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the-grey-hunt · 1 year

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last year i talked somewhat about jonathan harker in the role of the gothic heroine, which seemed to go over well! this year i've decided to challenge myself to delve a little deeper and keep my literary analysis skills sharp (trying to keep away from anything revealed later than today's entry, for the new readers)

for context in the literary background i'm examining here, the female gothic (a term coined I believe in the 70s) is a lens of analysis for gothic literature which examines the role of women as expression of contemporary anxieties around women and their roles in society, particularly as mothers and wives. like many kinds of horror, political and social anxieties are deployed as supernatural forces with which to terrify the "ordinary" citizens.

jonathan, our ordinary man, is certainly faced with horrors—but in what way? sent by an older man, Peter Hawkins, jonathan enters a foreign landscape where he enters into the power of another older man, at a particularly vulnerable time where a loved one (Mina) is waiting at home but jonathan does not appear to be married. the horrors that jonathan faces are the same trials set up against gothic heroines: threatening older men with power over you, poised at a huge point of transition in your life, etc, etc.

the main argument against jonathan as a heroine is, I think, his job. His transition point right now isn't an impending marriage or that he needs one, but that he's just established himself as a solicitor and is meeting with Dracula for business purposes. however, I think how these are deployed as tools in the story, such as Hawkins almost transferring guardianship of his young employee/ward to Dracula (temporarily), still very much mirror the ways in which high-class social norms are deployed against gothic women. even the work jonathan does in the castle (talking to dracula about real estate) isn't in service of bolstering his manly prowess, but serves as a tool for dracula to distract him, and keep him from realizing that he is trapped and serving dracula's own will.

rather than being tried in a manly fashion by his strength or his wits being challenged, jonathan's gothic experience is of his environment and even his body being manipulated by the man meant to be a helping hand in a foreign land. when I say body people might think it's a little early for that, but it's happening—dracula keeps jonathan up late so he sleeps in, forcing him to acclimate to dracula's own nocturnal existence. when he gets a glimpse of blood, he attempts to take it from jonathan. even today, a few hundred years after dracula's social anxieties about women's bodies being trespassed upon by men other than the ones entitled to them, women may see echoes of their own anxieties about bodily autonomy.

Dracula also isolates jonathan socially. He makes jonathan mistrust his own ability to percieve reality (gaslighting, anyone, a story about a woman being manipulated by her husband?) by pretending that servants are in charge of the cooking and so on, when really it's just dracula keeping up a masquerade.

this comes to a head in the mirror scene, where jonathan's shaving mirror—an item he uses to attend to his appearance—ends up being a helpful tool which exposes the supernatural reality of what jonathan's up against. however, because dracula is still the one in power, he immediately gets rid of it, calling it "vanity". I recall the quote by John Berger:

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

the ways in which jonathan is treated by dracula, and the ways in which he attempts to bolster himself against the threat (spying to see what dracula's really doing, seeing the lack of reflection by chance) mirror the highly gendered dynamics of the Victorian era which this book was written in the tail end of. perhaps purposefully subverting jonathan's gender as a further expression of the horror of dracula, stoker's work takes jonathan as a man secure in his position at home in england to being a manipulated, isolated, and precariously positioned figure subject to the whims of an abusive man while friendless in a foreign country

(and the essay on how race, ethnicity, and foreign versus home plays into this is a whole other post! racism effects gender too! it's not a mistake that jonathan is securely male at home but his gender is subverted abroad!)

#dracula daily #dracula #female gothic #jonathan harker #ok i have to stop myself here and do my actual homework

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hapalopus · 1 year

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I finished Clan of the Cave Bear and I've concluded that, if you're mad about the misogyny in the book, you didn't read the book.

The book was written during the late 1970s and born out of the author's frustrations with having hit the glass ceiling in her male-dominated career. It was also written at a time where no-fault divorce had existed in the US for less than a decade and was still only a thing in very few states. You cannot understand the book without knowing this. The book is 100% affected by these circumstances - rampant misogyny on the job market and 'marriage' essentially being a one-way trip.

The book is also not historical fiction, as it's often claimed to be. It's fantasy. There are multiple scenes that include telepathy, precognition, and spiritual journeys, and the Clan's spirits are strongly implied to be real and able to affect the world in very physical ways. It's soft fantasy, but it fits in so much better into the fantasy genre than the historical fiction genre.

It's a fantastical novel about the meeting of two species with the same ancestor - the Clan species, who have strictly defined biological roles and function via hereditary memory and instinct, and the Other species, who have no biologically determined roles or hereditary memories, but who are able to imagine abstract concepts and break rules.

Ayla is an Other girl raised by Clan people. Clan people enjoy their strict social roles - to put it simply, men hunt and women gather -, but it's hinted at several times in the book that this is not a sustainable way of life, and that the Clan branch of the tree of life is a dead end. Near the end of the book it's outright stated that they will not survive the ice age. There is no need for subtext: The text condemns the idea of biological gender roles, word for word.

And the way Ayla rises up against these gender roles, and the way the Clan people respond to her, further underlines this.

Ayla tries to play the Clan's game. She holds her tongue like a good woman should. She never speaks to a man unless given permission. She gets into position when the men need release. All in a desperate bid to survive in their doomed society. And it nearly kills he to try and play the role of a Good Woman. It makes her so depressed she stops eating. You know what saves her? Breaking the rules and taking up a man's role, against the Clan's wishes. She takes up hunting, and her passion for the sport keeps her going. The Clan people curse her with death for her transgression, but she survives the Death Curse because of the 'manly' skills she taught herself.

The text states over and over again that gender roles and expectations are bad, and that rebelling against them is good.

The Clan is doomed, in large part, because they define men and women by these ridiculously strict gender roles - going down that evolutionary path (as revealed in Ayla's hunting ceremony, where they call upon the ancient forgotten female spirits that the Clan left behind in favor of exclusive following male spirits) was the cause of their downfall. The Clan has such strict gender roles that they don't even know what to do with a woman who breaks the roles and instead decide that she is simultaneously neither and both sexes at once:

"Woman" in Clan society is exclusively defined by the roles a person plays, but a woman of the Others does not have biologically defined gender roles and, as a result, is not wholly or exclusively a woman.

