I've been watching a max-stats run of Disco Elysium's fascist political vision quest - cuz, hell no, I'm not disappointing Kim myself - and the portrait it paints of Measurehead is fascinating. in the base game, Measurehead is just a comically contradictory roadblock to meeting with Evrart: the philosophy of white supremacy spouted from a massive Black body. most players will interact with him early in the game, usually in close proximity to meeting The Cuno, and he's part of what makes the early game seem so unreprentantly edgelord. the kid said the f-slur! the Black guy is a racist! har har!
I've never loved that this is the foot Disco puts forward first, but, on deeper engagement, the game always has more on its mind.
properly speaking, Measurehead is, at his core, a genuinely good and kind man. he gives Harry good advice about not living in the past; he loves and adores his mother; he has an unhealthy respect for his hard and distant father but recognizes he learned strength and self-respect from him, while nevertheless refusing to repeat the cycle of abuse; indeed, he recognizes the balance he feels in himself, the mix of masculine and feminine, of soft and hard, was only possible because his parents lacked that balance in themselves, that his father saw the loving softness of Measurehead's mother and pivoted to its opposite, denying himself softness and embracing the rigid and cold so that Measurehead could experience both; Measurehead has chosen not to have children perhaps because he knows he could not retain this perfect balance, would have to follow his father's example and embrace only one side of himself to provide balance to a child; and he knows this self-possessedness, this full knowledge of who he is, is what makes him appealing to women, far more than his physique or philosophy; and, by all accounts, he eats pussy like it's going out of style.
what makes Measurehead such a batshit character is how he has to contort his philosophies to make room for this, how malleable fascism and race supremacy ultimately are. he can't just not want kids cuz he doesn't want to repeat daddy's patterns, he has to embrace a philosophy of "semen retention" and deny himself orgasm, and he fits that with race supremacy by insisting the real legacy is perpetuating ideas rather than flesh. he can valorize his devotion to his mother and the sexual consideration he pays his partners by insisting this makes him desirable to women and is how he outcompetes lesser men. the philosophy of "balance of soft and hard" is how he can exalt his father as a masculine ideal while still distancing himself from his father's abusive behavior.
one could argue these are all perversions of fascist rhetoric, if fascism had any coherent rhetoric to begin with. Measurehead has grasped the nonsensical nature of race science and authoritarian logic and put them to his own ends, and, being a giant specimen of a man, he can more or less get away with it.
I don't write this as a defense of Measurehead, because, of course, he is spreading a fascist rhetoric that encourages all kinds of violence and bigotry in the world, and a man who is good and kind in the privacy of his mother's office but is a champion of subjugation when in public - especially when he is, in his bizarre way, a true believer - is no kind of decent. but I see it as a look into the utter emptiness of fascist thought.
the four emissaries of fascism we meet on the vision quest - Gary, Rene, the racist lorry driver, and Measurehead - speak a lot of the same words but, at their core, have nothing in common. they have all latched on to the rhetoric and bent it to different ends - Rene yearns for the monarchy, Gary wants a pat on the head, the lorry driver is an incel, and Measurehead is trying to self-actualize within the confines of hypermasculinity. the only rhetoric that can encompass all four is one without substance, one of infinite flexibility, that offers nothing more than the promise that you will get everything you want, and that directs your rage at something other than yourself.
in that respect, despite being perhaps the most emotionally healthy person in the game, I find Measurehead pitiable.
this is the final Alt-Right Playbook. it's called The South Bank of the Rubicon.
thank you for watching this series the last eight years. I'm not going anywhere, but I'll be turning my attention to topics other than conservative rhetorical strategies; going forward, I don't see our battles being fought with rhetoric.
support my work on Patreon and/or subscribe to me on Nebula. transcript below the cut.
The Rubicon is a river in Italy. The story goes that, at the end of the governorship of Julius Caesar, he was ordered to disband his army and stay north of the Rubicon. When, instead, Caesar marched his army across the river and towards Rome, it was considered an act of treason, and the beginning of the Roman Civil War, at the end of which Caesar would reign victorious. It is said, as he forded the Rubicon, Caesar declared, âThe die is cast.â
In todayâs vernacular, we refer to a metaphoric Rubicon as the point of no return. Children âcross the Rubiconâ into adulthood, isolationist governments âcross the Rubiconâ into international politics. Each of us will cast the die several times in our own lives. But we say also that movements, that people, cross the Rubicon when they become irredeemable.
When times are bad, we wonder anxiously how far from the Rubicon we are. When does an insurgency become a war, a demonstration a riot? When is the moment an economy in danger becomes one in collapse? We scan the horizon for the riverbank, hoping we didnât cross it some ways back.
The thing about points of no return, the reason we worry over them so much, is itâs rare to know where they are until they are some ways behind you. The Rubicon is not the Mississippi; it is a muddy little creek history lost track of for centuries.
In the United States, we are increasingly comfortable saying that our democracy is âunder threat.â That we are âat riskâ of descending into authoritarianism. Few are ready to say that the threat has arrived. And Iâm referring to myself as I say that: Iâm not ready to say itâs arrived. No one wants to call it prematurely. The Right screams that âthe Leftâ - Black Lives Matter or Antifa or some thinly-veiled caricature of The Jews - are ready to kick down your door and bash your teeth in. And I talk about why they say this, their need to exaggerate the threat from the Left, so that, when they aggress against us, it seems like self-defense. So that we are to blame for any violence we suffer. I talk about the danger of this thinking being accepted. I say the way mainstream conservative politicians and media legitimize these arguments is âworrying.â But I donât say âthey are saying this in preparation to kick down your door and bash in your teeth.â I want people to listen to me. I donât want to sound irrational, and I donât want to sound like them. And⊠I donât want it to be true yet.
Say, for the sake of argument, you are, at this moment, ankle-deep in the water, desperately wondering how many paces you are from The South Bank of the Rubicon.
There was a time when any number of things would have been the moment. If you could go back to 2015 and ask, âIs a candidate promising to jail his political opponents, or a president building concentration camps at the border, or a lame duck provoking an insurrection to overturn a vote, the moment where you would unequivocally call him a fascist?â And we would have said, âNo question.â But those moments came, and they went, and we called them troubling, we called them dangerous, but it still seemed alarmist to call them fascist. Journalists and policy wonks still reacted with surprise if you came anywhere near the word. You could still run a campaign on âreasoning with the Right.â Republicans have made great strides by being so blatantly horrible that accurately describing their behavior sounds like hyperbole.
It seems we are always approaching the other side of the Rubicon, never arriving. We can turn back. The north is still the nearer bank.
There is a knack to this. Everyone expects it to happen all at once. That one day we will wake up to swastikas and kids in cages and unmarked vans disappearing people off the street. But those all happened on different days. And the swastikas were a natural extension of the barely-coded language of the Administrationâs supporters, the cages were the next step after their family separation policy, and the vans were not a surprise after years of police militarization. You donât have to cross the river quickly, just steadily. So that every step makes the last one seem inevitable and the next one obvious. The people who say âthis will never happen on our watch,â they will divert the river south to make it true.
Itâs losing a little ground on a dozen fronts every day. Itâs seeing so many lines crossed you canât even remember where you used to draw them. Itâs the readiness to give up on things being better and just wanting them to be quiet.
I canât tell you if that moment has come. I donât know how to call it any better than you. So, instead, Iâm going to ask you to do something: I want you to decide, at this moment, what the Rubicon is for you. What is that undeniable instant where, if something drastic does not happen immediately, your rights and freedoms are forfeit. And donât show up in my comments saying it happened years or centuries ago - youâre not wrong, but cynicism is acceptance. Iâm asking when would be the time to act. Write it down. Put it on your phone or your dry erase board or a post-it on your bathroom mirror. So when that moment comes you will remember that this was your Rubicon, because it wonât feel like it anymore. It will feel like the next logical step.
And ask yourself, when that moment comes, what is the right thing to do? You donât have to have an answer yet. But think on it. Cuz we havenât been doing it.
As a leftist, the futures I envision are full of possibility. I am fond of saying âthere are a hundred ways forward and only one way back.â So many things we could try if we allow ourselves to let go of white supremacy, of capitalism, of patriarchy. Imagining the future is a kind of world-building. To be on the Left, at least the way I try to do it, is to desire a spreading out, a pluralizing, an abandonment of hierarchy and a sharing of power between us all. I donât know if that future is likely, but I know itâs possible.
Thatâs not how things look on the Right. For the Right, left to its own devices?
New Alt-Right Playbook! This one was co-written with, and narrated by, Abigail Thorn of PhilosophyTube. We talk about the feint wherein a person is somehow rhetorically stronger being wrong on two fronts instead of one.
If you think this is good work and would like to see good work compensated, you can back me and/or Abi on Patreon.
Transcript below the cut.
Say, for the sake of argument, youâre having a discussion with a coworker about healthcare. (Actually, letâs go ahead and drop the pretence: youâre having a discussion about trans healthcare.) He says puberty blockers should be banned because some study said they're dangerous. And youâre a thoughtful person, so you look it up.
Only when you do, you find the study doesnât say what he said it does. Maybe it says something close, maybe it says the total opposite! But more than that, you realize - even if it said what he said it did, that still wouldnât support his argument. âDangerousâ could mean a lot of things - a little? a lot? low risk, high risk? Maybe one study isnât enough to go on. Hell, maybe itâs bogus for a whole host of other reasons! Maybe itâs written by people with an obvious agenda, or contradicted by a better study heâs ignoring. So you go back and tell your coworker, âHey, the study doesnât say that, and even if it did, yâknowâŠâ But he simply repeats âThe study said theyâre dangerous.â Heâs not just wrong⊠heâsÂ
DOUBLEWRONG
Institutions create policy documents all the time. Anti-bullying policies, climate policies, DEI policies - your job probably has a bunch of them. But a lot of the time these documents exist not to be read or followed, just pointed to. If someone is bullied, harassed, or discriminated against, managers might point to a policy that says, âWe are committed to not doing that.â And⊠thatâs it. The more you insist, âHey, these policies arenât being followed, the problem still exists!â the more you become the problem.
The document is a dummy argument, a substitute for the real one: âThereâs a problemâ Vs âNo there isnât.â This isnât a conversation about what some document says or doesnât say; itâs a conversation about power.
When your coworker cites a study that doesnât support his argument, heâs using that document in a similar way. Heâs not reading it; just pointing to it. âThis piece of paper means you have to listen to me.â The study could be about plankton, or Henry VIII, or squirrel poop for all the difference it makes. (Okay, maybe it matters a little: it has to at least look semi-legit at a glance.) Heâs not using evidence to inform his position; heâs decided what his position is and heâs pantomiming evidence to support it.
