macksmediadiary - Tumblr blog

macksmediadiary · 8 months

Text

Chuck Tingle - Camp Damascus 6/6

#book #horror #queer fiction #autistic fiction

I sit in my bed finishing this book. My boyfriend is right beside me masturbating. I can't imagine a more "us" scene.

We are an autistic gay couple. I am questioning-gray-ace, and he is as far from the ace spectrum as one gets. There is a lot of danger in this scene; just as his christian upbringing has tied his natural urges to shame, so too is shame tied to my moments of not getting into the mood when my partners do. But we are navigating it well, in our practiced way. When he finishes, I lean over, contented, and kiss his forehead. He smiles up at me, eyes clear and sparkling. We our being ourselves with each other to the fullest, and receiving nothing but love and acceptance back.

My first thought is of Willow holding Rose's hand, tapping out her counts with her. It's almost too perfect an analogy; I can't believe I'm not making this up. Autistic gay love has the power to take physiological facts about us that others' misguided love and imperfect expressions of other emotions have tethered to deep feelings of shame and guilt, and recontextualize them as normal, acceptable, and good. In my relationships, in my wider community, I am accepted, I can take off the mask, I can explore who I really am at the core.

Camp Damascus is a very well-crafted journey through a few connected concepts. Chuck Tingle is not playing coy with any of them. From the language he uses on his blog, I had started to guess that the villains of the story would be demon worshipers, or perhaps devils themselves, wearing the coat of the righteous; a warning that those who claim to be on God's side may be against Him. One of the ways the book surprised me was what it says instead of this. The people who will use demonic methods to achieve their ends believe they are on the side of the righteous, and this makes them all the more dangerous. For the most part, though, the book wears its symbolism on its sleeve, and is not afraid of being very explicit with its messaging. Kingdom of the Pine is not special in its thinking, only its practices.

The craft of this book was also at the level I needed to learn about writing from it. The way it jumps between scenes and expresses the passage of time is very natural, and very focused. I struggle a lot with plotting out my books, worrying a lot about structure and how to get characters from one place to another. My TTRPG background has me focus a lot on journeys, but I can struggle to allow myself to focus in on what matters. Camp Damascus gives you all the logistics that matter, like how Rose achieves her most important successes, and the plot-relevant mechanics of the universe and specific machines. It is also a lesson in having the perfect protagonist for your story. It is very natural that Rose succeeds because of the things that are most core to her, because those things are what the story demands of her, and at the same time the story works around the journey she needs to have as a character. The way these elements work together is something I will consider in my own writing. There are smaller things, too, in the writing that I am thinking about but would take too long to explain

A lot of thematic content in the book is not new to me, and a lot of the religious trauma content does not really connect to my life. However, some of the ideas are making a big impact. In particular, the expression of what love can do and what it is worth is impacting how I think about love in my own life. This book makes me appreciate the love I have with my boyfriend in a slightly new way. It also reminds me that I have a large accepting family that enhances my life in many ways. I will never again be at risk of ending up in a place like Rose at the start of the book. Just as surely as she is free from her nightmare at the end, I know my community has me for life.

At the same time, this is certainly a horror novel. There are scenes in this book so grotesque that they will have me shuddering for weeks. I don't have much to say on the topic, but could not leave out that the fear and discomfort are very real in this book. At the very same time, there's something else that this book very much makes me feel:

Love is real.

#chuck tingle #camp damascus

3 notes · View notes

macksmediadiary · 1 year

Text

The Banner Saga 1-3 (2014, 2016, 2018) - 6/6

#video game #strategy #story game #nordic fantasy #dark fantasy

As I just wrote on my main blog: The Banner Saga is a lot of things but at its core it is a story about how our unelected leaders will drain all life from the earth and stoke genocidal war to protect their place in it, but putting our trust in ordinary people against all reason can still save us.

The first game is primarily a statement on how to do "choices matter" in a game, which it does perfectly. There's that little bit of ludonarrative clash as a good player is going to crack the combat and end up with time split between crushing their enemies beneath their heel and navigating a bleak and desperate race to save a growing community. On the other hand, the combat is likely meant to be punishing, and for a long time for most people it will be, in which case it can do a lot to add to that desperation. This aside, it achieves what no other game really has in presenting really engaging choices to the player. The famous first real choice you have to make is how to react to a big stone monster running to kill your daughter - do you call out a warning, fire a warning shot to scare it off, or take a shot yourself hoping against hope to fell it in time? These things are horrifying and utterly alien, they were supposed to be all gone before you were born, can one arrow do anything? But if you do not choose this option, and then double down on it, a young man with a stout heart and shield arm dies protecting your daughter for you, and you miss out on one of many well-written characters for the next three games (and among the strongest combat units especially in game 1). I failed this test the first time, and it took me some time to learn the game's first lesson - in desperate times, any measures less than desperate are pointless.