The satire of 70s USAmerican gender roles is right there and if you can't see it, you need to practice your literary analysis skills.

#clan of the cave bear #no proof reading

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sunderingstars · 9 days

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✩ ‧₊˚ ⌞ CHARACTER STORY & BRUGHEL POISSON ⌝

sampo analysis m.list

— what the stars reveal: interpretative analysis, elation!sampo

— word count: 2.4k

— overview: (as of 2.5) an assessment of sampo’s character stories and his identity as madam brughel poisson. (yippee !! it’s madam poisson time !!)

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✩ ‧₊˚ ⌞ CHARACTER DETAILS ⌝

First, I want to note his description as “silver tongued.” It seems to serve a dual meaning — “silver tongued” references eloquence and persuasion, but also brings to mind “tongued,” which is a word often associated with snakes and serpents (think “forked tongue” and the history of snakes as persuasive and temptatious literary figures). This further cements Sampo’s connection to snakes and the deception often associated with them.

We have some more obvious information — i.e. that’s he’s always around when there’s profit to be made — but it’s also notable how his information network is in and of itself a form of snare or “trap.” Similar to the name of his bonus ability (which is literally “Trap”), Sampo is skilled at setting up the exact circumstances needed to lure people in, to make them need and be dependent on him. As such, his “customers” enjoy (or are perhaps afflicted by) a dual relationship: one where they get what they need, but are also subject to Sampo’s duplicitous nature and the danger of being deceived. Coupled with the next line that mentions Sampo’s penchant for turning “customers” into “commodities,” there is a distinct aura of dehumanization that occurs, the treating of clients not as people but as potential profit.

Personally, I feel this may mirror his potential relationship with Aha. If he is Aha or has an interconnected relationship with Them, this deception could be a direct result of Their existence; the constant dehumanization of others for the “profit” of the joke. If Sampo is an Emanator or other such high status, it could be that his own treatment of others mirrors the way Aha treats/has treated him. It is possible that Aha’s chaotic and powerful nature made Them difficult for Sampo to refuse when offered/seeking help, and now Sampo is part of a sort of cycle — one where he is treated and dehumanized for the “profit” of a joke, then (either as part of his personality or an unwilling byproduct of Elation), turns that commodification onto others.

My main takeaway is the specific phrase “not necessarily a good thing.” This is a phrase I often associate with Emanator and otherwise non-Aeonic theories; the idea that Sampo is “favored” in some way by Aha, but that attention is not a good thing. After all, Aha is known to often be callous and cruel in Their jokes, and if Sampo has ever been the butt of them… well… suffice to say that wouldn’t be very fun for him. I feel like this phrase may be holding up a mirror to Sampo’s own relationship with Aha, although that might also be a stretch.

✩ ‧₊˚ ⌞ PART ONE ⌝

Before diving into the story proper, I want to address the name itself — Brughel Poisson. From what I could find, Brughel isn’t even a name that exists (which is very fitting). Instead, the closest name I could find is “Bruegel,” which means “small village” in Dutch. I feel like this is in line with Sampo’s character and Madam Poisson’s position as an alias; it fits nicely into the “uncanny valley” territory of a name that is close to an already-exisitng one, but is just different enough to not be real. Additionally, “Poisson” is only one letter away from “poison,” which further associates him with snakes and venom. The name itself means “fish” in French, which may also link to Sampo’s name meaning “water rapids” in Finnish. Overall, the name symbolizes two main things: the “fakeness” of the identity, and the running snake motif. Just like Brughel Poisson doesn’t technically exist, so too does the name not “technically exist.”

Now, here are some things we can gather from Part One:

Brughel Poisson, Sampo’s alias, is positioning herself as a reporter from the “Crystal Daily.” As far as I am aware, this news organization does not exist either.

Sampo is aware of and directly interacts with the “Dark-Blue Scam Victims’ Association” as Brughel.

Not only that, but he directly starts a conversation about himself under the guise of an interview, and lets the “interviewee” vent their frustration until he catches the information he needs.

Sampo is, as always, very skilled at directing the conversation where he wants it to go, seeming to make up details like being interested in social justice causes completely in the moment and still managing to sell the act.

Throughout the “interview,” Brughel takes the other person along a winding series of questions, knowing exactly when to let them rant and when to step in to ask questions. It is, to put it simply, masterful trolling. Not only is Sampo finding out information he’s interested in, but he’s basically playing one big joke on the unsuspecting “interviewee.” This very much links back to the “silver tongued” aspect of Sampo’s character. Brughel and Sampo are identities interchanged efficiently and effortlessly. Most likely, Sampo has been doing this for a long time.

✩ ‧₊˚ ⌞ PART TWO ⌝

My main takeaway from Part Two is how Sampo and Brughel are not only so effortlessly interchanged, but how any given role is interchanged for another just as flawlessly. Brughel’s position is almost a complete 180 from the last part, going from an enthusiastic journalist to a straight-laced officer. There is no prose or identifying marks beyond dialogue — all we have to go off of is the spoken word. Even though we can’t tell how much Brughel has changed her appearance since the last time, we can tell that the tone of the dialogue is completely different. Despite Brughel being “faceless” in a sense, she gives off the strong aura of a guard, talking in shorter and more clipped sentences than her journalistic persona. She is able to put up such a convincing facade that even her slip-up of saying “expensive” instead of “valuable” goes unnoticed, and she is able to successfully answer the private’s doubtful questions with answers that convince them to go on leave.

Again, we see how Sampo is able to answer questions on the fly, often making up details as he goes that sound so rock-solid most people barely question them. I feel like these stories just put me in awe of how in the world he does it. Even with a greater power like Elation potentially aiding him, there’s so many moving parts that come into play when impersonating someone who doesn’t even exist. He’s basically making up entire personalities on the fly and executing them flawlessly. It also shows how quickly he is able to change personas. If he’s Brughel, after all, who else might he be? Who else might we have come across that looks slightly familiar yet different? If something this complicated is all a game to him, just a means of “profit,” then what is he capable of when he gets serious?

