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Brian Jarvis, Monsters Inc.: Serial killers and consumer culture, 3 Crime Media Cult 326 (2007)

Abstract

Serial killing has become big business. Over the past 15 years, popular culture has been flooded by true-life crime stories, biographies, best-selling fiction, video games and television documentaries devoted to this subject. Cinema is the cultural space in which this phenomenon is perhaps most conspicuous. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 800 films featuring serial killers and most of the contributions to this sub-genre have been made since 1990. This article examines seminal examples of serial killer fiction and film including Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels and their cinematic adaptations, Bret Easton Ellis and Mary Harron’s American Psycho (1991 and 2000) and David Fincher’s Se7en (1995). The main contention is that the commodification of violence in popular culture is structurally integrated with the violence of commodification itself. Starting with the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed, this article then attempts to uncover less transparent links between the normal desires which circulate within consumer society and monstrous violence. In ‘Monsters Inc.’, the serial killer is unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

But the notion of the monster is rather difficult to deal with, to get a hold on, to stabilize . . . monstrosity may reveal or make one aware of what normality is. (Derrida, 1995: 386)

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin (1999a) memorably proclaimed that ‘there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (p. 248). In contemporary US culture Benjamin’s chilling axiom is turned on its head: it seems there is now no act of barbarism which fails to become a document of civilization. Serial killing, to take one important example of this trend, has become big business within the culture industry. In his cult documentary, Collectors (2000), Julian Hobbs both explores and contributes to the explosive proliferation of art and artefacts associated with serial killers. Hobbs investigates the burgeoning market for ‘murderabilia’ and follows enthusiasts in this field who avidly build collections which mirror the serial killer’s own modus operandi of collecting fetish objects.

Murderabilia ranges from serial killer art (paintings, drawings, sculpture, letters, poetry), to body parts (a lock of hair or nail clippings) from crime scene materials to kitsch merchandising that includes serial killer T-Shirts, calendars, trading cards, board games, Halloween masks and even action figures of ‘superstars’ like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. Although it might be tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as the sick hobby of a deviant minority, murderabilia is merely the hardcore version of a mainstream obsession with the serial killer. Following negative publicity, trading in murderabilia was banned on eBay in 2001. However, it is still possible to purchase a vast array of legitimate serial killer merchandise online and elsewhere. A keyword search for ‘serial killer’ at Amazon, for example, produces hundreds of links to gruesome biographies, true-life crime stories and best-selling fiction by Thomas Harris, Patricia Cornwall, Caleb Carr and others. A search for ‘Jack the Ripper’ uncovers 248 books, 24 DVDs, 15 links to popular music, a video game and a 10’ action figure. The Jack the Ripper video game invites players to solve the Whitechapel murders, but a large number of its competitors profit by encouraging ‘recreational killing’. In some of the most commercially successful video games, one’s cyber-self may be a detective, a soldier or a Jedi Knight, but the raw materials of fantasy are constant: an endless series of killings.

In Christopher Priest’s novel, The Extremes (1998), FBI agent Teresa Simons becomes dangerously addicted to a Virtual Reality (VR) training programme which recreates infamous serial killings. It might be argued that other elements in Priest’s novel are ‘re- creations’: the focus on a female FBI agent seems indebted to the Silence of the Lambs and the VR game, known as ‘ExEx’ (Extreme Experience), recalls the SID 6.7 software in Virtuosity (1995). In Brett Leonard’s science fiction film, SID 6.7 is a computer pro- gramme which synthesizes the personalities of 183 serial killers and mass murderers including Ted Bundy, Vlad the Impaler, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler. Somewhat inevitably, SID (short for Sadistic, Intelligent and Dangerous) escapes virtuality and is hunted down by a detective played by Denzel Washington. Shortly after he starred in Virtuosity, Washington appeared in a supernatural serial killer film (Fallen, 1998) and a forensic serial killer film (The Bone Collector, 1999). Three serial killer films in four years is less a signature of Washington’s star persona than a symptom of the recent growth spurt experienced by this sub-genre. The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) lists over 800 films featuring serial killers and most of them have been made in the past 15 years. Serial killer cinema has many faces: there are serial killer crime dramas (Manhunter, 1986; Se7en, 1995; Hannibal, 2001; Saw, 2004), supernatural serial killers (Halloween, 1978; Friday the 13th, 1980; Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984), serial killer science fiction (Virtuosity, 1995; Jason X, 2001), serial killer road movies (Kalifornia, 1993; Natural Born Killers, 1994), true-life crime dramas (Ted Bundy, 2002; Monster, 2003), documentaries (John Wayne Gacy: Buried Secrets (1996) and Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1994)), post-modern pastiche (Scream, 1996; I Know What You Did Last Summer, 1997) and even serial killer comedies (So I Married an Axe Murderer, 1993; Serial Mom, 1994; Scary Movie, 2000). The expansion of this diverse sub-genre is facilitated by the fact that films about serial killing often appear as part of a series (Saw 1, Saw 2, Saw 3). The serial killer has also become a staple ingredient in TV cop shows (like CSI and Law and Order) and cult series (for example, Twin Peaks, The X-Files and Millennium).

According to Robert Conrath (1996: 156), ‘when Jeffrey Dahmer’s house of carnage was discovered in Milwaukee in 1991, television rights to his story were being negotiated within the hour’. Over the next few years, Dahmer was the subject of numerous documentaries (including An American Nightmare (1993) and The Monster Within (1996)), films (The Secret Life (1993) and Dahmer (2002)), several biographies and Joyce Carol Oates’s fictionalized Zombie (1996), a comic strip (by Derf, a cartoonist and coincidentally Dahmer’s childhood acquaintance) and a concept album by a heavy metal band called Macabre. The extensive media coverage of Dahmer’s exploits in 1991 coincided with the release of Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (which won the Best Picture Oscar and grossed US$272,700,000 in worldwide box-office) as well as the controversial and commercially successful Bret Easton Ellis novel, American Psycho (1991). Since the early 1990s, the translation of serial killer shock value into surplus value has become an increasingly profitable venture. This market both reflects and produces an apparently insatiable desire for images and stories of serial killing in a gothic hall of mirrors. According to case histories and psychological profiles, serial killers themselves are often avid consumers of films and books about serial killing. At the same time, the fictional monstrous murderers in popular culture, from Norman Bates to Hannibal Lecter, are often modelled on historical figures. In this context, Philip Jenkins (1994) proposes that, at least in the popular imaginary, the distinction between historical serial killers and their cinematic counterparts is dis- solving. In fact, even the label of ‘serial killer’ indirectly belongs to cinema. This term was coined by Robert Ressler, an FBI agent who named the killers he pursued after the ‘serial adventures’ he watched as a child in US cinemas. In his study of serial killers, Mark Seltzer (1998: 129) has offered a compelling critique of the virtualization of violence: ‘fascination with scenes of a spectacularized bodily violence is inseparable from the binding of violence to scene, spectacle, and representation’. The engine which drives this process is primarily economic. The commodification of violence is inseparable from the violence of commodification. In this article I wish to build on the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed towards the less transparent links that exist between consumerism itself and violence. A range of serial killer texts will be examined with the aim of uncovering unexpected intimacies between monstrous violence and the normal desires that circulate within consumer society. The serial killer will be unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer.

JUST DO IT: Killers, Consumers and Violence

Most people could confidently identify a serial killer, but definitions are more elusive. How many murders does it take to make a serial killer? Do these homicides need to involve a specific MO, in particular locations and within a prescribed time frame? Do serial killers have a characteristic relationship to their victim? Do they have to be motivated by sexual fantasy rather than material gain? And how exactly do serial killers differ from mass murderers and spree killers? There are competing definitions of the serial killer inside and outside the academic world. I have neither the space nor the skill to offer an authoritative classification, and so for the purpose of this article my working definition will of necessity be expansive. My focal point here will be fictional representations of the serial killer in film and fiction, but I will include reference to historical counterparts and supernatural metaphors (specifically, the vampire and zombie as figurative practitioners of serial homicide). The number of murders committed, the individual MOs, the timing and setting of the crimes, the connection to the victim and the motivation will be wildly divergent, but, in each instance, I hope to reveal covert affinities between the ‘monstrous’ serial killer and the ‘normal’ consumer.

While precise defintions prove elusive, the clichés are unavoidable. One of the most conspicuous commonplaces in the popular discourses of serial killing concerns the terrifying normality of the murderer. Rather than appearing monstrously different, the serial killer displays a likeness that disturbs the dominant culture. The violence of consumerism is similarly hidden beneath a façade of healthy normality. The glossy phantasmagoria of youth and beauty, freedom and pleasure, obscures widespread devastation and suffering. Etymology is instructive in this regard: to ‘consume’ is to devour and destroy, to waste and obliterate. With this definition in mind, Baudrillard (1998: 43) has traced a provocative genealogy between contemporary capitalism and tribal potlatch: ‘consumerism may go so far as consumation, pure and simple destruction’. The consumation of contemporary consumer capitalism assumes multiple forms: pollution, waste and the ravaging of non-renewable resources, bio-diversity and endangered species; the slaughter of animals for food, clothing and medicine; countless acts of violence against the consumer’s body that range from spectacular accidents to slow tortures and poisonings. At the national level the consumer economy produces radical inequalities that encourage violent crime. At the international level, consumer capitalism depends heavily on a ‘new slavery’ for millions in the developing world who are incarcerated in dangerous factories and sweatshops and subjected to the repetitive violence of Fordist production. In his autobiography, My Life and Work, Henry Ford calculated that the manufacture of a Model T required 7882 distinct operations but only 949 of these required ‘able-bodied’ workers: ‘670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed and ten by blind men’ (cited in Seltzer, 1998: 69). Third-world workers trapped in this Fordist fantasy to serve the needs of first-world consumers undergo dismemberments (figurative and sometimes literal) which echo the violent tortures practised by serial killers in post-Fordist cinema. And the violence of consumerism is not restricted to the factories and sweatshops. In The Anatomy of Resource Wars, Michael Renner (2002) explores links between first-world shopping malls and third-world war zones. Insatiable consumer demand fuels conflicts over resources in the developing world – from tropical forests to diamonds and coltan deposits (a mineral used in the manufacture of mobile phones and other electronic devices). Renner estimates that these conflicts have displaced over 20 million people and raised at least US$12 billion per year for rebels, warlords and totalitarian governments: ‘most consumers don’t know that a number of common purchases bear the invisible imprint of violence’ (p. 53). Recent conflicts in the Gulf are fuelled by the needs of western car cultures. In the 20th century the development of a consumer economy was twice kick-started by global war and the roots of 19th-century consumerism were terminally entangled in colonialism and slavery.

The violence of consumerism is structural and universal rather than being an incidental and localized side effect of the system. For many in the over-developed world this violence remains largely unseen, or, when visible, apparently unconnected to consumerism. In cultural representations of the serial killer, however, consumerism and violence are often extravagantly integrated. In fact, the leading ‘brand names’ in the genre are typically depicted as über-consumers. In Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), the eponymous Patrick Bateman embodies a merger between ultra- violence and compulsive consumerism. A catalogue of obscene and barbaric atrocities (serial murder, rape and torture) is interwoven with endless shopping lists of designer clothes and fashionable furniture, beauty products and audiovisual equipment, videos and CDs alongside multiple purchases at restaurants, gyms, health spas, concerts and clubs. As James Annesley (1998: 16) notes, ‘In American Psycho the word “consume” is used in all of its possible meanings: purchasing, eating and destroying’. Each brand of consumption is described in the same flat, affectless tone to underscore Bateman’s perception of everything in the world as a series of consumables arranged for his delectation.

Patrick Bateman thus represents a gothic projection of consumer pathology. In this respect, although his name echoes Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho, Bateman can be seen as a Yuppie analogue to the aristocratic Hannibal Lecter. Both killers coolly collect and consume body parts and can boast an intimate familiarity with fashionable commodities. In Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon and Hannibal, Lecter offers a connoisseur’s commentary on designer suits and Gucci shoes (a present for Clarice), handbags, perfume and aftershave. Lecter himself has become a voguish icon in millennial popular culture although his name alludes to mid-19th-century French verse. Baudelaire’s ‘Au Lecteur’ (1998 : 5) concludes with the following apostrophe:

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère!

[You know him, reader, that fastidious monster, You hypocritical reader, – my double, – my brother!]

If we follow Harris’s allusion, Lecter can be read, like Bateman, as the dark double of the monstrous consumer. The serial killer’s perverse charisma might be attributed in part to their function as allegorical embodiments of consumer drives and desires. According to this reading, the serial killer’s cannibalism is less a barbaric transgression of the norm and more a Neitzschean distillation of reification (in its simplest terms the tendency, central to consumerism, to treat people as objects and objects as people).

In Silence of the Lambs, the casting of serial killer as predatory über-consumer is underscored by animal and insect imagery. Clarice Starling is haunted by traumatic childhood memories of witnessing the hidden violence of animal slaughter. Dr Lecter diagnoses her devotion to the law as an attempt to silence the ‘screaming of the lambs’. Perhaps Lecter’s cannibalism might be diagnosed as an alternate response to that ‘screaming’, one which reverses power relations by putting consumers on the menu. Alongside the lambs, moths are a second key symbol that hint at the widespread though often invisible violence of consumerism:

Some [moths] are [destructive], a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do . . . The old definition of moth was ‘anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too . . . Is this what you do all the time – hunt Buffalo Bill? . . . Do you ever go out for cheeseburgers and beer or the amusing house wine? (Harris, 1990: 102)

The second serial killer in Silence of the Lambs is similarly doubled with the consumer and associated with animal imagery. While Lecter hunts for food, the predatory Buffalo Bill hunts for clothing. After the chase, Buffalo Bill deprives his prey of subjectivity and treats them like livestock: victims are penned, fed and then flayed for their skins. The nickname given to Jame Gumb by the media is suggestive. As a professional hunter, Buffalo Bill Cody was one of those responsible for reducing the bison population in North America from approximately 60 million to around 300 by 1893. After the near extinction of his prey, Buffalo Bill moved from animal slaughter to entertainment with his travelling ‘Wild West’ show. Thomas Harris’s ‘Buffalo Bill’, with his own serial killer trade marks, combines an identical mixture of hunting, slaughter and flaying with spectacle and entertainment. Buffalo Bill, alongside Francis Dolarhyde (the name of the killer in Harris’s Red Dragon again links money, skins and a doppelganger monster, Stevenson’s Mr Hyde) and above all the iconic Hannibal Lecter, have established Harris as a brand market leader in the commodification of serial killing.

The roots of the brand – the repeated logo or symbol that identifies a product – lie in cattle ranching. At the first crime scene in David Fincher’s Se7en, a morbidly obese murder victim is discovered after being forced to eat himself to death. (This MO is repeated in Brett Leonard’s Feed (2005) when a serial killer force-feeds obese women and broadcasts their demise on the Internet). When the detectives in Se7en investigate the crime scene they discover the word ‘Gluttony’ scrawled in grease behind the victim’s refrigerator beside a neat pile of cans with the ‘Campbell’s Soup’ brand clearly visible. The repetition of the Campbell’s brand of course alludes to Warhol’s series of paintings on the subject of consumer seriality. If, like the detectives in Se7en, we are prepared to ‘look behind’ objects in serial killer texts we may discover further clues to the hidden violence of serial consumerism.

