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chezzzie · 3 years

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Why Contemporary Women Artists Are Obsessed with the Grotesque

If artists are generally boundary-crossers, a younger generation of (mostly women) artists is going for full penetration—making artworks that speak to something deep in the body, producing responses that range from carnal attraction to disgust.Among the most potently grotesque examples are Tala Madani’s nightmarish babies and dystopian fantasies of voyeurism and violence, and Jala Wahid’s visceral, sculptural allusions to cuts of meat and dismembered organs and body parts. Or take Marianna Simnett’s unsettling, darkly comic videos that bring to life imagined narratives of bodily invasions—including a gruesome nasal operation and a fable about varicose veins and cockroaches-cum-cyborgs. Then there’s Maisie Cousins’s glossy, close-up images of a wet soup of food, decaying plants, and bodies, which recall the more appalling corners of Cindy Sherman’s imagination. In painting and drawing, too, the grotesque is rampant, with elastic, deformed, or monstrous bodies populating works by Christina Quarles, Ebecho Muslimova, Jana Euler, and Dana Schutz.

In recent exhibitions of work by older and historical artists, as well, we’ve seen the walls erupt in freakish, fleshy forms that have threatened the contained space of a room, as in Dorothea Tanning’s Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot, on view in her retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofia and traveling to the Tate Modern early this year. The ceilings of art spaces have dangled with multi-limbed, Medusa-like monsters and cyborgs (like the sci-fi-inflected psychic landscape of Lee Bul, who had a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2018).

With much of these artists’ works, the feeling of deep dread is often a blade’s edge away from erotic desire. As the narrator of Simnett’s film The Needle and the Larynx (2016) says, as she fantasizes about having her vocal chords surgically altered: “So sharp were his knives, so appealing…this was an irrevocable invitation.” This expression of temptation suggests a calling to make art—to create—as much as it does an inclination toward self-regeneration and other forms of transgression. The possibility of metamorphosing one’s flesh and image—of permeating thresholds—is both intoxicating and anxiety-inducing.

The grotesque is inherently associated with the feminine, long having shaped depictions of the female body—prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses.

The grotesque, as art historian Frances S. Connelly writes in her book The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture (2012), is “a boundary creature” that “roams the borderland of all that is familiar and conventional.” It is desirous of transformation—an “open mouth that invites our descent into other worlds,” like the underground rooms of Nero’s Golden Palace, excavated in the 15th century, which turned up walls decorated with hybrid figures sprouting bits of plants and architecture, and birthed the term “grottoesche.” (Today, our general understanding of the “grotesque” has been boiled down to mean simply “comically or repulsively ugly or distorted,” but art historians and theorists read more complexity into the term.) It is, in many ways, inseparable from the body, which is the most fundamental of boundaries. “What is most regulated in any culture is the body, particularly women’s bodies,” Connelly said during a recent conversation.

The grotesque, she writes, is inherently associated with the feminine—bodied, earthy, changeful. That thinking has long shaped depictions of the female body, including archetypes of sexual or environmental threat, like prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses. Even centuries before the term emerged, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle “advanced the influential argument that a woman’s body is monstrous by nature, a deviation from that of the normative male,” she writes.The term is fertile, opening up a womb-like space for new ideas and ethical conundrums to accumulate—a conduit through which cultures can play with taboos and shift the parameters of mores and conventions. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that some of the artists touching the grotesque assume a childlike, fairytale language. A fable tells us what is right and wrong, Simnett pointed out when we met. It is also “a game that you can write the rules for,” she said, one through which you can distort or expand reality. The landscape of morality tales and childhood lessons is ripe territory for boundary-pushing perversions to take root.

Very dark fairytales

Children play a central role in several of Simnett’s films, whose absurdist, grotesque narratives are preoccupied with infection, augmentation, and altered states. In her opus Blood In My Milk (2018), the girl protagonist flirts with the outside world, even as adults warn of the risks that this external environment poses.In scenes that take place within an echoey pink space suggesting the inside of an organ, children receive a lesson about the prognosis and treatment of mastitis in cow udders, interspersed with shots of oozing teats being squeezed and dissected. While an officious farm hand dispenses information about how to keep one’s milk clean and pathogen-free, the children engage in playground dares and brinkmanship that include fantasizing about dismantling a girl “into a million bits so she can never be rebuilt.” The children lust after blood in their milk.