✩ ‧₊˚ ⌞ PART THREE ⌝

This is the first part of the story where we get a perspective that doesn’t include Brughel directly. Instead, we spectate as two would-be thieves realize they’ve been screwed over by Madam Poisson. Piecing together the other stories, they seem to follow a narrative arc — Brughel hears about the spice factory, plans to steal from the 3rd Arsenal, then hires the people in this part to attempt a robbery on the spice factory as a diversion, allowing Sampo to slip into the 3rd Arsenal unnoticed. (At least, that’s my interpretation.) Again, there’s so many moving parts here, yet Sampo seems to have them all clearly sorted out in his mind.

There’s also a narrative distance created between us (the reader) and Sampo/Brughel — in the other parts, Brughel was directly involved in the events taking place. We could see her speaking and read what she was saying. However, we now see her from an outside perspective, as well as the sheer anger and confusion that comes from the thieves realizing they’ve been set up. In my opinion, this is a really cool way to show the impact of the real heist — Sampo raiding the 3rd Arsenal — by placing us in the same position as everyone else. We aren’t “in” on the joke anymore, just spectating like everyone else. Just like the thieves and the guards, our attention is pulled towards the spice factory rather than the real scene of the crime, leaving Sampo the only one who truly knows what happened there. (It’s also a bit self-aware, as if Sampo is intentionally making the decision to turn the audience’s heads away as well.)

Again, it’s just flawless. Even though the thieves eventually find out they’ve been duped, it was all part of the plan. Everything still works out for Sampo — by the time anyone realizes what’s been going on, it’s too late. And, as we see in the next part, he even gets away with it too.

✩ ‧₊˚ ⌞ PART FOUR ⌝

The last part of Sampo’s character story takes place after the Silvermane Guards have caught on to something suspicious going on. The conversation Madam Poisson has with the guard that comes by her place is very telling — once again, she is able to deflect any questions with ease, putting on the air of a worried and confused citizen. She even invites the guard inside to look for the wigs — something that seems very bold with the situation she’s in. However, everything still goes smoothly, and on top of that she gains enough trust from the guard to figure out what happened (although she likely already knew anyways). It’s even a bit of a reveal on the audience’s part; despite knowing Poisson is the common thread among all these stories, we only get her name at the very end — if not for that, it would be easy to mistake her for a new character since she acts so different from the other stories.

However, there is something slightly off to me. When the guard is asking Madam Poisson about the wigs, they seem very strict, even saying “Refusal to submit may result in serious consequences…”. However, as soon as Poisson invites the guard inside, they seem to do a 180, saying “… that won’t be necessary. I’m sure you have nothing to hide.” While this could be Sampo’s disguise working incredibly well, the change seems just abrupt enough for me to be suspicious. After all, if the Guards are so stringent on finding wigs, why wouldn’t they be willing to look inside themselves? This could be because they don’t have the proper warrants (which Sampo knows and exploits), or the guard is personally too shy to be put on the spot like that (which Sampo knows and exploits), or — and this is getting more into theory territory — it could be that Sampo is able to subtly distort people’s perceptions of him. He doesn’t need much, just enough to shift that guard over the line of “suspicious” to “probably has nothing to hide.” Either way, Sampo/Madam Poisson gets away with everything, at least for now.

✩ ‧₊˚ ⌞ WIGS ⌝

Before I give my overall thoughts, I want to briefly address the wig situation. In Part Four, Poisson says “As you can see, my hair is great,” drawing direct attention to something you’d think she’d want to divert from. While this could be a case of master gaslighting (leading with the assumption “as you can see”), my theory is that there are no wigs to begin with. The reason Poisson wasn’t suspected is because Sampo can most likely physically change into different forms. We’ve already seen physical transformation with other Masked Fools like Sparkle, and if Sampo is operating in the higher echelon of Elation, there’s a good chance he can do the same even without his mask.

It would explain why the guard says the male thief “changes appearance often” rather than saying something like “assumes this identity often” — there’s the implication that it isn’t just two identities Sampo is switching between, but rather a multitude of different faces under similar names. This means that his impersonation as a reporter, human resources officer, and regular citizen may have slight alterations that makes them difficult to tell apart, making it even more difficult for the Guards to pin down who exactly the thief is. Clearly, she would have to look different enough from Sampo to avoid being caught. This may also be why she is so confident in inviting the guard in — she knows there aren’t any wigs in the house because she doesn’t need to use them. Additionally, her drawing attention to her hair would be a point in her favor, since the guard would be able to see she wasn’t wearing a wig.

I would say this is probably the strongest evidence for a theory that Sampo can shapeshift. It isn’t entirely confirmed, but I think it still has a good chance since we’ve seen it from other Masked Fools in canon.

✩ ‧₊˚ ⌞ OVERALL THOUGHTS ⌝

Overall, I find these character stories to be perfectly emblematic of Sampo — persuasive, slippery, and mysterious. It’s important that we don’t get a story about Sampo directly, but rather the personas he takes on when trying to reach an ulterior goal. These stories haven’t really shown us Sampo, but rather kept us at arm’s length. Unlike other character stories, we’re still not sure what he’s truly capable of or even who he is, what he likes beyond profit, or what his deeper goals or motivations are. We’re placed in the same situation as everyone else, looking from the outside in. We’re not even given prose or narration, only dialogue. In a self-aware sense, it’s almost like he’s trying to hide from us directly. The stories are sprinkled with implications and hints, but it’s always something we as the reader have to piece together before getting answers. Perhaps that’s part of the game to him — making everyone wonder, including us.

It also shows that he has a penchant for switching faces and identities. This is something that Aha is directly stated to do, and whether Sampo is Aha Themself or a different higher entity of Elation, it makes sense that he would also effortlessly assume different identities for his own goals. Unlike Sparkle, he is able to do this without a mask, potentially speaking to a greater power that allows him to do so. Again: if this is what he can do without the mask… just what can he do with it?

