My Journey in Understanding Comics - Intermission "Trinity"
Another letter.
This intermission can be found published in DC Pride 2025. Just a little submission about "Galaxy: The Prettiest Star" and how important representation is.
Huge thanks to the DC Comics Discord Team for making this possible. And congrats to all the other submitters, a lot of heart-wrenchers in there!
In 1989 Trident Comics published a four-part comic titled St. Swithin’s Day.
St. Swithin’s Day follows an unnamed 19 year old who has decided to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. The comic follows him in the days leading up to the event. He steals, and later decides to throw away, a copy of Catcher in the Rye. He has a conversation with a woman in a cafe who only exists in his head. He sleeps in a maintenance train car. He dances to The La’s “There She Goes” in front of Karl Marx’s grave. He calls his mother, who begs him to come home and interview for a job at a grocery store. The morning of St Swithin’s Day he jumps in front of Margaret Thatcher, appearing as a madman reaching into his jacket pocket, "neurotic boy outsider" written proudly on his forehead. He pulls out nothing. He points his finger at her and simply says “bang” out loud and is promptly tackled by security. He rides home on the train, covered in bruises and less one tooth.
“It was worth it just to see her scared.”
St. Swithin’s Day was written by Grant Morrison, known for the incredibly metatextual first arc of Animal Man, as well as his run of Doom Patrol, The Invisibles, and All-Star Superman. He was part of the all-star lineup behind 52, the comic that got me into comics. It is illustrated by Paul Grist, an artist well-known for the series Kane. At least that’s what Wikipedia is telling me. I did not ever find the time to consume Grists’ other works, let alone study them as closely as I did Morrison’s, before deciding on my method of suicide.
[Recommended reading for this is on my new website, Earth-64. It is also available on Archive of Our Own.]
I tried to kill myself five times in a three year period. You’d say I’m being a bit loose saying I “tried” when I was never found unconscious on the pavement or bleeding out in the bath. Suicide is not a singular moment. It is weeks of spiraling. It is time spent feeling unreal. It is a decision made in a manner of thought existing below consciousness. It is a monster that festers inside of you, begging for the conditions to be met that would allow your conscious mind to accept it. A remaining sliver of your rational brain watches helplessly as you cut yourself off from your support network. You start consuming media that you know will make you sad. You want to get your brain to want to kill you. You want to feel like you want to die. You’re afraid you’ll get better, that you’ll miss your chance. You start writing a note in your head that you’re too afraid to put onto paper. Yet you may write it in a hurried panic late one night, because you need it with urgency. You’re afraid you won’t be able to write it later because you’ll be too far gone. You learn the songs that make you the saddest and assemble the playlist that will kill you. You plan the perfect day of melancholic vitriol that would make it possible and you set a date. I tried to kill myself five distinct times while in Seattle.
I’m hurtling towards the sixth attempt at forty miles per hour on the Sound Transit light rail as the soundtrack to my demise tocks Clark Powell’s “Ephemeral Muse” and ticks over to Will Wood’s “Against the Kitchen Floor”. Othello gives way to Columbia City and the Seattle skyline spells out a threat I know all too well it has the guts to follow through with. I’m thinking about how blind I must have been to think it said anything different to me as I was riding in just four years ago just as Mount Baker swallows the train whole. Will Wood’s apologies for his inability to become human echo through the maintenance tunnels of my brain.
We emerge from the tunnel out into Soho and Seattle is no longer a threat on the horizon but a looming beast. The light rail does not stop. We drive straight into the beast’s stomach as Ada Rook’s “Strangers” takes its turn stabbing me gently. This metal snake worms its way through the beast’s colon and I become aware of the other passengers for the first time as I start to bawl my eyes out. They do not react.
These underground stations are the familiar ones, the ones I would pass every day on my way to work. For the first year I lived in Seattle I took this train from Capitol Hill to the International District and back again. I remember every emotion I’ve ever experienced on this train. I remember how much hope and joy I had once felt. That was supposed to be the start of my Real Life. It wasn’t supposed to be an empty chapter of rot near the end of my book. I hate that I now feel so unwelcome here. I hate that being here now makes me want to die. I hate that I came here to die.
“Now arriving: Capitol Hill.”
I stand on the platform for a moment and take in the segmented planes I’ve passed under hundreds of times. On my first day here I took a selfie with them and made a joke about being with Eva-01. That’s just what happens when you show a daunting hunk of purple and green metal to someone who watched Evangelion for the first time just a few months prior. I wonder how many other people have made the same joke or even had the same fleeting thought for just a few seconds as they ride the escalator. Now I’m reminded more of the stealth bomber obscuring the moon at the end of Psycholonials, but that’s just what happens when you place a suicidal tranny underneath a daunting hunk of metal. It occurs to me for just a moment that I never once bothered to look up what this art piece is actually called or who made it. I don’t stop to do that now. I’m ascending up the escalator fast enough that the onism can’t keep up.
When I emerge I’m met with the heart-wrenching site of a clear blue sky. It’s a rare hot day in Seattle. I avoid a few nagging clipboard-wielders pedaling some kind of phone scam and make my way down Broadway. I should have exited the station from the other end. Old habit.
Each step I take into Cal Anderson feels like turning up the volume dial of a screaming static. The large round fountain is spilling water forth in an endless performance. The lawns are dotted with twenty-somethings smoking weed and throwing frisbees to their dogs. Only a couple kids are hanging from the monkeybars. I never saw many kids in this city. That horrid bright blue sky and roaring hot sun loom above it all. What is left of our natural world if you can’t count on rain in Seattle anymore?
My penchant for what the kids are calling “Aura and Hype” and I call “finding narrative fulfillment” and most would call “cringe” forces me to turn on Mike Oldfield’s “Nuclear” as I take a seat on a park bench.
Standing on the edge of the crater.
I try to imagine the cold ashes that must still lay embedded deep in the dirt. In my mind I see the lawns beaten down to workable soil. A sea of tents set up inside protective walls of chainlink and cardboard. And words, words everywhere. Cries for freedom and for change, mantras painted onto every surface. Endless crowds of people fighting loud and proud for a better world.
And I can’t see it.
I wasn’t there.
What a mess we made, when it all went wrong.
In June of 2020 I found myself back together with my long-distance right-wing ex-boyfriend after he simply refused to let me break up with him. I had quit my job in December 2019, he dropped the ball on moving me in, and I was stuck without a job when the pandemic hit. I tried to dump him as my politics took a miraculously wild turn left, then everything stagnated. The world came to a stop. My parents still wanted money for rent and there was a black void beyond our porch steps. They threatened to throw me out into it on more than one occasion that summer. Getting back together with my ex was the best option I had if I wanted to stay alive. But I did so with a stipulation: I told him that if a revolutionary movement started and led to a commune situation, anywhere on the planet, I would leave him immediately. I would drop everything and run to anywhere in the world to find freedom. Of course he didn’t think it would ever happen.
CHAZ was founded the following weekend.
I watched from afar as all the leftist history I had been reading for the past year played out in real time on my computer screen. I think to most people aware of it at the time it felt like a story of legend. Sparse images made their way online, stories passed around by pure written word promised a narrative that seemed magical, mythical. Even at that moment it was easy to dismiss it as a work of fiction. Five years removed and nothing here remains to prove it wasn’t.
I was uniquely positioned to know people who were there. I spoke to people who had their boots in this very soil. At the time it was a real thing I could see happening to people I cared about, and now I still see its echoes in their faces. The experience forever changed the ones that it didn’t kill.
I kept my promise to my ex-boyfriend, but I didn’t make it to Seattle until the following year. All that remained of CHAZ in 2021 was a community garden, which is now the green lawn of mowed grass I’m staring at while I sit here. That garden and the ghosts that haunt everyone I love.
CHAZ was a reprieve from culture. CHAZ was owning a gun and keeping a midnight watch. CHAZ was a fleeting glimpse into what really matters. CHAZ was all that has ever been real. CHAZ was the only chance we ever had to actually fight. CHAZ shattered the reality that internet drama or culture war means anything. The loss of CHAZ led to a lot of suicide.
4lung, in her song “Rat King World Champion - Quit While You're Ahead”, deals with the aftermath of there briefly existing a better world. Her lyrics–
“Oh my gosh I am so sorry! She gets so excited when we come here.”
“It’s fine,” I reply, taking off my headphones. The silence of the world hits me like a truck. I pet the dog. “What’s her name?”
“Maureen.”
“You have a very human name, Maureen.”
“She’s named after my sister,” says the woman as she takes a seat on the bench. We sit in silence for a few agonizing seconds before she breaks it. “You live here on the hill?”
“No, just visiting.”
“Family? Friends?”
“I’m going to commit suicide by cop. Elon Musk is in town to attend an esports event. I am going to point my fingers at him, shout bang, and be killed.”