The choices are mostly of this nature. There is something you clearly and unambiguously want, which is generally to protect your caravan and most importantly your family (which for some reason includes a gentle giant with huge horns who doesn't seem to like anyone else, and may include a well-spoken widow and said stout-hearted boy), but it is unclear how best to do this. With one important exception, there is no "press x to kill the orphan, o to save them" moment; in my first couple playthroughs I had to pause on many choices and mull them over for a long time, unsure what I thought was most practical, or for that matter moral. The Dredge are going to tear through this farm, but does that entitle you to take its supplies by force on your way through first? These people have nowhere to go but to you, but that's because they're outlaws who may be dangerous to your caravan, is that reason enough to condemn them to certain death? After all you've done? The man who betrayed you in the last town has thrown down his weapon and put himself at your mercy, so do you have more mercy or caution within you?

Importantly, the game is smart about how the choices pay off. The outcomes are not predictable per se, but they always feel like logical conclusions from the choices, while serving a thematic purpose. If you just blindly let everyone join your caravan you will get hurt bad, but you will also have a large loyal caravan and ultimately save more people than if you turned everyone away, at great cost. Fiercely protecting your in-group will keep them safe, but the cost, even to them, may be even greater. And trying to do good or be greedy for their own sake can create terrible outcomes for everyone if not thought out well. The theme communicated feels very pragmatic, that being a good leader necessitates great sacrifices, some moral, and that true leadership is a burden that no sane person would want, and no person is clever enough to get right all of the time.

Importantly, Rook and Hakon, the leaders of both caravans, do not seek out leadership, but have it thrust upon them by being trusted by their communities, Rook due to his proximity to the mayor's family and the town's only Varl (aforementioned horned giant, they are very important), and Hakon because of his deep kinship with the previous king of the Varl (while this is mostly a sort of brotherly love, Varl are all men, and the game does not shy away from this type of relationship being the Varl stand-in for romance - I told you, they're important, more below). They do their best throughout, and frequently lament their station. In contrast, the biggest villains in the game's narrative, the governor of Boersgard and fiction's worst brother-in-law, are people who do not have the trust of others, but seek to accumulate power underneath them through coersion and subterfuge. The game is already planting seeds for the overarching theme the latter games will explore in more depths here.

Now, what's with the Varl and Dredge? TBS's Nordic fantasy setting has the absolute best fantacy race dynamics of anything I've ever seen. Humans and Varl are opposed by humanity having women, and therefore a way to reproduce, while Varl have to be created one by one by a God who has died long ago, but live indefinitely. This is already fascinating. The writing goes deep into this divide - almost every disagreement between any Varl and Human comes down to the differences in what kind of legacy are possible for these people, and indeed Varl conflicts like that between Iver and Jorundr are mostly down to disagreements on what the best kind of legacy is, Iver wanting his legacy to be in the people whose lives he touches and Jorundr in the wonders his people built and protected (spoiler: the narrative pushes Iver's view, I think correctly). And while the depth of this divide is never lost, the two are closely connected allies because of how alien the Dredge are. Created by yet another God, the Dredge do not speak as Humans and Varl do, and all we know about them at first is how their fearsome warmongering forced the other races together against them, and now they are conquering the entire world after being quiet for a hundred years... at least in the first game. It already starts to show you the initial narration was unreliable when you encounter that x/o choice I mentioned, a dead Dredge cradling her living infant. While I love that the dialogue if you kill or leave the baby gives you a bit of an out that these things are horrible aliens as far as you know, the rest of the dialogue in this scene is so effective at humanizing stone people called "Dredge" you've been killing for 10+ hours.

In games 2 and 3 the focus is still Iver trying to redeem what he sees as a tainted personal legacy having killed another Dredge infant a century prior, and the other protagonists trying to survive an apocalypse, while villains who seek to hold to or create hierarchies stand as much in their way as the crumbling earth. But adding onto this are some more serious explorations of the evils of hierarchy and xenophobia.