Tala Madani is another artist who, in a different way, explodes any veneer of female containment or childhood innocence, making infants and girls agents of the grotesque. In her painting Sunrise (2018), a baby wields a sharp knife at a naked woman’s groin. An infant’s first act, the painting reminded me, is one of violence.In other compositions populated by menacing babies on all fours, withering adults are left in the dust. Shafts (2017) depicts a group of monstrously overgrown tots crawling off into a void-like cyberspace, with beams of light projecting out of their assholes. An aged man in the foreground holds up a flaccid string of feces like a banner of mortality—the next generation might have evolved into light-shitting cyborgs, but we are still blood, matter, and excrement.

The children in Madani’s works also exercise sexual agency. In her animation Sex Ed by God (2017), a young girl with legs splayed is being studied by an older man, a boy, and God (the narrator of this lesson). She reaches out of the frame and grabs her male onlookers, shrinking them down to size and squeezing them into her vagina, along with the rest of the scene. The adolescent counterpart to a baby who explores the world with its mouth, this teenager-protagonist processes the world and corrects its distorted power balances through her sex. (Madani has a corollary of a kind in the work of Ebecho Muslimova, whose ink drawings feature a female alter-ego who fills and consumes the world with her vast and doughy naked body, luxuriantly covering and penetrating objects—a piano, patio furniture—with uncontrollable flesh and organ.)Madani’s universe is one whose grotesqueries seem shaped, at least to some degree, by the thrills and anxieties of sexuality, motherhood, mortality, and technological change. But it is also one in which children subvert the hierarchy between parent and progeny. The grotesque becomes a means to dissolve power structures.

Both familiar and alien

The contemporary grotesque is interested in underlining the way that bodies that are different from the (white, male) norm, or that, in deviating from impossible standards, are treated as aberrant or monstrous. Artists who touch the grotesque subvert and claim power in part by owning flesh and blood.When I visited Jala Wahid’s studio recently, one sculpture she showed me comprised a cast of the artist’s buttocks resting on a smooth liquid-like surface that is based on the shape of a natural oil well. The exposed position of Wahid’s dismembered rear is both “a provocation and a vulnerability at the same time,” she told me, its position on an oil slick alluding to the politics of Kurdistan, where her parents are from. In her work, she is often thinking about the contested Kurdish body, which is continually “under threat” but also resilient—a body that is both powerful and yet subject to power and control. Another in-progress sculpture in the studio, a thick wedge of slick red jesmonite, will eventually approximate the form of a bloody ox liver that Wahid encountered in a meat market in Kurdistan. (It brings to mind the work of Paul Thek, whom she cites as an influence.)

The contemporary grotesque is interested in how bodies that are different from the white, male norm are treated as aberrant or monstrous.

Wahid is drawn to the great diversity of textures and colors that exist in bodies (in flesh, organs, offal), as well as the relationship between butcher and animal. She wants, in some way, to approach her role as a sculptor like a meat handler—with both violence and reverence—and to create forms that are live and confrontational. To frame her work solely in terms of power dynamics is to simplify it, however. She is interested in bodies in states of transformation, in their formal nuances and their vast capacity for expression. (She showed me a picture of an Assyrian frieze at the British Museum, which features the form of a hunted lion, its upper body upright and fierce, its hind legs shot through and flaccid—a single body in which “you have something really strong but at the same time dead and limp,” she explained.) But she does want her sculptures to have autonomy and wield a certain affective power in the room.

When bodies spill out of their boundaries, or when parts are severed from the whole, they become something unsettlingly other. That forces viewers to renegotiate the borderlands between inside and outside, between themselves and the source of their disquiet. In Wahid’s work, body parts and unidentifiable cuts of meat force viewers into a visceral encounter with objects that are familiar, but also alien. “A human corpse is not in itself abject, but one’s encounter with it certainly is,” Connelly writes, describing an idea within the philosopher Julia Kristeva’s seminal 1982 essay on the abject in art. This recalibration of one’s relationship to the object engages the body as it tries to gauge whether the foreign article is a source of threat or attraction—perhaps both.In the work of sculptor Doreen Garner, we see this at play to profoundly disturbing effect. In some cases hung from meat hooks, her hulks of fleshy silicone are neither human nor meat—too dismembered and deformed to be human, too suggestive of the whole to be flesh alone. Upon inspection, the horrifying human steaks, pierced with pins, reveal the fingers of a hand, or a stray breast. Garner’s objects are intended to touch a nerve deep in the viewer’s own body—specifically, to register the trauma visited on the bodies of enslaved black women by members of the American medical industry. This is the grotesque as a means to produce shock and empathy—to expose the transformation of the body into something monstrous as a consequence of the abuse of power.