I let the next few seconds of silence wash over me like a cool breeze. She responds, calmly, “Why?”
“What else is there left for me to do?”
“You could do it for real, if you’re sure you’re going to die anyway.”
I don’t think about it. I think about something else instead. I turn around and point to an apartment skyrise that wasn’t there a decade ago. I say, “I toured one of those apartments last year. I was so certain I was going to bring my girlfriend up here from California. It was a modest plan. We would both have jobs and we would barely scrape by living in a one-bedroom apartment. The real estate agent showed me around the room and I filmed it. I was so excited to show my girlfriend even that tiny place we could call our own. The agent took me around the building, showed me a gym I would never use, then up to the top floor. It’s beautiful up there: pool tables and grills and sun lounges and a killer view. I looked out and saw this whole park, all at once. A beautiful green lawn under a shining sun. The real estate agent smiled at me from behind her clipboard, talking about prices while I took in the breathtaking view of the world’s most beautiful graveyard. They burned our future and stuck an exorbitant price tag on its corpse.”
“Did you find a place to be with your girlfriend?”
“I did. It wasn’t here and it didn’t last long.”
She points at me. No, she’s pointing at one of my buttons. “It comes out in a couple days, you know? Don’t you want to be alive to see what happens next? And someday to see how it ends?”
At first I’m caught off guard. Then I remember how mainstream Deltarune is. I have to remind myself of that often. It still feels like a niche within a niche within a niche. A comic begets a game that begets a game. The further down the rabbit hole you go the closer you get to the surface. Obscurity is eroded by entropy. I respond truthfully, “It’s become hard to care.”
She looks almost… angry? “Given the option of a world-changing martyrdom or a continued search for meaning you choose… a pointless suicide? You’re gonna march up to the oppressor and ask to be excused? You’re gonna let a cop watch you bleed out in the street? Millions of people will know about you, and you’re wrong if you think you’ll be inciting anything in them. They’re all scared and you’re gonna make it worse.”
“Don’t ever volunteer for a suicide hotline ma’am, you’re awful at it.”
“Who do you blame?”
“I guess, ultimately, it's all my own fault.”
“So what now then? What the fuck now?”
“Now this is the part where we zoom out to reveal I haven’t been talking to anyone. You’re just a figment of my imagination. I made you up to have a different excuse to exposit than the last three monologues.”
I take a deep breath and zoom out again. West this time. The Front Bottom’s “Twin Sized Mattress”.
I came here a lot, on my worst days in Seattle. A maze-like bookstore with a bunch of live-in cats. When I’d hit a point where I could not stand to sit alone in my apartment for another moment, but could not dare to reach out to any of the friends I suspected of hating me, I’d come here and pet a cat. I was sure none of these cats held any grudges towards me, sure that none of them would recoil from my pet and complain “Um, actually I’ve hated you for years! I kept hoping you wouldn’t come back!” before issuing a restraining order.
I used to play a game here. I’d try to see if I could find a book containing someone I knew or someone that meant something to me. Well that version of the rules sounds a little easy because “liking an author” is enough for them to mean something to you, and plenty of people like plenty of common authors. The version of the ruleset that exists in my head is closer to “find a book containing knowledge that pertains to The Plot.” The Plot meaning… the things important to my own personal narrative. It’s much too late for me to be unpacking what that means. It’s not like it meant anything in the end, anyway, it would seem.
I take a seat amongst the science fiction books, the corner where the cats like to sleep in the sun. One that reminds me of a childhood pet is curled up in the windowsill. I run my fingers through its fur.
I’ve fallen, my knees screaming into the hot California cement. Sweat streams down my face and I can’t catch my breath. I can’t breathe at all. I’m dying. I just had to shovel some fucking rocks and it’s killing me. I’ve been given everything I’ve ever wanted and I can’t give back even this. I lost my temper and I screamed and I cursed and I made a fool of myself again. She’s going to be afraid of me like everyone else is. Everyone is afraid of me eventually. Because I’m rash and I’m angry and I’m violent. I couldn’t be reasonable. I had to lose myself and push myself until I was raw and bloody. I’m bleeding everywhere. I’m dying. No, I’m already dead. I’ve been dead. I killed myself in Seattle. I never made it out. I jumped off my roof and landed in Heaven and everything is so beautiful now that I don’t deserve it. I’m crying and screaming and bleeding in Heaven. I look up and see an angel so beautiful that I can’t belong here.
The cat yawns and stretches and walks away. I sit there a moment among the shitty Star Wars novelizations, listening to my suicide-playlist. “The Leaving”, Marcus Carline. I take my own, refusing to play the game. The old woman who runs the place is arguing with someone trying to resell books they just bought at the thrift store two blocks over. Outside the sun continues its onslaught.
I’m wandering at this point, stumbling through familiar streets. I try to focus on the music but I’m breathing too loud, thinking too fast. The steps don’t come naturally, I have to think about each and every one. I’m processing a thousand smells and sounds and a million sights. I can’t will myself to zoom out this time.
I tear off the headphones and collapse at the base of a tree. I close my eyes and imagine the feather. I count the numbers on London’s tattoo. I remember seeing a bunny. I saw it a few times, right here, on this street, when I would walk home late at night. I know where I am. I open my eyes.
That’s the roof I didn’t jump off.
I know just across the alley are the dumpsters I always liked the graffiti on. Rawrdcore’s fursona and a Sparkledog Clownpuppy. I always thought I was meant to meet the artists. I always meant to reach out to the artists. Just beyond that is a little sub-alley I could see from my old apartment’s balcony. I’d go out on it to smoke weed. The view from there was the wrong way, so I couldn’t see the city, just the alleyway where the homeless slept. I’d probably have died a lot sooner if that balcony was a bit higher. The five minute walk from my floor to the roof was enough of a mental gap to hold back the times the thoughts were just intrusive.
The sun starts to set and I take my place in the alley.
I’m lying on some concrete steps, looking up and imagining where the stars must be hiding behind the pollution, hoping the rabbit I know lives on this block hops by and reminds me how even such a pathetic creature can survive here longer than me.
I wonder what everyone I’ve ever known must be thinking. I wonder how many of them notice my absence. It’s just been a couple days without posting, surely none of them have noticed. I think of my girlfriend I left in California. She knows where I went but not what I’m doing. She thinks I’m rooming with a friend for a bit, just to get some space. She’s absolutely worried now that I’m not responding to all the texts. I consider calling her and telling her everything. I don’t.
It’s cold. It’s so fucking cold. I put too much brain power into thinking of the most boring thing to listen to while falling asleep, just for the sake of the reference. All for the sake of the reference. All I know is references. I give up searching for Glenda Jackson interviews and turn back on my suicide-playlist. I fall asleep listening to Will Toledo seeking reprieve from depression through dissociation.
Haven’t you?
Something between a dream and a feverish thought-spiral fills the entire sweltering night. Skeletons and ghosts dance amongst playing cards and chess pieces. The world unfolds like a dead origami unicorn and everything before me is a flat piece of darkness. I see a figure with its back to me. At the shadow’s edge the twilight reverie is shattered. A column of intense light, a blinding beautiful blue streaking into the ether. I can almost make out their face. I can almost hear the music. I can almost… I can’t. I can’t see anything.
I can’t see fucking anything. I’m laying on the cold pavement at three in the morning pretending that I care about anything. I’ve felt the same way every time I’ve ever gotten high: a small part of me is always perfectly conscious. I’m faking it. I’m faking everything. I could be fine if I wanted to and it’s all in my head. I squeeze my eyes shut and beg to dream more.
What if I never see more? What if I die not knowing–
God, what if she’s right? What if this insignificant anchor to reality will keep me bound here? What if I chicken out because, no matter how much I believe in what I’m doing, in the end I care too much about seeking more knowledge? I’m just gonna keep floating through life, a ghost tethered by unfinished business.
A friend leaves a suicide note lamenting that he won’t see the end of Homestuck and I know now a decade later that Shahrazad never stops spinning her tales.
My brain writes a dozen shitty dream sequences that my conscious mind rejects for being cliche.
I finally drag myself out of the alley after the sun is already rising into another clear blue sky.
Today is the day. I don’t mentally dwell on it.
I have another stop to make first. One more plot beat to hit. I pay for a bus fare with the ORCA card given to me by the ego-destructing manufacturing job I had a couple years ago. They made me pay for the card initially but then never asked for it back. Its magically gotten renewed both years since and I’m not complaining. We pass over Lake Union, heading north, towards Fremont. “The Mind Electric” on repeat.
