehead. “Other stuff. Whatever, the point is, this isn’t something we want to just leave roaming around loose out there. Look, I know tracking down some random guy we saw for five seconds at a convention full of thousands of people sounds like a pretty crazy, gargantuan mission, but honestly, the more I think about it, the more it feels like something I just gotta do.”

“Oh, that’s easy, I got his number.”

“You may well ask why, Alan, but it’s a question of responsibility. I have to ask myself, does it fall to me, as the sole superpowered defender of verifiable truth and generally good digital decision-making in this entire galactic sector, to… wait, what did you say?”

Alan was wrestling with his seatbelt, trying to get into his back jeans pocket without loosening the strap. “He gave me a business card, Captain. His name’s Mark… let me just give him a call.”

Anthony, shocked silent in the wake of Mark’s outburst, struggling for something to say, had only just opened his mouth when the sound of Mark’s phone came buzzing, muffled, from under the jackets in the back seat. It pulsed against the upholstery, vibrating through the fabric covering it like a smothered wasp. Anthony barely reacted to it at first, but as the sound came a second time, the fabric of Mark’s jacket illuminated faintly by that small blueish rectangle underneath, he blinked, twisted in his seat. Relieved, maybe, to have any kind of distraction, a reason to move.

“That’s, uh- that’s yours-”

He was already fishing into the back, feeling blindly around in the clustered shadows with one arm. Mark, instantly panicked, took a hand off the wheel long enough to try to grab the phone himself, but even though his arms were longer the driver-side seat was directly in front of where his jacket lay, and he would have needed to be some multi-jointed tentacle-being to have even stood a chance of getting a hand on it.

“Leave it, it’s fine!”

Anthony was fumbling under the jacket, hanging out of his seatbelt with half of his torso leaned into the back. “No, I got it- gimmie a sec-”

“I said leave it!” yelled Mark. The rhythmic double-pulse buzz of the phone felt like it was wired directly into his brain, the scraping of an insect buried between his ears. He felt the car start to drift under his control, and returned both hands to the wheel in a hurry, heart lurching, gripping hard. “Just let it go to message-”

“I got it, dude,” said Anthony- puzzled, uneasy, not a little wounded still. “What if it’s your mom?”

He sat back, poked the screen. “Hey, this is- hello? Shit, missed it.”

“See? Put it back, I don’t care who-”

“Wait, I could check the number-” All of a sudden, Anthony’s voice stopped in its tracks. Mark, glancing desperately sideways in snatches as long as he dared, was in a perfect position to see the exact moment that his worst fears were confirmed, right as it happened. Anthony’s brow scrunched, his hands went still, and he looked down at the phone in silence.

“What’re all these notifications?” he said.

“Don’t,” said Mark, but all the volume had gone out of his voice, all of the force, and with it the ability to even try to sound in control. The word sounded more like a small winded plea, and it was ten to one if Anthony even heard it, his finger already tracing and flicking and tapping, his eyes glued to the small screen.

“Thumbnail edited successfully? Thumbnail edited… thumbnail… description edited successfully… video title edited- Mark?”

Mark couldn’t breathe.

“Mark, what’s going on?”

Mark could feel Anthony looking at him. He could imagine his expression far too well even without looking, his accusing eyes, floating in the darkness with the lights flicking past the windows like the last crashing embers of his oh-so-clever plan. He said nothing, swiping the tears from his face with a quick, hot palm, kept staring straight ahead.

“Why did you change the video title?”

One last try. One last try, to explain again what he’d been trying to explain all weekend, to make Anthony see, as if anybody could explain anything well while battling the rising fury and panic that the embarrassment of being caught red-handed only flamed and fuelled, like throwing water on blazing oil. Like he should have to feel guilty, like he’d done something wrong, when he was doing the only thing he could, the one thing left that he’d been forced to do. Anthony was even incapable of understanding how he had forced him to this, forced him to lie and sneak around and feel like some kind of traitor.

“No-one cares about our videos,” he said, as patiently as he could. “This is the only way they’re going to be seen.”

Anthony was shaking his head slightly, automatically, the harsh light from Mark’s phone casting ghastly blue-white shadows up across his shocked, hurt face as he dropped the phone in his lap and turned to look at Mark.

“You’re making us sound like some stupid contrarian clickbait channel-”

“Those channels actually make money,” said Mark, evenly.

Anthony let out a quiet, punctured breath, and Mark didn’t even have to glance at him now to know he had that maddening, sympathetic, pitying look on his face again. He didn’t want to see it, he didn’t want Anthony’s pity. As if pity wasn’t completely useless, as if pity would green-light his mother’s medical coverage, or save her life.

“Look. I know you’re in a tough situation with your mom,” said Anthony, gently. “I get it! But that doesn’t have anything to do with the channel-”

“No, you don’t get it,” snapped Mark. His hands were still neatly at three and six, but his nails were digging into the fake leather of the wheel and he might as well have been driving underwater, or on Mars, for all the attention he was paying to the road in front of his burning eyes. On one level, he was aware that Anthony was not going to be any more easily convinced by being snapped at, or talked to as if he was a particularly stupid six-year-old. On another, he was too angry to care. “My dad’s not helping, our insurance got denied- I have to take care of her!”

“I’m sorry, Mark-”

Injured, understanding, but even now full of a kind of petulant, aggravating sympathy, Anthony’s voice grated in Mark’s ears and on his fraying nerves. To Mark, he sounded just like a whiny kid whose favourite toy was being handed away to someone else. And maybe that was the last straw, to hear so clearly in Anthony’s voice that the channel, the thing that was being dangled relentlessly over Mark’s head as his last thread of hope, was in Anthony’s eyes nothing but a neat toy he refused to give up, something fun he didn’t want to let go of just because it was his too.

“-but this isn’t just your channel! I’m not going to let you ruin this!”

Because this, this, was really the only thing Anthony cared about. Fun. Keeping something fun.

“You asshole-!”

Anthony’s stunned face, his eyes flicking all of a sudden past him, to the road. In the tumbling slowdown of seconds, his mouth opened without sound, the betrayal in his eyes flaring into panic, horror. Mark turned back to the road, far too late, as the car completed its slow drifting slew across the empty road and hit the kerb with a sickening, bone-shaking lurch, mounting it in a series of terrible earthquake bounces. A final glare of light, a snatch of safety rail, before the car dove headlights-first into a black void beyond. A black and crowding host of branches slamming against the windows, a rush of wet wheels tearing at the soaking grass, a final heavy impact that ended in a splintering crash of glass.

Silence.

Slowly, his pulse a jackhammer in his throat, his heart loud as a marching band in his ears, Mark raised his head. For a moment- a jumbled collection of moments- he wasn’t even sure where he was, only that his neck hurt and he felt sore and shaken in every nerve. His grasp on the thread of the world felt as if it had undergone a terminal skip, and he could catch hold of nothing coherent other than the fact that it was horribly, hideously dark, and something awful had happened.

Was happening.

Reality overtook him fast. Everything tumbled into place, and he jerked forwards- tried to- but his seatbelt held him clamped across the chest, a mechanical death-grip too tight to escape.

“Anthony?”

The car was quiet, the headlights, dash, every system dead and dark. The road, somewhere above and behind them, was empty, hidden, lightless. The engine ticked slowly as it cooled, water dripped and trickled, crushed branches groaned in the damp black night.

“Anthony??”

Fresh air started to seep in, cool against Mark’s face, full of rain and the scent of churned earth and bruised growth.

“Anthony!!”

#dftm #muse arg #don't feed the muse #mark mayhew #anthony williams #captain disillusion #alan the intern #alan amelik #my writing

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