Garner’s work occasionally recalls the work of a historical pioneer of the grotesque in art—Robert Gober—in particular, works like the artist’s Untitled (1990), a slumped chest cast in wax that sprouts a female breast on one side, a hairy male pectoral on the other. This crumpled human fragment expresses the vulnerability of the human body, and insists on its gender hybridity, while also speaking to another abuse of power that simmers beneath his work—that of the U.S. government’s failure to respond to the AIDS crisis.

A fascination with monstrous bodies

The grotesque, of course, is not owned by women artists. It’s interesting, as well, to note how queer artists, in addition to Gober, have played in this terrain. In his latest show, at Ashes/Ashes, Ryan McNamara presented a sculptural showcase that included I Can’t Even Think Straight (2018), a sad, cartoonish figure practically melting off the wall. Faces dissolve into pools of liquid fish scales (Whispers, 2018); a series of gungey monsters with skin dripping from their brains joyfully snap selfies. The ghoulish group was in part conceived as a celebration of the queer nightclub in Phoenix, Arizona, where McNamara danced with other outcasts and misfits in his youth.But women, too, are deploying monstrous bodies in the world to empower the marginalized, or to satirize cultural norms and behaviors around age and gender. In two of artist Jana Euler’s latest paintings, she seems to offer biting commentary on our culture’s existential angst and exaltation of youth. Global warnings (people who are over 100 years old) (2018) is a mosaic of portraits of the elderly, each with a fantastically warped face. They are melted, pinched, and sunken, with cyclops eyes glaring from foreheads, and mouths swiveled 180 degrees.

In race against yourself (2018), a naked man rides an equine incarnation of himself, hands and feet turned into muscular hooves. This ghastly centaur and its rider are set against a fleshy backdrop composed of a snaking, human-faced colon, squeezed into the painting’s borders. The work speaks to something deeply perverse in human psychology—a propensity to hurtle through our lives at break-neck speed until our bodies crumple and we hit the grave. We can’t escape our own proclivities, much less our flesh and blood.Indeed, a profound awareness of human mortality is rarely far from the surface when it comes to the grotesque. When I asked Connelly about the common preoccupation with degrading flesh and food, she had this to say: “Life is constant change; we’re eating the world, the world eats us. We’re all mortal. We’re all human. We’re all meat. That’s seen as really traumatic.”

Other artists have created distorted, dismembered, and multi-limbed bodies to more optimistic effect. Christina Quarles paints bending tangles of limbs, bodies that insist on setting their own parameters and determining their own identities. Cindy Sherman continues to irreverently expand the possibilities of the grotesque, harnessing digital technologies to create fabulously idiosyncratic faces via her Instagram feed—ones that contort her visage in every direction except towards any convention of beauty; her fictional selfies are gloriously aging, sun-damaged, plastered in makeup, with features too big, too small, too gender-ambiguous.

Sherman expands the aesthetics of the (female, queer) body. In Maisie Cousins’s saturated close-ups of decaying messes of flesh, entrails, petals, prawns, and flies, too, something generative emerges. Cousins’s celebratory collisions of wet body parts, food remnants, and plants give the abject a facelift. Images of mild disgust find a place within the aesthetic of slick fashion magazine advertising. As such, they variously recall Sherman’s glossy, stomach-turning mixtures of waste, Marilyn Minter’s photorealistic renderings of gaudily made-up bodies and imperfections, and Gina Beaver’s paintings of bodies and fast food. (The latter artist will open an exhibition at MoMA PS1 in March.) Cousins’s photographs are full of innuendo, ripe, inviting us to find beauty in things spilling outside of their borders—to see our own bodies in the bounty of organic matter that the world has to offer.

It makes sense that among a generation increasingly comfortable with open, fluid approaches to identity—and fluent in the great toxic and transformational soup of the internet—artists value aesthetics rooted in states of change and hybridity. “I feel that is a constant, to be in a permanent state of transition,” Simnett told me. “In a sense, everyone is undergoing a mutation. It’s where I feel most natural. You get to meet a million more people, species, ideas. It’s like tendrils constantly reaching out, rather than staying put.” This hunger to explore and break down the boundaries of human experience, however anxious or unsettling—to deconstruct and reinvent the body—is generating some of the most vital and complex art being made today.