Itâs almost as if weâve stumbled into The Sorcererâs Apprentice! Little Mickeyâs put on the hat and declared, âI know how this works! You stand up, all big and tall, and say âI have a study that says you have to do what I tell you!â Thatâs how you always play it. Well, this time Iâve got a study, so you have to do as I say!â
And you can tell him, âThatâs not how this works, Mickey: itâs a study, not an incantation. It has to actually say what you claim, and it has to be a good study.â
âOhhh, look at you moving the goalposts! Look at you gatekeeping! Deciding which studies count and which ones donât. Well I believe this oneâs every bit as good as yours, and I believe it proves me right!â
And is that what he believes? Maybe. Maybe not. Remember: The Card Says Moops - you canât prove he doesnât believe that. And for the purposes of âYou have to listen to meâ thatâs all he needs. This is a battle of wills now, not information, each half of the doublewrong argument functioning as both motte and bailey. If you successfully expose that study as bogus heâll move on to another, and youâll only be undermining the scientific method in his view: if studies arenât always to be trusted, if even quack science can get peer-reviewed, whoâs to say your studies arenât as bogus as his? And thatâs if he doesnât change evidence entirely - âOkay maybe I canât prove puberty blockers are dangerous, but this study says trans kids have high regret rates; this one says theyâre unhappy; this one says theyâre brainwashed!âÂ
Heâs understood the rhetorical function of science, but not the substance. Or perhaps heâs understood the rhetorical function all too well, enough to know, for the purposes of argument, substance rarely matters.
From here, you can chart the course of the entire conversation stretching out before you: You might rush in, hold the document under his nose and say, âLook! It doesnât say what you said it does! Whatâs the matter, canât read?â Which might be satisfying, but does make you look the pedantic asshole.
Or you can reject his so-called evidence as patently false, inadmissible, and leave yourself vulnerable to being obliterated the moment you make an honest mistake with a citation.
Or you can research every single shred of information he puts in front of you, so you can thoroughly debunk each and every one, which means he simply keeps putting bunk in front of you and drowns you with homework.
And he must see it, too, the conversation laid out in front of him. He hasnât positioned himself to persuade you, but to ensure neither of you ever persuades the other. What is the purpose of this debate, then? This ritual? What is it youâre really arguing about?
Well, your coworker believes that the government (or a doctor doing what the government tells them) should force citizens from a minority to do something with their bodies they donât want to do. But he wonât say that out loud because he knows thatâs socially unacceptable. âI want the government to force people to do what I want with their bodies no matter how many of them die in the process,â is an opinion that isnât likely to make friends. So he substitutes the document for the thing he really believes. âItâs not me. Itâs just science.â He is appealing to facts when, truthfully, this is a difference in values.
Doublewrong is a rhetorical technique to catch you out, to hide the real argument from you and leave you chasing the substitute. It also protects him.
People deploy these kinds of irrational, paradoxical moves to stop themselves thinking about topics that make them uncomfortable. If your coworker interrogated his values about the proper relationship between the government and minorities he might find heâs not the person he thought he was, or that his friends and colleagues expect him to be. (And you might too - letâs not pretend Leftists and Liberals have the moral high ground all the time - interrogating your fundamental values is an uncomfortable experience for most people.) He probably wants to think of himself as a good person, and yet he also believes (maybe not even consciously) that the government should own the bodies of at least some citizens. He knows heâd probably hate that if it happened to him, but he still wants it to happen to others. Doublewrong relieves him of the burden of forming a rational position. The document is his nice big safety blanket.
This plays on a human weakness that spans the entire political spectrum: we all wrap ourselves snug in faulty information from time to time. We share studies without reading because the abstract conforms to our assumptions; we treat a supposition that is likely as though itâs a proven fact. And this is, after a point, necessary: as informed as you are, you do have to stop researching somewhere. You do, at some point, have to go on assumptions, take someoneâs word, trust that a pattern holds, because the videoâs due before the end of the month if you want to charge your patrons and make rent!
âŠsorry.
But we do, sometimes, treat research as a ritual rather than a method. Because, often, we want to appeal to facts, papers, authorities, without having to do any of that pesky reasoning. But that is exactly what leaves us open to a doublewrong attack. The flaw with your coworkerâs study is heâs using it to claim trans healthcare is dangerous, and heâs wrong. He has a comeback for every way you could try to convince him, but heâs still wrong. You canât prove trans healthcare is safe by gesturing at studies, because the opposition wonât read them. And will write their own studies. You canât prove it with peer review, because theyâll game peer review. You canât call them liars because theyâll insist theyâre sincere. There is no rule they canât pervert, no system they canât twist to their advantage. You canât just appeal to things that signify âreason,â at some point one of you will have to do some actual reasoning to figure out whoâs making sense, and, well, itâs not going to be them.
Remember: this is a conversation about values. Presuming you know what yours are, you may have to speak them aloud.
âI think people should do what they like with their bodies without politicians interfering, and even if I thought puberty blockers were dangerous (which by the way theyâre not because on the off-chance you actually care about evidence hereâs all the good stuff) I think people have the right to make risky decisions about their healthcare too. If there was a drug with a 1% chance of healing your terminal cancer and a 99% chance of dangerous side effects Iâd support your right to take it if you wanted.â Now youâve avoided the trap of arguing about what some document says. Youâre focusing on the second, deeper part of the doublewrong instead of the first. Youâve also put him on the back foot: now he has to justify his values, which is exactly what he wanted to avoid!
Of course, he may just repeat himself: âThe study says theyâre dangerous!â This is not a technique for winning arguments. Itâs a technique for starting them.
New Alt-Right Playbook! This one's on spurious claims and how they don't even need to be ARTICULATED to follow you around.
If you wanna keep this series coming out (and maybe help it come out a little faster) do please consider backing me on Patreon or subscribing to me on Nebula.
Transcript below the cut.
Say, for the sake of argument, you are the kind of progressive leftist with a platform who gets a share of harassment - seasonal or perennial - from reactionaries. In this situation, you will, inevitably, hear one who positions themself as a reasonable moderate ask, âWhy Donât You Respond To Criticism?â
Thereâs a lot going on in that question, more than is obvious, and itâs worth understanding.
First is that the question is not only directed at you. It exists as a marker, showing up in your Q&Aâs, comment sections, or Twitter threads, to imply to anyone paying attention to you that there is some wealth of legitimate criticism you have long ignored. There may well be a specific point this person is referring to, but itâs often left unspecified or generalized, so that the content - and the quantity - of the criticism is left to audience imagination. It is meant to publicly undermine your legitimacy.
Second, itâs meant to make you question whether there is some legitimate criticism out there in the din of people screaming at you. Youâre not perfect, and a knock-on effect of being harassed is you get numbed out, unable to discern good faith from bad, often removing yourself from the streams through which your peers used to correct you because of the endless flow of garbage coming through those channels now. But the only way to verify the ambiguous claim that there is criticism worth responding to is to once again strap on waders and climb in, which is often what your critic really wants.
Third, the question isnât really âwhy donât you respond to criticism?â Odds are, you do respond to some criticism. People in your position are often addressing or pre-empting criticism all the time, arguably too much. No, what this nonspecific question is really asking is, âWhy donât you respond to my criticism?â Theyâll let it sound like youâve been ignoring everyone, but they mean âwhy are you ignoring me?â They are going to insist you owe them a response, that their critique, regardless of your opinion of it, is valid, and demands immediate attention. Odds are there are dozens of people saying the same, all at once.
Fourth, odds are good that you have, in fact, addressed their specific complaint, but not in a manner they will accept. This one personâs criticism is likely not unique, you may have covered it somewhere in your output purely because you know what kind of arguments are getting thrown at you and you want to cover your bases. Thereâs a decent chance your critic doesnât actually consume enough of your work to have seen it. But itâs maybe even more likely that they are aware of your counter-argument - possibly one of your fans directed them to it - but donât consider a response legitimate unless it is directed at the critic. Covering it in a different context or on a different platform doesnât count. They are owed a statement they can respond to directly, because they want the argument to continue. Really, the question is, âWhy donât you respond to my criticism on my terms?â
Finally, even if you did respond to them by name, itâs likely your response would still be disqualified. If you were to summarize their argument in any way, they would claim you are building a straw man. If you isolated any specific critique, or pointed to the cruelty that accompanied it, they would claim youâre cherry-picking. You must, it seems, first present the criticism, full and unabridged, before you may respond to it. Which is to say: the only âcorrectâ way to respond to criticism is to platform the critic.
And there are dozens who expect this of you. Who will tear into you for not addressing, in meticulous detail, every single critique theyâve ever tossed your way, and, in the same breath, make fun of you for talking too much. Because they donât want to move on from âWhy Donât You Respond to Criticism?â As a rhetorical tactic, itâs pretty ace. To announce, before the argument is even stated, that it is thus far undefeated? ::chefâs kiss:: Because any response you make will keep the focus on you and not their argument. âItâs not worth responding to.â âWell why should The Accused get to decide what is and isnât worth responding to?â âI have responded, repeatedly.â âWell why didnât you respond in this particular way?â None of this looks at whether the argument had any credibility to begin with, only at whether your rebuttal is following procedure.
Take, for example, the hypothetical criticism that you should not listen to me because I am just four eels in a trenchcoat. How would I respond to that? What can I say that isnât exactly what four eels in a trenchcoat would say? âIâm not even wearing a trenchcoatâ? Well, the first thing four eels would do when people start to catch on is wear hoodies. Show my birth certificate, saying I was born a single entity to a human mother at a weight four newborn eels wouldnât add up to? Well, did that work for Obama? Or did the guy saying the birth certificate was fake get elected President? And, of course, anything I have to say about how fascism has evolved on the social internet is suspect if I canât even prove Iâm human. What do fish know?? We stayed at war with Iraq for seven years after the government announced the Weapons of Mass Destruction we were looking for never existed, and some people, to this day, still think we found them. What hope would I - a warm-blooded mammal who would make very mediocre sushi - stand in the face of that? [bell chime]
So, if you ever see this claim out in the wild, âwhy havenât you responded to _____,â ask: do you know what _____ is, do you yourself agree itâs a valid question, and are you sure it hasnât already been answered? And donât repeat the question unless youâve got three yesses.
by a wide margin the weirdest video essay I've ever release: List of Songs that Represent "Smart Music" Ranked from Most to Least Appropriate to Put in a Video Essay
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as a quick note: YouTube has already demonetized this video, as two different corporations are claiming copyright on recordings they do not own the copyright to - both are Creative Commons recordings of public domain music, that, in one case, YouTube has misidentified as a different recording, and, in the other, YouTube has the music in its database as under copyright despite it being having been released under CC BY-SA 3.0. I am disputing these false claims and will (hopefully) get whatever money I am owed, but, for now, YouTube is not paying me a dime for this.
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thanks. transcript below the cut!
List of Songs That Represent âSmart Musicâ Ranked From Most To Least Appropriate To Put In A Video Essay (And Presented In Drill Bit Order).
1. Clair de Lune, Debussy
This has been top dog ever since the teaser for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and cemented its position against challengers with a showcase in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Said film could have been the shark-jumping moment where the song was irretrievably lost to irony, given directors Kwan and Scheinert (Daniels)âs style mercilessly marries the aesthetics of prestige and shitpost. Yes, despite its silliness, EEAAO is achingly sincere, but could the general public be trusted to recognize that? But then it won Best Picture, so apparently yes! Beautiful, delicate, to score a film or video with Clair de Lune signals a desire to be seen not only as an intellectual, but as an aesthete. The song could lose potency if the Clair de Lune sequence were parodied enough, but how does one parody EEAAO???