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.𖥔 ݁ ˖ જ⁀➴ thank you for reading to the end!

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#⌞ ✎ sunder.writes ⌝#⌞ ✧ super.nova ⌝#⌞ 🎭 ⌝#hsr #honkai star rail #honkai: star rail #sampo #sampo koski #sampo hsr #hsr sampo #sampo honkai star rail #analysis #hsr analysis #hsr theory

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crumblinggothicarchitecture · 4 months

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I'd like to know your opinion on why ts songs are considered so good lyrically by her fans. That one line in cardigan is hailed as the peak writing skill by them. The one that says you drew stars around my scars. Am I missing something or are they just gaslighting me?

Hello- sorry it took me sooooo long to get back to you :) I am a busy little bee these days- but I love chatting with people too! <3

So, the line “you drew stars around my scars / but now I’m bleeding” is perhaps good writing, when we only compare Taylor Swift to her own work. It’s certainly a change from “the players gonna play, play, play,” but it is not somehow a gift to lyricism. I know that swifties tend to use lines like these to say that “look see, she is a talented writer” when the truth is that it’s just a boring metaphor that essentially goes nowhere in the song.

Yeah- They are literally gaslighting you. It’s an alright line- but it’s not genius. The reason swifties think this line is amazing is because of the alliteration between "scars" and "stars." Apparently one alliteration is enough to make someone into literary genius? Just one repetitive sound- and they think she’s pulling off something amazing.

Compare this line to a full narrative arc in an alliterative verse epic poem from early Germanic Literature- and Swift's writing is basically loose change on the dashboard compared to gold bar- lyricism.

So, her line "you drew stars around my scars / but now I'm bleeding" is mostly incoherent. She's honestly saying word salad in most of her songs- with vague rhymes at the end of each phrase- but I digress.

I think you're keying into a thoughtful observation here. Putting aside my comment on its general incoherence, let me first speak to the fact that this line is an attempt at metaphor.

She is saying "you drew stars" in effort to merge the conceptual point of "drawing stars" to someone reaching out- or creating interpersonal connection. She continues "around my scars" to showcase how this new connection sees her past, the “scars,” and is encapsulating it with a drawn star instead of, for instance, marking it out with a black mark or something. The connotative value of the word star, in this case, calls forward the idea of goodness and since it is tied to her connotative value of "scars" as a past hurt- the line ultimately means that some new interpersonal connection is viewing her past and approving of it rather than hating it. It's meant to ring as a redemptive arc- yet nothing in the song actually needs redemption or ever mentions it again. The theme drops immediately after the line finishes.

The line finishes, "but now I'm bleeding" which is meant to mean that the scar is reopened- because the connection she made is no longer interested in her. This analysis, however, requires many leaps in logic. I cannot point to any specific linguistic markers that would denote the connection between "scar" and "bleeding." Though Swift clearly means to interconnect these two points, scars don’t bleed. So, she’s trying to say that the scar has reopened- perhaps because the person who drew the stars is leaving. However, there is nothing in the language itself that suggests this conclusion; rather she relies on audience reception to jump from point "a" to point "b." She never calls it a wound, she mentions "bloodstain" is a later line- but the connection between all the different phrasing is tenuous at best. I mean that there is no storyline within the line itself that is suggestive of the meaning Swift is attempting to lay out.

Beyond this line- nothing in the whole song ever revisits the thematic purpose of the metaphor. She never mentions stars, or scars, and does not revisit the theme of redemptive love. She barely even lays out the idea of redemption in love in the first place- and further drops the imagery by never going back to the same theme again. She conjures up this image just to drop it immediately.

This is a pattern in her work- she writes one thing, and then drops the idea.

I mean it sounds clever- without actually being clever.

#anti taylor swift #taylor swift criticism #literary criticism #taylor swift critical #ex swiftie #metaphor #cardigan

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darkest-fantasy · 4 months

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One more post before I’m done with this:

1. I was requested to make my first analytical video with the skills that I obtained while getting an English literature degree.

2. I have never made personal claims about anyone. I don’t say slurs to people and I have never commented on anyone’s mental well-being.

3. You don’t need a degree to understand SJM. But a degree in literature does help to analyze the text in a different perspective. People who have spent years training and being educated on a subject do hold more credibility on that subject. I also open my comments for respectful debates and conversations. I always say that this is my own literary analysis.

4. I have been the subject of several posts ever since I made my first few videos. There was never any kind of discussions about this topic before I made these videos.

5. You can all call me a narcissist because I’ve brought up my education. I’ve been around bullies before and am not afraid of you now. We all see what has happened and what continues to happen regarding this subject.

Stop shaming people for their eduction. Stop these false narratives. Stop the bullying

#stop the bullying #the fandom was never like this #don’t try to gaslight me #acotar #acomaf #sarah j maas #a court of mist and fury #a court of thorns and roses #acosf #azriel #elain archeron #azriel shadowsinger #azriel spymaster #gwyneth berdara #a court of silver flames #post acosf

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rhyselinn · 1 year

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In Defense of Toby Fox’s Halloween Hack

Twitter is all in a tizzy about the Halloween Hack as of late. The apparent reason for this is because the Halloween Hack uses a word commonly used as a homophobic slur, not taking into account that the hack was created in 2008 (when the internet was a different place) and that 2008 was 14+ years ago (and people are known to grow and change over this time). There appears to be some amount of discussion over whether Toby Fox should be “cancelled” for this.

I’ve seen a fair bit of banter from both sides on this, but what I haven’t seen people on the internet talk about is the CONTEXT of the game in which this word is used. And while I don’t spend a lot of time talking about HH due to Toby’s stated embarrassment when people draw attention to it, if the internet’s gonna go dig up old drama for some reason, then by golly, I’m going to go dig up my old love for this game.

So if you want to come take a wild ride through some internet history and literary analysis, then go buckle your seatbelt and click the Readmore.