That manufacturing job was actually split into two periods of temporary positions. In between the temp agency had me do a couple other odds and ends. Security check for a concert at the zoo was a fine one. The card shop inventory was not. I was so excited to be working with something I loved, Magic the Gathering, but it turned out to be the worst job experience of my life. A dozen people down in a basement, opening hundreds of packs of cards and sorting them by value. A frenzied repetition of destruction: peel the cellophane, crack open the box, surgically strip each card-pack of its glossy exterior. Endless trash bags of discarded skin and husks. Hundreds of Gandalfs and Frodos thrown into sorting bins. Mr. Salt wanted a golden ticket for his daughter. I ran screaming. I took the first bus home while they kept on ripping and tearing down there. I cried on the bus, quitting yet another job, when I looked out and saw Vladimir Lenin staring back and I knew everything was going to be okay.
That’s where I am right now.
He promised me so goddamn much. The pandemic hit and I sought any hope left in the world and I found it in books and in movements and in camaraderie. I slept through two decades of my life not caring about anything and suddenly I cared about everything. My enemies became my friends and I finally understood why anything on Earth was worth fighting for. My old friends became my new enemies and I could not comprehend why I could suddenly see what they still can not. My parents threatened to throw me out into the void of the pandemic and my once rival called me and told me everything was going to be okay. I sat on the curb feeling like I was about to die, crying into my phone, and she told me things would be okay. My whole damn world was flipped on its head.
Those were the best couple years of my life. I felt part of something. I felt like I had finally found out what it was all for. Every piece of media I had consumed and every day spent meticulously cultivating a social life and every night lost to lamenting how little I had done with my life all led here. The internet discourse and the social failures and the cloud-hosted scriptures all came together to form the singular Plot that kickstarted my Real Life.
We were going to save the world.
So what the hell happened? It all stopped as suddenly as it started. Every hope was dashed and every friendship burned and I found myself back where I had started. Am I here to follow through on my karmic destiny? Or am I just sick to fucking death of arguing with teenagers online? Am I just a sickly pessimistic person who can’t hold herself together enough to play her part in keeping the spirit of revolution alive? I should be teaching people as I was taught, forming the next generation, trying again. And here I am on a deeply selfish adventure trying to satiate the self-fulfilling prophecy the way one orders McDonald’s on UberEats. A quick, messy, expensive, destructive, self-indulgence.
I’m trying to dance. You should see me dancing. The Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again” is blasting on repeat through my headphones and I’m catching glimpses of Lenin’s hard stare towards the horizon with each pirouette. I want to dance and not have a care in the world. I’m going to die. I’m going to die today! I’m going to die today!
My footwork is sloppy. I took two years of dance classes to get out of Gym and now I’m just a crazy person stumbling in the middle of the street. I turn up the music louder. She’s down on her knees, my friend. Tears are streaming down my face, my friend. I’m dancing. I’m dancing and I don’t care that I’m about to die.
Why can’t you see it?
I’M GOING TO DIE.
I’M GOING TO DIE TODAY!
I’M GOING TO DIE AND I DON’T CARE!
I DON’T CARE!
I’M GOING TO DIE TODAY!
LOOK AT ME.
SOMEONE LOOK AT ME.
GOD PLEASE SOMEONE SEE ME.
I’m in the bathroom of a nearby pizza place. I’m shaving my face one last time. The final performance of a daily show that ran for 15 years. I’d have done it twice a day if I ever actually cared for the opinions of the spectators.
How many people will get hurt because of me? Am I just going to spur on the campaign of hate? Is every public appearance we make one that spurs on the campaign of hate against us? Should we hide? Should we pretend to not exist so that we may do so in secret? Do we beg for acceptance? Is rainbow capitalism today worth the inevitable genocide tomorrow? They will never accept us into the world as it exists. We have to make something new. We have to.
Back on the bus, heading south. I turn on something that isn’t on the playlist, something buried in my Youtube likes. “04 min 20 with Large Prime Numbers”. I don’t know the title, I don’t know the words. It’s just loud and emotional noise.
I wish I liked trains.
The light rail emerges from the tunnel and I breathe a sigh of a kind of relief the likes of which I have never felt before. As I watch Seattle fade once more into naught but a distant threat I suddenly remember that I had forgotten to tell you about how much I wish I liked trains. I just think it would be a neat autism to have. I could spend my days reading about the different models and makes, tracing routes on maps and researching the histories of stations and supply lines. I’d play railroad tycoons and watch those old VHS tapes they’d air the infomercials for. There wouldn’t be broken friendships, touchy subjects, callout posts, and endless balancing acts. I wouldn’t be traumatized by the punishments for being oblivious to feigned familiarity nor lost in the labyrinthine social web I spun myself into. I’d just like trains.
“I guess, ultimately, it's all my own fault,” as I catch my mind rewinding back to when I was 16, looking for a way to make some friends. All the things I got into, all the communities I joined, all the discourse I sought just because even that fucked up hate was one of the kinds of love we shared.
“I guess, ultimately, it’s all my own fault,” as it wanders back to when I was 23 and seeking any guidance at all. I had no plans for sleeping anywhere but the twin-sized mattress on my parent’s living room floor. I was beating my head against the wall, begging myself to make art good enough to absolve me of the sins of my fandom years.
“I guess, ultimately, it’s all my own fault,” and I’m saying goodbye to my dad at the airport, about to embark on the only real adventure I’ve ever been on. A lifetime of theme parks and movies did not prepare me for anything I faced when I chased a brighter future. He’s telling me to start living, to meet people, to have sex, to try drugs from the safety of my home. I think of his words as I’m standing in that accursed graveyard of a city for the first time, still blind, still naive.
“I guess, ultimately, it’s all my own fault,” and I’m listening to the Psycholonials soundtrack as the plane touches down in California and I’m given one more chance.
“I guess, ultimately…” I’m back on the light rail after my sixth botched suicide and I know I can’t blame myself anymore.
The bus stopped in front of the Climate Pledge Arena and I couldn’t get off. This was my stop. I knew this could be my stop. Musk would be there in 20 minutes and I could exit. And I didn’t. I just kept riding.
I let Youtube autoplay a song I had never heard before. My brain refused to decode the soundwaves and it all streamed through my brain like white noise.
I called my girlfriend. Told her I wanted to come home. She bought me a ticket on the earliest flight.
I couldn’t change the world. I wouldn’t have changed the world. Very few can. They’ve made it so hard for any of us to matter. It’s not a personal failing, I’m just another victim of oppression operating on a scale I cannot fathom. I should read more theory. I should make more friends. Right now I just need to stay alive. At least one more day. Even just one more day.
My 6th birthday party was themed after Tomb Raider. We played bingo with custom C-R-O-F-T cards we had custom printed. My dad hired a friend from work to come dressed as Lara Croft. He made me my own Lara Croft belt: a ring of felt with a skull sharpied on front, with two construction-paper gun-holsters. My presents included a few Tomb Raider comic books and an Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft action figure that for the next few years I would sleep with as if it was a stuffed plush and not a hard plastic figure.
We could begin unpacking the fact that I was, in the 2nd Grade, already dreaming of becoming a woman. Though there is a more shocking fact:
I did not play through Tomb Raider until last week, a month prior to my 28th birthday.
I owned all five of the original Tomb Raider games before starting kindergarten. Or rather, my dad did. While I had a number of kids games over on the family PC (Freddi Fish, Blue’s Clues, Play-Doh, Lego, etc.) (digital Play-Doh sounds sad and/or silly but that game was rad), our only console, a Playstation, sat next to a mix of games for me and games for my dad. A stack of jewel-cases where “Play With The Tellytubbies” was underneath “Grand Theft Auto 2”, underneath “Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation”, underneath “A Bug’s Life”, underneath “Fear Effect”, underneath “Punky Skunk”, and four other Tomb Raiders, and topped with “Rayman: Brain Games”.
I was playing games from this pile mostly at random. I was playing games from this pile before I could read. I was playing GTA 2 while wearing diapers. Imagine me here listing all of the various aspects of the world I was not aware of when I played Tomb Raider because it is literally all of them. I had no comprehension of existence when I played Tomb Raider.
The first three Tomb Raider games contain tutorial levels separated from the main game. You select “Lara’s Home” and are taken to a unique level: a large mansion containing a training course (of increasing complexity for each consecutive game). The fourth game opens to a mandatory tutorial level that is much more aggressively teachy. The fifth game has no tutorial other than a relatively safe first area
As a literal toddler, I would play these tutorial levels over and over and over. What many gamers saw as optional hand-holding warm-up areas became my first digital living space. Lara’s Mansion was the VR Chat Ambient Chill Relax 24/7 Furry Hangout Rain Bedroom of little Skyplayer’s preschool years. The three versions of the mansion were designed with increasing complexity in order to cover Lara’s expanding moveset. Young me only saw this as “was the red disc the one with the swimming pool or was that the blue one?”