9. Gymnopedie No. 1, Satie
I fear we must, as a society, and as a community of video essayists, move on from Gymnopedie No. 1. It held the title longer than, I think, any champion previous, and for that it deserves merit. But its time is over. It is, like the phrase âmad dated,â mad dated. It is saying âlmaoâ out loud. Did you know the original screenplay for 2005 film The Island specifically stated that, in the weird culty enclave in which the film opens, Gymnopedie No. 1 must be playing over the loudspeaker? I donât think Michael Bay followed that directive (Iâm not rewatching the movie to find out), but that is how long this was the âSmart Musicâ song - since 5 months after YouTube launched. If you must - absolutely must - put Satie in a video essay, use Gnossienne No. 1, though it too is on its way to passe. At this point Iâm prepared to say Vexations or GTFO.
2. Ave Maria, Schubert/Liszt
Nothing was certain after Satie vacated the throne, and for a while it seemed we might have a Starks vs. Baratheons situation between Schubert and Debussy. Following several appearances in pretentious YouTube videos, the Ave Maria made its strongest showing yet by scoring the opening scene of the grimdarkest Batman film so far, an entire twenty days before getting fully Lannisterâd by Everything Everywhere All at Once. Unbowed, unbent, and unbroken, still she nips at the heels of the king, and may yet take his place. No one else poses a comparable threat. Hers is a curious strategy, being a religious, Christmas, and even classic Disney standard now repurposed as âSmart Music;â she gets a big boost every December, but can she take the top spot before this cyclical exposure nudges her back into a prior niche?
8. Moonlight Sonata, Beethoven
If you were in a film program in the mid-2000s, you are sick to death of Moonlight Sonata. Also if you were in a music class where you were asked to determine a songâs time signature by ear - how am I supposed to tell the difference between waltz time and 4/4 with all triplets without the sheet music in front of me? To say scoring a video with Moonlight Sonata is a hack move - youâd have to be a hack to not already know! This was the soundtrack to the blind cave salamander level of Earthworm Jim 2, thereâs no coming back from that! I mean, the association with Tallarico Studios alone⊠Itâs done. Roll over, Beethoven.
3. Cello Suite No. 1 (Prelude), Bach
This one is firmly-rooted. It is not going anywhere, both in the sense that nothing could soon push it off the list but itâs hard to imagine rising any higher. It is just slightly too beautiful, too expressive, too legato to fall into the stiffness of Habanera or the pomposity of a De Beers ad, but just close enough to them in tone to always read as a hipper alternative. So youâll never be overexposed, but never go that long without hearing the Yo-Yo Ma version. And so here it stays, third on the podium, solid bronze, the waterbender, the Plup; with you as always is Prelude to Cello Suite No. 1. (Frankly surprised it took us this long to get to Johann, but donât worry - heâll be Bach.)
7. Air on the G String, Bach/Wilhelmj
Told ya. Itâs not that she isnât a beautiful piece of music, and itâs not that she already had her time. In truth, she never got her flowers. Inasmuch as she had a run, it was squished between the omnipresences of Beethoven and Satie. Youâll still hear from her now and then; she crops up, like a lucky penny. And youâll smile, every time, but you know the stars in your eyes are not present joy, but nostalgia. A fondness for what was and what couldâve been - what should have been. Why - why couldnât this have had the legs of Gymnopedie? I mean, even the Fucking Champs version - could that have made a run? Could TikTok pick up on it? But comes the day you have to accept - if it was gonna happen, it wouldâve happened by now. Air on the G String grows weary; let her rest.
4. Duo des Fleurs, Delibes
Bit of a dark horse, this one. Didnât exactly come out of nowhere - itâs been here the whole time - but you didnât see it coming! Itâs like that time I went snorkeling, and I wondered, âWhere are the fish?â I was told there would be tropical fish, but all I saw was blue. Then I caught one flitting by my head and, as soon my eyes registered the shape, I realized they were everywhere! I just hadnât taken them in. This is the one that makes you ask, where did I hear that before? Was this the one at the end of Margaret? No! How did it go? How do I hum dyads? But then it shows up and, oh yeah, thatâs the one! The really pretty one. I knew itâd come around again. Has staying power, could make a run for the top if it sees an opening, but seemingly content, for now, to dance around the periphery, appreciated when heard if only half-remembered the next day.
6. Prelude in E Minor Op. 28 No. 4, Chopin
The bottom end of acceptability. Anything lower, you must avoid. But you can use Prelude in E. It is a risk, and it takes skill. But you can use Prelude in E. It is not for the faint of heart. This is the ending of Fez weâre talking about here. This is that one TED Talk about how everyone loves classical music they just donât know it yet. This was all over Anatomy of a Fall. Are you sure you wouldnât prefer something lighter? Nocturne in E-flat [Op. 9 No. 2] is very nice. Prelude has just enough penetration that some people are going to recognize it, and enough clout that those who do are going to expect things of the person who puts it in a video essay. You canât just throw this under a rant about The Snyder Cut. But you can - with care, with effort, and with grace - use Prelude in E.
5. Spiegel im Spiegel, Part
We are not ready for Spiegel im Spiegel. The rare âSmart Musicâ that is, rather than classical, contemporary minimalist. This is - I have been led to believe - all over the film festival circuit. It is the go-to for aspiring arthouse directors. So I assume it is only a matter of time until it reaches general cultural awareness. But we - the YouTube video essay community - are not, at this point in time, pretentious enough to pull off Spiegel im Spiegel. This is not a statement on the song: it is a lovely, sparse, and unpretentious piece of music, which is why pretentious people are drawn to it. And we are not there yet. But I believe in us.
POSTSCRIPTUM
The List of Songs that Represent âSmart Musicâ is not ranked by quality; they are all, as a baseline, masterpieces. They are ordered, instead, by their possession of antipodal qualities. Beethovenâs Fifth may be a beautiful piece but itâs too well-known - to the casual listener, it reads only as âclassical music.â Vltava is a beautiful piece, but itâs not recognizable enough - to most, it will read only as âmusic.â Pachelbelâs Canon works in too many contexts. Mozartâs Lacrimosa no longer works in any context but âShitâs About To Go Off.â The Song that Represents âSmart Musicâ must balance these humors: suggestive, but not too specific; recognizable, but not overfamiliar. The kind of thing one imagines cultured people listen to, and fancies oneself cultured for having noticed it. Just popular enough to signify obscurity to a large number of people.
This impossibility of being both popular and obscure is what keeps the list in motion. Many songs drift back into obscurity before reaching the top, but, once in the primary position, a song begins its slow procession to overexposure. And when, at last, it is too popular to be niche, it does not slip to number 2; it plummets to the bottom, as did Icarus.
Due to this slow but constant movement, new songs will, at intervals, join the ranks, taking the place of those that became gauche. And if, dear listener, you were aiming to trendset, to score your next whatever-it-is-you-do with the newest Song to Represent âSmart Music,â and were I a gambling man⊠Bachâs Prelude in C. And Iâll tell you why: it appears in the Netflix series Bodies alongside Chopin (#6), mirroring Satieâs dual appearance in The Queenâs Gambit (#9); its arpeggiated structure makes it usable in scenarios similar to the Cello Suite (#3) (Johann did love him some broken chords); and it forms the basis of the Gounod version of Ave Maria, if you would like a Cool Personâs Alternative to Schubert (#2). You may feel Iâm playing too safe, but I tell you truly: this song is due.
But if I can impart one piece of wisdom let it be this: whatever you do, whoever you are, you cannot use Fur Elise. You cannot. You canât do it. It canât be allowed. Donât fu-
new video about Edgar Wright's Cornetto Trilogy, and how everyone* keeps getting them wrong! this video is sponsored by Nebula, a place where you can watch the original version of this video before I had to tweak it for YouTube's copyright bots. (by clicking that link, you can get an annual subscription for 40% off.) or you can just back me on Patreon, which is also cool and good.
transcript below the cut.
I adore Edgar Wrightâs Cornetto Trilogy. I flirted with making a video about it ages ago, had a draft of a script, but ultimately decided it wasnât about anything except âhereâs a thing I like, and here are its (I thought) very obvious themes.â So I shelved it. But, in the years since, I have seen multiple video essayists on this here website claim that these movies are about growing up and taking responsibility. (I say âmultiple.â Itâs not a lot. But itâs more than one! And thatâs enough.)
These people are 100% wrong.
Lemme lay it out: the Cornetto Trilogy is not about growing up. It is not about taking responsibility. It is the exact opposite, and thatâs not subtext. It is three movies about stunted manchildren thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and each, in the end, is saved - is redeemed - by abandoning his character arc and failing to grow or change. It is a three-part love letter to immaturity.
And I guess I have to set the record straight.
Sometimes making a video about a thing you love is an act of appreciation. And sometimes itâs out of spite.
The Cornetto Trilogy is three movies: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The Worldâs End. All three are written by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright; Pegg stars, and Wright directs; all three center on a relationship between Pegg and real-life best friend Nick Frost, which makes each film a reunion of the core team behind Spaced (excepting, but for a small role in Shaun of the Dead, Jessica Hynes). The three films span three genres: zombie apocalypse, buddy cop, alien invasion; each features a Cornetto ice cream cone: strawberry to represent blood, original blue to represent the police, and mint to represent little green men; this is a joking nod to Krzysztof KieĆlowskiâs Trois Couleur films, Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge, which were based on the colors and themes of the French flag (I donât care what you say, Emily: #TeamRouge); that nod is funny because Trois Couleur is high-art drama and these are comedies. All three are parodies of, tributes to, and actually surprisingly good executions of their respective genres. And the hook, the gag at the center of all these movies, is that Simon Pegg plays a character wholly unsuited to be starring in this kind of film.
Shaun, the burnout, is the wrong person to survive the zombie apocalypse; by-the-book British bobby Nicholas is the wrong person to lead an American-style bombastic actioner; and alcoholic asshole Gary is the last person to save the world from aliens.
And I think thatâs where people get stuck. Because âschlub finds himself protagonist of a genre filmâ is the elevator pitch for like a dozen Adam Sandler movies. The genre trappings may be as mundane as parenthood or mandated anger management classes, or as high-concept as action movie, whodunnit, or time travel Itâs a Wonderful Life if Clarence were Christopher Walken as the angel of death (that⊠that makes it sound good, itâs not, donât see Click; leave Frank Capra alone, Adam). But all these movies have the same basic shape: an extraordinary situation forces a guy to confront his shortcomings, which always stem from having never grown up. And you probably havenât seen all of these movies, but if youâve seen any, I bet you have assumptions about how the rest end: even though âAdam Sandler acts like a childâ is generally the selling point of an Adam Sandler movie, they all end with some lip service toward becoming an adult: hey man, grow up a bit; appreciate your family a little more; square your shoulders; clean your room. This is so standard, it was parodied mercilessly in Funny People.