Discover A New You: Killers, Consumers, and the Dream of ‘Becoming’

His product should already have changed its skin and stripped off its original form . . . a capitalist in larval form . . . His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation, (Marx, 1990: 204, 269)

Although the serial killer in David Fincher’s Se7en justifies his murders with pseudo-religious rhetoric, the victims he chooses also exemplify some of the capital vices and anxieties exploited by consumerism: the ‘Gluttony’ victim is guilty of over-eating; the ‘Pride’ victim is a fashion model guilty of acute narcissism; the ‘Sloth’ victim, according to Richard Dyer (1999: 40), is a case study in the dangers of under-exercising; the ‘Lust’ victim embodies a hardcore version of mainstream desires and fetishes. By foregrounding ‘sins’ that are central to consumerism and by naming the murderer ‘John Doe’, Se7en hints at the hyper-normality of serial killer pathology. Key aspects of consumer sensibility intersect with the trademark features of serial killer psychology: anxious and aggressive narcissism, the compulsive collection of fetish objects and fantasies of self-transformation.

In Silence of the Lambs, the epiphanic moment in Starling’s search for Jame Gumb comes in the bedroom of the killer’s first victim: Frederika Bimmel. As a Point Of View (POV) shot surveys the dead woman’s possessions the spectator sees the following: a romantic novel (entitled Silken Threads) beside a diet book, wallpaper with a butterfly motif, a tailor’s dummy and paper diamonds in the closet. Starling intuitively connects the paper diamonds to the cuts made by Gumb in the bodies of his victims. The spect- ator, however, might make additional connections. Demme’s mise-en-scene offers a symbolic suturing of the normal girl’s bedroom and the serial killer’s lair. Both spaces house dreams of romantic metamorphosis driven by self-dissatisfaction: the moths in Gumb’s basement are linked to the Silken Threads and butterflies in Bimmel’s bedroom while the diet book suggests the young woman shared the serial killer’s anxiety about body image. Clarice Starling, the young woman figuratively donning the traditional male garb of law enforcement (a woman trying to make it in a man’s world) is perhaps too preoccupied with tracking down a man who wants to wear a ‘woman suit’ to pursue these leads. Silence of the Lambs extravagantly foregrounds the importance of gender to subject formation. At the start of the film we are introduced to Clarice Starling in androgynous sweaty sportswear while training on an obstacle course. When the spectator subsequently arrives at the serial killer’s house, we see Jame Gumb sewing, pampering his poodle and parading before the camera like a catwalk model.

Jame may be symbolically feminized, but in Demme’s film, as in Harris’ novels, Se7en, American Psycho and the vast majority of serial killer texts, the murderer is biologically male. There are variations in the statistics (roughly between 88–95%), but the vast majority of serial killers are male (Vronsky, 2004). From a feminist perspective it could be argued that serial killing is not so much a radical departure from normal codes of civilized behaviour as it is an intensification of hegemonic masculine ideals. For the serial killer the murder is a means to an end and that end intersects in places with socially sanctioned definitions of masculine identity in institutions such as the military, many working places and the sports industry. The serial killer is driven by the desire to achieve mastery, virility and control: his objective is to dominate and possess the body and the mind of his victims. According to the binary logic of patriarchy, the killer/victim dyad produces a polarization of gender norms: the killer embodies an über-masculinity while the victim who is dominated, opened and entered personifies a hyper-femininity (irrespective of biology). The gendered power relations of serial homicide climax but do not end with the act of murder. Post-mortem the murderer will often take fetish objects from his victim. These totems function as testimony to his continuing domination of a dead body which exhibits an extreme form of the passivity which patriarchy seeks to assign to the feminine.

While serial killing is both literally and symbolically a male affair, the paradigmatic consumer is of course female. According to patriarchal folklore men are the primary producers and unenthusiastic shoppers while most women are devoted consumers and typically figure in the family as the person with overall responsibility for decision making with regard to most domestic purchases. Brett Leonard’s Feed (2005) might be mentioned here as a particularly pure example of this stereotypical dichotomy between the male serial murderer and the female consumer (the victims in the film are ‘Gainers’ who are fed to death). However, since the 1980s and throughout the period which has seen a dramatic rise in serial killer art, the consumer sphere has witnessed a withering of gender polarities. From the late 19th and for much of the 20thcentury, women were the primary target of advertising, particularly in the fields of beauty and fashion. The female consumer was relentlessly bombarded by images and messages in magazines, on billboards, and then through radio, cinema and TV, that encouraged physical self-obsession. Beneath the patina of positivity, this bomb- ardment aimed to promote an anxious policing of the female body – how the body looked and felt, what went over, into and came out of it. The covert imperative of this advertising was to manufacture that sense of inadequacy and self-dissatisfaction which is the essential psychological prerequisite for luxury purchases. Since the 1980s, the beauty and fashion industries, recognizing the potential of a relatively untapped market, began to target the male consumer in a similar manner. Subsequently, there has been a massive worldwide increase in sales of male fashion accessories, cosmetics and related products.

In the context of this erosion of gender polarities within consumer culture, it is noticeable that representations of the serial killer often involve androgyny and gender crisis. The killer is typically feminized by association with consumer subjectivity. He is obsessed with different forms of consumption and collecting and driven by dreams of ‘becoming’ (the key phrase in Harris’ Red Dragon), of radically refiguring his appear- ance and thus his identity. The killer’s violence might be read both as complicity with and rebellion against feminization through a reassertion of primitive masculinity. According to Baudrillard (1996: 69), in consumer culture there is a ‘general tendency to feminize objects . . . All objects . . . become women in order to be bought’. The feminization of the commodity is structurally integrated with the commodification of the feminine and the serial killer aims to assert mastery over both spheres. The violence of serial homicide might even be diagnosed as a nostalgic mode of production (of corpses and fetish objects) for the anxious male subject.

In Silence of the Lambs, Lecter offers the following diagnosis of Gumb’s pathology: ‘He’s tried to be a lot of things . . . [But] he’s not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill’ (Harris, 1990: 159, 165). The killer is driven by a profound sense of lack to ‘covet’ (Lecter’s term) what he sees everyday and then to hunt for the new skin that would enable a radical self-transformation. In this respect Gumb constitutes a psychotic off-shoot of normal consumer psychology: his violent response to lack is deviant, but the desires which move him are mainstream. Gumb succumbs to mass media fantasy and advertising which have trained him to feel incomplete and anxious while promising magical metamorphoses on consumption of the ideal (feminized) commodity. The dreams of the serial killer and the serial consumer converge: reinvent- ing the self through bodily transformation and transcendence. Buffalo Bill, we might say, is merely fleshing out the advertising fantasy of a ‘new you’. This is the same dream of ‘becoming’ pursued by Francis Dollarhyde in Red Dragon/Manhunter. It is also the dream of Patrick Bateman, known by his acquaintances as ‘total GQ’ (Ellis, 1991: 90) but who, like Jame Gumb, experiences himself as ‘total lack’: ‘There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory . . . I simply am not there’ (pp. 376–7). Bateman attempts to fill the void with an endless procession of commodities and logos: designer clothes and cuisine, male grooming products and technological gadgets, Versace, Manolo Blahnik, Giorgio Armani. Bateman is a cut-up (like his victims) of commodity signs. He talks in the language of advertising and incessantly imagines himself in commercials, sit-coms, chat shows, action movies and porn films. Bateman’s ultra-violence gives physical expression to the acute feelings of anxiety and incompletion which accompany the consumer society’s unachievable fantasy of perfect bodies living perfect lives.

Silence of the Lambs similarly articulates the complex integration of violence, fantasy, gender identity and consumer subjectivity. The first clue that Lecter gives to Starling is the cryptic, ‘Look deep within yourself’. Subsequently, Starling discovers that ‘Your Self’ is in fact a storage facility in downtown Baltimore. Closer investigation uncovers a dead body in a car crammed alongside hoarded possessions. Forcing her way into ‘Your Self’, Starling discovers a decapitated man’s head placed on top of a mannequin wearing a dress. This tableau captures the dark underside of consumer psychology: erotics, fetishism, fantasy and death. The victim’s cross-dressing signifies the same yearning for self-transformation witnessed in Buffalo Bill and Frederika Bimmel. For the killer, the victim and the consumer, fantasy is the exoskeleton of the commodity. The murder, the dressing-up, the purchase; each is driven by dreams of metamorphosis. Consumption, Baudrillard (1998: 31) reminds us, ‘is governed by a form of magical thinking’. Numerous case studies have concluded that serial killers are prone to hyperactive fantasy lives (see Seltzer, 1998; Vronsky, 2004). It would be a mistake to dismiss these fantasies as merely the overture to violence; rather, the violence is a means of sustaining the fantasy. By the same token, the practice and pathology of serial consumerism are driven by fantasies that cannot be fulfilled and so are compulsively repeated. We consume not products, but dream-images from a collective phantasmagoria.

These fantasies are fuelled by capitalism’s official art form: advertising. Perhaps in part the serial killer’s crime is taking the promises of advertising too literally – acting out the fantasy of a world ready-made for our consumption. The serial killer is both a millennial vogue and perhaps the ultimate fashion victim. Every aspect of Patrick Bateman’s lifestyle – clothing, diet, gadgetry, interior design and leisure time – is dictated by fashion. In his basement, Jame Gumb adopts glamour poses before a camera and struts like a catwalk model. The Death’s Head moths in his garment sweatshop symbolically suture the fashion industry with fetishism, hidden suffering and death. In his critique of the French arcades, the first cathedrals of consumer capital and forerunners of the department store and mall, Benjamin (1999b: 62–3) argued that fashion stands in opposition to the organic. It couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, it defends the rights of the corpse . . . fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between women and ware – between carnal pleasure and corpse . . . For fashion was never anything other than the parody of the motley cadaver, provocation of death through the woman.

EXQUISITE CORPSE: Killers, Consumers, and Mannequins

The sexual impulse-excitations are exceptionally plastic. (Freud, 1981: 389)

According to Benjamin (1999b), a key fetish object in the phantasmagorical arcades was the mannequin:

the fashion mannequin is a token from the realm of the dead . . . the model for imitation . . . Just as the much-admired mannequin has detachable parts, so fashion encourages the fetishist fragmentation of the living body . . . the woman mimics the mannequin and enters history as a dead object. (p. 78)

One of Benjamin’s German contemporaries, Hans Bellmer, explored the deathly sensuality of the mannequin through the lens of surrealist photography. Eroticized dolls were dressed in veils and underwear or covered in flowers. The mannequin was shot both as whole and dismembered, sometimes posed coyly and at other times torturously convoluted and bound in a perverse meeting of the shop window and the S&M dungeon.

In the 80s and 90s, the photographer Cindy Sherman developed a more explicit and grisly mode of mannequin pornography. In her ‘Disaster’, ‘Fairy Tale’ and ‘Sex’ series, Sherman deploys dolls and prosthetic body parts in tableau that combine eroticism, violence and abjection. Sherman’s photographs recall Lacan’s (1989) work on ‘imagos of the fragmented body’:

These are the images of castration, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, bursting open of the body . . . One has only to listen to children aged between two and five playing, alone or together, to know that the pulling off of the head and the ripping open of the belly are themes that occur spontaneously to their imagination, and that this is corroborated by the experience of the doll torn to pieces. (p. 179)

Imagos of the deconstructed body are everywhere in the infantile fantasies of consumer culture: perfect legs, perfect breasts, perfect hair, perfect teeth, bodies endlessly dismembered in the ceaseless strafing of advertising imagery. Sherman’s photography foregrounds the rhetoric of advertising: the dissection of the body by fashion, fitness and beauty industries into fragmentary fetishes. At the same time these images stage a spectacular return of the repressed for those anxieties (about filth, aging, illness and death) covertly fuelled by consumerism’s representational regime.

In 1997, Sherman attempted to import her ‘imagos of the fragmented body’ into the mainstream in the film Office Killer. Dorine Douglas, a female serial killer, murders her co-workers at Constant Consumer magazine and takes the corpses home to her cellar where she plays with them as life-size dolls. Douglas’s hobby echoes Jeffrey Dahmer’s confession that his ‘experimentation’ with the human form began with the theft of a mannequin from a store: ‘I just went through various sexual fantasies with it, pretending it was a real person, pretending that I was having sex with it, masturbating, and undressing it’ (cited in Tithecott, 1999: 46). The mannequin enjoys a peculiar prominence in serial killer texts. In Maniac (1980), Frank Zito scalps his victims and places his trophies on the fashion mannequins that decorate his apartment. In Demme’s Silence of the Lambs, Benjamin Raspail’s decapitated head is placed on a shop dummy and mannequins are conspicuous in Jame Gumb’s garment sweatshop. Similarly, in Ed Gein (2000), the eponymous killer’s ‘woman suit’ is draped over a mannequin in his workshop. The climactic scenes in the serial killer road movie Kalifornia (1993) take place in mock suburban dwellings (part of a nuclear test site) occupied exclusively by mannequins. In House of Wax (2005) the serial killer trans- forms his victims into living dolls by encasing them in wax and a similar MO is evident in The Cell where the killer bleaches his female victim’s bodies in imitation of the dolls he played with as a child.

Although mannequins are less conspicuous in Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) than in Glamorama (in which they function as a key motif signifying the millennial merger of fashion with terrorism), they still perform a crucial symbolic function. Mannequins epitomize the ideal of 80s body fascism: tall, youthful, slim, impervious to wrinkles, scars and blemishes, untouched by illness and aging. Bateman’s obsession with the designer clothing worn by others in his social circle underlines their status (and his own) as mobile mannequins. Bateman’s fetishistic fascination with ‘hard bodies’ – both the muscular torso built in the gym and the stiff and frozen body parts he collects – similarly attests to the prevalence of a mannequin ideal in contemporary consumer culture. In ironic affirmation of this aesthetic, the film adaptation of Ellis’s novel was accompanied by the marketing of an ‘American Psycho Action Figure’ – an 18’ inch mini-mannequin equipped with fake Armani suit and knife.

In pursuit of the hegemonic fantasy of the hard body, in the gym and in his daily fitness regime, Bateman remorselessly punishes himself. The über-consumer is narcissistically fixated on his abdominal muscles, his face, his skin tone, how his body is adorned, what goes into it (dietary obsessions) and comes out (especially blood). The violence that Bateman inflicts on his victims appears as an extension of his own masochistic self-objectification:

Shirtless, I scrutinize my image in the mirror above the sinks in the locker room at Xclusive. My arm muscles burn, my stomach is as taut as possible, my chest steel, pectorals granite hard, my eyes white as ice. In my locker in the locker room at Xclusive lie three vaginas I recently sliced out of various women I’ve attacked in the past week. Two are washed off, one isn’t. There’s a barrette clipped to one of them, a blue ribbon from Hermès tied around my favourite. (Ellis, 1991: 370)

In Bateman’s locker we witness the gender confusion of the male killer and the latent violence of consumer body culture writ large. Bateman’s attempt to transform himself into an anthropomorphosized phallus is partly offset by the accessories (a hair clasp and ribbon) and pathologies gendered ‘feminine’ by patriarchy (vanity and masochism). According to Baudrillard (1998: 129), the consumer is ultimately encouraged to consume themselves: ‘in the consumer package, there is one object finer, more precious and more dazzling than any other . . . That object is the BODY’. For Patrick Bateman, serial killing is a mode of extreme make-over: a refashioning of bodies, including his own, into trophies. In Demme’s Se7en, John Doe’s body terrorism (force-feeding a fat man, cutting off a female model’s nose) mirrors, albeit in grotesque distortions, the mania of millennial consumer society. Similarly, the serial killers in Thomas Harris are fixated on bodily transformation: Buffalo Bill attempts to put him- self inside a new body while Lecter puts others’ bodies inside himself. The horrific practices of these fictional killers find their everyday analogue in the slow serial torture of the consumer’s body by capital: the injections and invasions of cosmetic surgery, the poisonings, pollutions and detoxifications, the over-consumption and dieting, the leisure rituals and compulsive exercise.