The big reveal is that Eyvind, the helpful demigod-level wizard you've brought to every combat the game lets you, is the game's ultimate antagonist. This is not a "my machinations lay undetected for years" moment, it is more, "I knew this guy had problems but I didn't realize ALL of the problems were his problems!" Trying to save his fellow demigod after she is put to death for trying to control others' minds directly with magic, Eyvind summoned forth this inky blackness and now everyone has to die about it. The answer to "should people have so much power that they can end all of creation over natural consequences for trying to push their already total control over others even further?" is an emphatic "no."

The climate change metaphor isn't central at all, but it's there. While the creators say their chief influence here is Neverending Story, which tracks as the darkness comes from a broken egg for the being that is supposed to swallow the world when it dies so that creation can start again, the corrupting darkness coming from under the earth is very oily, and there is heat beating down from an unmoving sun. This makes the menders big oil, or a group so unnaturally and openly powerful that governors allow them to run the show because to oppose them would be folly. This isn't the primary interpretation, but it fits a lot better than Neverending Story's dulling imagination.

Back to xenophobia. At first it seems like the Dredge are like Card's varelse, beings with minds so alien to Varl and Human that their coexistence is impossible. However, it eventually becomes clear that they are almost closer to humans than Varl, with their ability to reproduce, their similar magic, and, crucially, their language that select humans know how to speak. To me this is a bigger reveal - menders, yes them again, have always been able to negotiate with the similar leaders of the Dredge, but the two groups chose an arrangement of permanent complete segregation and war, and when one Human ruined it for everyone, the Human menders gave no quarter to the Dredge, and let everyone believe they were more stone than person, in hopes that they, and their secrets, would just die first. This arrangement is business as usual. Complete disregard for another kind of person was the motivation the first time, and it's the motivation at the end of the world. I'm not a Dredge. Fuck 'em.

It is up to the protagonists to right this. If you save the Dredge baby, it can be used as a show of goodwill, and you can bring the Dredge refugees - which they always were by the way, refugees of Eyvind's oil spill rather than invaders - into the last city that has any hope of holding back the darkness while Iver brings Eyvind to the scene of the crime in hopes of reversing things.

This is how this game's themes are interwoven. People who try to create and enforce artificial hierarchies through coercive force are evil and people who trust each other despite reasons to fear each other are good. The evil people use xenophobia to commit atrocities, but the good people are able to extend the olive branch and stop them, although it won't always be pretty.

Now of course the games have problems. The Varl are asexual, so it's weird that they all identify as "men." The Horseborn read very "noble savage." Eyvind is written in such a way that a little meow-meow reading is more possible than it should be. But these problems are miniscule compared to its triumphs. The way it communicates its themes is incredible, and it has the most inventive worldbuilding I've ever seen. These are some of the best games ever made.

Now back to my fifth playthrough for that pesky last BS2 achievement!

#the banner saga

13 notes · View notes

macksmediadiary · 1 year

Text

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) - 2/6

#movie #action #comedy

I think the strongest read of this movie is as a dumb hollywood blockbuster that uses Nicolas Cage's unique status as the driving force of its comedy and plot, under which reading it's fairly successful, but this is boring. The second strongest read of this movie is as a statement about the way hollywood's financial black hole warps the space of film around it, which is more interesting to talk about, so I'm going to focus on why it's almost that, but less that than the first thing.

So in this reading, the central premise of this movie is not that fictionalized inflated-ego Nick Cage is a spy because of reasons, it is that the viewer will follow two film lovers attempt to craft the type of movie they desire but see why they end up making a mediocre film out of necessity. A significant amount of attention is given to drawing parallels between the film you are watching and the film Nick and Javi are creating, most sharply in two scenes. First, when they take drugs and discuss putting a drug sequence in their movie, decide how to pay it off, and the film immediately pays it off that way. Javi even says "what if this was the movie?" Second, when we find out the characters literally did make a movie with the same plot as the one we are watching.