And this was a formative microgenre for my generation! Whole universe turns itself upside down to teach some shitty dude to, like, do the dishes and pay his wife a compliment now and then - Liar Liar, Bruce and Evan Almighty (all directed by the same guy, by the way). So I donât blame people of a certain age for seeing the first act of Shaun of the Dead and thinking âI know where this is going.â And when, at the last minute, it swerves and goes someplace else, you could read that as a gag, a final subversion of expectation, still the same basic shape. But no! No! Once is a gag - thrice??? Thrice is a thematic statement!
So lemme make my case. Iâma take you through these movies one by one - weâll talk about the manchildren and the expectations set by the genre, and then weâll talk about that last-minute swerve and what it means. And then youâll tell me Iâm right and apologize!
Shaun of the Dead:
Shaun is a man in his twenties. What kind of manchild is he? Heâs the slacker.
What is his problem? He needs to sort his life out. Shaun doesnât know how to take action. He hasnât advanced since college - heâs been working the kind of job a teen takes over the summer for like a decade, lives with the same best friend, has the same petty fights with his stepdad, goes to the same pub every week with the same group of people. He canât make a reservation, he canât manage a calendar, heâs a washup. This makes his girlfriend, Liz, feel stifled, trapped; he is a weight around her ankle, taking her on the same date week after week, keeping her from living her own dreams, having her own adventures. She gives him one last chance to prove he can sort his life out, and he blows it, and she dumps him.
And then: a zombie movie happens.
The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: to survive, and save his loved ones, heâll have to take action, make plans, be decisive. This is a common fantasy: when you feel ground down by the mundanity of life, you might imagine, oh, if only a crisis would happen, like a zombie virus outbreak, where my normal-life problems like âam I gonna make rent,â âis my girl gonna take me back,â âis my roommate gonna kick out my stoner buddy whoâs crashing on the couchâ become meaningless, and itâs immediately clear whatâs really important, what matters. Then Iâd know exactly what to do. Itâs why disaster movies work as escapism: a necromantic plague - or at least the fantasy of one - is sometime preferable to normal life.
Hot Fuzz:
Nicholas is a man in his thirties. What kind of manchild is he? Heâs the hall monitor.
What is his problem? He canât switch off. He is a hypercompetant police officer with a rulebook where his brain should be. Heâs so good at being a cop that heâs spotting and unraveling crimes even on his day off. He canât maintain a relationship, has no friends, all his coworkers hate him because he keeps finishing their work for them, and his stats show up the rest of the force so badly that they scuttle him out to the country.
Now you might be thinking, âMmm. A fastidious police officer who canât have fun? How is that a manchild? Sounds pretty grown-up to me. Youâre reaching, bud.â Ohhhh ho ho, smartass, do you remember this scene? [bar scene] Yeah! Nicholas Angel has a five-year-oldâs notion of law and order. Heâs still playing cops and robbers.
And thatâs a problem, because then: an action movie happens.
It doesnât happen all at once: he goes out to the country and finds they do things a bit differently there. They are (ostensibly) less concerned with rules than what than the rules are for: if the purpose of drinking laws is to keep the streets safe and orderly, and letting some people off with a warning or allowing kids drink so long as they do it inside achieves that end, the rule can be bent. Thatâs a judgment grown-ups can make; I mean, theyâre the ones who wrote the rules in the first place. So be lenient with shoplifters, donât hassle people for speeding; this isnât the Big City, you can use your better judgment. But Nicholas never got past doing whatever Mom & Dad said; obedience, and trusting whoeverâs up the chain, is his entire moral framework. He canât accept that bending the law could be more righteous than following it.
But also maybe thereâs a criminal conspiracy murdering people and writing it off as accidents and the police chief might be in on it. Or maybe Nicholas is so desperate for a big case with no moral ambiguity that heâs seeing things where they arenât.Â
The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: either thereâs nothing going on and he needs to chill out about procedure, or the department is corrupt and heâll have to go rogue like itâs Point Break - and this is how he experiences Point Break. [âpaperworkâ]
No matter what, heâll have to bend the rules, which he constitutionally cannot do.
The Worldâs End:
Gary is a man in his forties. What kind of manchild is he? Heâs the delinquent.
Whatâs his problem? Pfffft. What isnât his problem? Gary is a manipulative, narcissistic, lying, self-destructive, ignorant, violent, thieving, shit-talking, unapologetic asshole who peaked in high school when being all those things was still kind of badass. The greatest night of his life was the drunken pub crawl after graduation he and his friends didnât even finish, and heâs been tumbling downhill ever since. Heâs spent his life ruining everyone who knows him until thereâs no one left to ruin but Gary King. So now itâs time to bully the old gang into going back home with him to relive that night by finishing the pub crawl, because, in his own words, itâs all heâs got. And he and his friends have to confront how home has changed since they left - the bars have gentrified, not everyone recognizes them; the defining, epic deeds of Garyâs youth have been forgotten. You canât actually go back because that place doesnât exist anymore.
And then: a sci-fi movie happens.
Turns out the townâs been taken over by aliens, and all the people who couldnât conform to their new order have been replaced with robots! Thatâs why no one recognizes them! And thatâs why the pubs all look the same: the aliens are homogenizing everything! And itâs clear, if they canât get Gary and his friends to play ball, theyâll roboticize them as well! The obvious move is to get the hell out of town, but Gary keeps inventing excuses to stay and finish the pub crawl, and they sound pretty sensible because the groupâs already five pints in. The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: sooner or later heâs gonna have to give up on recapturing his youth and do whatâs best for him and his friends now, even if it means running back to the city where all his problems live.
So there we have it: the characters cross the threshold into an unfamiliar world where an external conflict cannot be addressed without resolving the tension within. The slacker will have to get his shit sorted, the hall monitor will have to break the rules, and the delinquent will have to do whatâs good for him. And, to an extent, all three know this! The movies Wright and Pegg pay homage to exist in these stories - Shaun knows what a zombie is, Danny keeps Nicholas up watching Point Break and Bad Boys II, and Gary and friends know bodysnatcher movies so well they have philosophical debates with the robots about whether ârobotâ is the PC term.
So, yeah, if you turned the movies off there, I could forgive you for thinking thatâs where theyâre headed. But you goofballs watched them to the end and then made content about them, what is wrong with you???
What actually happens in the second halves of these movies?
Shaun twigs that heâs in a zombie movie and, at first, tries to play the part - his survival plans are miniature heroâs journeys with him as protagonist, wherein heâll save the day by neatly confronting all his flaws. Heâll resolve parental conflict by saving his mom from his zombified stepdad, resolve romantic conflict by showing his girl he can come through when it counts, and resolve internal conflict by being a man who saves the day. And all his plans suck! Itâs just the same plan he always comes up with! Dragging around the same useless liability of a bestie, collecting the same group of people, and holing up in the same pub! He doesnât save his mom: his stepdad apologizes, resolving their conflict for him, and then survives in zombie form but Shaunâs mom gets killed; most of the friend group gets killed because the crisis does not actually suspend but in fact amplifies their personal grievances; and he doesnât save the day, just manages not to die long enough for the military to show up.
But⊠well, Liz wanted adventure and now sheâs had enough for a lifetime, so⊠sheâs down to just be boring with him for a while - sit on the couch, watch TV, hit the pub. Beats running for your life. Tensions with the roommate are gone cuz roommate died, but rent is covered cuz Liz moved in. Zombies donât get eradicated, just folded into normal life, so Shaun can mindlessly play video games with his bestie forever, and itâs not a problem that bestie doesnât have an income cuz he doesnât need food or shelter.
The zombie apocalypse doesnât make Shaun sort his life out, it changes the world til he doesnât have to.
When Nicholas discovers that, yes, there is definitely a murderous criminal conspiracy inside the police department, he recognizes the only way to bring about justice is to become what Danny has always wanted and go Dirty Harry on the town. Itâs either that or just swallow the crimes. But he does neither. He and Danny go on an epic shooting spree, recreating famous movie scenes, taking out the entire criminal organization against all odds, and spouting badass one-liners⊠but everyone who helps them is a cop, they donât actually kill anyone, all perps are formally arrested, and they fill out all the paperwork. I think he even properly signs out the weapons. He never switches off, never breaks a rule, does absolutely everything by the book, only⊠louder. And this violent showdown saves him from the chill town with lax rules he thought heâd moved to. Now he, with his five-year-old notion of right and wrong, is in charge of the police department.
The buddy cop actioner doesnât make Nicholas bend the rules, it changes the world til he doesnât have to.
Gary knows exactly how a movie of this sort is supposed to go and spends the whole movie running from it. Friends and secondary characters keep sharing these poignant moments with him, because they know this story, too: yeah, heâs gonna reject help at first, but sooner or later heâll hit rock bottom and then someone will get through to him. And, as the night goes on, and the characters get drunker and drunker, and Gary passes up more and more opportunities to abandon the pub crawl and go home, these moments take a tone of desperation. They start to sound more like interventions; like, Gary, we all know youâre going to come to your senses but could you hurry up with it??? How many of your friends need to literally die for you to shape up? Are you gonna get them all killed?
And the answer is: Gary will never shape up! To Gary the Human Dril Tweet, his friends trying to save him, psychiatrists trying to treat him, and aliens trying to assimilate him are all the same thing. He doggedly makes it to the end of the pub crawl and confronts the alien overlord who tells him all the technological advancements of the past few decades - all the efficiency and homogenization thatâve changed the face of his home town - are their doing. The Information Age is an intervention on behalf of Earth, a pan-galactic effort to save humanity from itself. And the reason theyâve been replacing people with robots is some people are too fucked up to go along with it.
And hereâs Gary, King of the Fuckups, brashly declaring that fucking up is what makes us human. There is no freedom without the freedom to ruin your life. We are endowed by our creator with the right to be drunken, ornery pieces of shit.
He tells the aliens to piss off and heâs so fucking annoying that they do, and they take the Information Age with them.
Now⊠I know⊠ugh⊠I know a lot of people love this movie, say itâs the best of the three. Some friends whoâve struggled with mental health or just being an adult under late capitalism really identify with Gary, and the valorization of being a mess. I see you, youâre not wrong, I get it, I really do. But can we just⊠not âbutâ but âalsoâ can we⊠can we also admit that this ending is⊠this is Space Brexit.
Like, literally itâs an alien invasion but symbolically this is Gary rejecting the adult world of rules and authority and doing whatâs best for the community and thatâs how Brexiters view the EU. And people keep telling him âGary, this is in your best interestâ and Gary says, I donât want my best interest! I am registered in the anti-Garyâs Face Party and I will cast my vote by cutting my nose! I choose to do whatâs bad for me.
And, like a true Brexiter, he chooses for everybody.
Now tell me thatâs a movie about growing up. Gary collapses human civilization in its entirety rather than change, and in the world that follows, he thrives⊠by being an immature, irresponsible bag of garbage.
To Wright and Pegg, growing up is death, and these are movies about being alive. These characters donât cross the threshold back into the ordinary world with the ultimate boon of character growth; all three stay in the extraordinary world. The zombies remain, the robots remain, Nicholas is offered his London job back and chooses to stay in the country. These are stories about normal life spontaneously turning into a genre film, and they are made with deep love for those genres; why would they end with leaving those genres behind? Because itâs what Adam Sandler would do?
So there you have it. I rest my case.