In an early scene from Mary Harron’s adaptation of American Psycho we witness Patrick Bateman’s morning exercise and beauty regime: crunches and push-ups are followed by ‘deep-pore cleanser lotion . . . water-activated gel cleanser . . . honey- almond body scrub’. As Bateman admires himself in the bathroom mirror his face is sheathed in a ‘herbal mint facial masque’ that lends the skin a mannequin sheen. When Bateman peels off his synthetic second skin the gesture echoes the gothic facials practised in Silence of the Lambs. Lecter, who, at their first meeting, identifies Clarice by her skin cream, escapes his captors by performing an improvised plastic surgery – he removes a guard’s face and places it over his own. This act is the prelude to a subsequent ‘official’ plastic surgery performed to disguise his identity. Jame Gumb’s needlepoint with human flesh might be traced back to Norman Bates’s taxidermy. Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) (the inspiration for Hitchcock’s movie) was loosely based on Ed Gein’s flaying and preserving of human flesh. Gein’s ghost also haunts the exploits of the Sawyer family in the series of Texas Chainsaw films: throughout the original (1973), the sequels (1986, 1990), the Next Generation (1994), the remake (2003), and the Beginning (2006) flesh is flayed, cut, tanned, sewed, worn, displayed and consumed. Mark Seltzer (1998) has noted the prevalence of ‘skin games’ in serial killer cinema and fiction. Beneath these ‘games’ we might catch glimpses of a profound skin disease promoted by the mannequin aesthetics of the beauty industry. As Judith Halberstam (1995: 163) has commented, ‘We wear modern monsters like skin, they are us, they are on us and in us’.

OBEY YOUR THIRST: Compulsive Seriality

The circulation of money is the constant and monotonous repetition of the same process . . . the endless series . . . the series of its [the commodity’s] representations never comes to an end. (Marx, 1990: 156, 210–11)

The structure of repetition which is the economy of death. (Blau, 1987: 70)

Baudrillard (1998) proposes that the models and mannequins conspicuous in consumer culture are ‘simultaneously [a] negation of the flesh and the exaltation of fashion’ (p. 141). Conversely, it might be argued that contemporary consumerism entails a massive extension and eroticisation of epidermises. The bioeconomics of consumerism involves ceaseless and intimate miscegenation between capital, commodity and the corporeal. This results in both an objectification of the body and a somatization of the commodity. In his Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, Haug (1986) explores ‘the generalized sexualization of commodities . . . the commodity’s skin and body’ as it penetrates the ‘pores of human sensuality’ (pp. 42, 76). The passion for commodities, their pursuit and possession by consumers might be diagnosed as a socially-sanctioned fetishism. The collection of shoes and the collection of human feet of course involve radically different fetishistic (not to mention ethical) intensities, but these activities share psychodynamic similarities.

For Baudrillard (1996: 87) there is a ‘manifest connection between collecting and sexuality . . . it constitutes a regression to the anal stage, which is characterised by accumulation, orderliness, aggressive retention’. Case studies suggest that serial killers are often devoted collectors (see Vronsky, 2004). Their histories typically begin with killing and collecting dead animals and when they progress to human prey the murder is accompanied by the taking of a trophy. In Collectors, Julian Hobbs offers an uncomfortable analogy between this trophy-taking, the hoarding practised by the cult followers of serial killers and the collection of images by the documentary film-maker. This practice is similarly conspicuous in fictional representations of the serial killer from Norman Bates’s collection of stuffed birds, to his namesake, Patrick Bateman, who compulsively collects (and seemingly without distinction) clothes, gadgets, music CDs, body parts and serial killer biographies: ‘Bateman reads these biographies all the time: Ted Bundy and Son of Sam and Fatal Vision and Charlie Manson. All of them’ (Ellis, 1991: 92). In Silence of the Lambs, Gumb collects flayed flesh while the more refined (at least while incarcerated) Lecter ‘collect[s] church collapses, recreationally’ alongside fine art prints (Harris, 1990: 21). The killer in Kiss the Girls (1997), like Jame Gumb, collects his victims and hordes them underground. Similarly, in The Cell, the killer locks his victims in underground storage before using them to build a collection of human dolls. Although the killer in The Bone Collector is only interested in accumulating skeletal fragments, his activities similarly require subterranean investigations. Digging beneath the psychological surface of the collector and his system of ‘sequestered objects’, Baudrillard (1996) detects a ‘powerful anal-sadistic impulse’:

The system may even enter a destructive phase, implying the self-destruction of the subject. Maurice Rheims evokes the ritualised ‘execution’ of objects – a kind of suicide based on the impossibility of ever circumscribing death. It is not rare . . . for the subject eventually to destroy the sequestered object or being out of a feeling that he can never completely rid himself of the adversity of the world, and of his own sexuality. (pp. 98–9)

Irrespective of the object, ‘what you really collect is always yourself’ (Baudrillard, 1996: 91). Serial killing, like consumerism, is driven by a sense of lack. Psychological profiles of serial killers typically diagnose the cause of the subject’s compulsive behaviour as a profound sense of incompletion (see Seltzer, 1998). Although of a different order, comparable dynamics are evident in what Haug (1986) calls the ‘commodity-craving’ of consumer sensibility. Estimates vary (from 1 to 25%) but an increasing number of studies agree that compulsive shopping is a recognizable and burgeoning problem (Hartson and Koran, 2002). American Psycho offers an extended parallelism between compulsive consumerism and compulsive violence. Attempting to describe the sensations he experiences after his first documented attack Bateman relies on consumerist tropes: ‘I feel ravenous, pumped up, as if I’d just worked out . . . or just embraced the first line of cocaine, inhaled the first puff of a fine cigar, sipped the first glass of Cristal. I’m starving and need something to eat’ (Ellis, 1991: 132).

Ellis juxtaposes exhaustive catalogues of commodities with exhaustive catalogues of sexual violence and proposes that the frenzy of consumer desire climaxes, for Bateman, not with fulfillment, but increasing boredom and acute anxiety.

In Serial Killers, Mark Seltzer (1998: 64) proposes that

The question of serial killing cannot be separated from the general forms of seriality, collection and counting conspicuous in consumer society . . . and the forms of fetishism – the collecting of things and representations, persons and person-things like bodies – that traverse it.

Every aspect of Bateman’s existence is structured by the compulsively circular logics of capitalist reproduction. Bateman (Norman Bates’s yuppie double) has seen the film Body Double 37 times. When he is not watching Body Double over and over, Bateman compulsively consumes other examples of serialized mass culture: daily episodes and reruns of The Patty Winters Show (a parodic double of the Oprah Winfrey Show); restaurant reviews and fashion tips in weekly magazines; crime stories in the newspapers and on TV, endlessly repeated video footage of plane crashes. On a shopping expedition, Bateman finds himself mesmerized while ‘looking at the rows, the endless rows of ties’ (Ellis, 1991: 296). On the run from the police he is similarly paralysed by rows of luxury cars (BMW 3, 5, 7 series, Jaguar, Lexus) and thus unable to choose a getaway vehicle. Bateman collects clothes in series (matching suits, shirts, shoes), beauty products, music CDs, varieties of mineral water, recipes and menus. Despite the advertising promises of unique purchases that offer instant fulfilment, there are no singular only serial objects in consumer society and ‘each commodity fills one gap while opening up another: each commodity and sale entails a further one’ (Haug, 1986: 91).

The pullulation of serial objects is accompanied by the expansion of serialized spaces. Throughout American Psycho, Bateman is continually lost and unable to distinguish between identical office buildings, restaurants, nightclubs and apartment buildings. This confusing interchangeability extends to people. Although clothing is instantly recognizable (everyone identifies everyone else by labels) people repeatedly misidentify each other. Thus, American Psycho underscores Jeffrey Nealon’s (1998: 112) disturbing contention that, in contemporary consumer society, ‘identity, for both commodity and human, is an effect rather than a cause of serial iteration’. The killer in Se7en, the anonymously named John Doe, attempts to build a distinctive identity by performing a series of grisly murders. At the first crime scene, as noted earlier, Doe’s arrangement of Campbell’s soup cans clearly alludes to Warhol’s work on the seriality and compulsive repetition of consumerism. Manhunter (1986), the first of the Hannibal Lecter films, makes a similar point in more comic fashion. A shot-reverse-shot sequence in a supermarket is littered with glaring continuity errors as father and son remain motionless while the products lined up in neat rows on the shelves behind them change (and the sequence ends with the detective framed by the cereals aisle). In Manhunter, Dollarhyde’s repetitive violence is partly inspired by Hannibal Lecter. This repetition is repeated in Red Dragon, the remake of Manhunter. Serial killers are often copycats and serial killer cinema repeats this trait: in Copycat the killer repeats famous murders and in Virtuosity a virtual criminal is manufactured from a serial killer database. Serial killer films themselves become series, spawning sequel after sequel. Although these narratives typically conclude with the murder of the killer, the audience is reassured that he will return in a vicious circle that begs the question: can seriality itself be killed?

DARK SATANIC MALLS: Killers, Consumers, and the Living Dead

We suffer not only from the living, but the dead. (Marx, 1990: 91)

[Bateman] moved like a zombie towards Bloomingdale’s. (Ellis, 1991: 179)

Serial representations of serial killers are often haunted by suggestions of the supernatural. In Silence of the Lambs, for example, one of Lecter’s guards nervously inquires whether he is ‘some kind of vampire’. This question echoes the nicknames given to serial killer Richard Trenton Chase (‘Dracula’ and the ‘Vampire Killer of Sacramento’). In Psycho Paths, Philip Simpson (2000) tracks the ways in which ‘fictional representations of contemporary serial killers obviously plunder the vampire narratives of the past century and a half’ (p. 4). Simpson also proposes that many of the supernatural monsters that have evolved from folklore (vampires, werewolves, zombies etc.) may have been inspired by historical serial killers avant la lettre. Historical and fictional serial killers are often traced through a supernatural stencil and in this concluding section, I shall consider the supernatural monsters of contemporary popular culture as metaphorical serial killers/consumers.

Since the 80s, cinema and video audiences have consumed a succession of successful horror franchises founded on supernatural serial killers: for example, Freddie in Nightmare on Elm Street (parts 1–8), Jason in Friday the 13th (parts 1–13) and Michael Myers in Halloween (parts 1–8). The popularity of this sub-genre has grown alongside the increased media coverage of serial killing and might be interpreted as a form of displaced engagement with the urgent reality of violent crime. Within this gallery of celebrity monsters the vampire continues to be a conspicuous presence. Dracula, for example, continues to appear in fiction and film, comics and cartoons, children’s culture (Count Quackula) and breakfast cereals (‘Count Chocula’). The publication of Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire in 1976 was the prelude to a renaissance in vampire film and fiction: Rice’s own highly successful Vampire Chronicles (including Tale of the Body Thief in which an angst-ridden vampire assuages his conscience by preying on serial killers) have been augmented by Blade and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, Underworld and Van Helsing. These gothic incarnations of the predatory serial killer have never been so legion. In criticism of this oeuvre it has become almost compulsory to read vampirism as a metaphor for capitalism. This trend can be traced to Marx’s (1990) own penchant for vampiric tropes: ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (p. 342). Perhaps Marx, an avid reader of horror fiction, was inspired here by the serialization, in 1847, of James Malcolm Ryner’s Varney the Vampire. Despite his aspirations to scientific objectivity, a gothic lexicon is employed repeatedly in Marx’s work: Capital is crowded with references to vampires, the Wallachian Boyar (a.k.a Vlad Tepes, the historical inspiration for Stoker’s Dracula), werewolves, witchcraft, spells, magic and the occult and Marx claimed repeatedly to have detected ‘necromancy’ at the heart of the commodity form. In the work of Walter Benjamin, similarly packed with gothic tropes, ‘necromancy’ elides with necrophilia. For Benjamin, the sensual engagement between consumers and the products of dead labour blurs the lines between lust (appetites) and leiche (the corpse). Precisely this disturbing entangle- ment of death and eroticism is at the core of the predatory vampire’s charisma. The vampire has fascinated consumers and Marxist critics alike – the latter as an allegorical embodiment of the monstrous and mesmerising energies of capital.

A far less seductive version of the living dead, one who has received relatively little critical attention alongside the aristocratic vampire, is the zombie. The MO of the zombie – cannibalism – is also practised by many historical and fictional serial killers. In fact, the consumption of human flesh, blood and organs is the most transgressive taboo performed by historical and fictional serial killers from Jeffry Dahmner (subject of Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie) to Hannibal Lecter, from Armin Meiwes to Patrick Bateman and Leatherface. Cannibal studies has become a burgeoning field in contemporary critical theory and one of its most contentious assertions is that modern consumerism constitutes a mode of neocannibalism. For example, Crystal Bartolovich (1998) proposes that consumerism embodies the cultural logic of ‘late cannibalism’, Deborah Root (1996) detects a ‘cannibal culture’ in contemporary consumerism, art, popular culture and tourism while Dean MacCannell (1992) has similarly called for a reinterpretation of western tourism and other aspects of consumerism in terms of cannibalism. In a variety of fields, from ecology and tourism to sexuality and organ transplants, from business take-overs to pop culture intertextuality, critics in various disciplines have uncovered intricate intersections between cannibalist and consumerist modes of incorporation. Although contemporary capitalism is of course founded on a figurative rather than literal practice, with its relentless consumption of land and labour, resources and spectacles, cannibalism without necrophagy still mirrors the modes of desire and domination, the obsessive violence, wastefulness and irrational excesses that under- pinned classical cannibal practices. According to Deborah Root (1996: 3), one might detect in the endless hunger of late capitalism a ‘pervasive cannibal unconscious’.

The past few years have seen a dramatic upsurge in films that focus on flesh-eaters: Land of the Dead (2005) and Return of the Living Dead 5 (2005), Resident Evil (2002) and Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) (based on a hugely successful survival horror video game franchise), 28 Days Later (2002), Children of the Living Dead (2001) and Shaun of the Dead (2004). US popular culture began its colonization of Haitian folklore in 1932 with Bela Lugosi starring in White Zombie. The setting of Victor Halperin’s film on a Caribbean sugar plantation offered a suggestive analogy between zombification and slavery. Although most see the zombie as sheer superstition others have read it, like vampirism, as political metaphor. In his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre used the metaphor of colonial subjects as zombies. On occasion zombification could be more than mere metaphor. In 1918, in Haiti, newspapers reported that most of the employees of the American sugar corporation who worked on the cane plantations were zombies. Conspiracy theorists proposed that US chemists had finally caught up with voodoo medicine and had started poisoning the workforce to produce docile and submissive labourers.

George Romero’s seminal zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), overturned the tradition of offering zombies as symbols of oppressed colonial labour and instead offered a gothic caricature of consumers as the living dead. Dawn of the Dead is set largely in Monroeville, a shopping mall in Cleveland, some time after a zombie epidemic has swept the nation. Four human survivors seek refuge at the mall but their respite is interrupted by the arrival of hordes of zombies. One of the characters explains their presence thus: ‘some kind of instinct. Memory . . . of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives . . . It’s not us they’re after, it’s the place. They remember that they want to be here’. The zombies seem like slapstick shoppers: they are hypnotized by the mannequins, they fall over on the escalators or into fountains while looking at glistening coins. Initially, the humans have no trouble in trapping and killing the zombie-shoppers using muzak, PA announcements and by posing in shop windows as consumable bait. Gradually, however, the threat increases and Romero progressively collapses the distance and differences between the human characters and the zombie mob.