(content warning: discussion of homophobic slurs)

A quick bit about me: I am an adult on the internet, and I fall into the original Halloween Hack (hereafter abbreviated as HH)’s target demographic: teenagers who existed on Starmen.net, an Earthbound fan website, in 2008. I am also a current admin for Starmen.net, which puts me in a good position to comment on the history and culture of the site as a whole, and how that ties into the reception of HH.

Starmen.net has a long and rich tradition of events called Funfests, in which the site staff run a combination art/writing/music/etc contest for the site members, usually coalescing around a theme such as “Earthbound”, or sometimes “Winter” or “Halloween”. These events offer prizes such as forum avatar/rank privileges, and historically they sometimes even offered physical prizes. The 2008 Halloween funfest had an entire website made for it, which you can view here. Toby Fox submitted HH to this 2008 Halloween Funfest under the internet handle Radiation.

This is the context of HH: a passion project made by a teenager for a fan website full of other teenagers/twenty-somethings. If you go to a high school science fair, you could rightfully lambast every project for being undeserving of a Nobel Prize, but that’s not why we host high school science fairs OR Starmen.net Funfests. These events are an opportunity for teens to show what they are capable of and receive commendation from both their peers and a panel of judges selected specifically for this age demographic and venue.

For perspective, here’s what one of the hosts of the 2008 Funfest had to say about HH:

“Radiation nearly outclassed himself with this effort of skill labour and love. What a lot of fun. Despite getting repeatedly killed in the sewers this was one thoroughly enjoyabe hack. I Think I’ll go and play it again!”

HH won an award in the 2008 funfest-- a #1 in the “Most Effort” category. For some perspective, few people on Starmen.net go to the lengths of creating an entire game for a Funfest (and HH has a playtime of roughly 5-6 hours!). Of those who do, most of the resulting games are consistent with the output you would expect from a teenage userbase, since it’s not fair to expect teenagers to produce professional-quality work. That said, I can say with confidence that HH is a standout in the areas of both effort and quality.

Another thing that needs to be said of HH is that it is not a standalone game made in today’s modern game engines-- it is a hack of a preexisting game. Earthbound's codebase is notoriously complicated, and a lot of the tools that modern Earthbound hackers use to make their jobs easier (eg Coilsnake, Ebmused) didn’t exist in 2008. Toby had to do a lot of manual coding grunt-work to make HH, up to and including manually typing hexadecimal values into his computer in order to compose Megalovania. (Source: Toby wrote a really in-depth post about the process he used to make HH way back when, which I’m referring to here, but it’s unfortunately been deleted since then.)

I can imagine a hypothetical objection at this point: “ok but high effort homophobia is still homophobia”. In this post, I am also going to argue that Toby’s usage of this word can be considered artistic merit when taken in context, but you’ll have to bear with me for a bit while I explain that context. I’ll also talk about some of the cool and neat things this game does along the way because I think they’re worth talking about.

HH is, at its core, a derivative fan work of the video game Earthbound. And while I love Earthbound deeply, I also recognize that it’s a cult classic that not everyone has played. So while I encourage people to play the game I love deeply, I’ll also sum up a few relevant plot beats here so folks can understand the source material HH draws from:

--Ness, a thirteen year-old boy, meets a creature named Buzz Buzz from ten years in the future who tells him that an alien named Giygas has destroyed the world (direct quote: “All is devastation”). As such, Ness and his friends must save the world.

--One of Ness’s friends is a shy boy named Jeff with a penchant for shooting bottle rockets at enemies

--Jeff’s dad is an odd character named Dr. Andonuts. Dr. Andonuts is a reclusive scientist who lives in a snowy region called Winters who sent his son off to boarding school at a very young age. Andonuts’s lab includes no other signs of life, certainly not any indications of a wife/Jeff’s mother. Andonuts ends his conversation with Jeff by saying “Let’s get together in another ten years or so.”

--Towards the end of the game, Dr. Andonuts uses a device he created called a Phase Distorter to send Ness and his friends to the venue for the final battle. This is very clearly telegraphed as a one-way trip, as the kids’ brains are described in text as needing to be transplanted into robots to get there, but the kids go along with it anyway because the world is at stake.

--The kids go on to fight the final boss in a spectacle that words can’t do justice to here. All I’ll say is that after a long-fought battle, in the grace of an unexplained Deus Ex Machina, the souls of the four kids are impossibly returned to their bodies so they can enjoy their happy ending.

These are all canonical events that happen in the base game of Earthbound. Earthbound’s sequel, Mother 3, was released in 2006, two years prior to HH, although the English fan translation wasn’t released until around the time of the 2008 funfest, interestingly enough. Mother 3 does develop Dr. Andonuts’s canonical character somewhat, but I won’t discuss it in further detail here other than to say it mostly re-emphasizes his odd, solitary nature and his overly cavalier attitude towards his science experiments.

It’s also worth noting that in an oddball game like Earthbound, there are a lot of weird and funny idiosyncrasies to theorize on. There are pencil-shaped statues that block your way, which need to be removed with a device called a “pencil eraser.” Ness and his friends fight robots, aliens, and Krakens, but they also fight handbag-wielding ladies and walking mushrooms. Dr. Andonuts’s character oddities, while strange, fit nicely into the evenly distributed mesh of oddities that comprise Earthbound’s world.

Derivative works, particularly fan works, exist in conversation with the source material. They answer questions posed by the source, interpolate details left out of the original, and otherwise build on the world of the original in a collaborative way. This conversation sometimes happens in a one-on-one manner, between fan and original creator, but it also happens in conjunction with the fan community as a whole. When a theory takes traction, it will begin to appear in more and more fan works, growing in popularity and notoriety until it is “accepted” as the most common interpretation of canon’s strange idiosyncrasies. Newer or more fringe theories are less likely to be taken as a “default” interpretation, but they are more likely to be taken as “fresh” or “interesting” until/unless they, too, begin to gain traction.

