random thought but i love the idea of Herobrine being less of an explicitly evil character and more of a weird cryptid thing that exists by accident and can only be perceived at long FOV distances by humans, forever being sort of isolated from the rest of them to only be seen partially obscured by the fog. he physically exists, but can only be perceived as though he were a ghost. he's very curious about other humans, watching over them as they traverse the world, but he means no harm. this can often look like stalking behaviour which can freak other humans out and make him seem menacing or off putting. scrambled throughout the world are legends and scriptures written about this mysterious being that make him out to be terrifying and threatening. warnings, spells and summoning rituals are seen scratched across the walls of ancient catacombs and ruined civilisations. locked inside dusty chests are torn and withered parchments scribbled with illustrations that depict him to be some sort of monstrous eldritch creature, perhaps mistaking something more terrifying for the legends of the strange man all should beware that have persisted for centuries. others depict him more as a silent, stalking shadowed figure, lurking behind trees and mountains with unknown intentions.
the only reason he exists is because of a strange bug that causes a duplicate of the main player to generate along with the world, and no matter how many times the developers of Minecraft try to remove him, he always quietly comes back somehow, implying that the rules of the game they created has developed into its own ecosystem that is slowly developing its own independence separate from the game, and that Herobrine is an integral part of it. he might possibly be a remnant of an ancient experiment or society that has long since disappeared, but for whatever reason, Herobrine still persists.
8 notes
·
View notes
self indulgent got concept.
Ned brings Jon home, Cat hates the boy, everything stays the same... until Robert Baratheon is charging through the halls of Winterfell looking for the babe, ready to butcher the poor thing where he lay helpless in his cradle.
in a matter of moments Catelyn learns three things:
The babe was never a bastard, Ned had only lied to her to protect Jon, and that she would die before she let Robert lay a finger on the babe she'd previously wished death upon.
cue Catelyn Stark snatching Jon from his cradle, holding him, protecting him, loving him as she would her own son, risking it all to keep him safe, all care for herself thrown to the wind.
like they say, what a mother's love holds no bounds, and what it makes her capable of had no limits.
16 notes
·
View notes
thinking a lot about how IMMORTALITY squeezes a ton of meaning out of being a game. like, theoretically, you could get all the same themes and significance from watching all the footage once or twice, in order, all the way through. after all, that's kinda how previous game by the studio Her Story was: there was a full picture, and it was waiting for you to put all the pieces together so you could see it.
but IMMORTALITY's a bit different. the thing that you perceive to be the big mystery actually isn't that hard to solve, and is really just a couple stops to check off along your much longer journey of understanding. and so much of that is thanks to the specific mechanic of how you uncover new clips. you click on something in the shot, and you're brought to another shot with the same object, or a shot related to that object, or a shot thematically linked to that object. you're navigating via the Kuleshov Effect, and that means you're constantly, inevitably creating meaning through how you interact with the game.
like, super minor, non-spoiler-y example: there's a set of scenes connected by a cat. you see a cat in one scene and click on it, and you're taken to the rehearsal of a scene that will have that cat, but they aren't using the animal actor yet cuz it's just rehearsal. you're brought to the moment that an actress is leaning down and petting where the cat will be, at some point, later. it's a cute little move by the game designers, cuz yeah, these scenes are connected by that cat you clicked on, but not literally, only in the final product.
but then i clicked on the space where the cat would be, and it took me to another scene, once again with the actual cat. and isn't that funny. isn't that interesting. of course it makes sense in hindsight, right? we're traveling via cinematic language, and in rehearsal there's no difference between a cat and an empty bit of floor where the script tells you a cat will be. you gotta treat that empty space like there's a cat there, or else the whole thing falls apart.
this isn't a significant moment in the game. none of the three clips involved really matter that much. but like, at the same time, by connecting these three pretty empty filler scenes in this way, by taking you from a cat to a not-cat to a cat, and telling you that they're all equivalent, the game is making a pretty strong thematic declaration, one that would be completely absent if you'd just watched these three clips separately, in the parts of the movie that they belong in.
not every player is gonna read that deeply into this moment, just as i havent read this deeply into most of the other connections ive made in my so-far 12 and a half hours with the game. some folks will read something completely different into it (there's a pretty fun discussion you could have about it happening in 2 Of Everything specifically, playing into the mistaken identities plot via Schrödinger's cat). some players won't even find that connection at all! there's enough redundancy in everything here that nobody needs to find every possible point of interaction to finish or understand the game. and all that's kinda the beauty of it, right? there's a million ways to examine this text, to work your way through the enormous tower of information you're presented with, and every single one of those paths is gonna create unique meaning. they've taken the process of interpreting art and made it a game mechanic, without hamstringing the actual act of interpretation in the process. the game says "hey, in order to see everything, you're gonna have to make connections," but never forces your hand in what those connections have to be. it's absolutely fascinating.
12 notes
·
View notes