Tess Thackara

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the-cryptographer · 6 years

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I’m actually replaying Tales of the Abyss now instead of just thinking about replaying it as I become randomly taken over by Dist-related feelings. So under the cut is my experience with the first third of the game (everything up to the haircut).

- Imma just start with the character stuff and then move onto the gameplay stuff bc nobody cares about gameplay.

- Yeah, I started playing this like - “I wonder if I’ll still like the same shitty ships I liked when I was playing this ten years ago.” And the answer is FUCKING YES - they are apparently permanently ingrained in my psyche.

- On the subject of Luke... I didn’t actually remember how much of a douche he is for the first third of the game, since it’s been a while and I’m more accustomed to seeing portrayals of the better rounded and kinder character he eventually became. I’m going to say, I’m really glad he grew out of it on both a narrative and personal level, but I also really did enjoy and love long-hair douchey Luke. He’s insufferable and I adore him.

- That being said, I think this kind of puts an interesting spin on Luke/Tear. I do genuinely like this ship and am happy with where it ended up, but a lot of what seems to keep their early interactions from going even more poorly than they do is that Luke is... very used to bossing people around. And Tear is very used to being bossed around. Like, she’ll obviously talk back to him, but even so- Tear kind of falling into this servile protective bodyguard role is kind of what ends up endearing her to Luke and it’s kind of bad and good at the same time. Especially combined with things like her thinking the Baticul maid outfit his servants wear is cute... This idea could be taken places... I’m glad the relationship didn’t stay like this in the larger context of things, but I’m also kind of enjoying where it’s at so~

- That being said I feel like the party starts making lovebird jokes way too early. Like, I like this ship a lot, but I also have bad taste, and this isn’t the kind of thing I feel should be encouraged irl/in-universe. Not as their relationship exists during this part of the game, at least. ubb.

- More generally I do like Tear a lot tho. I think having her be a bit more serious and stoic and emotionally withdrawn are things that speak a lot to me, with regards to female characters and heroines especially. I also like that she is genuinely competent as a fighter and protector. And that the more traditional damsel role is occupied by a man, Ion.

- I’m also surprised that Tear’s boobs are as modestly proportioned as they are. Maybe it’s because of doujin content, or a couple of tactless jokes later on in the game(?) but I always thought they were HUGE instead of, well, buxom and hourglassy in the vein that you might find on a real woman. This game in general isn’t super fanservice-y in its character designs (although there’s something to be said about a few of the scenarios). There’s some Zettai Ryouki on the girls, but that’s about it. I guess the fact that this game's age is showing.

- The different iterations of ships involving Anise, Arietta, and the Ions are also something that are still appealing to me a lot. Part of me feels bad for being okay with Anise/Florian, since Florian’s a kind of an obvious replacement character. But then I start thinking about how conflicting and upsetting it would be for Anise and then - whoops - I’m interested again.

- Luke and Ion crush on each other so hard though. This was not a ship from when I first played but, god, it’s so cute how much Ion seems to genuinely like Luke, and how Luke gets so tsun and blushy about protecting him. Excuse me while I try and figure out a way to write this that isn’t heartbreaking, and fail.

- me: I wonder if I’ll like Jade as much as I did the first time. Since I seem to have come to a realisation that he’s an emotionally manipulative asshole with a very limited capacity for empathy on any non-abstract level. Jade’s disembodied voice *hasn’t even shown up on screen yet* : Move out of the way or it’s not my problem if you get run over by this tank I’m driving. me: I was a complete fool. He’s a total asshole and I love him so much.

- Naw, yeah, for real tho: one of the first things Jade does upon meeting Natalia is try and establish that she’ll be easy to emotionally manipulate and control. He rather easily brushes over watching the suffering of others in favour of more goal oriented behavior. That, in addition to what happens when he extracts information from Dist at the Keterburg Hotel... I don’t really think I was off the mark about Jade potentially negging his boyfriend or exacting physical torture on his ex, especially insofar as his ex is a criminal anyhow. Like, obviously Jade has some kind of moral code by the time the game begins. And overall I think it’s admirable that he’s concerned about things like minimising the world’s death toll and human suffering. But he’s certainly not above breaking a few eggs to make and omelette, even if those eggs include visiting long-term physical and psychological damage on others. I would... hope that he could restrain himself from taking that kind of route with things. But I don’t think I’m exactly wrong in thinking he’s not a person I would trust not to, and thus not someone I’d want to invite within a mile of my personal life. Although he’s probably going to continue being a character I really cherish. He might still be my favourite playable character in the game - although Tear and Anise come close.