âOkay Ian. Why does this matter?â
âŠwhat was that?
âYouâve made your point: these movies arenât about growing up or taking responsibility. So what?â
Uhhhh.
âBring it home for us.â
âŠ
âWhy do you care so much?
[breath]
I wrote the first draft of this script when I was around Shaun and Nicholasâ age, and âso what?â is why I shelved it. Now Iâm Garyâs age, this videoâs been in the back of my brain the whole time, but I got this far and âso whatâ is where I got stuck, again. This is why the CO-VIDs came out quicker, cuz I let myself end with âso thatâs interesting!â and got on with my life. But thereâs clearly something sticky here, more than âsomeone is wrong on the internet.â (Also, to the YouTubers Iâm vaguebooking, who said these were movies about growing up - Iâm way more annoyed at the folks Iâve argued with on Twitter about this, you just made a better rhetorical device; you do not owe me an apology!) (Also, to the commentariat: I am not extrapolating this from like two data points, this is chronic and recurring and has been bothering me for years.)
There are a few directions I could take this to give it some âcultural weight.â I could put on my social justice hat and talk about how the âcrisis of adulthoodâ doesnât play as broad comedy unless you look like Adam Sandler or Simon Pegg, or put on my class analysis hat and talk about how signifiers of adulthood are, traditionally, ways of spending and accruing capital which are, today, often inaccessible to people under 40.
And thatâs all legit, but hereâs the real deal: Iâm just mad at Gary. The world changed around Shaun such that he could stay a child. And Nicholas ended up somewhere he could stay a child. If you missed that, youâre wrong, but whatever. But to say that Gary grew up grinds me, because Gary chose this. The whole movie is people telling him to grow up, and he says no! He says it out loud! He says it to the literal end of the world. To walk out of the theater and say âthatâs a movie about growing upâ is more than a mistake, itâs a refusal. Itâs trying to âfixâ the movie by fitting it into a more familiar shape, so it doesnât say what it says, so Gary isnât who he is, who he chooses to be.
Iâm being cheeky when I say this because heâs a fictional character, but saying Gary grew up is enabling.
Gary says thereâs no freedom without the freedom to ruin your life, which is the problem with alcoholics and libertarians: itâs not just your life, Gary! You live in a community, a culture, and an ecosystem! Your actions - everybodyâs actions - impact other people! Thatâs just the way the world is! You canât shit yourself at the bar without other people having to smell it. Weâre all fuckinâ connected, man! You donât want anyoneâs will imposed on you; you spend the whole movie imposing your will on everyone else! You say humans donât wanna be told what to do, and then you decide humanityâs future by yourself with no input or consent from anyone!
People point to Gary ordering water in the last scene instead of beer as evidence that he got sober, like thatâs proof that he did grow up in the end, which are you fucking joking??? Getting sober is a shorthand for maturity the way buying a house is, it doesnât signify anything in and of itself! Gary drank to escape the adult world of rules and responsibilities! So, yeah, under normal circumstances getting sober would mean heâs made peace with that world and is ready to integrate. But thatâs not what happened! The thing he was escaping doesnât exist anymore! He literally destroyed it!! People died! Probably millions! Now he lives a happy life LARPing as Omega Doom - no I donât expect you to catch that reference! He doesnât need to drink! He is literally reliving the best day of his life forever. And even if it did mean personal growth, the idea that a person could make what would be, unequivocally, the most selfish decision in human history, and then spend his life celebrating the outcome, oh but if he overcame a personal demon in the process then on balance thatâs maturity? That is lightspeed solipsism! Who are you if you think that way? Are you all Adam Sandler???
And none of that makes this a bad ending, or Gary a bad character. I mean, he is the reason The Worldâs End is my least favorite, and I donât like the ending, but I donât think itâs bad that I donât like the ending. Rather than watch another addict pull his life together or destroy himself, we watch a downward spiral with so much gravity the whole world self-destructs alongside him. And thatâs why The Worldâs End is the most interesting of the three: it is a bold choice, and I think we are free to feel however we want about the conclusion Gary engineered for himself. I donât think itâs valid to pretend it didnât happen.
In the context of the trilogy, we see that Shaunâs immaturity is mostly a problem for Shaun: he would be, at worst, a footnote in the lives of the people who love him; âyeah, I liked Shaun a lot, but I couldnât carry him through life anymore.â Nicholas is the kind of overachiever that is useful if pointed in the right direction; juvenile code of ethics aside, he is, empirically, helping the community (within the entirely fictional framework where thatâs a thing police do). If the world hadnât changed to turn their flaws into strengths, they would still be relatively harmless. Gary is what happens when immaturity isnât harmless, and shows us how a world built by that immaturity would look.
There is an appeal to Gary King, a wish fulfillment. Letting your id fully off the leash because you no longer care what anybody thinks - itâs why some people drink, and itâs why some people would like to drink with Gary. But if thatâs not just your Friday night, not just your twenties, but thatâs your life? There is a destination at the end of that road, and itâs Gary doing something truly ugly. And we see that ugly thing the way Gary sees it: as awesome. But then you see the reality: the Monday morning after the Friday night. We went out with Gary and he did something terrible.
And Iâm not telling you to hate Gary for it; Iâm not saying Gary canât be forgiven. In fact, seeing it for what it is is the only way Gary could be forgiven, because, if he âgrew up and took responsibility,â thereâs nothing to forgive.
I think this is the only way the trilogy could have ended. I mean, you make stories about boys who get older and older and donât grow up, it eventually becomes a problem. Thereâs only two ways to resolve it: you either end with a guy actually sorting his shit out, or you go for broke and show what happens if he doesnât. And I think some of us boys saw that and said, âno, noooo, they did grow up! all three of them!â rather than say, âhaha! hahaaa! âŠâŠâŠâŠâŠshit.â
New video essay! On the Reverse Gish Gallop - how conservatives can ignore 90% of your argument and still appear to be winning.
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Transcript below the cut.
Say, for the sake of argument, youâre watching a political debate on TV. The conservative candidate has used their opening arguments to dump a truckload of dubious claims on their opponent. You recognize this maneuver: thatâs the Gish Gallop! The debater makes point after dubious point, and, if the other debater doesnât rebut every single one, they will appear to have lost the argument. These points donât have to be good or hard to disprove, there just has to be a lot of them.
Oh, but whatâs this? The liberal candidate seems to have come prepared! Thatâs new! They succinctly and efficiently dismantle each of their opponentâs arguments, offering a clear rebuttal to every single one. Itâs obviously not the first time theyâve heard this particular gallop. So, the conservativeâs petard has just fully hoisted them. [âWhat a hoisting!â] Theyâve just lost their own game and have to go on the defensive⊠right?
Turns out, no! The conservative points to a minor error - maybe the liberal said their program would cost $40 million but is actually estimated to cost 43 - and treats them as an ignorant sap who canât even count correctly. That is now the subject, everything else has been forgotten, and the liberal is backpedaling.
Wait, you exclaim, how does that work?! The liberal has to rebut each and every point but the conservative takes issue with one and stays in the driverâs seat? Are audiences fooled by this? Are liberals that easily snookered? The answer may shock you!
Youâve just borne witness to The Reverse Gish Gallop, where an entire argument falls apart if any of it can be disputed. These disputes, again, donât have to be good, they just have to call the airtightness of the argument into question.
A good example is how conservatives obsess over gaffes. (Which, fuckinâ... really guys?? [W, Trump]) Some Democrat will be all âconservatives want to shut down post offices as a form of vote suppression; theyâre pushing voter ID laws and the post office is where many people get IDs; also we are relying more and more heavily on mail-in voting; they overwhelmingly try to shut down offices in Black and Latine neighborhoods; a lot of services like healthcare and courts still use physical mail by default and there can be serious consequences to getting it late; many elderly people still donât use email, and, hey, maybe some of them like getting junk mailâ âAH BA BA BA THATâS IT THATâS YOUR WHOLE LIFE NOW FOR THE REST OF YOUR CAREER YOUâRE THE ASSHOLE WHO SAID OLD PEOPLE LIKE JUNK MAIL.â
Your mistake was assuming that dishonest people abide by the same rules they impose on everyone else. When I was a teenager, some friends of the family would invite me along when they asked my parents to dinner, because I would play with their five-year-old and let the grown-ups chat in peace. And heâd make up games where weâd bat a balloon back and forth or whatever, and change the rules on the fly when it suited him. Because the rule wasnât actually âyou can only touch the balloon once per turn;â the rule was âAndrew wins.â
The purpose of a Gish Gallop is to establish a narrative not through argument or logic but force and volume. Once established, it takes a lot less effort for them to maintain than for you to establish a new one. If they shake confidence in your argument, the audience will often revert to the previous argument, whether or not that one was ever proven. Itâs a not about which story is true, itâs about who sets the parameters for all stories going forward; who got there first. This is not a debate; this is a Zerg Rush. Understand: a dishonest argument is Lego - you havenât dismantled it until every brick is separated. But an honest rebuttal? An honest rebuttal is Jenga.
New Alt-Right Playbook, regarding the minimization of power imbalances with "enh, it's not SO bad."
If you like this and my other work, do please back me on Patreon and/or watch me on Nebula.
Transcript below the cut.
Say, for the sake of argument, you and some other folks have gotten embroiled in a debate about the use of content warnings. One side has put forth the usual case: some people have trauma or anxiety disorders, and giving them a heads up about common triggers lets them make informed decisions about how to engage with a piece of media. They arenât always looking to walk out, even, just to avoid a panic attack by having a few moments to prepare themselves. And this is often better for everyone as more people can appreciate the work itself and the discourse doesnât derail into another discussion about whether it shouldâve had a content warning.
And then someone from the other side of the debate says, in all seriousness (and I remind you this is about whether or not people should put a single sentence at the beginning of a video, the start of a game, outside the door of a theatre), âCanât you just, like, have your panic attack? I mean, this isnât life and death.â
The discussion quickly and predictably devolves from there into people who have panic attacks trying to explain how miserable they are, and how comparatively simple putting up a content warning is, and you realize far too late that this whole conversation is missing the point. Because the âitâs not life and deathâ crowd? They never claimed they are more inconvenienced than the person having panic attack! Content warnings ainât life and death either! They made no attempt to frame this tradeoff as fair or justified. Only that, in the grand scheme of things, itâs not so bad.
I call this Didoing.
(Relationship Discourse would call it The Tolerable Level of Permanent Unhappiness, which is a really powerful phrase, but I came up with Didoing and Iâm keeping it.)
You see Didoing everywhere. Be as gay as you want, just donât tell your commanding officer. Be trans if you must, but pee at home. Kink is fine, but keep it out of Pride. Drag is whatever, just not in front of children. Being a woman on the internet isnât hard if youâre willing to block seventy thousand people and just use this service to scrub all your private information from the internet so men have a harder finding your home address. Itâs eleven bucks a month! What, you canât afford eleven bucks a month??!
And, yes, all these are minimizations, and, if you want, you can point that out. You can tell them what itâs like to get a Twitter DM threatening to murder your entire family using a quote from Mission: Impossible 3. Yeah, heâs probably not gonna do it! But it can still fuck up your day; the goal is to fuck up your day. But the âitâs not life and deathâ crowd wonât understand, not because they donât care, but because they donât care enough.