This was all amongst the earliest influences on my brain comprehending 3D spaces. While I can, and probably will, write a similar piece praising Spyro the Dragon for likewise affecting how my brain is built on locational memory, Tomb Raider was just a much more grounded example. Lara moves stiffly, slowly, methodically, not unlike a toddler learning to walk. She rocks back and forth to turn in place. She takes careful steps back from dangerous ledges. She sidesteps one foot at a time to align herself with wall switches. She inhabits a house too large for herself. The mansion’s walls are belittling, the blocky polygonal stairs too large, the spaces between furniture vastly empty to accommodate player movement. Lara is only as proficient at locomotion as the player is with their controller, only as familiar with her own home as the player is with it, not much more than a child is to their own home. An adult player will complain about the tank controls, a child will see and feel a realistic depiction of their own lack of balance and confidence in movement.
Children can also run around in a circle in a video game for hours and be entertained while nothing in particular is happening. And be too scared to step outside the safe boundary of the tutorials.
I mean Lara’s Butler is scary enough!
Now that you are equipped to properly call out my nostalgia goggles, I will immediately say that as an adult I found the tank controls of Tomb Raider to actually be profoundly satisfying and nigh mechanically unparalleled.
Tomb Raider, released in October of 1996, followed Super Mario 64, released in June of 1996 in Japan but not until September for the US, by a margin slim enough that the former could not have been influenced by the latter beyond the developers knowing Nintendo was also doing A 3D Thing. This is probably an obvious statement to those alive at the time, but the mythology of Super Mario 64 existing as a progenitor of all 3D creation in the digital realm has buried itself deep in the cultural zeitgeist. I believe Nintendo is only as responsible as Core Design or Argonaut or any number of hobbyists exploring the computing power available in the 90s, even when it comes to things like “widespread public perception” or “game design precedents”. The 3D-Game was inevitable.
Which is all to say that Tomb Raider has ideas about 3D design that differ wildly from Super Mario 64 because they are two separate branches burgeoning from the theoretical 3D progenitor. Where Nintendo saw perhaps a more natural approach to design (rolling hills, free-flowing landscapes, open plazas with branching paths not unlike the Hub-And-Spoke design adopted by Walt Disney), Core Design saw structure and rigid shapes in the form of human architecture. In a 2007 documentary Core’s studio manager Gavin Rummery explains the level design being the result of working backwards from the design of Egyptian tombs. The interconnected rooms of sometimes-claustrophobic square hallways and grid-based rectangular rooms of towering ceilings came from the influence of human architecture, not software architecture (though the Saturn’s peculiar rendering techniques probably helped) (the Saturn rendered skewed sprites, not true polygons, something in between the “fake” 3D of Wolfenstein or Doom and the “real” 3D of polygonal meshes.) (All digital 3D is fake! It all gets rendered to flat pixels! It’s just arrays of points stored as plain ol’ integers!).
Hopefully this helps disperse the idea that Tomb Raider’s level design or control scheme are “outdated”. I truly don’t believe Tomb Raider has many software limitations that “don’t hold up” to modern eyes. On original hardware I would perhaps argue against the draw distance (though there may be those that argue for it adding to the atmosphere given, for example, Silent Hill), but the playthrough of mine I’m writing about now was done using the “Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft” collection (a mouthful, it seems “The Tomb Raider Trilogy” was already taken as a 2011 repackaging of the three later-6th and 7th generation games).
In so many 3D platformers, especially the collectathons, levels are presented as open playgrounds. Shining, often spinning objects sit atop tall geometry, drawing you in to search for the start of the guided hiking trail that will lead you to it. Pathways of small collectibles lead you meandering between landmarks, perhaps branching to small puzzle rooms. You go into a cave, solve a puzzle, get a reward, and leave the cave with a slightly heavier inventory. They are branching trees that stay close to the root: sometimes one reward will lead to a second, rarely will a more complicated chain emerge. Each time you return to the same open area, ready to find the next branch.
Tomb Raider isn’t doing this and it doesn’t want to do it. Some would say Tomb Raider’s linearity is a limitation: a way to render less, design less, display less. Screenshots do less justice of telling Tomb Raider’s intentions than a distant view of a Nintendo level.
“Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark” opens to Indy trudging through a jungle and coming to the overgrown entrance to an ancient structure. There is no immediate awe to the interior of this structure. His local guides abandon him. He barely fits through the narrow hallways, he intrudes on a hive of spiders that have taken residence, the very stonework become hostile towards him with deadly traps and collapsing floors. Only after much ordeal does any room open to be larger than the last, and even then it’s the most dangerous one yet. Upon committing thievery the building completely turns against him, chasing him out.
“Tomb Raider” begins with Lara arriving at the plateau of a snowy mountain, standing in front of the opening to an ancient structure. Wolves storm out of the stone gates, killing her local guide. The player is given control.
The first “world” of Tomb Raider, for lack of a better word describing a set of levels, is one continuous trek through this ruined place. You spend quite a bit of time running through a snowy cavern, killing the wildlife you have intruded upon. The caves begin large enough, though already smaller than any tunnel you will find in Super Mario 64, gradually shrinking as you dare to go deeper into the darkness. Through a few levels the icy rocks give way to smooth stone, then to walls inscribed with ancient writing, then to mossy ruins of a long-forgotten civilization. All the while the gameplay is ramping up in difficulty as any game naturally would. Small hops become larger leaps. At first these jumps have floors below, requiring you to climb out if you fail. Then these chasms get deeper, falling means damage. Then missing a jump becomes deadly. You find a bear making its home underneath a precarious bridge, then you find yourself leaping off high rocks to avoid pits of spikes. The level design narrows, caverns become hallways, caverns become rooms. Danger begins condensing: multiple difficult jumps between any flat areas, those flat areas inhabited by jaguars instead of bats.
Finally, in the third level of a single linear path, when even the doorways narrowed and now you feel like you’re slipping between cracks in walls, you come to the Lost Valley. An immediate awe-striking view of a jungle untouched for untold years. The game did not hand you Bomb-Omb Battlefield and tell you to have fun, it hid this larger world from you miles beneath hostile territory. You bask in the graphic fidelity of a fully grown jungle.
And a T-Rex appears from the black fog. It eats you in one bite.
You respawn, now knowing this valley is in fact the most hostile place yet. You are not here to explore. You are here to get the thing you came for and to then get out.
Where Indiana Jones is satisfied with its location-centered short story and happily broadens out to a typical three-act character-centered adventure film, Tomb Raider isolates this as a gameplay loop, the rest of the game running that design to its logical conclusions. Each “world” plays with geometry and pacing but always comes back to that core design: you are always pushing deeper into the hostile unknown.
Tomb Raider and Super Mario 64 share the philosophy that The 3D-Game’s target is to inspire and satisfy curiosity through exploration. Mario, and really any similar Nintendo game, especially Zelda, envision this act of play as a child running around a park. Tomb Raider offers a more active engagement, a way of pushing back on the player. I find this tactile force-feedback the much more satisfying style when it comes to playing games as an adult. As a kid I forced Tomb Raider into the Nintendo style, by refusing to engage with the hostile areas.
This dichotomy is displayed just as clearly in Tomb Raider’s other, surely more, contentious aspect: the controls.
Tomb Raider is using what is often referred to as “tank controls”. In most 3D games the left directional pad or joystick will move the player in four directions. As soon as the control stick is moved the character will pivot their entire body to face the direction pressed. If Mario is facing away from you and you press “down”, or towards yourself, Mario too will face to look at you. This is what is colloquially known as “controlling a dude”. Tomb Raider’s controls are something I wish was more often colloquially referred to as “driving a car”. While Lara is facing away from you, pressing down causes her to backstep, moving in “reverse”. Pressing left or right will cause her to rotate in place, pivoting in a circle while remaining still, like a car pulling off a pavement-burning screeching-loud donut stunt, or, if she is already moving forward, will have her drift to the appropriate side in a smooth arc. Pressing forward will make her move forward, this is your “gas” button.
You could say that this makes her movement independent of the camera, though Tomb Raider’s camera employs more restrictions than Mario’s.
Tank Controls are often paired with a “fixed camera”, meaning multiple static camera positions exist parented to the world geometry, hand-picked by the developer, as in Resident Evil, a set-up that would be correctly described as having camera and movement systems that do not affect one another.
Tomb Raider’s relationship is better described as being the inverse of Mario’s: the movement controls the camera. In the original release of Tomb Raider there was no player camera control outside of a special “look mode”. While holding the first left shoulder button the directional control is changed to only affect Lara’s head, which in turn carries the camera along with it. In the re-release the player is allowed some control over the camera with the right analog stick, but trying to force the camera to face Lara head-on will cause it to quickly swing around her, placing you back behind her. In either situation if the player wishes for the camera to turn and rest to the left, Lara must physically turn to the left.