How pertinent is Romero’s carnivalesque parody of mindless consumerism? In The Malling of America, William Kowinski (2002) describes the psychology of shopping in malls as a ‘zombie effect’. The architectural design of malls induces consumers to wander for hours in an endless pursuit of goods and services. In ‘Islands of the Living Dead: the Social Geography of McDonaldisation’, George Ritzer (2003) focuses on the devivifying influence of commodification. In accordance with a socioeconomic and psychological design perfected by McDonalds, the landscapes of consumerism are so structured, standardized and disciplined that the subjects moving through them are, he contests, simultaneously alive and dead. Ritzer borrows a phrase from Baudrillard to describe this as a world that resembles ‘the smile of a corpse in a funeral home’ (p. 127). Sometimes shoppers shuffle numbly by instinct between aisles and shops (like Romero zombies), but sometimes they can get nasty (like Romero zombies). Rhonda Lieberman (1993) and other analysts of shopping disorders have commented on increases in violence in consumer spaces: mall hysteria, sales frenzy and even full- blown riots. For example, when IKEA opened a new store in Edmonton, North London, in 2005, a riot involving 7000 people and multiple stabbings ensued (Oliver, 2005). The zombie desires to consume all the time and when it is prevented from consuming it becomes violent. An emergency broadcast in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead explains why the zombie plague has spread so quickly across the country. The living dead only consume around 5 per cent of their victims before moving on in search of the next meal. The violence, wastefulness and instinctive serial consumption of the zombie makes it, like the serial killer, a gothic projection of the commodifying fury of late capitalism. Monsters Inc. is a booming business. The spectacular increase in images and narratives of serial killing in millennial western culture, from the media coverage of historical homicide to the proliferation of fictional and supernatural fantasies of serial homicide, ultimately embodies the consumption of consumption in a necrocapitalist order.

References

Annesley, James (1998) Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Pluto.

Bartolovich, Crystal (1998) ‘Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism’, in Barker, Hulme and Iversen (eds) Cannibalism and the Colonial World, 204–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baudelaire, Charles (1998) The Flowers of Evil. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Baudrillard, Jean (1996) The System of Objects. London: Verso.

Baudrillard, Jean (1998) The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London: SAGE Publications.

Benjamin, Walter (1999a) Illuminations. London: Pimlico.

Benjamin, Walter (1999b) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Blau, Herbert (1987) The Eye of the Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Burroughs, William (1965) ‘The Art of Fiction’, Paris Review 35: 1–37.

Conrath, Robert (1996) ‘Serial Heroes: A Sociocultural Probing into Excessive Consumption’, in John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet (eds) European Readings of American Popular Culture, pp. 147–58. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Derrida, Jacques (1995) Points . . .: Interviews, 1979–1994. Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press.

Dyer, Richard (1999) Se7en. London: BFI.

Easton Ellis, Bret (1991) American Psycho. London: Picador.

Fanon, Frantz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove.

Freud, Sigmund (1981) Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Halberstam, Judith (1995) Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Harris, Thomas (1990) Silence of the Lambs. London: Mandarin.

Hartson, H. J. and Koran, L. M (2002) ‘Impulsive Behaviour in a Consumer Culture’, International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice 6(2): 65–8.

Haug, W. F. (1986) Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Advertising and Sexuality in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Polity.

Jenkins, Philip (1994) Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Kowinski, William (2002) The Malling of America. Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris.

Lacan, Jacques (1989) Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge.

Lieberman, Rhonda (1993) ‘Shopping Disorders’, in B. Massumi (ed.) The Politics of Everyday Fear, pp. 245–68. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

MacCannell, Dean (1992) Empty Meeting Grounds: Tourist Papers Vol. 1. London: Routledge.

Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Nealon, Jeffrey T. (1998) Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Oliver, Mark (2005) ‘Slowly but Steadily, Madness Descended’, Guardian, 10 February.

Priest, Christopher (1998) The Extremes. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Renner, Michael (2002) The Anatomy of Resource Wars. Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute.

Ritzer, George (2003) ‘Islands of the Living Dead: The Social Geography of McDonaldization’, American Behavioral Scientist 47(2): 119–36.

Root, Deborah (1996) Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Seltzer, Mark (1998) Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. London: Routledge.

Simpson, Philip (2000) Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Tithecott, Richard (1999) Of Men and Monsters: Jeffrey Dahmer and the Construction of the Serial Killer. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Vronsky, Peter (2004) Serial Killers: The Methods and Madness of Monsters. New York: Berkley Books.

#deviance #commodification #Consumerism #popular culture #serial killers #violence #true crime #serial murder #hannibal lecter #spectacle #consumption #media consumption #murderabilia #violence of commodification #deviance studies

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zenonaa · 5 years

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Read here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18318629/chapters/43451429 Read from the beginning here: http://zenonaa.tumblr.com/post/183875659535/read

Comments: Day 4... Night! I mean, it takes place at night, so that counts for something, right? Also, while they are talking about murders in this chapter, no one actually dies in this chapter.

warning: there is a mention of sexual assault. it’s not detailed but referred to.

***

Hope’s Peak Academy sat right in the middle of a large city like the Sun in the solar system, and all the buildings and lots around it were planets or chunks of rock that had been pulled into orbit. However, due to the establishment’s location, light pollution was strongest here so to the naked eye, only the brightest stars could be seen at best, and so Touko wondered what Byakuya was looking at as he faced her dorm window.

Yes, that was right. Byakuya was in her dorm. He visited, voluntarily, and she let him in, voluntarily. Touko stood over by her coffee table and rubbed her wrist. If she had known, she would have tidied first. Stacks of books sat on top of her desk, around her desk, around her bed and crammed into bookcases. They occupied much of her floor, not just a handful but dozens of them, resembling a city with high-rise buildings. When Touko moved out of the house she rented while she attended her previous high school, she had brought her collection of books here with her. Every single one.

Her grip on her skirt increased as she nibbled on her lips. She should have sorted the place out. Spruced it up. Even though she hadn’t totally expected his visit, she still should have made her living arrangements presentable in case she hosted someone as esteemed as him.

Perhaps she should clean now, put on a maid outfit and spit shine his shoes too, but she didn’t know where she would get a maid outfit from. What a disaster.

Byakuya finally turned away from the window, and she roused from her fretting. Even though she had memorised his face, could write every detail about it, to the shade of his blue eyes to the angles of his lips throughout various expressions, at this moment, she couldn’t read him. The best she could describe his countenance was with ‘thoughtful’, but she couldn’t tell what he was thinking except that it wasn’t an amusing thought.

He slowly raised a hand, which held the purple notebook that she gave him to read.

“Touko Fukawa,” he said, and she had to hold herself. Her name rolled in his mouth like a piece of hard candy. Byakuya gave the notebook a small shake.

She glanced at it but locked onto his face as her target, breathing loudly.

“I already knew that you are incredibly talented,” he said, staring back at her. “Even if I abhor romance as a concept and in real life, I would be lying if I said that your skill didn’t exist. However...”

Her panting snuffed out, held in. Suspended. She held her breath.

“... after reading your I-Novel...” Byakuya paused again, to adjust his glasses and choose his words, like taking steps through a pitch black room. “... I realise that your talent is on a whole other level to which I assumed.”

Touko widened her eyes and gasped, tucking her elbows into her sides. He lifted his chin but didn’t break eye contact.

“With your romance novels, you made fishermen more popular with women. You did the same with butlers, with teachers... using words. Reading this I-Novel, based on experiences on your life... stirred in me an emotion,” he told her, and she shivered.

“An... emotion?” she repeated, unable to process any thoughts of her own.

“Yes. It was dark.” His head shifted, and his glasses flashed as he did. “You described everything in vivid detail, and I read all of it in a single sitting. I am not a man that is easily affected by others. I have seen a lot of things that many people would have broken down at.”

He stopped talking. She couldn’t prompt him even if she tried. Her throat had closed up.

“... At the end of the competition to choose which sibling would be the sole heir of the conglomerate, there was a round where fifteen people were chosen,” he said, seeming to change the subject. “Despite my success in previous rounds, I was eliminated. During my research, I uncovered that a sibling had bribed those overseeing the competition and had been taken my spot. So, I found out where it was taking place and donned a disguise. Accompanied by a detective, we went to investigate...”

Touko nodded. She could do that. And her breathing had evened out, just about.

“The final round took place on an island. A challenge would have been set, but before one was given... one of the competitors died.”

His revelation shot a chill up her. She clasped her hands together. From how darkly he said it, the death didn’t sound natural. “Died?”

“Then another... and another,” he carried on. “It became clear that there was at least one murderer on the island. Soon, only a handful remained, and then...”

When he hesitated, his face didn’t contort, but he gritted his teeth and a spasm quivered once in his cheek that he couldn’t control.

“... two of the competitors, twins, set another competitor on fire. After that, a different competitor murdered the twins, and as the burnt competitor lay there, helpless, he attacked her.”

Touko visualised the scene, picturing twins with blue featureless skin, one with pigtails, one with a bob cut, who were cut up with an axe by a bigger blue humanoid. Once they were dead, it reared its head and set its eyes on its prey - a small, blue humanoid. At this point, everything fractured, crumbling away, and her toes curled in her shoes.

“Did... he...?” Touko mumbled.

“Yes. He wasn’t even a Togami by blood, it turned out.” Byakuya glared, not at her, but she felt its intensity, the heat of its glow, and cringed. “Instead, he was the adopted sibling of the competitor that he brutally assaulted, and he had been slotted into the last round of the competition... under my name!”

She flung a hand to her mouth and jolted.

“But...” Her head spun, and she could feel her heartbeat between her ears. “How did he bribe his way in? Surely, the conglomerate boasted such a vast amount of money that they wouldn’t be able to be swayed with money.”

“Exactly.” He folded his arms over his chest. “Apparently, he offered an incredibly rare creature, but I have never seen proof of its existence.”

Touko couldn’t bring herself to dwell or care about this supposed rare creature, at least for the moment.

“What happened next?” asked Touko, wishing this was like a book so she could skip ahead and find out.

And she hated it when people did that.

“Me, the detective and Pennyworth found the imposter as he was in the middle of... that,” said Byakuya. Her stomach knotted. He didn’t give anything away, speaking with an impartial tone, with smooth features. “There was a confrontation, and in the end, Pennyworth killed the imposter. Almost everyone was dead, but I had proven myself, so I shed off my disguise and claimed the right to be heir. Then my mother married my father - for formality’s sake, of course. Outside of public appearances together, they rarely talk unless it has to do with conglomerate business.”

She digested what he told her. The last scene he described played out in her head. Apart from Byakuya, everyone had blue skin, and she pictured him as a young teenager, surrounded by all that carnage, his features hardened as he stood, victorious. As the final image faded out, she swallowed thickly.

“What happened to the girl?” she asked, wringing her hands. “The one her brother assaulted? Or did she...?”

“Survived. The losers are usually expelled, but I decided to keep her around as my secretary. Most people who are sent into exile seem to die unusual deaths, anyway,” he said.

He drew closer to Touko, footsteps muted, movement fluid, and stopped a short distance in front of her. She peered up at him with her mouth hanging ajar.

“You might be wondering... why am I telling you all this?” he said. “It is because, Fukawa, even though I have gone through what I have, your prose still managed to fill me with an inescapable feeling of despair.”

Touko scratched at one end of her lips and wavered. “S-Sorry...?”

But he shook his head.

“I don’t care for an apology. I am praising you. Your writing ability is beyond anything that I have seen before. You could use it for incredible things, yet you waste it on your romance novels.”

At first, her chest had swelled with pride, but as he came to an end, she felt a flicker of offense. She clenched her fists.

“You’re wrong...”

His brow furrowed. “What did you say?”

“I’m not wasting my talent on it,” she said, tensing her shoulders. “My stories... provide escape. A channel. The feelings inside of me... my love... they aren’t a weakness. They are a source of my strength.”

Byakuya was quiet. She maintained her stance. After a while, he angled his body away slightly, opened the notebook, and leafed through it to a certain page.

“Toward the end, you mentioned your shadow,” he said, skimming through the notebook for a certain section. “At first, I thought you were being metaphorical. ‘Some fear what the darkness hides, but for some, that is where we hide. From my nook, I see blond cresses, slender fingers and eyes alive and blue. But where there is light, there must be shadow, so where there is me, there must be her.’ ”

She waited for him to elaborate for her.

“I’ve deduced that you’re referring to me, but who is the ‘her’ that you are referring to?” His eyes flitted from the notebook to her, flinty. “Is it you?”

“No,” Touko snapped, and Byakuya tilted his head a bit in surprise. She realised and softened her gaze, and as she stared up at him, his face hung like a full moon in a bleak sky.

His face glitched. For a moment, he had blood running down from one eye, scissors in his neck, but when she blinked, he returned to normal. Touko’s jaw shuddered, and she imagined her features glitching too. An eye narrowed, red where there should have been hazel-purple, and one end of her lips hiked up in half of a grin. In that moment, her tongue tried to seep out, thick and grotesque.

It didn’t really fill her mouth - that had been her imagination, but something made it harder for her to breathe.

“Byakuya-sama...” She couldn’t look at him anymore. “I...”

This time, he waited for her to elaborate. Touko forced the words out, scrunching up her face.

“... know who Genocider Syo is,” she said.

Silence reigned, and she looked up.

He didn’t react at first, staring, then he absorbed what she said and his eyebrows climbed.

“What?” he said softly.

She hunched her shoulders. Wrapped her arms around herself and squeezed.

“What you read... in that I-Novel... our society... smothered me, until the pressure at my core grew too hot, too dense, and all that emptiness compressed together, until I imploded and out came her.”

Her legs quaked but she didn’t let them buckle. She stayed on her feet, no matter how much the weight in her heart wanted to drag her down, how arms of ghosts extended from the blue carpet and tugged at her. In her vision, Byakuya hung like a floater in her eye, constant and out-of-focus.

“You mean...” His lips rustled, as if he was licking them because his mouth had gone dry, but she wouldn’t, couldn’t look up that high to confirm. “... you’re Genocider Syo?”

Touko winced at the swooping sensation in her gut.

“That name belongs to another personality in me,” explained Touko. Her voice was cracking. "An alter. Sadistic, murderous, assertive.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you, why?” said Byakuya, calm but bordering on a sneer. “Is this a joke?”

If only it could have been a joke, a sick joke in bad taste. Touko trembled as she hitched up her skirt, revealing her leather holster and all the scissors stored within. She passed one to him. He studied it, turning it over in his hands, caressing the metal with his slender fingers, until he finally looked up.

“Anyone who I have started to have feelings for, she has chased them down and murdered,” Touko told him. His face framed her vision and she thought he was so, too beautiful, even with his brow creased like that. “All... All except you.”

“For now,” he said tersely. He glanced at the door.

She grabbed his wrist. His eyes darted back to her.

Neither moved.

“What do you expect me to do?” he said. Touko felt him shift, but he didn’t try to remove himself from her grasp. “Do you think I can give it a kiss and you’ll be all better?”

Her heart skipped at the mention of a kiss, then sank as he finished the rest of his question.

“Since I’ve attended this school, she hasn’t killed anyone. I’ve been able to suppress her,” Touko said, and she increased her grip. “I think, with your help, that I could keep her at bay. N-No one else will die.”

“And you’re sure of that? Hm?” He bared his teeth. “Tell me why I shouldn’t inform the academy? Now that I know your secret, what position does that put me in? You’ve started a timer on my head, and it’s a matter of time until Syo awakens and kills me to silence me. Don’t you see? You let your emotions overcome you and blurted this out. This love of yours blinded you foolishly.”

She twisted her hold on him.

“I... I won’t let her!” she hissed. “If I can be with you... then I won’t let her! You can help me control her.”

Touko screwed up her eyes.

“I’m sure,” she said, shoulders heaving, and she said it again. “I’m sure.”

“But what makes me different to all your other victims?” asked Byakuya, his cool tone in stark contrast to hers.