But even that is letting them control the conversation. Youâre trying to stress the pain of a panic attack, the anxiety of a death threat, to emphasize a gulf of iniquity between their experience, as a person who does not deal with these things, and that of someone who does. As if, were the gulf smaller, it would be not so bad. In this, you have accepted their premise. Did you even catch what the premise was? That itâs okay for things to be unfair within a certain tolerance. That some people do and should take extra precaution just to exist in the world alongside the rest of us. That itâs okay for others to suffer for the convenience of the normals. Because itâs not so bad.
This is a bit different from how privilege usually works. The issue with content warnings - really, most things people Dido over - is that, if you are a person with triggers, it means other people can provoke a panic response in you against your will. The severity of that response is, frankly, immaterial: the point is, they have power over you, and, if youâre going to operate in this world as equals, you need their word that this power will not be invoked.
The usual move for people on the privileged end of a power imbalance is to deny the imbalance exists: âwhite privilege is a myth,â âthere is no gender wage gap,â etc. etc. You would think, the greater the imbalance, the harder it is to deny, but itâs just the opposite: people Dido when the imbalance is small (or, at least, appears small in the eyes of the Didoer). It happens with content warnings, microaggressions; âno, I donât get followed around Macyâs like Iâm gonna steal something, but is that really so important? is this life and death? donât you have bigger problems?â (Which is a funny thing to say, because, according to white privilege: no! The bigger problems donât exist!)
Didoing is foundational to the privileged mindset, because itâs one scenario where they will admit to the Didoee, âyes, I do have power over you⊠and you should just let me have it.â
New video! Another miniature Alt-Right Playbook, about how Far Right recruitment is not dissimilar from pick-up artistry.
Back me on Patreon. Transcript below the cut.
Say, for the sake of argument, youâve been having a knock-down-drag-out online with a reactionary for weeks. Itâs been going long enough that you donât remember how it started, or, entirely, what youâre talking about. The argument seems to center around the nation of Israel. Youâre fuzzy on what his position on Israel is - he seems to think of it as a religious ethnostate, which he likes, and wants to use as a model for the US, but itâs a Jewish state and he has a lot of awful things to say about Jews. He also has a lot of awful things to say about you! Heâs been giving you every incivility you can imagine - and a few youâve never heard of - since this began. Itâs not helped by the fact that, while you know your position on ethnostates and antisemitism - theyâre bad! - you donât actually know a lot about the history, founding, or government of Israel, so he often catches you out by infodumping and then mocking your ignorance.
Heâs just so rude and conceited and youâre absolutely desperate to show the guy up, trying to bulk up on history every day before logging on, but then something unexpected happens. All of a sudden, he stops insulting you. Heâs still saying awful things about everything youâve ever claimed to believe, but now itâs directed at a âthem.â Liberals, commies, SJWs, what have you. But heâs not calling you any of those things. Heâs treating you like youâre smarter than all those limp-wristed leftoids, smart like him. Better than them. Itâs like he sees potential in you. And after weeks of trying to one-up this guy, suddenly having his respect is actually kind of cool.
This is a recruitment technique. This is the outer edge of the onion. It centers around treating a person badly so they fixate their attention on you, seek some kind of recognition, and maybe have their confidence undermined, and then turning around and treating them very well. The nearest analogue is actually pick-up artist techniques like Negging and Love-Bombing.
If anyone does this to you, understand: you are being groomed.
oh lookie another bite-sized Alt-Right Playbook. back me on Patreon plz.
transcript below the thingy.
Say, for the sake of argument, youâre twelve or thirteen, itâs the mid-90âs, youâre sitting across the table from your conservative aunt at a family reunion. (This aunt will, a decade from now, become a Tea Partier.) You have - you sweet, innocent child - brought up the subject of evolution, being too young to know itâs politicized, and your aunt has not taken well to it. She goes on one of her classic tirades, dismissing the very concept of evolution as patently ridiculous, dropping a quote that will stick with you for ages: âYou canât get snakes from chicken eggs.â And you do your best to explain, with your limited knowledge-base, that, yeah, you can only get a snake from a snake egg, but that snake is going to be a little different from its parents, and the next snake will be a little different from its parents, and you multiply that by a few million generations and you might have something very different from that original snake. Maybe something with legs, or that can breath underwater, or see better in the dark!
And your aunt stares you dead in the windows of your soul and repeats, âYou Canât Get Snakes From Chicken Eggs.â
This is an ego-saving maneuver in which a complex truth is rejected in favor of simplicity. Your aunt has a statement that is true, though non sequitur to the argument at hand. And, after your explanation of how genetics work on long timelines, she repeats her original statement to herself and it still feels true. Itâs the belief that the truth is easily recognized, and that itâs always simple, because the world is simple, and, if you canât explain it to me like Iâm five, then youâre probably wrong or making things up.
This heuristic very hard to argue with. Youâve heard that same aunt claim the hole in the ozone layer is caused by sunspots. Now, weâve talked about the memetic power of statements that are short, quippy, and wrong, and this is a fine example. You might feel the correct response is a statement that is short, quippy, and correct, but hereâs the conundrum: the truth is âthe hole in the ozone layer is caused by chlorofluorocarbons.â Not only is that a more complex sentence, itâs a more complex idea. If the ozone hole is caused by sunspots, then itâs probably been happening for billions of years, itâs not caused by humans, and we donât have to do anything about it. Itâs reassuring, and tells folks all they care to know without further questions. But the truth of how aerosols deplete ozone is more complex, not least because, even without knowing the science of it, it implies itâs a problem we should do something about.
Ultraviolet light makes CFCs release chlorine into the stratosphere, where it bonds with ozone, converting it into oxygen and chlorine monoxide, neither of which do what ozone does to protect us from the sun. There may be people who can explain that more simply than I just did, but thereâs a floor to how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods donât have that. There is no limit on how simple an idea can be when it doesnât have to conform to reality.
You play the game of âwhoâs got the simplest argument,â liars win every time. You canât get much simpler than âsunspots.â But if you can convince people that the world is complex, then simplistic explanations, across the board, become suspect. It might be too late to do that with your aunt, but maybe thereâs still hope for your cousins.
If youâre wondering what they do when confronted with something they cannot deny is complicated: well, thatâs your fault. You, or someone like you, took their simple world and overcomplicated it. All the conspiracy theories and fingerpointing and screenshots theyâve squiggled over in MS Paint, all of that is the story of how you overcomplicated the world; it fills in the gap between the simplicity of the world they believe in and the unambiguous complexity of the one in which we live. And, yes, that story is at least as complex as the truth youâre trying to tell them, and, no, it doesnât make any sense, but thatâs a detail. Because the moral of that story is incredibly simple: it is this way because some people made it this way, and all they have to do is take the power back from those people and things can be simple again. This is their version of âa wizard did it.â
New Alt-Right Playbook! There's a bunch of bite-sized videos like this in the works as I clear out the remaining points I wanna make before the series wraps. If you like this and wanna see more, back me on Patreon and/or follow me on Nebula.
Transcript below the cut.
Say, for the sake of argument, thereâs this guy, this just real abomination, total scum-sucking garbage hole, whoâs running for President. And conservative politicians, pundits, and voters have been laughing their asses off about him. âOh my god, heâs such a disaster, heâll never get the nomination, and, if he were to get the nomination, no one would ever elect him.â They trot him out as a punchline. But November 8th draws near and heâs still not out of the game, and the Left is banging on the walls, like, hey, that âjokeâ youâre giving free press to is saying some pretty scary stuff, and the Right is like, âLook, donât waste your breath. Weâve already accepted that we lost this one, weâre certainly not going to bat for this guy, heâs going to lose.â And then, at the last second, when they do go to bat for him, and he does win, and the Left is like, what the absolute heck my dudes? they go, âCanât do anything about it now, heâs the President.â
And when, four years later, you finally get his ass out of office, the Left turns to the Right and says, âOkay, now that heâs not President, are you gonna acknowledge all the stuff he did? You know, the stuff he said he was gonna do, and we warned you he was gonna do, and you said we were delusional for thinking he would do, that he did?â
And theyâre like, âOh my gawd, Heather, heâs not even President anymore! How are you still talking about this?â
I call this one The Slow Breakup. Itâs like when your partner starts canceling date night, and then starts getting home really late, and then starts sleeping on the couch, and you keep asking, âHey, is there something wrong?â And they just say, âOh, sweetie, of course not, work is just running me ragged lately and I when I have time off Iâm too tired to go out, and I get home so late these days I donât want to wake you up by coming to bed.â And then one day you get home and their bags are packed and theyâre like, âLook, we both saw this coming.â
(You know that thing. This- this happens to everybody, right?)
Itâs always not happening until itâs already happened. The moment is skipped over where they would acknowledge they misled you, take responsibility for whatâs happened, or, critically, where you could still do something about it.
Peel your eyes for this one, youâll see it a lot. This is how conservatives jumped straight from âclimate change isnât happeningâ to âclimate change isnât man-madeâ (and now some are trying to jump to âmaybe itâs a good thingâ). Rhetorically, all these arguments mean the same thing: âWe decided long ago what we were going to do. Nothing you say will change our course. This conversation is over.â
A new video essay has appeared. The second Protagony, this time looking at Abed Nadir and the weird way modern audiences treat the fourth wall.
If you like this video and would like to see more Protagony, Alt-Right Playbook, and what else have you in the future, consider backing me on Patreon!
Transcript below the cut:
The doors open. The line starts to move. The usher takes your ticket and points in the direction of your seat. Preshow music plays over the soundsystem as you side-shuffle past the knees of the folks in your row. You stick your bag and your jacket under the seat and sit down. You leaf through the playbill, futz around on your phone, until music starts to fade. The lights in the auditorium dim and the lights come up on the stage. The show is beginning.
This is one of those plays set in a single location: three walls on the stage represent the interior of a French bistro. French bistros typically have at least four walls, and thatâs where you come in: the lip of the stage - what theatre nerds call âthe prosceniumâ - is where the fourth wall would be, and itâs your job to pretend itâs there. Or - let me rephrase that: itâs your job to ignore that itâs not. That is the bargain you make when the lights go down.
To the characters onstage, everything inside those walls is real, and nothing on the other side of that fourth wall exists. The ambient noise, the guy two rows down and four seats over whoâs clearly playing Words with Friends, even you yourself, you are - and this is a nerd word again - ânon-diegetic.â Youâre here, but you exist outside the story.
That is, untilâŠ
[Picasso at the Lapin Agile]
EINSTEIN: My name is Albert Einstein
FREDDIE: You canât be, you just canât be!
EINSTEIN: Sorry, Iâm not myself today. (fluffs up his hair so he looks like Einstein.) Better?
FREDDIE: No no, thatâs - (pause for laughter.) No no, thatâs not what I mean. In order of appearance.
EINSTEIN: Come again?
FREDDIE: In order of appearance. Youâre not third. (aside, to audience member) Excuse me, maâam, can I borrow your program? (to Einstein) Youâre fourth. It says so right here: Cast in order of appearance. I knew you were fourth. I knew it when you walked in.