This creates a close connection between the player and Lara. Nintendo’s games often feel, by design, like peeking into a toy diorama or a miniature world. Tomb Raider puts you closer to the action, demanding focused vision and intentional movement. It is planting the philosophical roots that would become the modern third-person cinematic experience, your God of War and your Last of Us. Though those games have, with time, sanded away the satisfying friction that comes with the other half of Tomb Raider’s interface: movement.
The original Super Mario Brothers popularized a subtle, almost unconsciously intuitive quirk of control: holding the jump button makes you jump higher. There are dozens of frames one could release the jump button to cut the jump short, incorporating their prior velocity to create a nearly unique jump arc. Despite this complexity, it only takes a few minutes of practice for the jump in Mario to become second nature. It begins to happen with only milliseconds of conscious thought, a reaction more than an idea.
Tomb Raider gives you a small handful of canned jumps. On a flat surface, pressing the jump button will always result in Lara jumping over one grid tile and landing on the one beyond it. Tapping the back button will have her hop one tile backwards, the perfect amount of running room for you to press forward and hold jump, executing a running jump that will always take you over two grid tiles and land on the third. These can be combined with a “grab” command that has her reach out to grab the ledge of an adjacently forward grid tile. Ignoring movement intricacies used by speedrunners that are not required for the game’s completion, these four jumps are your only options.
This is what makes platforming the star attraction of Tomb Raider. The grid-based levels and the intimate controls meet in harmony to present the main challenge of the game as a tight loop of observation, planning, and execution.
Any given room in Tomb Raider can be broken down into an ordered list of these four jumps. Any given gap between broken pillars or jagged cliffs can be counted on grid, asked by the player which jump this particular gap calls for, and narrowed down to a specific solution. As we charted before the player is introduced to these types of gaps one by one, with gradually increasing punishment for failure. This complexity is increased through the level design, not the available movement. You will never get a power-up that affects jump height or unlock a new kind of movement tech (within this first game anyway).
Instead the game may ask for more planning and planning under pressure. It will introduce sloped surfaces, where Lara will automatically plummet if you do not decide whether or not to jump and whether or not to grab by the time she slides off the end. It will introduce traps: retracting blades that add an importance of timing, spikes that require slow movement to avoid damage, puzzles that require retreading of areas with retracted platforms, or perhaps from a reverse direction, requiring a fresh perspective and replanning.
Where some games suffer from a feeling of redundancy that comes from canned interactions, single-solution platforming challenges leading to the thought that you are simply acting out a set of button-pressing instructions designed by the developer, Tomb Raider manages its complexity ramp to keep the challenges fresh. Where,say, Uncharted will present over-the-top blockbuster fake danger vignettes for every few seconds of wall climbing and ultimately present only a facade of complexity, Tomb Raider will give the smallest of static spike pits enough real danger to be far more worthy of your attention.
There’s just enough room for self-expression to place the final cherry on top of Tomb Raider’s repertoire. The standing jump can be performed in any direction, allowing for sidehops and backflips. Chained jumps will initiate more quickly in succession. This allows you to complete otherwise fiddly zigzagging sets of platforms with essentially a string of bunnyhops, where Lara never has to change direction or stop moving. Climbing up from a ledge has a stylish acrobatic cartwheel variant if an extra button is held. Lara can perform a graceful swan dive with a complex three-button running jump but it never serves any gameplay purpose. You are given movement options, but complexity is always defined by level design.
And then the bubble bursts.
Maybe that’s not an apt metaphor. It’s not a sudden pop. I didn’t finish that last paragraph and stare at the blank page for a moment, and then hit enter a couple times and start having this epiphany.
No, it’s been a few days. It’s been a few quiet showers. It’s been a few panic attacks, a few half-filled job applications, a few nights of restlessly tossing and turning while that horrendous buzzing scatters my brain waves. It’s been a few skipped meals and a few evenings of guilt for the ones I didn’t skip. The ceaseless news cycle all the while.
It’s directly after an episode of Sarah Zedig’s Trans Questioning 2 that all this stress comes to a point. I’m staring at the ceiling and eating a Wendy’s Frosty and listening to the rare patter of Californian rain. I’ve finished Studio System: Guardian Angel today and played the new Monster Hunter beta and didn’t get any art done. I’ve begged myself to relax for a day and hid the pill inside the peanut butter of content creation. I feel bad that even the act of playing an artful video game is something I view as a step in my own art, but even that selfishness is manufactured as an excuse to myself.
My mind comes back to this article. I think of the bulk of it being so mechanical. I wouldn’t argue that there isn’t an art in breaking down the mechanics of a video game into a digestible explanation. I recognize the voice in my head telling me it's pointless to be rambling about a nearly 30 year old video game as being wrong. Lots of people write things like this, lots of people read things like this. It’s remarkably easy to me, in fact, to ignore the negative thoughts and the imposter syndrome and the nagging fears.
I could make this three times as long. I could write about the puzzle mechanics and the underwater segments and the sound design. I could praise the original pixel textures, taking some time to download a repository of all the ripped files to show you a few of my favorites. I could put them side by side with the new Remastered versions, showing how clearly they used Generative AI that, even with human touch-up, refuses to make sense under scrutiny. For some time I played with the idea of including my complete review of Tomb Raider 2 inside of this one. Tomb Raider 2 is truthfully awful, as it misses the point of Tomb Raider and focuses on all the least fun parts of this game. This could become an entire series retrospective. I could treat this as a video essay script. A lot more people would watch that than are going to read this.
Even if I stop here I’ve checked off every box with due diligence. I went through the motions. I talked about my childhood. I made this personal. Then I dove into the mechanics. I hopefully offered a unique outlook on old discussion simply by being a unique individual, as we all are. Now here at the bottom I make it personal again. Even this diatribe is fitting in the formula. It’s so easy.
Why am I doing this?
Now there’s the hard one.
I don’t have a job right now. I am very lucky to have found someone to house me. I have enough money to keep me alive until I find another day job. Meanwhile I’m filling my days with the Fantasy. Every year or so I find myself in a time between jobs, when the stress of living is lifted just enough that I have the drive to create things. I have just enough time to breathe that I remember I have the drive to create things. I see so many of my friends living off their creative work and I recognize within myself the ability to do the same and I get caught up in trying to chase that end because it feels so close.
It’s really not. I can buy a lottery ticket just the same as anyone who has won millions. I can write a video game review just like so many that I read that are by people with incredibly large Patreons. I have piles of notebooks of ideas for video games and youtube videos that I know I have the talent to create and I know have all the criteria to be popular, but I think about the end goal and I think too hard about what drives me and it all falls apart.
I hate money. I hate capitalism and clout and branding and the grind and I hate watching people sell out and I hate seeing my friends selling Makeship plushies and I hate the numbers I hate the numbers so god damn much. I hate their successful Patreons and their viewcounts and I love what they create so much. I wish one could exist without the other. I wish I – no I wish everyone could exist without the numbers.
If waking up every day and feeling the urge to play and review a 30 year old game and share my childhood with it to you and infodump about it for a while was enough to be alive then I would do it. I would do it every day and it could all be played straight and I wouldn’t feel this awful urge to ironically twist everything I create.
This is where my artistic ability breaks. I lack the genuinity. I have every skill needed to put all the crazy imagery in my brain down on the page. I can see exactly how this essay should have ended. The concluding paragraph has been seared into my brain by my middle-school teachers. I can see the final note at the bottom, the same note at the bottom of every blog post on every blog. I see the exact words -
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- as these words have been sitting in my brain for a few weeks now, begging me to finish the Content part. The Fantasy promises so much, asking for me to just do what I do best, telling me that every lottery ticket I buy with my hard-earned time is another chance for it to come true. The Fantasy feeds my ego. It tells me how close I am. It tells me how many of my friends have already been selected. It offers me avenues of revenue. It fills my dreams with Makeships and fanart and recognition. It tells me my art is worth more than me. That my friends are so far above me for having created their own, that I cannot be anything until mine is complete, that all I have to do is follow the formula.
I try to fight it. I try to lie to myself. I tell myself my art isn’t good enough. That I’m not old enough. That my time will come but for now I need to stop trying. Fill out an application for Costco and stop listening to the Fantasy. My imposter syndrome is a self-diagnosed injection of Reality. It’s a conscious decision.
And these two parts of me smash together, a hundred miles an hour collision that finally makes the bubble pop and I start typing this.
Nearly everything on this blog so far follows this meta formula. I get three quarters through and have this internal battle, Fantasy versus Reality, where neither comes out on top and I end up breaking character in defiance. I try to find the kernel of genuine emotion, because neither the emotional personal stories nor the mimicry of professional infodumping are genuine, even if the former tries to claim so over the latter.