She couldn’t answer that. Years ago, Syo tried to communicate with Touko using sticky notes left in places she thought Touko would stumble upon quickly. Bedside drawers. Replacing bookmarks. When it became clear that Touko had no interest in talking to her, they petered out.

“Byakuya-sama, you think that my emotions have made me weak, but please, let me prove you wrong. I’ll show you that they are the source of my strength,” said Touko, her face burning fiercely.

He didn’t reply, staring at her. Finally, he smirked and gave a hum, returning the scissors to her.

“Very well. Fukawa... if you think your feelings of love are as strong as you claim, then I would like you to show me,” he said, and her heart gave a leap.

Touko let out a laugh.

“T-Thank you, Byakuya-sama!” Her eyes stung with the threat of tears, but her heart felt lighter than it had for a long time. She jiggled his arm. “Let me show my... my love! Do you want some coffee? A massage? To use me as a footstool?”

His face darkened. He snatched his arm away, and with nothing to hold, she squeezed her hands together.

“Shut up. I didn’t plan on being here long. I have other things to do,” he said.

“Are you going to the library?”

“No. I’m going to my room. I’m going to sleep.”

“What about tomorrow... can we meet up tomorrow?” asked Touko. “Perhaps we could read a book... or see a movie?”

“A movie?” He thrust up his nose in scorn. “Do you mean a romance adapted from some book?”

“No! I hate movie adaptations! What sort of movies do you like?”

“I have a very refined taste. Some of my favourites are what are called cult classics,” he replied. “There is Branded to Kill, Tokyo Drifter...”

She broke into a grin.

“Ah! By Seijun Suzuki?” she said excitedly.

“Yes.” He quirked his brow. “You’ve heard of them then?”

“Of course! I’ve seen both of them. They’re stylised masterpieces! I haven’t seen them,” since that failure of a date, “for a while, but I could go on at length about them.”

Byakuya studied her, considering.

“If you can discuss them as well as you do with books, then... I suppose we could watch one of them together,” he conceded, then added curtly, “Tomorrow. In the AV room. In public.”

Now, he turned to leave. She reached a hand toward him.

“Please don’t tell anyone, Byakuya-sama,” she blurted.

He stopped and looked over his shoulder.

“Who would believe me?” he asked her. “No, I don’t intend to. I don’t wish to taint this school’s image, and by extension, the conglomerate’s image. Besides...”

Byakuya smiled slightly and pushed up his glasses.

“... you’ve intrigued me. I’m not finished with you just yet.”

With that said, he walked the rest of the way over to her door and left. Touko stayed still for a couple of moments, and then shuffled over to her bed. She collapsed onto it, physically exhausted but her mind buzzed, keeping her awake for a while longer.

Could this be a date with Byakuya? Even after she told him her secret? Despite the excitement bubbling in her, she eventually fell asleep. This time, when she dreamed, he didn’t die. They smiled and held each other’s faces, and then...! Then...!

When she woke up, early daylight poured in through the window, and she was alone.

But she didn’t feel alone anymore.

That had been her only good night for a long, long time.

#togafuka #touko fukawa #byakuya togami #danganronpa #togafukaweek #fanfiction #croatian rhapsody

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starsailorstories · 6 years

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@genderlessspacerock replied to your post

“Hey it’s nanowrimo eve and I really wanna talk about my book but can’t...”

4 and 5 asks the astronomer

@lando778 also asked for #5!

So here they are, finally:

4. Cosmologies:

To understand the mainstream view of the universe in the Cosmonist religion (and the older faiths that were eventually subsumed into it) you have to understand some stuff about astraea species and what they have in common:

All of their conscious mental processes AND “genetic”1 information are contained in the lights on their heads, which operate like mini-stars and follow stars’ life cycles

Before they had spoken language, they communicated by manipulating the beams of their lights, like a projector, and it’s still used by many species to indicate tone/expression rather than having a lot of auditory tone variation in their languages

Although it’s not super prominent in actual cosmonist teaching and practice anymore, the ancient equation of the stars and suns in the sky with the tiny “stars” that power astraea consciousness and biology is really important culturally, and light=life-force or light=spirit is an almost pan-galactic motif.

Because of all that, the light you emanate, your personal starshine as it were, is–both metaphorically and kinda literally–what you put out to the world while you’re in it. This is your praefulgeria–the effect of your soul on your current lifetime, which will be judged at your death.

Enter the Cosmic Prism.

A person’s praefulgeria is usually represented by a light beam. The universe is represented as a prism that scatters the light beam. The various points of the prism separate people into different species/positions/experiences based on the characteristics of their souls.

Prior to scientific advancements made about a generation before the story takes place, it was widely thought that the Andromeda galaxy lay in the center of the prism, and that the creator-goddess Orellistia had her home in the center of the galaxy. There are still those that cling to this idea but mainstream thinking has mostly shifted away from it (there’s no official word on the debate from the Aula so for now it’s free to shift where it may). Intergalactic sailors have been superstitiously honoring the Great Attractor as the locus of gravitational force (which is seen as the goddess’s will) for centuries, so eventually that may be accepted as the new “center”. But that really only matters if you’re, like, making an illuminated scripture anyhow.

The prism has five points in total: Excelsia, Limina, Ladiu, Longitu, and Altiu (those u’s are pronounced like schwas with tighter lips, think French).

Excelsia is the topmost point, and ideally your light bounces upward through your cycle of death and rebirth, presumably being freed from the cycle at the top--or at least, that’s the popular concept. The Levinoxian temples, when they existed, generally held that there’s no way to actually reach it before the reunion of the goddesses at the death of the universe, or else that the upward spiral is literally eternal--there’s always more to learn (although most believe some things are learned in other realms/dimensions after an enlightened-ish soul/praefulgeria has incarnated for the last time).

The lowermost point, Limina, is what it sounds like--a kind of limbo where souls that have fallen from grace with the cosmic order are judged and either healed or released to oblivion if they refuse to be. It’s not a place of punishment exactly, just sort of a...like...astral airport lobby where you’ve got nothing to do but think your shit out for an unimaginably long time. People with an agenda are fond of implying that ALL empty space in the universe is a part of Limina, and that as little as griping about your boss behind her back can land you there, but most folks who aren’t indoctrinated young dismiss that as utter raving b.s.--if not because they see the convenience of literally deifying the status quo, then because it’s just like, then what are all the other myriad possibilities for reincarnation for?

The other three points, as you might guess from their names, correspond to the axes of three dimensional space (now might be a good time to say that the “uppermost” and “lowermost” positioning of the first two is understood as not literal) and are places souls pass through to receive knowledge on their way to the next incarnation. It’s common in stories and myths for living characters to journey there too, in order to learn truths beyond normal understanding or confront something with effects beyond the current lifetime.

This isn’t the only traditional perception of the universe--the Caesurans, who settled on their planet very early (and being blue stars are shorter-lived than most astraeas), have depicted the universe as a circle centered around their solar system for thousands of generations. The Ashtivans, who just lived in space for most of their prehistory as a species, have pretty much always had a pretty accurate picture of at least the galaxy. They too regard the unknowns of empty vacuum and dark matter as the home of the unclaimed dead, though they tend to do absolutely everything they believe will keep their own dead from winding up there.2 But because of the reach of the Basillan attempt to unify all of Andromeda’s different religions, their cosmology is the most widespread.

5. Spacefarer Superstitions:

Obviously there’s a lot of them and they’re very diverse, but here’s a few that are mentioned in the book:

Tracing the positions of the Seven Suns (or the stars in whatever constellation most often guides you home--for central andromedans that’s usually Aviana’s Bow) with your finger over the airlocks when you close them is a ward for safe passage.

Luxmotes, which are little jellyfish-like creatures with a Light on them in a similar way to astraeas (and most animals in andromeda) that live in the vacuum, clustering around a ship are a good omen--they show the goddess of gravity’s favor on a mission.

That’s the one exemption to this controversial but extremely perennial one: it’s bad luck to bring any symbols of Orellistia or gravity into interstellar space. The reasoning is that it isn’t her domain, things float around willy nilly, if she wanted her stuff on her wife’s side of the material plane she’d have put some stars or planets there. As Levinoxia has become more of an oppositional/trickster figure it’s also said that symbols of gravity offend her and will cause her to play havoc with your ship’s systems, get you lost, and generally ruin your mission. This is a BIG problem for pious destigravitational cosmonists as symbols of gravity are kind of Their Thing, it’s like if you told a ship full of catholics it was bad luck to wear crosses. But most experienced sailors, especially older ones, swear by it. When artificial gravity systems started to be introduced it was common to overhear grizzled grey-haired captains, pilots, and boatswains, who’d come into their own in the solar-sailing days, in the public houses swearing up and down that they would NEVER contract to sail a ship with that newfangled fake-your-own-planet tech, it’s just ASKING for an instrument malfunction in black hole territory

Dark stars and neutron stars and their systems are dead, but still inhabited by the spirits of their solar goddesses and all the life that might once have been in that system in attendance to them. If a crew doesn’t maintain respectful silence while passing through, their ship might become uncontrollably trapped in the dead sun’s pull.

Signals that are transmitted too far out in the vacuum to reach a receiver are received directly by Levinoxia, goddess of the void and protector of sailors and travelers. At the midpoint between the last lighthouse on the Andromedan coast and the first on the Milky Way’s, pilots both religious and not so much have a tradition of praying the Dodecacet, a series of twelve short hymns to her, into their radios. For many working-class folks who were practically raised “at sea”, it’s the only prayer they know.

If any of your crewmates died while in space, you have to jettison everything they brought aboard personally--clothes, possessions, all of it. If not your bad luck is your fault.

Cadrian ingots stuck into the outside of your gravity ballast tank draw in treasure if that’s what you’re lookin’ for. Or something. Truthfully it’s just fun to drop them into the grooves they fit perfectly

Different planets have different beliefs about what kind of animals it’s lucky to have on board and this can become quite the debate among interstellar or intergalactic missions whose rates have only sailed between planets before because 90% of boatswains are going to be like “we can bring ONE”

1They actually still use the term “genetic” even though they don’t have genes--from their perspective, it comes from the Orellistian epithet “Genetris”.

2They don’t have the reincarnation cycle concept that tends to be consistent closer to the dome--they think the spirits of their ancestors stay with their families, just beyond the veil. Ashtivans, like their sun, are small, slow-burning stars, and death tends to be a much more peaceful transition for them rather than a jarring nova, so it makes sense that they don’t have as much of a sense of separation.

#genderlessspacerock #sweet chariot #long post

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longforgottenunofficial · 7 years

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Here Comes the...Never Mind, She’s Here: Constance and the Hatchet Man

Updated March 2015

(photo: Jeff Fillmore)

Like I said last time, the Constance addition is an ambitious attempt to expand the Mansion's backstory and solidify it. The attic bride now has a name (Constance Hatchaway) and a definite story. She's a "black widow" bride, marrying five men in succession (or at least five) and beheading each on their wedding night (Sigmund Freud, call your office). Each man is more wealthy than the last, and Connie's accumulating fortune is symbolized by the addition of a new string of pearls around her neck in each successive wedding portrait. Her junk now clogs the attic. Mostly wedding gifts. There are some cute items amidst the clutter, like this porcelain couple with the man fallen and with his head broken off.

Here's the grim tally:

1869: Ambrose Harper

1872: Frank Banks

1874: The Marquis de Doom

1875: Reginald Caine

1877: George Hightower

There are official mini-bio's for each man (cf. Surrell 2nd ed., p. 84); the most interesting fact is that George is expressly said to be a former owner of the house, implying that Connie inherited it. Evidently, before it became a retirement home for ghosts, the Haunted Mansion was Connie's residence. As if to emphasize the point, the widow portrait in the stretching room is now officially recognized as a portrait of Constance. The resemblance between it and the last wedding portrait in the attic is obvious.

Objection, your honor: The Constance ghost is clearly still a young woman, while the stretch-room widow was just as clearly a senior citizen before she died. In addition, isn't the plot simply too far-fetched? You're saying there were five identical and sensational murders on Connie's successive wedding nights, and no one caught on? Were the latter suitors such dolts? And were the police brain dead? There are limits to our suspension of disbelief. I'm no fan of the Connie thing, but I will say that these objections hold no water. The notion that ghosts appear as they appeared at the time of their death is not the only popular notion out there. There is also the idea that ghosts haunt because there is unfinished earthly business that must be resolved before they can "cross over," and perhaps they appear as they appeared at the time of that unfinished business, which may have occurred well before death. In Connie's case, it's an unavenged murder spree from her youth. That too is a concept not unknown to ghost lore:

From The Reader magazine, 1904 (hat tip Craig C.)

Interestingly enough, Ken Anderson invokes this ghost theory in one of his 1957 scripts: "... our house had a tragic and bloody history of unlucky owners who died sudden and violent deaths, which resulted in their unhappy ghosts remaining behind to fulfill the uncompleted missions of their lives." As for the preposterousness of the plot, it all becomes plausible when we throw money into the equation. Bribe the police, bribe the judges, remove any public record of the crime or its investigation, falsify death certificates, and presto: a clean slate for the next victim. Sure, she would have needed a good missing-and-presumed-dead story the first time (a teary-eyed Constance describes how Ambrose fell into the river on their honeymoon), and the second time would have demanded a cop or judge who could be bought pretty cheap (perhaps she used, er, other assets as well?), but after that she probably had enough wealth piling up to cover her tracks easily. As for how suitor #4 or #5 could be foolish enough to marry a widow whose previous husbands managed to disappear so quickly after the wedding, well...she's got a pretty face, see, and a certain wiggly-wag.... Objections overruled. How did they cook up such an idea in the first place? To begin, mad female ax murderers are nothing new on the radar screen of public cultural consciousness. Lizzie Borden and all that.

Closer to home, once again we find an interesting changing-portrait concept in the huge pile of unused material left behind by Marc Davis. He came up with a macabre version of a famous portrait by Thomas Gainsborough. So popular was "The Honourable Mrs. Graham" in its day that Gainsborough did several versions of it, including an etching:

It doesn't take much imagination to see inspiration for Constance in Davis's spoof:

(Artwork ©Disney. Animated gif by Captain Halfbeard) Another inspiration for Constance hidden in the WDI vaults is the long-forgotten "Mr. Meaker," a character concept unknown until the recent discovery of a crude notebook sketch by Dick Irvine (VP of Design at WDI from '52—'73) . . .

. . . and this accompanying description: "Mr. Meaker was a very simple man who lost each of his five wives in a very tragic manner. They died in bed—apparently of natural causes. Mr. Meaker's only compensation was that his wives were all insured. He smothered them with affection." Here the tour guide throws a switch and the canopy of a nearby bed descends. The tour guide continues: "One night he was testing the mechanism while his cat was sleeping on the bed. When Mr. Meaker found out that he had killed his pet, he was heartbroken. He hanged himself." It's not hard to see a male version of Constance in certain details of this outline. It's curious that he hanged himself, because if the HM's hanging man was already considered the Ghost Host at this point (and he probably was), then this backstory identifies the Ghost Host with Mr. Meaker. This opens up a can of interesting worms, but we'll tackle that one a little further down. (Actually, I've never tackled a worm and would decline any invitation so to do. The unfair weight advantage, for one thing, would take all the joy out of it for me.) One of the most important factors shaping the creation of Constance, however, was inspiration drawn right from the existing ride. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Imagineers involved would respond to the criticism of Constance as an unwanted intrusion by pointing out that, on the contrary, they are zealous traditionalists with the highest possible respect for what the original Imagineers created. In expanding the backstory, they definitely wanted their addition to stay true to what was already there. And they have a good case, so far as it goes. First, Connie is a throwback to the original, scarier bride, skipping over and ignoring the forlorn 1995-2006 models in favor of their darker predecessors. On our own analysis, the original attic scene gave you just enough clues to conclude that the bride killed her groom via decapitation. The Hat Box Ghost goes topless to the tune of her lub dub, lub dub, remember? Secondly, the Constance narrative seizes on the two items from the original HM that indicate a history prior to the "retirement home" story and it weaves the two together into a single story, so you could argue that the Connie story tidies things up a bit. I'm talking about (1) the Ghost Host's ambiguous tie to the house on the one hand (actually, it's his neck, but let that slide), and (2) the attic's tale of some kind of nuptial homicide on the other. Everything else in the HM is part of the three-act play taking place on the stage of "this ghostly retreat." The Ghost Host connection is largely unspecified at this point, but there is every indication that it is waiting in the wings, ready to be rolled out as time and funds permit. That's right, people, there is another shoe waiting to drop. There are more chapters to the Constance saga up WDI's sleeve, so you had better get used to her. If her role is destined to change at all, it is only in order to expand it further. Do I have an inside line on this undisclosed sequel? Nope, but I can tell you that it will involve a character sometimes called the "Hatchet Man." The Hatchet Man A creepy portrait of a man with a noose around his neck and a hatchet in his hand has been in the DL Corridor of Doors since the place opened.