HH exists in a few conversations: one with the source material, one with the fan community of Starmen.net (and the broader Earthbound community as a whole, although there was much more overlap between the two back in 2008), and one with Starmen.net’s Funfest culture. In order for HH to be well received by the Funfest judges, it would need to be aware of the community sensibilities as well as push the boundaries of the fan conversation with Earthbound as a whole-- a careful balancing act of being both interesting but also recognizable.

So, the fundamental fan question that HH tries to answer is “why is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THAT?”

This is an absolutely fair question, and Toby was certainly not the first to ask it, although his answer in the form of HH is one of the most high profile now.

HH is set in the world of Earthbound a few months after the final boss fight in autumn, but one where Ness and his friends did not magically return after their one-way trip to the final boss. Word has it that Dr. Andonuts has turned evil and must be defeated. On its surface, this is standard fare for a throwaway plot for a Funfest submission, but the magic of HH is that it does not treat this premise as a throwaway plot. It sets out to earnestly discuss why this happened by delving into Andonuts’s psyche.

Coming back to the idea of derivative works existing in conversation with the source material and interpolating unexplained details: Earthbound does not explain why Dr. Andonuts lives in solitude, nor does it give any hint as to the identity of Jeff’s mother. It also gives no indication as to why Andonuts didn’t seem to have bonded well with his son other than the handwavey explanation that Andonuts is just “like that”. HH initially poses the question of “why did Andonuts turn evil”, but leaves the reader to puzzle that out while battling monsters in Earthbound’s RPG engine.

At first, Toby offers a partial explanation: in HH, Dr. Andonuts is portrayed as feeling immense guilt at having sent his son into what he perceived as a death trap. (quote from the game: “The world is dead, and I’ve become senile with guilt and rage.” He also says stuff like “what’s the point in living without them”.) As such, he turned evil and created zombies to storm the world of Winters, causing a surge in refugees and desperate survivors. This is why the main character was sent to kill him.

(image transcription: a picture of a menu with the text “What do you do!?” followed with a single option: “Kill him”)

But in order to see the depth of this explanation, the true answer to the question “why is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THIS”, the player must hit “B” to cancel out of a menu at the correct moment, something Earthbound players tend to learn by habit from closing the equipment menu so many times, but never used as a plot-relevant mechanic in the base game. HH takes this subconscious muscle memory and turns it into a mechanic gating off half the game if you don’t “spare” the enemy, a precursor to the “spare” mechanic that would debut seven years later in Undertale.

When the player does this, they enter Dr. Andonuts’s “Magicant,” a dream-construct representing his inner psyche, with his hopes and dreams and fears all laid bare. The main character is tasked with finding Dr. Andonuts’s lost Courage. In the base game, Ness enters his own Magicant, so this feels familiar to a veteran player, but it also gives Toby the chance to more closely examine Dr. Andonuts’s character than he otherwise might be able to do.

Over the course of the rest of the game in Dr. Andonuts’s Magicant, the player continues to control the main character, a bounty hunter named Varik, but the NPCs in the game often mistakenly treat Varik as Andonuts. The dialogue we see from these NPCs reflects memories from Andonuts’s own life. We see a lot more characters try to make connections with Dr. Andonuts (”hey don’t you want to play baseball instead of doing math?”), but these are apparently rebuffed througout Andonuts’s life. One NPC guarding the entrance to the path leading to this lost Courage advises “Be careful. Be yourself.” We see memories of Dr. Andonuts’s presumed wife/Jeff’s mom, who is an OC Toby created for this work to answer the questions posed by canon.

Varik is tasked with fighting three “demons” behind three doors, where each demon is said to be stronger than the next. Since this segment takes place inside Andonuts’s mind, these are unsubtly implied to be Andonuts’s inner demons. The second and third doors represent Andonuts’s relationship with his son and his guilt over getting people killed; the first door is relevant to this post, so I’ll talk about it in more detail.

Inside the first door, Varik sees Andonuts’s memories of something called “Remember Me,” who despite being faced in a battle, is friendly and affectionate and causes no damage apart from being “hard to think about.” This enemy has a stock overworld sprite of a male NPC from the base game.

(image transcript: a smiling purple sprite in an Earthbound-style battle. The text box says “The Remember Me? was a little hard to think about again”)

At the end of this map, we see a cutscene in which it’s implied that Dr. Andonuts felt disconnected from his wife, perceiving her as an incessant insect. She says things like “Lately, you’ve been acting kind of... disinterested in me. Is there something wrong with me?” She asks if Dr. Andonuts has been hiding something from her, which triggers the following battle:

(image description: an Earthbound-esque battle against three enemies, each a sprite depicting a closeup of a man’s muscular body: a bicep, a chest, and a swimsuit-clothed groin area)

All three of these enemies are named NO. The music that plays in the background is deliberately unsettling, and their battle moves consist mostly of “flexing in a masculine way”, “slapping their buddies in a masculine fashion”, and “being hard to think about again”. After three turns, these enemies deliver a series of un-dodgeable moves that kill the player before it’s possible to defeat them, ending the game. The only way to proceed in the game is to select the Flee option in the menu.

To summarize the themes being presented here, Dr. Andonuts is gay and repressed his homosexuality to try to preserve his relationship with his wife due to his lack of courage. From a game design and literary merit standpoint, this NO battle is actually a really poignant way of portraying Andonuts’s mindset and all of the fears that kept him in the closet, portraying men’s bodies as an enemy that he must fight, or in failing to do so, must run from. Remember that Earthbound takes place in 199X-- none of the 1990′s were known for being especially tolerant of gay men, nor was 2008 when Toby made this hack; 2008 was the same year that California passed a bill intended to ban gay marriage. In another since-deleted web page, Toby said that one of his motivations for creating HH was “the lack of non-stereotypical, major homosexual characters in media”. With that in mind, this is a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of the pains of repressing one’s sexuality, especially from a teenager.

Toby also portrays some complexity in Andonuts’s relationship with his son Jeff, making the case that Andonuts helped Jeff in his fight against Giygas as a way of living vicariously through him to feel like less of a monster. From this standpoint, it’s easy to see that Andonuts’s abrasive language might be a defense mechanism for his own self esteem issues, calling others monsters to deflect from the fact he sees HIMSELF as a monster.