I know this part is the genuine one, because I don’t know how to end this. I can’t offer a resolution. Every atom in my body is screaming at me to give in to the Fantasy. To create for money. To keep up the daily panic attacks long enough to create something that will be seen and I will be deemed worthy of being kept alive. I don’t care what others will think of my art. I don’t care if it will touch someone emotionally. I don’t care about building a community or becoming famous or making sure the next generation can find solace in my words the way I find it in the ones before me.
I just want enough money to be alive.
Anything I create before I have the money to live will be tainted by that desire.
I hope the world will one day get to see the things I could create if I could create with genuinity.
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I give the first Tomb Raider a 4 out of 5, to keep it real.
My Journey in Understanding Comics - Intermission "V"
This was written as my inaugural Letterboxd review. It got a bit out of hand so I have decided to present it here as well.
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While Part 3 of my writing on my personal journey into reading comic books continues to bake in my brain (a fancy way of saying I am still brainstorming its final format) (a fancy way of saying I have not yet started writing it) as the list of included comics grows, I wanted to stop for a moment and write about one in particular for selfish reasons.
On November 5th, 2024 I began reading V For Vendetta, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. This was on the whim of having read Alex Jaffe’s recommendation on the DC Blog and the vague understanding that this was the important date to read it on. This is the part where I reiterate that as a teenager my dad had given me a copy of Watchmen, then question why he only gave me that and never other Alan Moore books even after I expressed a love for Watchmen, leading in asking why, especially with him showing me Fight Club not long after, he would a few years later become fearful of my leftist radicalization. Instead of briefly ruminating on the chudification of anything with leftist morals, of red pills and project mayhems and Fawkes masks, an aside consisting mainly of “I’m too scared to know too much about the other side to properly critique them.”, I have decided to first write whatever this is: a paragraph about not writing things. I fall easy prey to the gimmick of writing something about itself when I lack the time to write something lengthy or god-willing something good. Only at my laziest, when I so badly want to splash paint onto a canvas and call it art to try and feel the relief granted by having created something again, do I create a piece of writing about what itself isn’t.
So instead I will write about my day, and hope you can make something more of it than I can.
I began November 5th, 2024 expecting the worst. I was scheduled for a 7 hour shift. This is not the place I will go into detail about the way my brain comprehends the passage of time, except saying that this is beyond the limit that my short-term memory can comprehend as Now. By the end of a 7 hour day it feels like my entire existence has been that day.
Before work I was hoping to start playing Planet Coaster 2, a theme park simulator I had pre-ordered. Unfortunately I was a day off on its release, it came out today, November 6th. Instead I played Dead Estate, which I really had to think about right now to remember. Before leaving for work at Noon I remembered that November 5th was the day of that one rhyme that I was vaguely aware was tied to V for Vendetta, a comic I heard was good but knew nothing about. I started reading the first issue before heading out.
At this time the vibe on social media was one of trepidatious optimism. Panic had not yet set in, but doom was creeping at the edges of every post. Those that engaged in the stage-show were sharing graphs: maps and analytics, populace represented by numbers and figures. Those that hide were still standing in the open, sharing their strategies for their planned retreats: assuring each other that there were games to play, films to watch. Smoke them if you got them. I would have headed their advice if not for my usual required time to temporarily become a machine again.
I found myself behind the kiosk of the grocery store Starbucks counter, tightening my apron, as my manager was already whispering to my co-worker, pointing at her phone, pointing at a map that showed the city of Seattle in bright blue and the rest of the state a deep red. It was not by my choice that I would not be among those hiding through today.
I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of running a Starbucks kiosk. I use “running” because I am usually alone, I was on that particular day for the final 3 hours at least. It is a ceaseless stress: there is always something to get done, someone to attend to, or something to worry about. They keep adding more responsibilities, berating me for doing a wrong thing I have done a hundred times without being berated before, and introducing further uncertainties and unwinnable scenarios. It is a job where they try their hardest to make life unlivable and I try to scrape together every ounce of relief from stress. Like all jobs.
The only interaction that mattered enough to mention here was one from a regular. An older man who was before this simply another vertice from which stress radiated: a notification that arrived at the counter and asked for me to recall the piece of information that is his usual order, to which my brain would offer me no help. A Diner Dash icon asking to be clicked. He complimented my lipstick.
I’ve been carrying around the same lipstick for a couple years now. It was a gift. I have been told it is too bright, too red for me. It makes me stand out, to stand out of place. The phrase “pig with lipstick” stands out despite its meaning not fitting here, more just the visceral imagery that it brings forth. I know I am overcompensating. Everyone who looks at me does. The lipstick tube is doubled-sided: one side the too-bright red, the other a layer of glitter, meant to be added on-top to dull the red. I have told myself the glitter side is meant for special outings, I wear the red at work to make my machine-self look feminine, I would wear the glitter on top to feel beautiful on days I am not a machine. The red is nearly worn down to nothing, I have not touched the side with the glitter.
“You look good.”
“I am trying. It’s a process.”
“I know. It’s good you are trying.
Are you on estrogen?”
“Yeah.”
"That will help. You'll notice."
I did not tell him I’ve been on it already for half a decade.
I finished the first issue of V for Vendetta on my lunch break. I saw that I had missed the slow creep of doom take hold of the zeitgeist. The world had turned dark outside while I was busy not existing.
The store grew more busy. There were whispers by customers, talk of coming violence no matter the outcome. The sun set earlier than it had any right, and I found myself on one last bathroom break, seeing the first footage of the protests beginning not too far outside the building. As I clocked out and made my way down the street I could see photos of the very same street, a few blocks further down, of arrests being made. A car drove down the street with its bumper scraping against the ground, it sounded like a car crash in a constant state of occurrence. The screaming car and I kept almost perfect sync the entire length of my walk down the street.. It screamed over someone playing a saxophone on the corner of the closed-down Rite-Aid. It screamed over the guy playing folk music on his guitar next to the walk-up burger place. It kept screaming, down the street, towards the protests where people like me where being shoved to the ground by police. I did not follow it. I walked home and it was in complete silence that I stood on the street corner and watched the Sheriff’s new $6,000,000 helicopter flying over the city.
I watched John Wick with my girlfriend and I knew there was still screaming out there.
This morning I woke up and read four more issues of V for Vendetta. I played Planet Coaster 2 for just long enough to feel like I was wasting my time. I read four more issues of V for Vendetta.
I walked up the hill, I passed the grocery store I was regularly a machine at and saw they had their metal shutters locked down over the windows. One of my managers was on a smoke break outside and I almost said something but didn’t. I sat at a nearby restaurant and ate a burger and finished the last issue of V for Vendetta.
I’m home now, typing this while being mostly silent in a discord call with my friends. I don’t know if I’m hiding or surviving. I know this is not as good a thing as I wanted to write. I don’t know if I will ever let anyone else read this, or why they would want to, or what they would gain from it. I just know that as much as I feel like a fraud who copies the style of others, I know that I do not have the gift of memory possessed by the current writer I would be accused of copying if I let any of my friends read this. Maybe I’m just borrowing his style in hope I borrow the ability to remember all these details.
“Maybe they’ll give meaning to a plot one day.” is the god-awful sentence I typed next.
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It is now November 30th.
On November 12th I finally watched the film adaptation of "V for Vendetta". I watched it in a hurry, trying to squeeze it in before an important appointment I had before lunch. I had bought a DVD version a couple days prior but opted to watch it digitally instead, I feared the screech of my CRT.
I had been pleasantly surprised when I found the DVD on the shelf. It had somehow gotten into my head, perhaps the color palette or the concept of a dark comic character, that this was a Zach Snyder film. My brain lit up when I saw the Wachowskis listed instead. I could not think of better people to adapt this comic. I've found that many of the things my Dad did not enjoy or did not opt to show me have been because they do not line up with his personal beliefs. Naturally I've loved all of those so far.
Sadly, "V for Vendetta" did not live up to the vision of the film that spontaneously popped into my head upon reading the word Wachowski. This film pulls almost every punch. It waters down characters and motivations: it removes themes of drug use and sexual abuse, it takes away the agency of every supporting character, it keeps the film away from any of the story's original historical context. Re-ordering scenes for the sake of movie pacing is necessary but it does so with wild abandon. It is the big slop Hollywood loves.
This is a film by people who's extremely personal queer project had blown up to massive proportions. The public wanted Matrix sequels and franchising of the standard Hollywood variety and the Wachowskis did not waver in their vision. The people with money knew that The Matrix could have been the next Star Wars and the Wachowskis did not allow it to be. They were under pressure to create something mainstream again, and they were still deep in the closet.
So what did they do?
They made this film 15 minutes long.