Do not doubt the word of your blog administrator. Here is Hatch in a rare 1969 photo:

The Orlando HM has had Hatch since the day it opened, but as one of the "Sinister 11" portraits rather than in the Corridor of Doors:

This guy is the Ghost Host. First, the concept art for this character reportedly identifies him explicitly as the "Ghost Host," and second, the hanging corpse in the stretching gallery is scrupulously dressed so as to match the Hatchet Man, and of course the hanging man is the GH ("there's always my way"). This is a good example of WDI overkill for the sake of "making it real," since guests can't possibly see this.

Oh, and incidentally, the Hatchet Man is one of those rare cases where you can point your finger directly at a piece of outside art that inspired it. Davis modeled him on "The Old Witch" from Tales From the Crypt comic books. Betcha didn't know that. Sheesh, Marc, this one isn't even subtle.

There are at least three indications that WDI is preparing to raise the profile of this character considerably. First, his face is showing up elsewhere. Reportedly, when the Constance attic makeover took place at DL, plans included alterations to the Séance circle as well. The faces of Connie's husbands would be seen materializing around the perimeter, or something like that. It didn't happen. Either the report was false, or this part of the project was postponed for one reason or another (funding? technical feasibility? manpower? scheduling?). We did get a new effect in there, however, as the wandering Ectoplasm Ball began making faces at us. There were more than one, but one of them was Hatch:

Why him? Secondly, some guys from WDI just showed up one day and put a Hatchet Man portrait in the Corridor of Doors at the WDW Mansion. According to my sources, it was a complete surprise to the Florida folk. Bam. Now Orlando has a portrait similar to the one at DL. Hatch was already represented there as one of the "Sinister 11," so why this one as well? Not only that, but a dimension has been added to his character. Previously, you could say that his hatchet was simply the implement by which he cut his ties to the house. But now, he's wielding it as a frightening weapon—note the shadow.

Thirdly—and this one is more subtle—WDI has apparently adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward any identification of the Ghost Host with any other character, specifically, a certain Master Gracey. Among Mansion fans there's a very popular belief that the character in the following painting is named "Master Gracey" and that he is the Ghost Host. Neither of these is official; it's purely fan-generated Mansion lore.

For years WDI has looked upon this with a certain bemused tolerance, and in fact the name "Master Gracey" has risen to the level of, I dunno, what you might call semi-official sanction. But any suggestion that he is the Ghost Host has been ruthlessly suppressed in recent years. When they put up a construction sign at the WDW Mansion during the massive refurb of 2007 that identified the Ghost Host as "Master Gracey"—dude, somebody got a stern email from On High, because they had to go to the trouble and expense of fixing the sign to eliminate this boo-boo. We're talking about a temporary construction sign here.

Now you see it...now you don't.

(photos by Pickwickgrl) Sheesh, that's tight. "Who told them to change it?" "Top men." "Yes, but who?" "TOP. MEN."

And consider this dismaying observation. Jason Surrell had a loosey-goosey attitude about this whole business in his first edition (2003) of The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies. Speaking of the WDW Mansion, Surrell says: "As guests enter the Foyer, their attention is drawn to a formal portrait of the master of the house hanging on the wall above the fireplace. The master is the Ghost Host himself, or Master Gracey, if you go by the name on one of the tombstones in the family plot, although that is not the official story."

But between that edition and the second edition (2009), some Top Men evidently had a little clarification session with Mr. S. "As guests enter the Foyer, their attention is drawn to a formal portrait of the master of the house hanging on the wall above the fireplace. Contrary to another popular theory that has made the rounds over the years, the Ghost Host is not the master of the house—Gracey or otherwise—but merely one of 999 happy haunts."

And Jason—no fool he—gets to keep both kneecaps.

The most obvious reason for the crackdown is that the real Ghost Host is going to make a more formal entrance sometime in the future, and he's the sinister-looking Hatchet Man, not some dandy named "Master Gracey." How all this will tie into the Constance saga is unknown at this point, but they do make a charming couple with their mutual hatchet fetish, and I find it curious that a previous concept for the Ghost Host (Mr. Meaker) is in some ways a mirror-reflection of the future bride Constance, although I'm probably better advised to put that one down to coincidence.

One way or another, it appears that WDI is preparing to tie together the Ghost Host and the attic bride in a single backstory that tells the history of the HM before it became a ghostly retreat for wandering spirits from all over the world. UPDATE (March 2015) It's been several years now, and the second shoe has yet to drop. It may never. You see, the man I am sure was behind the implementation of this backstory is no longer in the position to do so. He's transferred to somewhere else in WDI now, and so far there is no evidence that the new boss is interested in developing the master plan of the old boss. Alas, the glowing face effect in the Séance Circle has fallen into neglect and disrepair, and merchandise identifying the Ghost Host with "Master Gracey" appeared on the shelves in conjunction with the Mansion's 45th anniversary. It's true that Merchandising tends to do its own thing and thumb its ignorant nose at WDI, but I'm pretty sure the previous guy would have put the kibosh on such heretical items.

Originally Posted: Saturday, June 5, 2010 Original Link: [x]

#long forgotten #haunted mansion #constance #attic bride #hatchet man #master gracey #sinister 11

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shannrussell-blog1 · 5 years

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The Annapurna Circuit is one of the most popular hikes in the Nepalese Himalaya, encircling 3 of the 10 highest mountains in the world and quite a few very bloody high peaks to boot. The full trek is roughly 220 km from start to finish and will take 3 to 4 weeks to complete.

The circuit is classified as a teahouse trek, which means that each night you’ll stay in a hotel in the many villages dotted along the trail, no camping required.

The circuit starts at 820m and then rises to Thorung La, which at 5416m is one of the highest mountain passes in the world. The altitudinal range means that you can traverse temperate forest one week and alpine desert the next.

Annapurna Circuit in Nepal is classified as a teahouse trek, so no camping is needed.

How to get there

Malaysian and Singapore Airlines fly to Kathmandu from Kuala Lumpur and Singapore respectively. From Kathmandu, you will need to find your way to the trailhead at the mostly unremarkable town of Besisahar.

A public bus is one option. The pace is ancient but it’s also the cheapest. Also, consider the more comfortable Greenline tourist bus. You’ll get free WI-FI and water, and also a catered lunch stop for about A$30-35.

Tip: if you take the Greenline, you’ll need to get off at the bustling highway town of Dumre and arrange further transport to Besishahar.

The most expensive is a private vehicle, which would be the quickest option.

Whichever you go with, the 173 km journey will take at least 6-7 hours. The roads are busy with various forms of transport and accidents on the narrow mountain roads are common.

Preparation

Fitness

You’ll need to be reasonably fit to hike the entire length. Sure, you won’t need to pack the crampons and ice axes, but there are many steep ascents and descents with areas of uneven ice and snow-covered terrain.

Be prepared for and understand the effects of altitude on the body before you decide to do this trek. Altitude sickness can ruin your hike, even if you consider yourself reasonably fit. It’s best to visit your doctor to ensure you’re in good health before you book your trip.

Nevertheless, some long distance hikes with a loaded backpack over hilly terrain would be ideal preparation. You can read more about training for a multi-day hike here.

You’ll need to be fit enough to tackle a typical long distance hike at a high altitude.

To porter or not to porter?

Whether you hire a porter to carry your stuff will be dependent on your budget, fitness level and the type of experience you want to have.

For those that want a walking guidebook, hire someone that knows the names of the various summits and the history behind them. I used a porter on this trek, and I think mine got sick of me asking!

Porters will also gladly arrange meals, accommodation and transport for you and are great company too.

Whether you hire a porter or not depends on the kind of trip you want to have.

When to visit

Winter is the dry season in Nepal (December to February). Skies are usually bright, clear and sunny.

Their winter is very cold, but with proper clothing and equipment, you’ll be comfortable to enjoy the starry skies and mountain peaks. A small price to pay for a bit of frozen toothpaste!

You’ll also enjoy relatively snow-free trails, as the circuit receives most of its precipitation during the summer monsoon.

The monsoon season (June to September) is not recommended if you want clear, unobstructed views of the mountains. But the landscape will be a verdant green and the waterfalls are at their majestic best.

Spring (March to May) and autumn (September to November) offer the best compromise but be prepared for crowded teahouses, long waits for food and less solitude with nature.

Do I need a visa for Nepal?

Yes, Australians need a visa to enter Nepal. If you’re travelling to Nepal for tourism you can get one upon arrival at

The dry season is a good time to visit, as you’ll still get clear skies.

What to bring

Gear will depend on the time of year, but this is a rough guide:

Merino base layers, a fleece jumper, wind jacket and down jacket, especially if trekking between October and April. Softshell pants are optional – I saw a guy hiking in jeans!

Beanie, gloves, and buff if it’s cold

Diamox for altitude sickness and Imodium for the inevitable upset stomach.

Water purification tablets to treat water, minimising the need to buy bottled water. Do not drink untreated water in Nepal! For more on safe hydration, check out this article here.

A sturdy, fitted backpack.

Hiking boots – that you’ve worn in. Blisters are no fun and can seriously detract from the enjoyment of, well, everything really.

Hiking socks

Sun protection – for high UV and snow glare. This means hats, sunglasses, lip balm, etc.

Maps and guidebooks – you can’t really get lost on the Annapurna Circuit, but the trail occasionally diverges and you have a choice of route.

Sleeping bag – buy one that is rated for the season you intend to visit in, but you could probably get away without one in summer. The tea houses generally provide other bedding.

Hiking poles

Head torch – essential for most of Nepal where power outages are frequent.

Hand sanitiser, wipes and toilet paper – worth their weight in gold.

Make sure you bring the guidebooks that you can navigate.

Costs for food and accommodation

Over the three weeks of trekking, I averaged A$25 a day for food and accommodation at the time of writing this. This does not include porter fees, any souvenirs you want to pick up, or transport to and from the trail. Bring cash with you to pay for things along the way. Meals and snacks are available along the trek, but you can bring your own snacks if you don’t mind carrying the extra weight.

Permits you’ll need

You will also need to purchase the Trekkers Information Management System (TIMS) and Annapurna Conservation Area Permit (ACAP) permits in Kathmandu before you set off. Both will set you back about A$25 if trekking individually, or about half that if trekking in a guided group.

Food and accommodation will set you back around A$25 a day.

Suggested itinerary

Segment 1 – Besisahar to Dharapani (40 km)

The start of the trail! From a starting elevation of 820m, follow the Marsyangdi River steadily upwards through quaint, rural villages and farmland. Settle into a routine of dhal bat (rice and lentil soup), milky coffee and school children holding your hand as you walk.

Opt to stay in Upper Chamje and order the Snickers roll (basically a Snickers bar cooked in hot pastry) and relax among the simal trees and waterfalls. You won’t be disappointed!

Nearing Dharapani (1900m), the canyon walls narrow and you will truly feel like you are up in the Himalayas.

The start of the journey will take you through farmland and small villages.

Segment 2 – Dharapani to Manang (50 km)

Shortly after Dharapani, you’ll catch your first glimpse of the snow-capped peaks of the Annapurna Massif, including Manaslu (8163m), eighth highest in the world.

There is a definite chill in the air as you pass through the ancient villages of Thanchouk (2400m) and Koto (2600m), unchanged for centuries.

The first glimpses of the snow-capped peaks.

After stocking up on any essentials in the regional capital Chame (2670m), I recommend the upper route to Manang (though there is a lower). It is one of the most beautiful sections of the circuit, with panoramic views of Annapurna II (7937m), Annapurna III (7555m) and Gangapurna (7454m).

After a lung-busting 300 metre ascent, stop for some momos (Tibetan dumplings) in Ghyaru (3730m) and overnight in the ancient village of Ngawal, huddled against the mountains on a wind-swept plain.

Manang (3500m) is one of the bigger towns on the trek, and you’ll be spoilt for choice in terms of accommodation. Absolutely stay here for 2 nights for acclimatisation, especially if you opt to take the lower route from Chame.

Eat some delicious momos (dumplings) along your way.

Segment 3 – Manang to Muktinath via Thorung La (31 km)

The stretch of scenery between Manang (3540m) and Letdar (4200m) is absolutely exemplary, and the type of epic mountainscapes that inspired me to hike the Annapurna Circuit.

Higher up, there is a conspicuous lack of trees, people, flowing water and oxygen. Some parts of the trail look like the surface of Mars.

The higher you get, the less plant life you will see on this trek.

Indeed, the lonely outpost of Gunsang (3950m) is the last permanently inhabited village before the other side of the pass.

You’re almost at the top! The night before crossing Thorung la, you can either stay in Thorung Phedi (4450m) or High Camp (4925m). I recommend staying in High Camp if you are feeling good, as this way there is a shorter 600-metre climb to the pass the next day.

This part of the trek showcases some incredible mountain scenery.

Segment 4 – Muktinath to Tatopani (62 km)

Muktinath (3760m) is the perfect place to rest your weary bones after a 1600 metre descent from Thorung La. In addition to being an extremely auspicious pilgrimage site for Buddhists and Hindus, many trekkers will end their journey here and Jeep it to Pokhara.

But the Annapurna Circuit has still much to offer! Kagbeni (2810m) is a small, almost medieval village with rustic mud houses and narrow, cobbled alleyways. Kagbeni deserves at least 2 nights to explore its unlimited charm.

After Kagbeni, you will gradually lose altitude and enjoy the soupy, oxygen-rich air. The village of Marpha is another highlight, with its white-washed walls, famous apple pie and a prominent Buddhist monastery.

In Kalopani (2530m), there are several more fancy teahouses where you can enjoy such luxuries as iced coffee, cocktails and fast-ish semi-reliable WI-FI. Go on, you’ve earnt it!

Kalopani is also one of the only places on the circuit where Dhaulagiri (8167m) and Annapurna I (8091m) can be seen simultaneously.

Kagbeni is a small village you should take the time to explore on your trek.

Segment 5 – Tatopani to Naya Pul (28 km)

Tatopani (1190m) will probably feel quite warm compared to the last couple of weeks trekking. The town is famous for its hot springs, making it the perfect place to soothe tired muscles.

But, you aren’t quite done with climbing just yet. Ghorepani (2860m) is a hard slog up multiple flights of stairs, but it is set amongst the misty forest, ferny canyons and superb rhododendrons (best-seen flowering in spring).

Instead of going directly to Naya Pul from Ghorepani, take the forested ridge to Ghandruk, a quaint old village where’ll you be afforded incredible views of Machhapuchhre (6993m) and many peaks of the Annapurna Massif.