(image transcription: a screenshot of the main character fighting Andonuts from the end of the game. The text in the textbox from Andonuts says “you idiots. look at your decaying, frostbitten bodies”)

(and just as a side note, I think the reminiscence of this dialogue to Flowey’s dialogue in Undertale is funny and interesting)

Dr. Andonuts says the following: "If I can't live with myself, why should anybody else? Ergo, nobody will live. Then, everybody will understand all the pain I went through. When everyone understands me... They'll cherish me so." This isn’t the expression of a healthy mind, but it is a portrayal of someone who’s experiencing some serious pain. I’d also argue that it’s a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of a character who is clearly in a crisis.

Another Andonuts quote: “you’re going to kill me, because that’s what a hero does. he has to kill that monster, right? even in this form, i am shaking with fear. i don’t want to die. leave me alone”

The second-to-last fight in the game is against an enemy called Id. In Freudian psychology, the Id is the representation of one’s most base desires, in contrast to the Superego who restrains a person from operating on these desires. The game up until this point does a good job at portraying Dr. Andonuts’s Superego-centric repression strategies, so getting to see his underlying base desires directly is a novel development. The enemy Id consistently reiterates a desire to be left alone and for the main character to not kill it. At the end, it apologizes for not being much of a fight. Only then does Varik fight Dr. Andonuts proper, and without the Id, all that’s left is the Superego-fueled repression, labeled in-game as “hatred”.

Andonuts’s villain monologue starts as such: “I know what this feeling is. It’s hatred for the person who came so far just to destroy an old man. My mind is gone. All that is left is pure hatred.

YOU SEE THIS BURNING, BLOODY UNIVERSE. YOU SEE THIS ULTIMATE, UNLIMITED POWER? Varik. I HAVE FUCKING HAD IT WITH YOUR SHIT. you little fuckers are going to have your bodies ripped in half. i’ll shove your asses so far down your throats that when you crap, you’ll sing fucking beethoven.”

This monologue is the precursor to the infamous line:

(image transcript: a screenshot from the final battle, in which Andonuts says the words “tl;dr: eat shit, faggots”)

As established earlier, this is a line uttered by a gay character who is in a tremendous amount of pain, which would make it an act of slur reclamation. We could argue about whether Toby Fox is in a position to justify this usage, but I refuse to have that conversation because I don’t think real life queer people should have to out themselves in order to justify the art they make. Whether Toby Fox is actually queer or not is, I would argue, immaterial to the story he’s trying to tell here, which is nuanced in a way that a homophobe would be unlikely to write.

We can also have the conversation of whether this word choice is a good decision or not-- and there are, I would argue, a lot of parts of this game that a storyteller with more experience and maturity would have handled better. There are some parts that come across heavy-handed and needlessly edgy, and there are parts that could have been handled with more grace. We can discuss whether “bury our gays” stories were stale by 2008, or whether stories of queer pain had fallen out of vogue for stories of queer joy. But again, this is a work made by a 16-year old, and being needlessly critical of a fangame made by a teenager for a community of predominantly teenagers feels needlessly meanspirited. Just because the game has been unforeseeably thrust into the public light like this doesn’t mean we need to eviscerate it from a 2023 lens. It’s not fair to Toby Fox, neither the original 16-year old creator nor the adult celebrity today.

So I’m not going to do that. What I am going to say is that a queer reading of this work would indicate that this word usage may very well have been a decision made with artistic intent, and a death-of-the-author reading of this work might indicate that this word has artistic merit anyways. If a gay character sees gayness as bad and uses a slur associated with gayness to demean his opponent, that does fundamentally say something about this character, and in this case it reinforces the existing themes that Toby had put in place. I wouldn’t recommend people in 2023 take this approach in storytelling lightly, but I can see and appreciate the spirit in which the game and this word choice appear to have been made.

In the end, Varik does defeat Dr. Andonuts and kill him.

(image transcript: Varik standing above the machine containing Dr. Andonuts’s dead body, not depicted onscreen. The text box reads “You feel a little like this situation could have been avoided.”)

This is one of the last text boxes of the game, and I think it’s a good ending note for this work-- saying that queer lives do NOT need to go this way, that we do not need to bury our gays, that this genuine pain that Dr. Andonuts experienced is not an inevitability.

In conclusion, I do love Halloween Hack for what it is, imperfections and all. It was very clearly a labor of love made by a very earnest and well-meaning teen, and a lot of the things that would later go on to make Undertale so popular are present in their nascent forms here. HH has some genuinely interesting things to say about Earthbound, from both a plot and a character standpoint, and it’s clearly a good-faith attempt at grappling with queer and psychological subject matter. If people on the internet were to engage sincerely with it rather than judging it (and its creator) based on one out-of-context screenshot, I think they might find a diamond-in-the-rough that still manages to be an absolute gem of a fangame.

#earthbound #halloween hack #undertale #toby fox #tw slurs

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verdemoun · 3 months

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Who in the gang would love musicals and which musicals would they love and would any of them fight over character interpretations (looking at Dutch)

Thank you I fucking love musicals let's gooooo

The 1899 gang get way too emotionally invested in Rent. What You Own is still Lenny and Sean's default karaoke song. They are relentless Mark x Roger shippers.

Arthur only needs to hear the start of Without You to take a sharp, violent breath, because it's not fair that he died alone but he thinks he's selfish for wanting the comfort of someone else being there in his final moments.

When he found out that Rent was based on La bohème, which is an opera based on characters fearing tuberculosis instead of AIDS, he similarly took a sharp breath and went silent for several hours processing this.

If the boys are sulking more than usual, Hosea will play La Vie Bohème as loud as possible and they will quickly drag themselves out of their rooms to sing along. With none of them being musically inclined (or at least Sean not willing to play jawharp to a crowd) musicals replace campfire songs for a good many years.