"V for Vendetta", as directed by the Wachowskis, is the sequence consisting of Evey's imprisonment, torture, and release. It is untouched as it is from the comic. It is a shortfilm of raw queer emotion. It is an echo that reverberates from the 80s British Thatcherism it was birthed in by Alan Moore, to the 2000s Bush-era the Wachowskis fought to mass-broadcast it in, to November 5th 2024 as Trump was re-elected and I was quivering in the toilet stall at work, without losing an iota of resonance.
It lays there, between the watered down adaptation, between the storybeats with their sharp edges sanded, between the kind of flavorless dystopian fiction they feed us to make us feel like we're being naughty when we're not and the big explosions that do nothing but set off primal dopamine responses, between the removal of the stories' main theme of individual action (replaced with the common group uprising plot you'd see in The Hunger Games or Star Wars that is usually a type of Imperialism masquerading as Anarchy) and an honest to god bullet-time sequence that no doubt some exec said HAD to be in a movie with Wachowski in the credits.
Two hours of runtime exist to fool the Hollywood execs. Fifteen minutes belong to us.
I thought of none of these things the day I watched the film on November 12th. I watched it, I shut off my monitor, and I went to tour an apartment I will soon be moving into with my girlfriend. We are alive and we will soon be together.
All through Summer 2024 the Nintendo fandom had been in a fervor. The Nintendo Switch’s reign had eclipsed its seven year apex: the time had come for a new flagship piece of hardware to take its place. The stage seemed to be set: the game releases were thinning, the Nintendo Directs sparse, and the major game releases clearly smaller, outsourced, and not the main focus of development. Nintendo had already acknowledged the new machine’s existence with an assurance of it being announced within the fiscal year, followed by a continuous promise below each and every announcement stream that there “will be no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor during [...] these presentations.”
As the dog days passed by, during the fleeting few weeks of Fall that still existed between the ever widening record-high Summers and devastating Winter storms, it seemed undeniable that the stage was being set. Nintendo filed new patents for motion sensor technology. Word got out that they were filming a commercial for a new piece of hardware. They flew out content creators to demo something kept under wraps. And on October 9th, 2024, fans awoke to a flurry of notifications, an early morning unheralded announcement shaking the very foundations of what was thought possible for the gaming giant:
Alarmo.
Nintendo’s smart alarm clock. A touchscreen device with a sleek interface, loaded with 35 themes inspired by 5 games (and more to come), and a $100 price tag. Their patented motion sensing technology made for a hands-free experience. Set the alarm once and from then on, each and every morning, your eyes would flutter open to a jazzy Mario tune, and your triumphant rise from bed would be rewarded with a victory jingle, a “Lets-A-Go!”, and a shot of nostalgic dopamine.
But is nostalgic the right word? The motion sensor only works with a very specific set-up: most notably being limited to one person, a small bed, and a room that will remain otherwise empty through the night. No spouses, no pets, no roommates. It was clear this was intended for a child’s room. So no, it wasn’t nostalgic. At least not yet. It was designed to create new nostalgia.
Nintendo Alarmo, along with the similarly aimed Pokemon Sleep, are part of Nintendo’s long-running obsession with intentionally forming habits and responses. From the scheduled broadcasts of the Satellaview to the daily-task centric Animal Crossing series, and especially the predatory practices of their mobile game releases, Nintendo had a penchant for designing parasites that attached themselves to your waking (and non-waking) cycle.
Today I’ll be sharing excerpts from interviews with people who received Alarmos as children, and uncover the shocking effects of waking each morning to a pavlovian coin-get jingle. But first, speaking of coin-getting, a word from today’s sponsor: LoanFast. Is payday just a—
God what a waste of time. Shit’s always so negative these days. These nostalgia-grab video essays used to be pleasant. Here’s an old-school animated movie you haven’t seen since the DVD bargain bin! Top ten cartoons of the 2010s! The misunderstood genius of the Wii U!
But nah, now time has crept past the optimistic millennials. We’re struggling to find the diamonds in the rough patch that was the 2020s, to salvage anything from that fucking trash heap of a decade. God, no wait. Now I sound like them. I grew up with that age of media. I love that age of media. It’s just so easy to let the zeitgeist of doomerism– Okay stop.
It’s way too easy to let these things override my brain. I had to mentally backspace the phrase “easily impressionable” right there too. I watch these videos with their big words and their gloomy ways of lookin at life and I feel it all start to seep into me.
Millennials will convince you that the 00s were the peak of human creation. That the 10s were the last big push of creativity. But that's just not true! My cartoons were way better! Our video games are just objectively cooler and bigger! Adults get stuck on trying to make fun of my generation for the same few bullshit things, if I hear one more Skibidi Rizz I’m gonna–
Shouldn’t think like that. I’m 24 now. That’s an adult. I’m an adult. I keep saying that and it doesn’t sound any more true. It happened so fast. It took so much time but it happened so fast.
I was just a kid, playing Super Mario Odyssey on an old LCD, and then I was a teenager and a lot happened, so much happened, and now I’m an adult playing Super Mario Odyssey on an old LCD and nothing happens, nothing ever happens. I am an adult and it is Christmas Eve and I am alone.
It was Christmas Eve then too. Back when Christmas felt like Christmas. I was 12 years old when I got the Nintendo Alarmo. December 24th, 2024 when I tore open my first present of the year. It was tradition to get one present the night before, usually something to pass the time until I was more tired than I was excited for the next morning. You wouldn’t think a clock would keep me busy but I spent the whole evening fiddling with the options, looking at every theme, resetting the time to hear the top-of-the-hour jingles for each game. I remember dad helping me put in the wi-fi password, I remember mom’s hurried trip to whatever convenience store was still open on the holiday because the damned thing didn’t come with an AC adapter. She brought back a package of Reese’s and one of those juice drinks with a plastic toy on it. It was… a Spongebob one? Yeah, and I set it on the shelf and it fell off during all the unwrapping the next day and it rolled underneath the shelf and it was down there for months and I’m remembering every single time I was sitting on the floor playing Mario and Luigi Brothership after getting it the next day and every single time I could see the Spongebob juice topper below the tv smiling at me and I never thought to get it I never put any thought into it being there it was just there until a day my mom must have swept and it wasn’t there and I didn’t think about it not being there. Until right now.
Why didn’t that thing come with an AC adapter, god that’s so stupid.
I think about all that and I don’t think about everything that happened afterwards. I’m 12 years old and it’s Christmas Eve 2024 and I’m getting the Nintendo Alarmo and now I’m 24 years old and it’s Christmas Eve 2036 and I look over at the window sill next to my bed and the Nintendo Alarmo is still there, still ticking. The AC adapter has been replaced a couple times and it’s a bit dinged up but it’s still ticking. So much happened all the while that clock kept ticking. I’m still ticking.
I’ve gotten so worked up over this fucking video and I’ve been scrolling my home page this whole time. I try to actually read the titles my eyes are glossing over: “The Untold Story of Minecraft’s 1.50 Disaster”, “What Went Wrong With Forza 2030”, “Does Sony Regret Dropping Out of Consoles?” and I almost click the last one to see which retired executive guy they’re interviewing and personifying the whole company onto this time and I stop myself. It just takes one god damn clickbait title to manufacture curiosity like that and I’ll be watching another two hour video about job layoffs and feeling like shit again. I’m so sick of feeling like shit. It’s getting harder and harder to find content that makes me feel good.
I decide to just turn the damn thing off. I sit there in the dark for a minute, as a dim light comes from across the room: it's 11:00pm and my Nintendo Alarmo is displaying a top-of-the-hour animation. Mario runs into view, bumps a block 11 times. I hear the little coin-collection jingle 11 times, and then the screen defaults back to its calmer darker state.
I google for a day calculator on my phone and punch in that Christmas Eve and this one.
4,383 days. If you take into the fact that after the Animal Crossing theme releases I swapped to that for Halloween and Christmas mornings, that’s 22 Animal Crossing mornings, and 4,360 Super Mario mornings, and 1 Mario Kart morning that I hated. Who the fuck wants to wake up to tires screeching? And the “FIRST PLACE VICTORY!” out-of-bed message was a bit patronizing even for me.
But yeah, 4,360 Super Mario wake up calls. 4,360 times I have heard the Super Mario Bros. theme song as the very first sound of the day. Through thick and thin, from one side of the country to the other, through every school morning from 2024 onward and every single day of every job I’ve worked, it's remained constant. A morning without that jingle is just not conceivable to me, it's as natural a part of life as anything else. As sure as I’ll eat food and as sure as I’ll take a crap and as sure as I’ll turn my computer on and as sure as I’ll sleep again the next night is as sure as I will hear that jingle. Speaking of, sleep.