You’ll have some spectacular views of Machhapuchhre from the village of Ghandruk.

Why you should do this trek

The Annapurna Circuit has to rank as one of the best treks in the world, mostly because it offers relatively easy access to some of the highest mountains in the world. The trek is light on the wallet, especially if you intend to walk unassisted, and the depth and range of scenery is unrivalled.

Is Annapurna Circuit on your bucket list? If so, why?

The post Guide to Trekking Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit appeared first on Snowys Blog.

#>Tribhuvan #/specFilters=5m!-!1502&pageSize=40&orderBy=-1&pageNumber=1 #entry_and_exit>Compact

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nickireadstfc · 7 years

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The Foxhole Court: A Summary - The Exposition Court

Exposition! Legit so many fucking character introductions! ‘!!!!!!!!’ moments! Foreshadowing! Show, Don’t Tell! Opinions! Predictions that will no doubt end up being Absolutely Fucking Ridiculous! Yay!

Sounds good? Then it’s time for Nicki to sum up the Foxhole Court.

In 2013, now-renowned author Nora Sakavic blessed us with The Foxhole Court, book one of the All For The Game trilogy. In this first installment of orange gay sporty murder shit, protagonist, runaway and professional sassmaster Neil Josten signs with the Palmetto State Foxes, a ragtag sports team of outcasts and lunatics, in order to escape his Fucked Up Past™.

On his team he finds Kevin, a childhood friend of his with an equally Fucked Up Past™, and Andrew, a messed-up murder maniac on meds. They play Exy, which is the three-way lovechild sport of lacrosse, ice hockey and bad decisions, and Kevin takes it upon himself to train Neil into the prodigy he sees in him.

But The Plot is coming for them: Kevin’s childhood abusers, Riko and Tetsuji Moriyama, and their team, the Edgar Allan Ravens, have come into their district, and they are set on taking Kevin back to their magical land of abuse and kind-of slavery, destroying the Foxes’ athletic reputation and generally fucking up everyone’s lives.

But the Foxes are not going down without a fight, and after an epic smackdown between Riko and Neil on national television, Neil is accepted into their dysfunctional family of fiercely protective psychopaths, and together they stare down into the abyss of whatever fucked-up shit is yet to come.

And that’s the Foxhole Court for you.

Did I like it? Hell fucking yes.

Do I think it’s probably going to be the weakest out of the three? Also hell fucking yes.

Let me explain.

The Foxhole Court mainly consists of one thing: Exposition. Nora Sakavic takes her sweet time introducing Neil as a character, unfolding both his backstory and his personality bit by bit, and introducing everyone else the same (although we are clearly not done with the backstories by any stretch of the imagination) as well as giving us a good feel of what Exy is and why we should care about this orange sportsball.

However, one tiny unimportant thing is kind of suffering under all that, and that is the plot.

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE exposition. I love getting to know characters, I love them having plot-unrelated banter, give me all that good shit. There hasn’t been one bit in TFC where I was bored or wanted to skip ahead (which, if you know my attention span, is a big thing). But we can’t deny that not much has happened so far.

In fact, there have only been five parts in this entire book where I was truly off my socks, either in excitement or shock or just general WHAT THE FUCK-ness:

When we find out Kevin’s (and Neil’s) backstory, fucking wHAT, I was blown away. I had not expected the book to be this serious. A+

The entire club scene with the monsters drugging Neil and Nicky kiss-raping him. I had stuff to say about that.

Neil telling Andrew like 80% of his Troubled Past™, I am deceased

THE MASTERPIECE THAT IS NEIL SASSING THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT OF RIKO CAN I GET A HELL YEAH

Seth overdosing being murdered by Riko, aka the latest installment in our popular series WHAT.

And while everything else has been lovely as well, this speaks volumes for the plot which has, up until this point, been kind of on the down low, save for the moments mentioned above.

The good news is: In all likelihood, Seth’s death at the end of the book marks the point where exposition is now the fuck over. Dramatically, it would make sense to now stop fucking about and get down to business, to defeat the huns Ravens and really get to grips with the plot now in the second and third book.

(( Also, side note on the Seth situation: Let’s take a lil look back at chapter 6:

“The death threats were creative, though,” Nicky said. “Maybe this time they’ll follow through and actually kill one of us. Let’s vote. I nominate Seth.”

Like wHAT KIND OF SWEET ASS FORESHADOWING.

Huge thanks to spookymiscreant for pointing that out. <3 ))

As for writing style, I’m pleasantly surprised. Self-published authors sadly often tend to tell too much and show too little, they describe lots and lots of things the reader could have figured out on their own and it takes a lot of immersion out of the reading experience.

Not so our dearest Nora, oh no. I’m immensely enjoying how she often just hints at feelings or thoughts of characters with just little details she drops every now and again. This works so well because those details often aren’t consciously recognized by a quick reader, yet they are vital in shaping our views of characters and scenes, providing true immersion and a full reading experience. Top notch, A+, 10/10 would author again.

(I’m too lazy to look up examples for that right now, but you all know what I mean anyways, and I’ve pointed a lot of things like this out in my recaps as well because I LOVE IT.)

Now, characters! Where do I fucking start. I’m thinking I’m just gonna throw my opinions on each of them in here and see whether they’ll change throughout the next two books.

Neil, my son. I’ve really, really grown to like him. Homeboy is still majoring in Extra and Dramatic, and I will still drag him mercilessly for it, but I like it. I like his style of narration, I care for his emotional well-being, but most of all, I like his sass. Seemingly every time he has to speak to someone for more than three sentences, he just cannot help but be the savage comeback prince he was destined to be, and I’m living for it. I hope he has lots and lots of dialogue in the next two books. I’m still not over that Riko scene. Love him.

Kevin is... I don’t actually have a clear opinion on him yet. I find him interesting as a part of Neil’s history – still not sure whether I’m buying that he doesn’t remember Neil at all –, I was stunned by his backstory and I absolutely want to fucking gut Riko for everything he’s done to Kevin, but that’s about it so far. He just….. didn’t click with me yet. Let’s see what comes around in the future.

Andrew is growing on me, I think. I’m not his biggest fan yet – he did do some fucked up shit (//eyes the club situation YET AGAIN//) and I absolutely hate him when he’s on his meds – but he’s v v interesting, both as a character and because of the med situation. And honestly, I think this is exactly what’s intended with him. Andrew was not made for immediate attachment, he was intentionally written to grow on you. And I kind of like that, it makes his character more round, more fully-formed, gives him more dimension. Also, I love him in combination with Kevin and Neil. Also just with Neil, obviously. He’s buying him clothes. Who is chill about this, not me.

Nicky……… My problematic sunshine idiot, I still have a very complicated relationship to him. I think Nicky is (as far as I've read) a wonderful example of a fuckboy who means well, meaning someone who does shitty things as a joke/bc he doesn’t think about them/bc it’s been socially engrained in him that they are okay to do (see: the kiss thing), but realises they are shitty afterwards and wants to better himself. Also, I’m just really, really grateful to have someone who brings a bit of laughter into this angsty shitshow. And gayness. Oh, how I am grateful for the gayness. Actually, who are we fucking kidding, I still love Nicky.

Aaron – who even is Aaron, seriously. I still know literally next to nothing about this dude. Apparently his mother was quite fucked up. Not close with his twin brother. Okay. Next!

RENEE, my daughter, my love, my darlingest little murder snowflake. We still don’t know much about her, but for some reason she just instantly clicked with me. She is so unbelievably kind and sweet and probably hiding like, three axe murders. GIVE ME ALL HER BACKSTORY AND GIVE IT TO ME NOW. She is probably my second-favourite character so far, together with Neil.

I’ve gathered that quite a lot of you like Matt?? I can see why, I guess. He’s a ray of sunshine as well, and an unproblematic one at that. He probably would have deserved to be captain as well. Tall Billie Joe is a good egg. <3

Pretty much all of that goes for Dan as well. Good human being, good team person. Takes no shit. Very Gryffindor. I’m wondering what her backstory is tbh, because so far, she seems like an actually stable, healthy person, which we all know cannot be true in Foxland.

I’m still sort of indifferent to Allison. She hasn’t given me reason to hate her yet, she also hasn’t given me reason to like her. I feel bad for her because of Seth’s death, though.

And Seth… Well. We kind of discussed that already.

As for the Parent Triumvirate: Idk if this ever came up, this may be news to you, but hAVE I MENTIONED I REALLY REALLY FUCKING LOVE WYMACK. Seriously. He is my favourite character, from chapter fucking one. He is the only person who can rival Neil in terms of unbound sass, which makes him great to begin with, but most importantly, he is caring, compassionate, and just the fucking kindest person in this book, yet takes no shit and doesn’t baby anyone.

“Did you think I made the team the way it is because I thought it would be a good publicity stunt? It’s about second chances, Neil. Second, third, fourth, whatever, as long as you get at least one more than what anyone else wanted to give you.”

This is the best thing anyone has said in this entire book fucking fIGHT ME. HOW DOES ONE NOT LOVE DAVID WYMACK TO THE HEAVENS AND BACK. #dicksoutforwymack

Abby and Betsy are both shaping up to be Really Cool People as well. As well as with Wymack, I love their “I’m gonna be supportive kind and good to you, but I’m not going to take any shit from you” attitude, which is precisely the way to run a team as dysfunctional as the Foxes. A+ parenting, 10/10 would love again.

Lastly, some predictions about what will happen within the next book! We’ll see what came true. I cannot wait to cringe at myself and my idioticy/blissful unawareness eight weeks from now.

They’ll deal with Seth’s death – some better, some worse

The banquet thing will happen and it will be hella awkward and hilarious and something Super Dramatic And Important will happen

Neil will master the Raven drills Kevin is making him do and it will be EPIC

Andreil will continue having Important Gay Moments™

The “Kevin and Riko know Neil” situation will not be addressed (!) (I’m expecting that to be in the last book, near the final epic smackdown)

Neither will we meet Neil’s father (again, last book)

However, we will meet Tetsuji and shit will go down

Also, we’ll meet some Ravens I suppose, since it is the Raven King after all. There was this Jean guy?? I’m intrigued

We will find out Renee’s backstory

We will find out something – if maybe not everything – about the Minyard-Hemmick backstory

Some more kisses will happen. I don’t care who kisses whom. Probably not Andreil (yet). Let it be Abby and Wymack. Aaron and his irrelevant girlfriend. I don’t care. Give me kisses.

And now all that’s left for me to say is, again, thank you thank you thank you to all of you who read this blog. All of you who give me your thoughts and comments on everything, who keep this project going and who drag my motivation back in by its hind legs every time it wants to run screaming into the other direction – you are the sole reason this thing exists. You all rock and I love you infinitely.

We’ll meet again next Sunday with The Raven King. xx

Side note: I’ve gone through the blog and organized all asks/replies dealing with frequently discussed topics, go check them out! All links are listed on the Read All Chapters page as well.

The demisexuality discourse

The mental health discourse

The Seth discourse

America vs Everywhere Else things

Side side note: Remember when I said I was going to rename all the chapters Percy Jackson style? So I may…… be doing that soon…….. keep ur eyeballs peeled friends!!!

#tfc #the foxhole court #aftg #all for the game #nicki reads tfc #[the last five years voice] it's over it's done #this was fun I'm gonna do those after every book I think #wheeeeeeee #edit: edited the parts where I used the m word as I realized it was Not Fucking Okay

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Game 41: Eamon: The Beginner’s Cave (1979)

This is pretty dope for the time, to be honest.

I’m tackling Eamon today, which presents something slightly different from my usual fare. On the surface it looks like a text adventure, but when you dig into it a little bit it’s very obviously a CRPG. More than that, though, it’s a tool for users to create their own games, very possibly the first one that was ever made available to a wide audience. Certainly it’s the first one I’ve encountered on the blog (unless you count the Wander programming language used to create games like Castle and Aldebaran III, but that could hardly be described as widely available).

If the number of games available for Eamon are anything to go by, it certainly had some measure of popularity. The Eamon Adventurer’s Guild – which is still posting updates in 2020, surprisingly – has a list of over 250 games available, which beggars a real question for a project like mine. How many of these games am I going to play? My gut instinct is to defiantly shout ALL OF THEM whenever the question comes up, so that’s a possibility. But being more realistic, I’m going to play it by ear as I plan out each year. For 1979 I have two Eamon adventures lined up: Beginner’s Cave and Lair of the Minotaur. 1980 jumps up to ten, and by 1984 there are a whopping 41. I’ll stick with it for as long as it seems feasible, and for as long as I’m enjoying the games.

But let’s take a step back and look at how Eamon came about. The details are a little hazy, because the game’s creator Donald Brown has spent the last 30 years not wanting to talk about it. What we do know is that Brown was a university student around the time that his father purchased an Apple II circa 1978. He was fascinated by the machine, as well as two other interests that seem so common to the CRPG creators of the era: Dungeons & Dragons, and the Society for Creative Anachronism. With the encouragement of his friends, Brown combined these interests to create Eamon, and distribute it out of his local shop, the Computer Emporium. From the beginning Brown made Eamon public domain, and it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t making any money from it: he was selling the game and its scenarios for the price of the media they were stored on. Later, in the mid-80s, Brown had a stab at a commercial version of Eamon with the SwordThrust line, but that apparently failed and Brown has had little to do with Eamon ever since. Others have maintained the community in his stead, and the entire library of games is still available today.

There’s some debate about exactly when Eamon first debuted. Most sources will cite 1980, but Jimmy Maher over at the Digital Antiquarian has done some pretty convincing detective work that suggests a date of 1979 is more likely. It’s pretty hard to dispute, so I’m going with 1979.

At this point I should probably get to the point and talk about what Eamon is, and what it does that’s inspired a community spanning close to half a century. I can’t really get into the technical specifics, which are well beyond my expertise, but I can speak to what it offers that no CRPG before it has done: an ongoing “campaign”. One of D&D’s most compelling features is its persistence, the ability to take your character from one adventure to the next and to have him or her gain in power (hopefully) or suffer setbacks along the way. Certainly games had emulated the “gain in power” aspect, and persistent characters were a thing going back to the PLATO days, but you were always stuck inside the same game, the same dungeon. Eamon expanded that to include a potentially endless number of scenarios, and gave users the tools to create their own scenarios as well. Not a bad deal for the price of a few floppy disks.

Eamon’s original release was on the Apple II, but it was later ported to the PC, and an Eamon Deluxe was created in the late 90s for MS-DOS. It was even made playable in a browser in 2017. I’m going to be playing the Apple II version, of course, and I won’t be checking out any of the other ports right now.

Before getting into the game I took a look at the documentation that’s out there, at least for players. (I didn’t want to get into the manuals for creating scenarios, because as much as I’d like to try it I don’t have the time to get sucked into something like that.) It covers the game’s systems in some detail, as well as giving a little bit of backstory: “Far away, at the dead center of the Milky Way, is the planet of Eamon. It doesn’t orbit any suns – all of the suns orbit it. The shifting pulls of all these great bodies bring strange forces to bear upon this planet; twisting light, tides, even the laws of science itself!” So that’s the basic framework for adventures within Eamon, although I’ve no doubt that there’ll be scenarios out there that make no sense within that framework. The player is supposedly a citizen of the planet Eamon, a free person out to seek their fortune.

The core of Eamon is the “Main Hall” of the Guild of Free Adventurers, which is contained on the main game disk. Here you create your characters, equip them, and save them between adventures. My first experience with the game was a rather ignominious one. The game begins as you enter the hall. There are many men and women guzzling beer, and a desk with a sign that says “register here or else!” I opted to join the beer drinkers first, and got a sword in the back for my troubles.

