#narratives

[thatdamnokie]

i love you fairy tales i love you folklore i love you myths i love you stories as old as humanity itself i love you oral traditions i love you characters carried through time on my ancestors’ tongues i love you story i’ve seen a million ways and want to see a million more i love you archetypes i love—

[ghostfacerseffect]

Thinking about film scores & concept albums & auditory storytelling

[daisies-on-a-cup]

THEY DID IT THEY ESCAPED THE NARRATIVE!!! THERE IS A WAY OUT!!! THE STORY CAN BE ALTERED!!! YOU ARE NOT STUCK- THERE IS AN ESCAPE!!! THERE IS A LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL BUT YOU HAVE TO WALK TOWARDS IT!!!!

[pierremcguire]

Don't let those demons in again I fill the void up with polished doubt, fake sentiment

False Confidence - Noah Kahan

[tohakumaru]

"...it's a long walk to the bazaar, better head off now if we are to make it by summer solstice..."

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finally finished the nomad's clothes & packed its wares for the bird-people pilgrimage. sorry for the back to back posts on this, i am actually packing up and moving myself, so just need tidy up some ends as things have to go into storage until i get to the new place.

here's the nomad on top of my drawer

it will have "its own place" soon, hopefully!

thank you for sticking around, we're back to normal posts after this (illustrations/models).

[dougielombax]

“hiSTORy iS WRitteN bY THe vicTORs¡”

Oh do fuck off with that Churchillian, pompous, small-minded, imperialist, triumphalist Great Man Theory bullshit!

That stopped being true after 1945 and you know it!

Get in the bin with that shite!

Besides I’m pretty sure that quote was actually about biased narratives.

Mind you, I’m not using it to justify revisionism or “lost cause” narratives! That shit can also get in the fucking bin! Starting yesterday.

[thoughtfulfangirling]

Option 1: You've saved your friend from a magical disability that unmoors their body from your existence, and a powerful enemy has just destroyed the artifact you created to anchor her here, and if you don't get out of the battle quick, you might lose her forever.

Option 2: You discover you have an unwanted magical destiny that you can't avoid. The girl of your dreams could also share this magical destiny with you, but only if you recruit her yourself, irreversibly tying her to that destiny which she otherwise could have been saved from and you wish you yourself could be saved from.

Option 3: You're in a Groundhog Day cycle that you started and could end at any time full of grief and pain, but you went into this to save your friend from an inevitable decision to help others; however, each time your 'day' starts, it makes the consequences you're trying to avoid that much worse if it comes to pass

Option 4: You've found the spirit of the dead man who is most important to you in the world, who you spent your life with. You can give him a semblance of a life, but the caveat is that he will experience it through you, sharing your body, meaning you can't ever be sentient/conscious at the same time - sharing an existence but never able to interact

Option 5: You are fated to die, but your lover takes your place, and you're so scared you don't stop them. In a twist, she is returned, brought back from the dead, but she never speaks again despite continuing on in her life with you.

Option 6: You die saving the world for the second time after hard battles and tragic losses. Death brings paradise and peace, and you are happy, but your party hasn't been able to live with the death and resurrect you back into life where you have to continue the fight that caused all the losses.

Option 7: You've fallen in love with a girl caught in space. There is a limited corridor of physical space she exists within that doesn't allow for her to feel the rain falling or the comforts of a cozy bed. You've never known actual magic or sci fi to exist in the real world, and yet you may perhaps be the only person who can puzzle out how to free her from this reality unmoored from any existing known occurrences.

Option 8: You've found love and a life with the woman of your dreams, but it is a taboo love, and she is too afraid of her deep feelings for you. She decides to marry someone who will be kind to her and help her advance in her goals in life, but she wants to keep you too, have you live with them in a seemingly respectable role while you are her mistress. You know there is no world in which you will be happy with that arrangement.

There was never going to be enough space for these and they were kind of hard to come up with / remember, so only 8 options for this one! XD

After results are in, I'll say what they are from but I will do it in a way to avoid spoilers for the most part! Or you can just block the 'tragic story poll'

[thirdity]

What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

[sexy-sapphic-sorcerer]

"But the reason why we retell the tales over and over is to create hope. We keep these themes and characters alive because we need them, because we need to make sense of what is happening and what needs to happen in our lives, and what better way to do that than with grand, tragic characters who already make sense to us? They explain the world to us and inspire us to keep going even though a happy ending may not be possible (Gilgamesh) and maybe because a happy ending may not be possible yet (Arthur).

“When Albion’s need is greatest,” Kilgharrah says in the last episode of Merlin, “Arthur will rise again.”

And he has risen when we needed him most. Multiple times. We were even the ones doing the resurrecting."