- Actual favourite character is Dist, of course. I mean, he’s hammy and awful and terribly written, but I love him so much. ‘Everyone is jealous of my intelligence and beauty.’ (Which is even funnier considering the post-battle dialogue where Anise and Jade tell Luke to write about their beauty and intelligence respectively in his diary. Birds of a feather.) idk, it’s just really strange, because I don’t really like when fanon iterations of characters are made more femme and flamboyant than they are in canon. But you have actual femme and flamboyant men in canon (Dist, Wallace from pkmn, etc) and somehow I love them so much, omg. (Dist also has a lot of grief stuff I like tho - v relatable with regards to Nebilim.) idk, I just count my lucky stars every day. Because five of the six God Generals die in this game, so the odds were definitely not in my favour, but somehow my favourite is the one that makes it out alive?! I’m dying at how blessed I am. Dist is basically the opposite of the Bury Your Gays trope, and I love it.

- On that note, when Jade and Dist are snarking and Luke and Guy share the look(tm) and are like ‘they’re off in their own little world’ asdfghjkl;

- me: I wonder if I’ll like Natalia more this time. Since I’m more aware now of the baggage and misogyny that goes into female character creation, and am more likely to blame authors than the characters themselves. Natalia: *to Luke, after taking one look at Tear* Are you fucking the servant girl? me: YIKES(tm)

- Naw, she’s okay. I mean... she’s not less okay than Anise or Tear, really, in terms of poor (stereotypical) writing and poor (catty) behaviour. I certainly think her commitment to being a kind ruler and acting towards the public good with her own hands and own feet is quite touching. But she appeals to me the least out of the three girls on a personal level. And, also, I think there are several issues with her introduction-

- Well... first off, that we hear about Natalia from Luke and Guy earlier in the game - and we’re told she’s high maintenance and clingy before we’ve even met her. And then we meet her and her introduction ends up immediately corroborating what Luke says about her. So... it’s a very bad first impression in a way. In general it’s kind of interesting seeing how the narrative feeds out information, now that I know all the characters and all the twists. Some of it is info-dumpy, and some of it is unintuitive, but it’s interesting to watch how it drops out hints and evidence for you to try and piece together before the reveals come.

- But I digress, the other thing is Natalia is, after her disastrous first impression, set up as a foil for Luke. Her kindness and selfless concern for others, and how seriously she takes her responsibility as a state leader, are both immediately cast against Luke’s self-absorption. Which... is in some ways ineffective for me tbh.

- Idk, just, like- An adult man spends seven years building up trust with a child that’s been isolated and emotionally neglected by design, and then manipulates and uses him as part of a murderous rampage. (two children, if we’re including Ion) And somehow this is Luke’s fault? Yeah, I don’t... buy that.

- I mean, Luke is obviously rude, callous, selfish, and arrogant. And I think all of those things are problems. All of those things are Luke’s fault and responsibility. I do think it’s upsetting that Luke is more concerned with dodging blame regarding Akzeriuth than he is concerned about... everyone who just died. And I’m certainly glad that Luke makes a decision to change. But... none of those things are really related to him feeling he can trust Van, and it’s pretty monstrously unfair to blame him for being manipulated by the only adult he really felt took his interests and concerns seriously as a kid. (I mean, obviously his parents love him, and he them. But there’s also a definite feeling that his concerns are not being prioritised by them. And that he can’t even advocate his concerns with regards to his mother, whose emotional and physical health could be endanger if Luke burdened her with his upsets.) As the player, we don’t really have a reason to trust Luke, and Luke’s loyalty to Van, more than Tear’s (and the rest of the party’s) distrust of her brother. We’ve known Luke and Tear approximately the same amount of time. But... Luke has known Van for seven years. And Luke has known Tear and Jade and Anise for a couple of weeks and has little reason to trust them. Tear spirited him away from the safety of his manor and into a dangerous world. Jade and Anise had him restrained and arrested and made no secret they were using his status for their political goals (good goals, but still...) They’re all openly disparaging of Luke. It seems pretty natural that Luke would trust Van over them, and the fact that Van was counting on that when he betrayed Luke and everyone... I mean... I also don’t blame the rest of the party for blaming Luke in the heat of the moment, but I think the game and narrative itself takes the ‘it’s your fault’ stuff a bit too seriously and uncritically. It’s also super obvious that they ramped up Luke’s unlikable qualities in preparation for what happens at Akzeriuth - pride cometh before the fall. And, even if it’s emotionally effective, it still don’t really go from point A to point B that being selfish and rude and arrogant makes you at fault for being susceptible to emotional manipulation. Which is kind of frustrating.