I mean, do I really want to associate with these people?

I’m not sure what the point of that was, but I suppose Donald Brown wanted to send a message to Eamon players to follow the rules. Or maybe he just thought it was amusing, who knows.

If you go to the desk, a burly Irishman – which already puts a dent in the planet Eamon set-up if we’re being honest – asks for your name. Here you can retrieve a character you’ve created before, or put in a new name to create a new character. If the character’s new, you get to choose whether you’re Male or Female, and then you get given your statistics.

This is done by a “tall man of possible elvish descent”, who tells you what your scores are in Hardiness, Agility and Charisma. He also gives you a book of instructions, which you can opt to read or totally ignore.

The three stats range between 3 and 24, generally landing in the mid-teens. Or at least, they’re supposed to be between 3 and 24; on the first version of the game that I downloaded I was getting stats in the 30s and 40s. Almost every version of Eamon that I found had the same problem. I suspect that the game had been cracked somewhere along the way, and for whatever reason that was the version that’s become widespread on the net. The version from the Eamon Adventurer’s Guild works correctly though, so if you’re looking to play the game that’s the place to get it from. The browser version also works correctly.

Hardiness is the equivalent of hit points. It also determines how much weight you can carry, although I can’t say that I ever ran into any encumbrance problems during The Beginner’s Cave.

Agility measures how often a character lands a hit in combat. It can apparently be useful for avoiding traps and other hazards, but again this didn’t come into play in this adventure.

Charisma is used to determine how characters will react to you, whether certain NPCs will be hostile or friendly. It also has an effect on the prices in shops, which is a thing that fantasy CRPGs like to do a lot that is in no way applicable in real life. No matter how lovable and charming I might be, ain’t nothing changing the price of that jar of Vegemite.

After that, the elf-like man gives you a Vulcan-like hand gesture, and you can enter the Main Hall proper. From here you get six options: go on an adventure, buy weapons, buy spells, deposit your gold in a bank, look at your stats, or save and quit. Going on an adventure without weapons would be foolish, and the spells are too expensive for a beginning adventurer, so visiting the weapons shop is the best first option.

Temporarily leaving the universe sounds pretty good right about now.

Eamon splits weapons into five categories: axes, bows, clubs, spears and swords. The game is very up-front with its internal systems, and gives you your base chance to hit with each weapon: beginning adventurers are good with clubs (20%), okay with spears (10%) and axes (5%), average with swords (0%) and bad with bows (-10%). This seems like a fair approximation to me for what weapons would be easiest for a novice to pick up and use without training.

Armour has only three categories, leather, chain and plate. Wearing armour reduces the damage you take when hit, but it also reduces your own chances to hit when attacking. Shields work much the same way.

You begin with 200 gold pieces. This was generally enough to buy one weapon, a suit of armour (usually leather, although with a high enough Charisma I could sometimes afford chain) and a shield.

My character just before his ill-fated adventure.

All of the above is done through menus, and is pretty self-explanatory, but the game does try to liven things up a bit by giving the various shopkeepers some personality. The weapons shop is run by Marcos Cavielli, a pretty heavy italian stereotype. The wizard who sells magic is an old grump called Hokas Tokas. The banker is called Shylock, which I’ll assume is a Shakespeare reference and leave it at that. It’s a valiant attempt, and it’s somewhat charming the first time you go through the process, but after a while it becomes a little tiresome reading the same dialogue over again.

When it’s time to adventure, the game asks you for the scenario disk. For The Beginner’s Cave, you just leave the main disk in and continue.

I couldn’t bear not to add an apostrophe.

The Beginner’s Cave is the first Eamon scenario, and the manual helpfully explains that it was set up by “The Warlord” as a service to all Free Adventurers, as a way for them to test their skills in a mildly dangerous setting. How thoughtful! As we’ll see, it makes very little sense with the adventure as described below.

The adventure began when I apparently stole a horse and rode it to the cave, where I was inspected by the local knight marshal. If you have no weapons he will turn you away, and he also won’t let you in if your stats are higher than those of a beginning adventurer. Like the sign on the cave says, this one is strictly for beginner’s only.

Doesn’t the guy care that I nicked some poor bugger’s horse?

Movement and commands are done in the usual adventure game manner: NESW for North, East, South and West. The game has a parser that generally behaves like an adventure game, but the commands are limited. In fact, if you type a command that the game doesn’t recognise it gives you a list of every command in the game. Apparently these can change depending on your scenario, For The Beginner’s Cave, it’s mostly basic stuff like GET, DROP, LOOK, EXAMINE, READ, OPEN, etc.

The entrance to the cave led to a passage heading south that then opened into a huge chamber with torches lining the walls. The entire dungeon is filled with lit torches, so there’s no need to worry about light sources. A tunnel headed south, and there were chambers to the east and west.

I started by exploring the east chamber, where I met a smelly old hermit. Also in the room was a bottle, which I took. The hermit, perhaps incensed that I was nabbing his personal belongings, attacked me.

The hermit was hostile this time, but in other games he’s been friendlier and decided to follow me around and help me fight various monsters. As I mentioned above, this is dependent on my Charisma. It also depends on the NPC’s Friendliness rating. The manual says that the Hermit has a Friendliness of 50%, which means that without modifiers he will be friendly half the time. This is modified by the player’s Charisma score minus 10, then multiplied by 2. A character with a Charisma of 5 would subtract 10 for a result of -5, then multiplying by two come up with a modifier of -10, which would reduce the Hermit’s Friendliness to 40%. If the player had a Charisma of 15, the Hermit’s Friendliness would be raised to 60%. Some characters and monsters have a Friendliness of 0, and will be hostile regardless of the player’s Charisma.

Obviously this time the roll hadn’t gone my way, because the hermit was attacking me. We exchanged blows for a few rounds, until he fumbled and dropped his axe. I picked it up, and without a weapon he wasn’t able to defend himself, so I beat the hermit to death without fear of reprisal. After the fight I examined the bottle and learned that it was a healing potion. I’d only been struck once byt the hermit, so I decided to save it for later.

Beating an unarmed hermit to death. Hey, he started it!

The chamber to the west had some treasure in the form of a pile of diamonds, but it was guarded by a trio of giant rats (each a different colour so that the parser can differentiate them). I struck the black rat, killing it, and the other two fled out of the room.

The ability to land a blow in combat is a percentage based on your Agility score multiplied by two, modified by your skill with the weapon you’re using and the complexity of that specific weapon. My character had an Agility of 16, which is doubled for a base score of 32. He was using a mace, for which he had a skill of 20%, but its complexity was -10%, so his chance to hit each round was 42%. If he’d been wearing armour it would have been further reduced, but for this game I didn’t buy any.

Your weapon skills increase through use. Basically, for every blow you strike, the chance of missing is your chance of increasing the skill. My character above would have a 58% chance of increasing his score with clubs every time he hits. This raises your skill in that weapon by 2% each time, which increases the chance to hit but makes the chance to learn a little lower. It’s a pretty solid system, and I could even see someone building a decent tabletop RPG out of it. Unfortunately, in practice it boils down to typing ATTACK BLACK RAT over and over again until you win or die. The math works, but it’s still a system that doesn’t give the player a lot of options.

I should also note that once you’re on an adventure you can’t look at your stats, and you have no idea how much Hardiness you have left. The combat descriptions give you a general idea of how your character is feeling, but you never know exactly how close you are to dying. It does provide a certain level of uncertainty that I appreciate (and I’ve done similar things when running tabletop D&D), but it would be nice to be able to check how my weapon skills are advancing.

With the black rat dead I scooped up the diamonds, and fought the two remaining rats in the main chamber. Sometimes when a creature fumbles its weapon can break, and in the screen shot below you can see the absurd situation of a giant rat killing itself by breaking its own teeth.

Actually, I’ve smashed a tooth out on the concrete before and it was bloody awful, so this tracks.

I headed south, into a long passage lined with cells, six in all. In the first one I explored was a human warrior armed with a sword and shield. His shield had a sticker on it that said “Hi! I’m Heinrich!” Sometimes Heinrich will help you out, but once again the random numbers were against me, because Heinrich was hostile. I won the following battle, but by the end I was “knocking on death’s door”, so I drank the healing potion to regain some Hardiness.

In the other cells I found a gorilla guarding some gold pieces, and a mimic disguised as a chest. The gorilla fumbled and broke its weapon, so I was able to kill it without it fighting back. The mimic was disguised, as I said, but there was no way to find that out without first opening the chest. This caused it to grab me with its tentacles, and I had no choice but to fight back. I killed it with my first blow, and found a gold ring hidden beneath its corpse.

Further south I came to an intersection. One path led to a library, where I found a glowing book. I took it with me and left. (You can read the book, but this results in you being transformed into a fish and dying of asphyxiation. A typically arbitrary adventure game death, with no way of figuring out beforehand that this might happen.)

The tunnel east led to a flight of stairs heading down. The tunnel continued east until emerging in a small bay surrounded by cliffs. There was a pirate here, guarding a pile of jewels, and at my approach he muttered a word that caused his ornate sword to blaze with green fire. I probably should have fled at this point, seeing as I was quite badly wounded, but I decided to fight anyway.

Yarr, it be Trollsfire it be.

After the first swing the pirate fled. I took his jewels and pursued him along the tunnel, killing him with my first stroke. Now that he was dead I could claim his magic sword, called Trollsfire. Unfortunately, I used the wrong command when trying to wield the sword. I should have typed READY TROLLSFIRE, but instead I typed WIELD TROLLSFIRE. The game interpreted this as me activating the sword while it was on my person but not in my hand, and burning myself to death. Whoops.

Dumb ways to die, So many dumb ways to die.

Despite dying I’d covered everything that Beginner’s Cave had to offer, or so I thought. While I was doing some preliminary reading for this post I discovered that there’s a secret passage leading to another area. I promptly stopped reading and sent another character into the cave, and began searching. I found the secret passage in the tunnel just south of the cells, where the walls are described as “very broken and rough”. I suppose that’s a hint, but it doesn’t come across as one when you’re not actually thinking about secret tunnels.

You can go east here without finding the tunnel first. If I’d been using my usual adventure game method I’d have stumbled across it for sure.

At the end of the passage I found a temple, being presided over by a mad priest of some sort. Also here, presumably as a captive, was Cynthia “Duke Luxom’s not-too bright daughter”. This was the first I was hearing of any of this, but I duly killed the priest and allowed Cynthia to follow me. I also took some rare spices before I left the temple.

“An insane look on his face” covers most of the priests I’ve met.

Whenever you return to town, you sell all of your treasures to Sam Slicker, the local buyer of such things. I also got an extra reward for rescuing Cynthia, which kid of irks me to be honest. If I’d been told about her beforehand I’d have been much more inclined to start searching around for secret tunnels. As it was I thought I was done after killing the pirate, because there was no indication that there was anything else to do. And that’s not even mentioning the apparent set-up of “the Warlord” creating the cave for adventurers to train, which seems an unlikely place for an evil priest to be holding the duke’s daughter captive.

The reward you get for Cynthia is based on your own Charisma, which certainly says something about how much Duke Luxom value’s his daughter.

I can’t say that this is a great start for Eamon, if I’m being honest. I like the idea of a CRPG with an adventure game parser, and I love the idea of being able to take my characters from adventure to adventure. Beginner’s Cave is a little too simplistic, though. There’s really nothing to do inside it but fight. Sure, there are friendly characters, but you can’t actually interact with them. Either they attack you or they follow you; they don’t react to any of your other actions. I’m also aware that fighting is pretty much all you do in loads of other CRPGs, but that works when the combat has some tactical depth. Eamon doesn’t, at least in its first scenario, and it suffers from that.

I suspect this will change in further adventures, particularly because of Eamon’s spell system. The game has four spells: Blast, Heal, Speed and Power. Blast hits the target with a magic arrow. Heal restores your Hardiness. Speed doubles your Agility for a time. Power is an odd one, in that its effect changes from scenario to scenario. It’s justified in-game as a “call to the gods”. It’s the only spell that’s cheap enough for a starting character to afford, so I bought it and tried to use it in the Beginner’s Cave. When I cast it I heard a sonic boom in the distance, but when I explored I didn’t notice any changes to the dungeon. Casting it in battle didn’t seem to do anything either, although in the final room it caused the rare spices to disappear. I’ll write more about the spell system when I cover The Lair of the Minotaur, because I’ll actually be able to afford some of the spells before going in.

RADNESS INDEX:

Story & Setting: There is a story to Beginner’s Cave, but the game doesn’t clue you in until you stumble upon it. If it had mentioned the duke’s daughter and the evil priest at the beginning it might have scored a little higher here. As for the setting the caves don’t really make a lot of sense. The setup with a warlord maintaining them to train adventurers almost works in a fantasy D&D-logic sort of way, but it’s harder to see how an evil priest got in there, or why it opens into a pirate’s cove. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: I appreciate that the game goes to some extra effort to give its shopkeepers personality, even if they are more than a little stereotypical. The monsters don’t offer much in the way of tactical variation, but they make up for that a little bit with some descriptive prose. The characters that you can befriend and fight alongside are a nice touch as well, although genuine interaction with them is very limited. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: This is effectively a text adventure in terms of visuals, with no sound beyond the very occasional beep from the speakers. Still, the descriptions of the rooms and characters are better then those in the vast majority of adventure games on home computers from this era. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Combat: This is among the least complex combat systems I’ve encountered in a CRPG. Possibly the magic system would mitigate this, but it’s pretty much inaccessible in the Beginner’s Cave scenario. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: Despite the lack of options in combat, the math behind it is solid, and I do like how your abilities improve through use. The parser works, although it is extremely basic. I never had problems finding the right command in a situation (aside from accidentally killing myself), but that’s because the numbers of commands available are very limited by the standards of parser-based games. Or maybe not. It could be that adventure games of the era are just as limited, but hide it by not giving you the full list of commands available. Either way, I feel like Eamon loses that illusion of flexibility by putting the commands right out in the open. It’s a simple game that does what it does pretty well, but at least in this scenario it’s not trying to do all that much. Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: I only died twice in the half-dozen times I played through this adventure: once when I read the book, and once when I accidentally burned myself to death with Trollsfire. For all the battles I fought in the cave, I never lost one of them, and the game was really rather easy. Of course, that is its intention: it’s a beginner’s dungeon designed to give an Eamon novice some extra experience and a feel for the game. It succeeds at that, but as a game in its own right I’d still say that it rates as trivially easy. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Fun: I like a short game, but this one was too short, and not at all challenging. I didn’t hate it, it’s just inconsequential. Although the secret passage and the unmentioned kidnapping of Cynthia did irk me slightly. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 2. I’m giving this game both bonus points for its historical significance and the potential it gives for better adventures in the future. I really like what it’s trying to do, it just doesn’t quite get there with its first scenario.

The above categories total 12, which doubled (and given the bonus points) gives a RADNESS Index of 26. That puts it equal 27th, and equal 11th out of 17 CRPGs. It’s equal on points with Moria, which has the opposite problem, in that it’s empty and far too long. Otherwise it’s sitting just below Akalabeth, which was impressive but fundamentally flawed, and above a whole bunch of CRPGs that I didn’t much care for. Right on the dividing line between games I liked and games I didn’t get much enjoyment out of seems about right. I suspect that future scenarios for Eamon will do better.

NEXT: Next on my list is Futurewar which is a PLATO game that seems to be part CRPG and part primitive 3D shooter. I’m tempted to kick it off my list because I just don’t want to get stuck on a months-long mainframe game again, but it does have stats and experience points and levels, so… I guess I have to at least check it out. If I do get into it for any great length of time, I’ll alternate posts between playing Futurewar and progressing through the other games on the list.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-41-eamon-the-beginners-cave-1979/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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