[dynamite-derek]

Looking at the self doubt and intrusive voices of Alan Wake 2

Note: I tread very lightly on spoilers in this writeup, however I do discuss an endgame scenario, so if you wish to enter that segment of the game completely fresh I would visit this piece after finishing the game. Last year, a lot of praise was circulating around over the movie Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Not only was it apparently a very good movie, but it also contained a realistic depiction of a panic attack. For as much as mental health issues have been brought to the forefront in recent days, it seems like accurate depictions of actual mental health events are quite rare. Especially in children's media

Gaming received a moment like this in 2023 but it is far less talked about. Sure, fans of the game probably discuss it amongst themselves because that's what fans do, but the wider public hasn't grasped onto it yet. Hey, 2023 was an astounding year for games, stuff is going to slip through the cracks.

Alan Wake 2 contains a constantly shifting and complex narrative. The world seems to be changing based on the story the titular character Alan Wake is writing. The player will likely be questioning their memory on certain things as they play. "Did this interaction play out as I remember it? Did I miss a key point in the narrative that would clue me in as to what's going on?" Nothing is quite as it seems and you are constantly guessing about what is going on as you play.

Probably the biggest 'questioning the narrative' moment in the game is related to one of the game's playable characters Saga Anderson and her daughter, Logan. Saga is sent to a town called Bright Falls to investigate a series of supernatural murders. You witness a phone conversation towards the start of the narrative between Saga, her husband and her daughter that's fairly innocuous. It basically just tells you that they're a loving family. But that's the last little bit we hear about this happy family throughout. From that point forward, things change.

Various citizens of the town you're in act like Saga is an old regular of the place. They address her by her first name and speak in very familiar tones. They think she separated from her husband and took her daughter with her to this down. Oh, and also her daughter died via drowning. Kind of a heavy pill to swallow but one you probably shake off the first couple of times you hear it because you witnessed that phone call at the beginning of the game. You HEARD her marriage was happy and you even heard her daughter. Things are fine.

But as the game goes on, more NPCs mention this to you. In fact, basically every plot relevant character including Saga's partner thinks Logan is dead. Eventually you start to doubt yourself. Did you actually experience that phone call at the beginning of the game or is it a false memory? You didn't actually SEE the characters she was speaking to, was it something she hallucinated? Is the twist for this game that the narrative impacting the game world never actually twisted this part of Saga's life?

As the player, it's hard to determine what's real. In a lot of games, the character the player is controlling doesn't actually mirror the emotions of the player. You might be confused but the main character isn't. It all makes perfect sense to them! And for a lot of this game, Saga comes across as someone who absolutely believes her version of events. Logan is alive. Her marriage is fine. Alan's narrative is shifting the world and fixing that will fix everything. As a player I was second guessing everything the game was throwing at me but the character I was controlling was more sure of herself.

However, we get to peer into Saga's mind a fair amount. The game has a gameplay mode called "The Mind Place." In it, Saga can deduce pieces of evidence related to the various cases you undertake. You can get her perspective on a lot of events in the game this way. A lot can be inferred about Saga's personality through this. You find out she is very sure of herself and competent. But in the end game, things change.

After a wild sequence of events, Saga is locked in the mind place. Usually when you can exit out of there with the press of a button, but no matter what you do, you are stuck. With nowhere to go in the 'real' world you are stuck alone with your thoughts and here are where a lot of your doubts throughout the game come to surface. You grab various pieces of evidence throughout your mind and all of them are just overwhelmingly negative. "You are a bad mom, you are a bad cop, you let your kid die, you are a bad wife." With every new piece of evidence you collect, the player and Saga's doubts become more and more intertwined.

It hits hardest when you're dealing with Logan. Every piece of evidence basically just screams "YOUKILLEDHERYOUKILLEDHERYOUKILELDHER" over and over again. The evidence is accompanied by a picture of your daughter that slowly fades after each message. Is everything the NPCs were telling us about this character true? Is it possible that everyone else in the world is wrong and her life actually does suck?

When I'm having a dark period of time and I think everything is bad, I often search for proof that things aren't as bad as they seem. I think of interactions I've had with people or stuff I've done at my job and go "okay so maybe I'm not as bad as I think" but invariably when I try to cheer myself up like this, a voice in the back of my head calls bullshit on everything I am saying and pops up right when I am on the brink of breaking out of it. "Oh that person was just being nice to you" "Oh, you just achieved that because you knew the right person" "You have done nothing with your life." That sort of stuff.

And wouldn't you know it, Saga does the same thing. She rejects that the death of her daughter is a reality and tries to find evidence to support this theory. All very strong stuff and a lot of it is not new information to the player. And yet, with every bit of evidence you collect that suggests maybe you're not a bad wife and mother, maybe you're not a bad fed, Saga basically screams at you that you're wrong and in denial. That you are looking for an easy escape to the obvious solution. That you are merely coping to evade reality.

Eventually your evidence becomes so strong that you snap out of your funk and are able to leave the mind place and return to 'reality.' Saga still has those lingering doubts, but she also has given herself enough reasons to believe that the doubts are in her head. She is at a point where she is comfortable confronting the nature of her personal life. You know in the back of her head she's not sure what she's gonna find on the other side of her mind place, but she is at least no longer content with sitting in obliviousness.