[/Picasso at the Lapin Agile]
This is what we call âbreaking the fourth wall,â and Steve Martinâs Picasso at the Lapin Agile is a great show for demonstrating it because the character Freddy literally reaches his hand through the wall and into the audience. Like many fourth wall breaks, this is played for laughs, because itâs a kind of narrative transgression; youâre not supposed to do that. When the diegetic intrudes upon the non-, the audience is reminded of all the things they were ignoring: that this is not a French bistro in 1904, but a bunch of plywood flats and actors in pancake makeup and period dress. The disbelief that was suspended is brought back to school, as it were.
But what I want to highlight is how durable the fourth wall is. For starters, in order for this joke to work, the audience has to be already suspending its disbelief; the boundary must be drawn before it can be broken. And, shortly after this gag, Einstein exits, Germaine enters [âSorry Iâm lateâ], Freddy makes a little wink to the audience [âYouâre not late, youâre fourthâ], and the scene continues as if nothing had happened. The audience wraps itself back up in the story, and the fourth wall is rebuilt, so that, when itâs broken later in the show [âWhen will you be there?â âWhen the play is over.â] itâs funny again! If the wall had stayed down, that joke wouldnât work.
Why do we build the wall? So we can have a wall to break.
Often enough, these acknowledgements - in theatre but also film, novels, video games - any time a narrative reminds you of its own artifice, it is contained such that it does not disrupt the narrative too much. It operates like the soliloquies in Shakespeare or the songs in musicals. When Deadpool speaks to the audience, everyone around him goes deaf.
But what I got curious about, when I first read Francesco Casettiâs Inside the Gaze - or rather I read the glossary because itâs very dense Italian film theory and I was nineteen - was, what if you didnât make that bargain when the lights went down? What if breaking the fourth wall wasnât a disruption of the narrative, because the story is built such that the artifice is part of the narrative? Can you break the fourth wall⊠diegetically?
Now, that was a punchy idea as a teenager. As a man in his late thirties, I am aware this idea has been approached many times in many ways throughout the history of storytelling [Brecht: âAm I a joke to you?â]. Weâre currently living in a golden age of metanarrative where most major properties have folded the audienceâs relationship to that property into the text. But I wanna talk about my favorite example: Abed Nadir.
Now, my feelings about the show Community are⊠mixed, but I love me some Abed. [âpretty adorableâ] Abed is a pop culture-damaged perpetual college student raised by his television, who loves TV to the point where itâs his primary metaphor for looking at the world. In other words, heâs an American millennial. His tendency to filter his life through sitcom tropes is lent a certain pointedness by being a character on a tropey sitcom. Por exemplo, when Annie asks him for help [âPhoebe and Chandlerâ clip], or when the new school year coincides with the conclusion of the previous seasonâs arcs [âself-contained capersâ clip], or when it looks like heâs going to spend the day locked in study hall [âstarting to feel like a bottle episodeâ clip]. In these moments, Abed Nadir is not breaking the fourth wall. He may not fully understand that real life doesnât have bottle episodes, but this is real life to him. Heâs not seeing the cameras pointing at him, heâs not disrupting the narrative by winking at a sitcom audience.
But there is a sitcom audience - we are the sitcom audience - and the writers did just use Abed to wink at us. âCooperative Calligraphyâ is a bottle episode. Abed is speaking diegetically to his friends, who read his comments as the pop culture references they are, but they double as things a person who was breaking the fourth wall might say. [âThis is totally metaâ clip] The rules of narrative are not transgressed, and, yet, we are, all the same, constantly reminded that weâre watching a work of fiction.
This kind of interreference, in which a sitcom points constantly at itself, at other sitcoms, and at âThe Sitcomâ as a medium, can come across kind of masturbatory. David Foster Wallace argued that the pop culture reference in mass media serves three functions: â(1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so âcommentâ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.â I would say (2) is far less prevalent now than when he was writing.
The reality is this: how you gonna write a twentysomething millennial in 2009 who doesnât talk a lot about whatâs on television? This is a conundrum many writers face. There is still the High culture urge to make art that is timeless, that avoids what Foster Wallace referred to as âthe frivolous Now,â and the Low culture necessity of not looking dated eight months after you air. This can be approached many ways: you can avoid reference and just take the verisimilitudinous hit; you can create fictional, in-universe pop culture for your characters to reference; you can reference pop culture that is old enough to be considered timeless, functionally setting your story in a different âfrivolous Now,â e.g. the way Sex Education and Life is Strange are both canonically set in the present but are aesthetically set in the late seventies and early nineties, respectively; or you can embrace chaos and just reference contemporary culture.
But, once youâre a show on TV with characters referencing other shows currently airing on TV, things might get a little meta, especially shows that lean into it the way Community does. So what does this do to the fourth wall? That supposedly sanctified construct, the violation of which is most often either a failure or an act of deliberate anarchy? How are we to suspend disbelief for stories that donât even pretend not to be fake, and whose primary pleasure is in acknowledging the fakery?
Abed is, to me, a distillation of the modern audienceâs more intricate relationship to the fourth wall. Art imitates life, and when much of life is spent discussing popular art, popular art begins to discuss itself. And art that discusses itself requires a more liminal relationship to the fourth wall. These days we donât choose to either see it or ignore it, but pay both kinds of attention at once, letting the fourth wall, as needed, fade in and out of visibility, like glass when it catches the light, or seeing your face in the monitor when it fades to black. This was maybe inevitable in a media-saturated environment where the lines between audience, participant, and creator continue to blur, where we watch even straightforward media with an eye towards how itâs made, because we imagine making something like it ourselves one day, or because any viewing experience is potential #content. In a world where it is rarer and rarer to experience art in a darkened theatre that shuts out the world, but where itâs watched on phones during bus rides, in the background while cooking, in an open tab while writing emails. We keep fiction and reality running in tandem, shifting between them with little more than a saccade. The real world isnât forgotten but edged out of the foreground during a cigarette break.
What tickles me is that Brecht violated suspension of disbelief to create distance between the fiction and its audience. But postmodern reflexivity just makes Abed relatable. He watches TV the same way we watch Community. You can imagine him watching his own show and responding much the way I am now: OK, so you want me to mentally construct a fourth wall that the performers will pretend is there, but the writers will constantly - and entertainingly - bring to my attention its nonexistence, such that I need to suspend my disbelief while thinking about the fact that I am suspending it, which should be mutually-exclusive modes of thought, but, to even understand what Iâm watching, Iâll need to do both at once?
To Filth: Thoughts on Life is Strange: True Colors
[spoilers ahead]
1.
I will state my biases before the court:
Maybe you have a person who is, for whatever reason, not in your life anymore, and you have missed them every day since you said goodbye. Their absence is a scar, a bit of ostensibly healed flesh that nevertheless acts up when the weather changes. That person whom you can think about, after several years of effort, for up to thirty entire seconds before crying.
I don't know how universal this experience is. But I have that person, and True Colors' protagonist Alex Chen reminds me of her so much. The hair, the fashion sense, the taste in music, the unexpectedly good singing voice, her friends' exclamation of "oh my god, you own a skirt???" Even the central hook of taking on everyone else's feelings. It's uncanny.
And I adore her. I would do almost anything for Alex Chen. And random moments were so authentic to my own, hyper-specific experience that I was devastated in ways pretty much no one but me will experience that way. The other 99.9999% of players may be devastated by the same moments in similar ways - a lot of us have That Person and, mathematically, at least a few will be like Alex Chen (in fact I think Alex Chen is the kind of character destined to be That Person for a lot of people) - but they won't drag up my memories. They won't think of that one day, that one moment, that one song. No one has lived my life but me.
So this game hit in ways particular to Ian Danskin, and it will hit different for people who are not me.
2.
So here we are again. I made a whole video about Life is Strange. I did a write-up on Life is Strange: Before the Storm. I devoted 1/3 of another write up to Life is Strange 2. (Are those diminishing returns? Maybe.) I guess I'm a lifer for this series, even as my thoughts on every single one have been different phrasings of "mixed."
Life is Strange: True Colors isn't getting a video, but it deserves a full write-up.
In absolute terms, this is probably the series' best entry since the first. It also, I think, marks the point where the series stops growing. This is the FarCry 3 of Life is Strange. Dontnod created the IP but it's owned by Square Enix, and they've handed it off to Deck Nine. Dontnod are a weird bunch, driven to do weird things, tackle weird subjects, mess with weird mechanics. They have heads bursting with ideas; their reach is very long, and their grasp very finicky; they are a claw machine.
That's not Deck Nine. Deck Nine played things very safe when they made Before the Storm, their previous entry in the LiS series, made while Dontnod was working on the (ambitious, disastrous) LiS2. And they gonna take it from here. Dontnod will be off doing weirdo shit like Twin Mirror and Tell Me Why and Squeenix will leave Deck Nine to make LiS the sweet, offbeat series the first game was about 40% of the time and will try to wrangle the other stuff it was into something... manageable. Peripheral. Repeatable.
It's good, but it's also the end of something.
3.
Thing is, Deck Nine does what it does well. Per Goethe's three questions, I am ambivalent as to whether Deck Nine should be turning Life is Strange into something cozy and safe, but damn if they don't sell it!
True Colors is about another young person with superpowers, using them to explore human drama (and the occasional criminal conspiracy) in a sleepy noplace with a one-block Main Street and about 12 residents who've known each other since forever. (Haven Springs is very much a pretty how town with up so floating many bells down.) Another bisexual love triangle, another set of tragedies, another pack of hallucinatory images safely cordoned off from the narrative in dreams and visions.
But Deck Nine can write. Deck Nine can animate. Deck Nine is more about tugging heartstrings than punching feels, but they are expert stringpullers. The first chapter (this is a single game in five chapters rather than Dontnod's episodic structure) is more or less perfect. The depth/nuance/subtlety on Alex's face, the amount of emotion she conveys with a nervous, sideways glance (you can tell she's breaking eye contact even when the person she's talking to is unseen). How do they pull off "conveying emotion while trying to hide it" solely in facial animations when they clearly don't have Last of Us money?? How do you capture "trying to disappear into the background" and make it look easy? Because, friends, I know it's not easy. And the dialogue is miles beyond what Dontnod can pull off, not even when they brought in ringers for LiS2. These are nuanced, believable, human characters who come into focus with only a few lines and expressions.
If you're going to make Life is Strange be about this and only this, the quiet, the human, the slice-of-life shit, it helps to be really good at that.
But there are reasons True Colors had so much good will when it was new but seemed to fade quickly from everyone's memory. Cozy and safe doesn't leave an impression the way a Dontnod dumpster fire does.
4.
Here's the hook: Alex can feel people's emotions. They cast auras that she can tune into. For most strong feelings, she can hear the associated thoughts; for particularly intense ones, she feels them to the point of losing control.
Alex's deal is she and her brother, Gabe, lost their mom as children and, after a few years, their dad bailed and they ended up in the foster system. She and Gabe were separated when he stole a car and got sent to juvie. You can imagine a young girl with no family and a lot of trauma surrounded by a bunch of other youths dealing with similar and who literally feels all of their feelings as well would have a rough time at the orphanage. She is afraid when other people are afraid, gets in fights when other people are angry, and has a long history of scaring away friends and foster parents. As the game begins, she is finally a legal adult, about to reunite with her long-lost brother who settled in a small burg in Colorado.