I brush my teeth with Scooby Doo bubblegum toothpaste and a toothbrush that I avoid looking too closely at because its got Spongebob on it and I’m too tired to let myself start back down that path of thinking about the things I took for granted. I can feel on my teeth that the brush is awfully frayed. I’ve been putting off buying a new one for months. I don’t know why. I could just grab one at the store and swap it out and it would make me feel so much better and be so much better for me, but I just don’t do it, I just never think to get it while I’m there and that just happens everyday and I blink and it's been months and my toothbrush is still frayed. 4,360 times. 4,360 times.
I catch my brain multi-track drifting and decide I can’t sleep without a distraction. I open Youtube on my phone and start scrolling for something to play while I sleep.
I crawl into bed and I just barely remember it's Christmas tomorrow. I grab the Nintendo Alarmo and thumb through the settings, swiping through menus.
When I wake up tomorrow I’ll think that maybe I was just too tired, maybe I just got other shit on my mind, and that maybe these old LCD touchscreens are just over-sensitive pieces of shit or that maybe just maybe I am. But tomorrow my eyes will open at the time they’re used to opening anyway and I’ll be ready to hear the special Animal Crossing Toy Day Jingle that I was so certain I set it to, and I’ll hear the horrible screeching of tires on pavement and something will snap in me and I’ll hear the “FIRST PLACE VICTORY” and think about the empty platitudes and the 12 years I can barely remember and the four thousand wake-up calls that accompanied me as I kept sleep-walking through them and I’ll wake up and something will shatter and I’ll spend Christmas morning cleaning up the shards.
“Frogger: Walkable City” is a bite-sized RPG-Maker game about a world where Frogger is allowed to live. Its absurdity is instantly captivating, its humor is sharp in utilizing the RPG medium in profound ways, and the emotional core of the concept is gut wrenching. It manages to toe the line where such compliments are both facetious and justified. I recommend going in without any preconceived notions, stop reading here and play it yourself.
Here’s a few light-spoilery thoughts anyway: “Frogger: Walkable City” is a fantastically balanced tongue-in-cheek adventure. The individual bits, of which there are about 10, are each wonderfully unique, utilizing RPG tropes such as fetch quests and random battles in delightful comedy bits, exploring multiple genres in vignettes and at one point even building a set piece out of nothing but exceptional use of sound effects. I can’t recall the last time the solution to a puzzle hit me like a truck in a way that left me laughing before even trying to see if I was correct. It was just so funny that it had to be.
Yet just past the endless jokes is a story that anyone can relate to: the soul-crushing experience of co-existing in a world of automobiles. So too do we yearn for a world where DMVs are a curiosity. So too do we dream of a world without parking lots, where our streets are occupied by farmer’s markets, our children can walk to school without fear, our casinos occupied by only the rumbling of the wind, and our frogs untrodden by weird 8-bit race cars.
Sadly, that is all we can yet do: dream of such a future. Until then, play “Frogger: Walkable City.”
Part 1 is not required reading. In fact, I will refrain from even linking it here. Every blog post is someone’s first.
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It shouldn’t be embarrassing to admit that I needed to have “comic books” explained to me. Yet I feel ashamed that I allowed the entire medium to exist within a hair’s breadth of my cultural understanding for so long. I’ve already gone over my select few childhood run-ins with comics, as well as the false-start that nearly was my first paper-comic obsession* (*See “My Journey in Understanding Comics” #1! - Ed.), so my story this time will start in November of 2023.
I was working a mundane job at a manufacturing facility. Full-time hours of applying stickers to pieces of foam, or punching out holes in paper, or assembling little devices of god-knows-what, praying that for every life-saving defibrillator adhesive pad I quality-checked that the insulation padding I was shape-forming wasn’t destined for a war machine. It was a place of room-sized printing presses, massive machines that shaped and cut materials with the power of water-jets, and dark laboratory backrooms with more nausea-inducing chemicals filling the air than oxygen. While I didn’t end up falling into vats of any of the horrifically powerful bleaches we used to clean the printing screens (although I did retire home early on a number of occasions from dizziness caused by breathing in acetone), it was here that I had way too much time on my hands and binged podcasts.
I was devouring 10 hours of audio content a day, from audio dramas to history lessons to comedy sketches. The hardest part of the job became satiating my hunger for endless content. After exhausting “Midnight Burger” and Penumbra’s “Juno Steel”, I listened through all of Tim Roger’s “Action Button” reviews in audio-form. On recommendation from my girlfriend, that made a natural transition into gulping down hundreds of episodes of “Insert Credit”. Among other branching paths (I recommend “They Create Worlds” and “Video Game History Hour”), I was led through Alex Jaffe to “52 Pick Up”.
“52 Pick Up”, hosted by Alex Jaffe and Gita Jackson, discusses DC’s 2006-2007 weekly comic book “52” issue by issue. I dipped my toe into it with hardly any context: it had been many years since I read comics, very little of that had been DC. Certainly none from around the time “52” was published, and certainly not any that would provide any helpful context to “52”. I cannonballed into the the deep end, albeit without risk of drowning: if the podcast hosts helped me stick the landing then I would be opened to a whole new world of possibilities, if I was just utterly lost by the interwoven plot threads and greater context of the comic then I would just shrug it off and go back to the comforting familiarity of learning about unreleased Nintendo knitting machines* (* “VGHH” #117! - Frank ( - not Frank)). This isn’t the iTunes review section so I’ll spare you from me simply pasting in the glowing review I left for them, but rest assured that “52 Pick Up” does its job of introducing someone to the context of comic books tremendously well. I was hooked, and have not missed a bi-weekly wednesday since.
However, it wasn’t enough to break the floodwall I had erected after the comic-related disaster I had beared the full brunt of so many years ago. I followed “52” and kept saying to myself “I think I’ll subscribe to that DC mobile app, and read some of the surrounding context”, but I never pulled the trigger on that purchase. My interest was piqued, I was given the on-ramps, taught all the techniques from a master of comics knowledge, and yet I could not begin the simple act of reading.
I hold the act of consumption on a higher pedestal than it deserves. I regularly find myself hesitating to consume. Is this the right time? How will this work affect me? “Are you ready?” I ask myself, fighting back my natural instinct to presume anything unknown to me is not “for me”.
In February of 2024 I finally made a concession: I would start with something I felt I was closer to. Something that wouldn’t be “out of character” for me to consume. I had already been into “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” for some years, so I turned to manga, and read “Dragon Ball”. This isn’t the place for me to put all my thoughts on “Dragon Ball”. Know simply that it was a prime example of works of fiction finding me at exactly the right moment in my life, affecting me tremendously, with Toriyama’s passing happening right in the nearly exact middle of my readthrough. My dad had treated “Dragon Ball” with the same disdain as Wrestling or Football as I was growing up, something that wasn’t “for me”, something dumber, barbaric.
Comic books were his thing, and manga was not my thing. Before I moved out I had to find ways to justify things as being “my thing”. Webcomics were a natural extension of an interest in video games, manga was an eventual gap bridged by years of anime expos and the absurdity of “Jojo’s”, but “Dragon Ball”, among many other things, remained unreachable.
Now that I live on my own there are no gaps between works of fiction that need filling. My brain still often tricks me into thinking I cannot leap over the vast chasms that separate genres and mediums, but it is only the residual fear of being perceived as not being myself. There is no longer anyone in my daily life that has known me for a great amount of time, no one to police me to stay true to my platonic self. I have to remind myself that I can choose to wake up and be a whole new person if I so wish. Any day could be the day I decide to start being a person who reads comic books.
In late July 2024 I found the catalyst: a copy of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art”. It was a book always on my radar as being something that I would get a kick out of, but I never wanted to just read a scan of it. I knew it deserved to be read physically, but I never had the drive to order a copy. In the end it needed to appear before me, on the shelf of the thrift store I regular, as a spur of the moment purchase. I’ll again spare you from a full overzealous review, but it was exactly what I needed. “This is what a comic book is. This is why it’s important. This is why it’s for everyone.” That’s what I needed to hear. I needed someone to lay it all out, label all the pieces, explain the history, and tell me that comics can be for me.
In August my friends decided to marathon some of the X-Men movies. All the stars aligned: I had the knowledge, the motivation, the relief from social permission. No, not a relief. A triumph. I had triumphed over a lifetime of social pressure, of expectations and preconceived notions. I didn’t need to hide my mood-swing dips into unfamiliar media. I didn’t need to be ashamed of stepping outside my comfort zone. The version of myself in others’ heads are their own flawed snapshots of pieces of my true self, not a script they write for me to follow and fear. I could be anything I wanted.
I could be someone subscribed to Marvel Unlimited.
The conclusion to our thrilling three-part epic is up next in our amazing tale of self-reflection and ceaseless inner-discovery awaits! You don’t wanna miss it true believers!
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