- Also, yeah, zol was right. You could’ve saved that kid with stalagmite or smthn, Jade.

- There’s a lot of weird bullshit along the lines of gameplay vs plot dissonance. Like trying to light barrels of oil on fire in the Abandoned Factory. I’m surprised none of them blew up in Luke’s face. Did nobody think to bring a candle? Or just have Mieu light up the dark with fire near the switch? That would have been a lot more expedient and a lot less dangerous.

- Ion: The seventh fonon was recently discovered. Jade: And thirty years ago, when I was a young lad, I was upset I couldn’t use the seventh fonon and blew up my teacher by mistake (whoopsie). me: what the flippity fuck, Ion? that’s not recent. I thought you were supposed to be better than Luke about this shit. What could possibly be responsible for this mistake - OH!

- In general, since Ion’s four years old and somehow knows a shitton about the world, it kind of takes some of the wind out of Luke’s sails when he’s had a three year lead on Ion ‘but i had more important stuff to learn, like my parent’s faces’. Luke’s amnesia and subsequent isolation are pretty well integrated into the story for the most part, but parts of it are obviously exaggerated for the sake of having a character that needs the relevant info about the game world infodumped on them.

- Mieu... is a thing. I don’t really like mascot characters as a concept in general. But I think some authors, like CLAMP, have done a good job integrating them into their stories. I can’t really say the same for Mieu though. That he kind of is Luke’s chew toy for the beginning part of the story is interesting. And that he fucked things over for his people and the Ligers due to this random accident (much like Luke) is kind of interesting. But... overall he’s just a very annoying cute thing that’s following you around for no reason. I wonder if his voice is less grating in Japanese, but the PS2 version of this game at least didn’t come with JP audio, which was kind of a bummer. I like the dub for the most part (Anise especially is really good) but I would have liked to hear the JP version this time.

- I think I still prefer platonic Guy/Luke to romantic Guy/Luke. (Although I don’t dislike it, the way I dislike Asch/Luke) but I am super charmed by the drama with Guy having all this resentment towards Asch that then becomes easier to move past once Asch gets switched out for Luke. Like, I think in some ways it’s more about Guy being in a different place looking after this helpless newly replicated Luke at age 14 compared to looking after the better-realised Asch when he was younger, rather than because of a stark difference between Luke and Asch themselves. But I can’t help but love Guy a little for seeing them so differently and feeling certain that Luke is the one that’s his friend. It’s really sweet and cute x’)

- And last thing - the hyperresonance stuff was super poorly explained. Particularly the first one between Luke and Tear. We’re told that this is something that can randomly happen when two seventh fonists interact, and Tear’s like ‘i should have been more careful’ like this is something that happens periodically that you can predict and avoid. but... how? What are the conditions that lead to this? Is this scientifically replicatable at all? Or is it something that can happen completely at random whenever Luke and Tear touch each other? Whenever Natalia and Asch touch each other? they’re just going to be having sex one day and randomly teleport out into an open field or smthn. This is so dumb. Except I know that the teleportation thing was actually 100% convenient plot bullshit, so I shouldn’t even pretend it can be made sense of in any real way, smh.