This should signal to the viewer that when the characters are discussing their movie, they are discussing the movie the viewer is watching. The writers use this direct channel to describe their movie as, at its core, wanting to be an adult character-driven drama about the relationship between two men, but in order to market it, must have a kidnapping subplot shoehorned in, that the characters say will make it an entirely different movie. The characters sort of agree to make the compromise on the grounds that a movie that starts as a character drama then morphs into an action blockbuster "has something for everyone," but notably the events of the plot have forced the characters to say this to each other as a lie, and the viewer is being told that they do not believe what they are saying. The obvious takeaway is that the writers had to lie to themselves that this formula would still be compelling as a character drama in order to be okay with making the boring movie we're watching.

And, speaking in my own voice now, the action in the movie is boring. As I was sitting watching Nick and Javi take down the gun cartell, I was bored, and found myself reflecting on the movie itself, which is how I thought of this reading in the first place. "Maybe I'm supposed to be bored," I thought, "maybe this incredibly uninspired action is taking up so much runtime in a row in order to make me lament that it was necessary to interrupt the actually well-written character drama with it." There is genuinely nothing you couldn't find in any other movie in the action subplot, and it in no way coheres with either character's arc aside from Javi saying he needed to confront his cousin, a confrontation he loses and learns nothing from. The best bit is the setup-reminder-payoff of the knife in the back of the truck, and the payoff of that is the moment the film moves from one to two levels of fiction as the knife throw goes to over-the-top slow-mo action shot, which is, in a vacuum, worse, and in context, a strong indicator towards the present reading. So back to that reading.

The problem with this reading is that it doesn't really do anything with its supposed theme. What exactly is the statement? "I wanted to make a compelling character drama about a guy whose passion for cinema and need for attention drive a wedge between him and his daughter, but you fucking apes need explosions, so now I can't?" Because the characters really are lying to each other, this movie does not deliver on its character drama, and it's because of the space the action takes up. In one scene Nick is still so unable to be the father he wants to be, his new best friend calls his attempt pathetic. Then a lot of action happens. Then his next scene with his daughter, she just respects him, and he sincerely has changed his habits. That's bad character drama. It's good action movie writing, but now it really is a different movie, where there's not a resolution of actual character growth, and instead a nod to the action mattering on a personal level, which adds pathos to the action, not the drama or characters. The Climax is a knife throw, not a character's apotheosis, the film's genre is action.

I don't know what other theme to pull from this reading. The film says nothing about why these goals can't exist together. They can. Watch Everything Everywhere All at Once, Arcane, Logan, I don't know, there are so many movies that use the synergy between action and character drama to advance the drama. The film isn't drawing any special attention to specific conflicts of interest, or specific problems, it's at best gesturing towards the idea that character dramas lack mass appeal. But that's not a theme, that's market data.

I wish mature character-driven dramas were more common and more popular. But you can still make them, they do sometimes do well, and this movie does nothing to contribute to discourse about them.

So overall, despite all the signs, this movie does not actually read well as a commentary on hollywood. The best reading is the face-value reading, which is extremely okay! There is nothing wrong with a nice dumb action movie. The problem is that this movie invests a lot into the characters talking about cinema with no real point, and very little into the action itself, and ends up only being a passable action movie.

On the other hand, its comedy is very well written and acted, and I came away from it with more good humour from that than disappointment. Putting Nicolas Cage as himself to make all his quirks believable was a great move, and while I'm sad that I didn't get to watch the character drama the movie pretended to be for half an hour, I'm glad I got to see Pedro Pascal's awesome comedic acting with a good comedy script for all the time the movie was focused on comedy.

#nicolas cage #the unbearable weight of massive talent

1 note · View note

macksmediadiary · 1 year

Text

The Knife - Shaking the Habitual (2013) - 5/6

#album #experimental #electronic #onrepeat

TLDR: the post-structuralist themes come through in the instrumentals in a really cool way, the long slow parts make for a fascinating and repeatable cover-to-cover

Since this is a personal journal, I'm going to start personal.

In 2013 I was spending a lot of time on 4chan.org/mu/. Most of what I was listening to I found there. When Shaking the Habitual came out, it was the hot controversial topic. It's certifiable /mu/core, with a unique sound and heavy experimentation, but it's also undeniably left-wing in its themes. The way I remember the discourse can kind of be summed up as people falling on either side of "this album is absolutely brilliant musically, but it's awful SJW nonsense and that either doesn't quite or does ruin it." Due to where I was at in my journey in grade 12, this meant I was scared to listen to it in case I liked an SJW thing.