The handling of intrusive thoughts is done so well. You the player are the one who is going about grabbing the evidence that you're not mentally broken, but the voice in the back of your head is shoving all the bad thoughts up front whether you want them to or not. I cannot overstate how gripping the storytelling is during this 30 minute segment. Many people would call the gameplay in this section 'walking-sim' esque, but I would argue it the most gripping bit of gameplay in the game despite not requiring anything out of the player from a reflex perspective.

There are no fail states. It's just you and the mind of one of the characters you've spent the past several hours with. And it is enthralling.

[philosophybitmaps]

[sovengardeswag]

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

==

Narratives are stronger than facts.

[unicornofthemidwest]

looooove stories that are like. Yes, you can change, Yes, you can get better. But you're going to have to break down everything you ever thought about yourself and lose your whole sense of identity because the core is rotten. Yes, you might be okay at the end but you won't be the same.

[tohakumaru]

[>a desert spanning out for miles

> (cold, glittering sand sings to the stars above. a moonless sky.)

the sand flows over your limbs like water. on your skin it feels like the sounds the sea makes. you can't quite move yourself, no matter how much you try. despite knowing that you do have a body, it seems to be detached from you besides that soft feeling of flowing sands.

unable to move, you lay there and wait for the panic to kick in. wait for the gut wrenching anxiety that has brought you out of bed every day, all this time.

yet it never comes.

out of nowhere, the moon appears and stares down at you

as the sand slowly settles

and the stars blinks indifferently

there is not a single gust of wind.

you think about your mother, and find yourself unable to recall how she looked the last time you saw her. you try to picture your father walking up the stairs, the clouds when you left, your best friend's smile, the junction where you saw a girl lying by a bus, the sun that burned the tarmac. but they slip pass you like a stream of silvery fish. with all your might you reach into your head, trying to grasp onto anything, anything at all.

there was nothing left.

and then it floats up to the surface, noiselessly like a bubble in a pond. a face that you'd carefully buried under the mundane ghost you'd become to stay alive, or so you always tell yourself.

"give it to me", the moon says.

you hurriedly, and carefully, put the face back into its shallow grave. not yet.

the moon smiles, "your loss".

and just like that, everything and everyone you knew, all but one, are gone from your mind. you are now an orphan in the desert.

[the-wanted-man]

"Let's say you're granted a wish-- any wish at all!-- with one major stipulation: It MUST be selfish. You can't use this wish on anyone but yourself. What would you wish for?"

Oh, what a question. Malika always asked the best ones, though in this case he supposed she had also asked one of the worst. A wish, any wish at all, but not for anyone but him. Roman frowned a little, stroking his beard while he thought about it, and the more he thought about it the more he realized he'd never really thought about this kind of thing before.

"Well...shoot..." he muttered gruffly, resting his hands on his hips. "Reckon you've stumped me." An awkward chuckle escaped him following a soft gesture. "I...rarely think 'bout things I want. M'shore that's not much surprise to ya. Likely why you asked, even." Which meant he likely couldn't go avoiding giving an answer, though the elusive thief wasn't someone he typically withheld his thoughts from.

"I git th'sense you'd understand what I mean when I say that wantin' things kin be its own kinda prison. Spend enough time thinkin' bout what ya' want, an' it starts t'hold ya hostage." Clearly, he spoke from a level of experience as a vague, and fidgety discomfort seemed to overtake him. As a man who valued his freedom above all else, there were many things he felt a natural resistance to should they make him feel trapped and that included his own desires.

The desperado seemed to trail off a little as he wrestled with the odd feeling that had manifested in his mulling melancholy. He scoffed a little at himself, before stealing a quick look at the Keeper. "That almost makes me sound proud. Dignified. Truthfully, I'm more coward than all that.." He muttered in a wry, semi-amused drawl.

"I've wanted a good number've things an' have managed t'obtain very few of 'em. I think wit' time, I've trained m'self out've wantin' things. Or mebbe, I've jus' gotten good at thinkin' about anything else, so as not t'set m'self up fer disappointment." That wasn't an answer to the question though, and at best he was stalling for time until he had a proper response. His brow furrowed, and he chewed on his lower lip as he thought of some of the things he'd come to regret in the past few turns. Along those lines, it didn't take him long to find his answer.

"I....I've fancied th'thought've...runnin' away. Fer good. Goin' sum place far away, y'know? Mebbe....Mebbe wit' sumone who wouldn't mind runnin' away wit' me, too. I think that'd be a nice kinda wish." The cowboy chewed on the inside of his cheek before he shrugged, lips quickly tugging into an absent smile. "Anyroad. Wishes are nice t'think about, but y'know. I don't mind lettin' life happen how it happens. What'll be, will be." he rumbled.