Lenny would adore musicals he is a theatre bug in another lifetime he would have been Hosea's to-go on cons because he adores the artistry of a good performance. His absolute favorite is The Wizard Of Oz though. No matter how many times he's seen it or has forced the person he is watching it with to see it he will still interrupt to talk about the connections between Oz and gay culture, lore behind how the film was made, fan theories and so on.

When Sean got him tickets to Hamilton OBC in 2016, Lenny ascended to a higher plain and cards were off the table absolutely anything Sean wanted he got for a good few months before they went to see it.

Arthur and Charles watch Cats when they're drunk. But only the 1998 film version both were very disgruntled elder gays at the local premiere of the 2019 version. When they accidentally adopt a stray cat they feel obligated to name it Mr Mistoffelees. They have a running joke of calling Sean Mangojerrie (get it, because mangoes and gingers and Mungojerrie).

Javier gatekeeping In The Heights because he can't stand people pronouncing the spanish lyrics wrong.

Dutch loves Jekyll and Hyde partly because he read the novella when it first came out. He has rancid takes like thinking the explicit motive for Jekyll creating the potion was necessary because despite being a very well-read and articulate queer man who grew up in the era the original novel was set in he still has the narrative comprehension and literary analysis skills of a walnut. Also believes Hyde did nothing wrong because murder is only bad when people he doesn't like do it.

Bill in his little trailer pulling the black-out blinds down barricading the door sitting on the bed with his five dogs watching Phantom Of The Opera because he actually loves romance. Love Never Dies, Waitress, Dogfight, Hadestown all the big romantic dramas of theatre he has dodgy bootleg recordings of the original performances. Got into a fight with Dutch on twitter over Heathers (neither used their actual names in their handle they have no idea).

Dutch would defend Dear Evan Hansen no one knows how or why he saw it but he did and he thinks Evan did nothing wrong.

#rdr2 timewarp au

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olderthannetfic · 1 year

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I'm the anon from /722161235858161664 with one more continuing thought related to adults who don't realize they've outgrown childrens' media. Essay/rant incoming, because I want us as adults to Do Better.

It doesn't escape me that a lot of the shows and movies people have complaints over have to do with war and how the adult "fans" think the franchise depicts war unrealistically. Of course it does. It's for kids. And because it's for kid's, adults who watch and read these things need to understand that the authors aren't really teaching kids about war. They're teaching kids about basic empathy and conflict resolution skills 99.9% of the time. In SU it's more obvious, but let's take the "Problematique" SnK ending that adults with poor understanding of literary analysis don't get. It's illustrating to children these things: conflict resolution skills, empathy, the dangers of extremism and violence. Half the story beats you over the head about how people in conflicts on both sides need to extend a hand to the other side to understand their perspective. The world and people's problems aren't always black and white, so we have to work together to resolve issues. Extremism and violence, like Eren exhibits, hinders social progress and continues cycles of anger and violence. The child audience is supposed to agree with Armin who wants to resolve the conflict peacefully. And based on how the many children I've met who clearly understand this, I don't count this as a flaw in the manga's writing, but a result of adults with poor media literacy and being Very Online but refusing to engage with media for people their age. At most, kids just think Eren's wrong, Armin's right, and Eren has cool powers. Obviously, these characters children are meant to agree with tell Eren "thank you" because, even though they don't agree with his actions, they have to embody the Main Moral of the story. They have to combat Eren's ideological violence/rage with kindness to prevent cycles of violence. It's extremely idealistic because it's a shounen; it's for kids. The manga couldn't be more obvious, even though it has a rushed ending. How do children understand this but adults do not?! It's so obvious. Yes, the ideals exhibited through Armin are extremely unrealistic and childish when applied to real-life martial conflicts--but it's not real life. The war is a metaphor for everyday conflicts because it's still for kids!

War in childrens' stories are not usually played straight. It's usually a metaphor for basic conflict that will illustrate skills kids can replicate in the everyday lives. Be kind and fair to others, even if they don't agree with you. Have empathy for others. Don't go to violence as a first option for resolution. In YA novels, as well. War is usually a metaphor for intergenerational conflicts and adolescents' desire for social freedom from adult regulation. On the flipside, there are other stories for children like Kingdom, which is about war but sticks mainly to illustrating historical stratagems and introducing basic martial philosophies to children. Are the opponents necessarily wrong for defending their home from the conquerors? Are conquerors like the main cast correct just because they win? Is the end result and quest for power worth it? Simple introductory questions regarding war for children to ponder, so they can later take the training wheels off when they move onto stories for adults.

War in childrens' media is not usually about actual war but about simple conflicts for kids to apply to their own lives. Even the poorly written war arcs, like Fullmetal Alchemist and Naruto. however, Naruto is unique in that the ideologies presented as the principle goals in the initial series (countering general mistreatment, being an underdog, bucking authority and control, etc) conflict with the manga's later misapplication of shounen power fantasy tropes like Naruto being a Chosen One/child of prophecy who must come out victorious. The use of genre and demographic tropes of Weekly Shounen Jump House Style resulted in discordant, empty ideologies that doesn't fulfill the original premise of the story: Naruto becomes a vehicle of the state that enforces oppression because he has to achieve his initial goals, and adhering to genre conventions made the story collapse in on itself. To stick with his initial premise, the manga would have to reframe itself to Sasuke as the protagonist and Naruto as the villain (or remove the power fantasy elements from Naruto as the main character), which opposes the types of stories published by Shounen Jump. The mangaka wrote himself into an inescapable hole because he needs things approved by his editor and publisher. Even Kishimoto acknowledges this, that he ended up writing a story about people needing to be oppressed for the continuation of the state being a good thing. It's just a poorly crafted childrens' story, which is fine.

This is where we, as adults, have to do the grunt work to understand how a story fails and succeeds in relation to its publication. Who is the publisher? What are conventions of stories released by this publisher? When did it come out? What are the main themes and how are they illustrated?

It's not difficult, and I hate that we have to discuss simple children's stories as though they're Beloved or War and Peace because adults refuse to grow up and meet the stories where they are.

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