I didn't justify it to myself that way, however. There was a second toxic thing going on on /mu/. "It's impossible to understand this album outside the context of this band's other work." I heard that about everything, and never clued in that it was a pattern. I now recognize that this is often an intelligent thing for a serious music reviewer to say, as context can help a lot, but what isn't intelligent is for people who are not serious reviewers to recommend to each other not to listen to what they want to listen to until they've made it to that point in a band's discography, which is sometimes how this was presented. This got ingrained into me so deeply that in 2014 when a very attractive classmate, after a really long stimulating conversation about music, asked me if I wanted to go listen to her vinyl copy of Centipede Hz in her dorm, but I said no because I was only as far as listening to Strawberry Jam in their discography and didn't want to ruin the album for myself, a memory that can derail me very hard when I think about it.

In 2019 or so I saw the iconic neon album cover and realized I'd missed out on an album because of my political confusion, so I did the natural thing and listened to their self-titled 2001 debut. It's an okay album, featuring a wonderful half-cover of I'm on Fire by Springsteen, but it didn't really catch me. It took 2 more years of occasionally listening to it in hopes of getting it until I forced myself to listen to their 2003 album Deep Cuts, which I thankfully disliked enough to break my habit - I said "well I'm not going to stick to this discography, might as well see what the fuss on this one was about."

Shaking the Habitual blew my mind!

A Tooth for an Eye is way better than anything on their first two albums, right out of the gate. It sounds like the bike jousting scene from Akira with a witch mournfully chanting spells over it. It starts out disorienting and enticing, and slowly ramps up for a few moments, paying off with high-pitched flute-like synths that are still understated enough to not blow the whole album's load, then slows for a minute of percussion playing with itself to set you up for the rest of the album. Full of Fire follows it up perfectly. It's super dancey, and continues to have expressive and untamed percussion alongside shifting synths and other sounds with witchy enticing vocals. The repeated "let's talk about gender baby" at the end dragged me into the lyrics, which turn out to be dense enough that I'm far from done analyzing them. And then A Cherry On Top is the big reveal - this is not going to be a dance album, even the presentation is experimental, we could dip down into nearly 9 minutes of drone at any moment, don't get comfortable.

The album continues to go up and down this way, playing with post-structuralism at every level. My favourite song is Without You My Life Would Be Boring, which has the eponymous Foucault quote, though I sure appreciate what the grueling 19-minute Old Dreams Waiting to Be Realized adds to the actual listening experience, making me forget every time that I'm listening to my current favourite album and helping Raging Lung and Networking do what they're supposed to do after. While my favourite fact about it is that this album was the result of two progressives going full tranarchy after reading Foucault, at once proof of and a celebration of what theory can do to someone, and furthermore that even the troglodytes on 4chan could tell this just by listening to it... more skilled music reviewers than me have already explored this extensively. It's why you should listen to it, but but to how it impacted me.

So, in terms of my thinking... sorry not sorry gang, but I was already where you were trying to get me. Foucault has been big on my radar since I realized more than half of the biggest sources for my dissertation considered him their biggest influence, and at this stage of my life, "let's talk about gender baby" sounds less like a threat and more like a nice thing a friend would say over tea. Maybe this album could've done me some good in 2013, but at this point it's too late to say. However, it's definitely to this album's credit that it embodies its themes so well that to someone who already embraces its ideas it's absolutely perfect to bump non-stop!

The big effect, however, has been on how I approach music I'm interested in. This album gave me the confidence to trust that I can handle listening to an album for the first time without context. I don't think anyone on /mu/ ever actually warned me not to listen to anything from an album without the context of the discography it's part of, but my autistic brain constructed this version of that site's ideology. Now that I've even gone back and listened to 2010's Tomorrow in a Year, I see that there is merit to putting an album in context for review - while The Knife has been wanting to be experimental since their second album, and have been talented musicians capable of making catchy stuff since their first, only when they found a topic that truly stirred their passion did they make good on bringing the two together - and that this merit is virtually nonexistent for a casual listener. Nothing about my individual love for this album comes from the context I brought from having listened to their first two albums, and my Midcity loving ass would've grocked it just fine on its own in 2013 as well. Never again will I see a specific project I'm interested in and immediately go to the artist's discography to see if it's worth catching up. I will go where my fancy takes me, and use the structure of discography where it makes sense to in order to guide my exploration after that. I, too, am post-structure (I know that's not what that means).

#The Knife #Shaking the Habitual

0 notes