- New Game Plus! I debated quite a bit, but in the end EXP x10 was the only thing I purchased from the grade shop. I wanted to have the experience of gathering all the items and bonuses myself, since I forgot what happened the first playthrough. But I’m regretting the decision a bit now since I did all the sidequests and ultimate weapons and stuff the first time around and had a very full inventory, and I’ve already missed at least one thing on my current playthrough when a combination of not saving and forgetting how to walk lost me Barrelow X’s Capacity Core. (Not saving also made me not have a save to go back to to win against Asch at Yulia City- boo) But, regardless, even without all the other perks, I figured EXP x10 would basically mean breezing through the story, which was what in theory I wanted. But then I decided to combine this with the Unknown Difficulty Mode (enemy stats x3.5) which effectively made the game even more slow than the first runthrough, EXP x10 be damned. I spent a lot of the first part of the game crowding around Engeve, frantically trying not to die before I gathered 100 gald to stay at the Inn. I was completely outmatched on the Tartarus when it gets overrun with Griffins and Ligers. And I made about a dozen trips between the Fubras River and Engeve before I finally made it to Arietta without my characters dying. After getting my party to level 40, spamming Mystic Cage, and still getting absolutely crushed by Arietta at Coral Castle, I finally gave up. I lowered it down to Very Hard mode instead and defeated her in two minutes. After a quick search, I learned that this is considered one of the hardest battles with the hard mode stat multipliers, and it gets easier from there. So I technically could have kept going to level 50 or smthn but... it also seemed like a lot of these people were doing this challenge with the capacity cores and equipment rollover, and without them I’d most certainly have to grind more (and grind without good capacity core stat bonuses). And the simple truth of the matter is I wasn’t having fun anymore. So... if I do a third playthrough in another ten years, I’ll rollover everything properly to do Unknown properly, but in the meantime I’ll stick to whatever mode lets me farm grade the most easily.

- On that note, it became very clear that the defense stat in this game is very broken. All the characters (including your own characters, pretty much regardless of level) have /lots of HP/ and are meant to take /a lot/ of small hits - this is just the play style. So, as long as you have full TP and a way to heal, taking on characters with multiple times their usual attack and HP stats is doable. On the other hand, characters with high defense, like Arietta, Golems, etc... Even small differences between your attack stats and the opponent’s defense stats can result in your own attacks doing half/quarter/tenth of their usual damage, which means a battle taking two/four/ten times longer than usual (and you’re way more likely to run out of TP and healing items this way). I think this essentially means that high fonic/phys attack (respective of whether the character has a mage vs melee move set) are the most important stats for the player character. It would be cool if you could replicate Arietta’s defense effect with your own characters but... the truth is the bosses in these types of games are built very differently than the player characters (unlike something like pkmn)... so I’m not sure you can(?)

- Pet peeves currently include the Tales Of series’s multi-part cutscenes. It’s started already and I know it will get worse (i distinctly recall latter parts of this game where I had to fly between characters in different cities collecting cutscenes before I could move onto the next dungeon) But, yeah- I’m at a bit of a loss here because, while I like open exploration game worlds where you walk between different locations and vastly prefer this to games that teleport you between battle stages (ie Sonic Adventure 2, Disgaea) there is a lot of retreading old pathways in Abyss (as there was in Legendia) trying to negotiate between different talking heads. Like... I saved my game going up the tower at Coral Castle, intending to walk into a boss fight. And then a cutscene happened, during which I was teleported three loadscreens back in the direction I came from for another cutscene. And then I had to manually walk back the same exact route and save again, before another cutscene and finally the battle. What’s the rationale behind not just making that one big pre-battle cutscene with the travel included/implied? Maybe the fact that they DON’T HAVE A CUTSCENE/SKIT SKIP BUTTON which is another pet peeve, mind you. Another example is when you get to Luke’s home in Baticul and have to run back down to the port to retrieve the scrolls that the maids threw out, and then climb back up to his house again. It’s not like anything exciting happened on the three different elevators I took between those two points. It’s not like I don’t know what the trip between those points looked like - I just came from the port. There’s no reason not to just have it be automatic. Even attempts to reduce this - the wing bottle - are frustrating in their setup. By requiring me to spend money and keep inventory in order to use the teleport function, they are incentivising me to /not/ use the teleport function. They’re requiring me to spend money to /avoid/ doing something boring. And that’s, idk, kind of unnecessary and shitty? Like, usually in a game I want to be spending money in order to unlock new features and content and have more fun. Not to, like, avoid playing parts that I’ve played already. idk, because i do realise that streamlining some of these moments would require alterations to cut down some of the movement in the plot - and ultimately I think flying between cities to talk with different people before acting isn’t bad or unrealistic plot wise. buuuut, even if some of the multi-part cutscenes need to stay for this effect, even if not all of them could have been streamlined into a more direct line of action and travel, even if not any specific moment of this travel is unbearably awful, it still frustrates me that this clearly wasn’t even a priority for the devs.

#this has spoilers for the rest of the game too - not just the first third #meta lite #Tales of the Abyss

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