The way Max's time travel powers in LiS1 could function as a metaphor for youthful indecision, Alex's work as a metaphor for empathy. This leads to a lot of beautiful moments; like, shockingly beautiful. Genuinely incredible. But between those moments are choppy waters.
5.
Basically, a metaphor - especially an interactive metaphor - should illuminate something. It makes the abstract literal - emotions, ideas, what have you. Like, part of Max's story was about how every choice has consequences, that there isn't always a "right" decision, a "good" ending, that it's all trade-offs and decisions. Becoming who you want to be is giving up all the people you could have been. Making that tangible with time travel is a great way to explore the idea! It helps us get into guts of it, gives us something to hold onto, to visualize. It works.
Alex's powers don't work as a metaphor for empathy. They're too simple, too literal. Alex is carrying a lot of baggage, her emotions are erratic. She's understandably anxious and focuses a lot on how people around her are feeling. As a child she took it on herself to make peace between her ever-fighting father and brother, stuffing her own feelings down for their benefit. She gets in fights when other people are angry at her, or even around her. She panics when other people are afraid. She needs everyone around her to be stable before she can be stable herself. And now, as an adult, it means becoming a caretaker for everyone around her, even her elders, diving into everyone else's fear and anxiety and trauma, trying to help them instead of asking them for help with her own shit.
I didn't need a metaphor to explain any of that. Those are perfectly understandable themes. In fact, Deck Nine's precise set of skills are ideal for exploring them. Much of the game is them doing precisely that - conveying these themes with nothing but good writing and careful animation.
And, worse than not adding much, the superpowers are actually where the game feels... over-simple. Mechanical. Gamey.
6.
The big upheaval at the end of Chapter 1 is that Gabe dies. His long-term girlfriend's son, Ethan, runs off to the mountains alone, Alex and Gabe and Gabe's best friend Ryan go looking for him, but the mining company is blasting that night and this causes a rock slide. Alex is tied to Gabe with mountain-climbing gear, but he gets knocked off the cliff and starts to drag Alex with him, so Ryan, to save Alex, has to cut the rope, letting Gabe fall to his death.
As I said, this chapter is more or less perfect. The set of puzzles you solve to figure out where Ethan has gone (reading his homemade comic book and realizing it's based on his adventures at the abandoned mine) really work. Alex has to save the kid despite having to fight through his fear as well as her own. It's really good! And that final beat - Ryan cutting the rope - sets up a lot of possibility for the rest of the game.
I mean, imagine it! A girl just out of the foster system, reunited with her brother, coming to a tiny town that immediately promises to stitch her into the community as they've already done with Gabe. A home and a life and a new set of friends, all the things she's been missing. And now that brother is dead. Imagine her having to deal with her own grief and everybody else's. Imagine the question of whether Ryan was wrong to cut that rope, whether Alex could have pulled Gabe up instead of going over, whether Ryan had any right to make that decision for her. Just think!
So many of these possibilities are weakened by the central metaphor. Alex starts tapping into people's feelings without getting overpowered by them (the thread where anger and terror make her lose control is swiftly dropped) in order to fix people's grief. We get little puzzles where we dig around in their memories of Gabe so she can find just the right things to say. Sometimes we get visualizations of their pain: Ryan's surroundings fall away until there's nothing but him and the cliff where Gabe died; Gabe's girlfriend Charlotte's abstract sculpture turns into a manifestation of the people she's angry with. And these all turn into little adventure game puzzles where you find all the memories and say the right thing, and... poof! Grief resolved!
There's just so much about the subject matter that can't fit into that Psychonauts loop. How on Earth am I doing little puzzles to relieve Ryan of his grief over killing my brother?? How is he not dealing with my grief? Where even is my grief? At the end of Ryan's puzzle chain, I'm given three dialogue options regarding who should forgive Ryan: does Alex forgive him, would Gabe forgive him, or does he need to forgive himself? What it doesn't give me is the option of Ryan not getting forgiven. Not because he doesn't deserve forgiveness, not because he should've risked us both dying, but because it's too soon. I believe Alex can forgive Ryan someday; I can even believe she'll need to for her own healing. I don't believe she can forgive him the day after it happened, nor that he could forgive himself so quickly. But it's a sequel to Life is Strange, so we've gotta have a bisexual love triangle, and Ryan's the only eligible bachelor in Haven Springs, so we've gotta get that pesky "grief over letting your brother die" thing squared away with a single dialogue puzzle.
(Which, by the way? Not a fucking chance. I got together with the cool lesbian - you think Alex Chen is straight? Do you see her side-cut? (Though, unlike Warren in LiS1, I could at least see the appeal of Ryan - he's sweet and lumbersexual. It's just that he killed my brother.))
This is the issue. The very first thing Alex does after Gabe's wake is solve a little puzzle to make Steph (the cool lesbian) feel better about her friend dying. Then she helps the old lady in the early stages of dementia deal with her fear and confusion. And on and on.
And the game lends itself to the interpretation that Alex is dealing with everyone else's feelings rather than addressing her own, and that this is her character flaw, the thing she'll need to overcome. But it doesn't actually go there. Because, like, that's the core mechanic! You help people with their problems. The game is gonna keep making you do it, so it can't come out and say "this is actually deeply unhealthy for Alex." (I mean, Dontnod would've done it. They spent the second half of LiS1 saying that about Max, but those are the very parts Squeenix hired Deck Nine to sand off.) So many interactions resolve with Alex "forgiving" people at the time in her grief where forgiving others would be most painful, and, based on the framing (and the "other player stats" at the end of each chapter), I can't shake that this is, canonically, the "right" way to play.
7.
Let's talk about what works.
Beyond that immaculate first chapter, there's an extended bit in Chapter 3 that is pure delight. To cheer Ethan up, Steph plans a an elaborate LARP set in the universe of Ethan's own homemade comic, with Alex playing his companion (in my game she was a bard). The whole town gets in on it - the local bar is converted to a tavern managed by the local high-functioning alcoholic, the record shop sells "potions," a townsperson whose cat went missing in Chapter 1 is pretending to be a blacksmith and when you read his mind he's really into it. Also Ryan shows up three times in three different masks as monsters to be felled. And when you enter battle? The camera moves to the side and, since it's a LARP and you have to yell out what move you're doing, you of course pick your moves from a dialogue tree, but that means, functionally, the game becomes a turn-based RPG. It's wonderful.
Oh but it gets better. Ethan has been having a hard time since Gabe died, and this is the first he's really perked up. And at the end when he finds his magical boon, he's so happy that Alex starts picking up on his joy. And it does that thing where she gets visions of what the other person is experiencing, so the whole town turns into an actual fantasy realm and you fight the final boss in realistic garb with realistic ruins and the same sideways camera but now selecting moves from the dialogue tree has the Final Fantasy "bwip bwip" sound effect and the moves have particle and lighting effects instead of just a boy swinging a cardboard sword and yelling "two damage!" It's beautiful. It's everything.
And in Chapter 5 there's an extended tour through Alex's memories, where she has to "play her part" in the moments when she lost each member of her family, and it's absolutely heartbreaking. (Though it ends with her imagined Gabe telling her to stop blaming herself and "let it go," which, once again, is treated as an event rather than the beginning of a years-long process but whatever!)
And the climax is Alex confronting the man responsible for covering up Gabe's death. (Oh, uh... Gabe's death wasn't an accident, the mining company set off the blast knowing people were on the mountain, and there's been an elaborate cover-up because it's not Life is Strange without a small-town criminal conspiracy! Anyway, Ryan's dad was in on it and he shoots you and drops you down a mine shaft at the end of Chapter 4.)
Anyway, you confront Ryan's dad (Jed) at the end, and it's another of those scenes where the game reviews all your choices for you, this time by seeing who in town believes your story. The nonbelievers think Alex is delusional and only looks like hell because she wandered into the mines alone. (Weirdly she never says "I have a bullet matching Jed's gun in my gut right now." (And this would be a really easy plot hole to fix? Just have Jed kick Alex down the mine shaft instead of shooting her. C'mon people!)) And, whatever, that's always hokey, but I've come to expect it from these kinds of games.
But then her powers come into the confrontation and it's... glorious. Because it's the first time Alex uses her powers to do something other than make someone's bad feelings go away. She uses her power of empathy to read Jed to filth.
And it works so freaking well. She, I dunno, freezes time or something (don't ask questions) and basically searches his soul and tells him everything that's going on inside him. Tells him why he covered up the truth, what lies he tells himself, what feelings are under those lies. She uses her empathy but not to absolve, not to heal, but to confront. She uses it to inform her own emotions, and then make someone else see how she's feeling. She is able to feel complete and total empathy while still tell him he is wrong. And, if you are inclined to read her character arc as being about learning not to caretake everyone around her, it's a real culminating moment (though you'd be doing most of the legwork there). I still think the game wants me to forgive him but it at least gives me a choice this time.
Confronted with the brutally honest truth about him, forced to feel all the things he's buried, he bursts into tears and confesses.
This scene is powerful.
8.
In the end, True Colors is a bunch of good parts. It's not more than the sum of its parts. I'm not convinced it's less, either. I don't think it's parts sum at all. It's a collection of good bits and some stuff holding them together. It doesn't feel complete. It doesn't cohere. There is so much it should be that is left on the table. I am left wanting. But it has parts that are among the best moments in the series. And that's what I'll be remembering. I won't remember this as a whole game. I'll remember it as a character I cared about, and a handful of scenes that meant the world to me. And the rest, I'll just... forget.
It could have been so much more. But it could have been so much less. I don't have much hope for the series' future. But. We had some moments. I'll hold onto them.
Theme
The person who is returning to Monkey Island here is, most obviously, Ron Gilbert. He got him brand back. Go Ron! And, look, I was skeptical. I mean, I was, above all, cautiously optimistic! But I was keeping my skeptic hat on the coat rack next to my hoodie, you know? I said the philosophy of The Secret of Monkey Island is "cheerful nihilism," and I stand by that. But Ron Gilbert's nihilism is not always cheerful. Or, actually, I think he's usually having a good time, but it often feels at my expense. How badly did I want him to take me back to the first series I ever loved?
I am on record as having never liked the ending of Monkey Island 2, which is the last Monkey Island game Ron directed (though he apparently had some peripheral involvement in Tales of Monkey Island). I am also on record as having haaaaaaaaaated the ending of his last adventure game, Thimbleweed Park. Ron likes a cop-out ending. Frankly you should know that by now - don't play Return to Monkey Island if you aren't prepared for a cop-out ending. It's what Ron does. And sometimes... sometimes it's a deliberate rug-pull. Sometimes he's laughing at you for expecting the ending to be good.
The Secret of Monkey Island's ending was a bit of a piss-take. It was short, it was abrupt, it rendered the entire plot up to that point irrelevant. Its instant replays and Blimp-cams and snarky final lines made it a parody of a video game ending. But, parody or no, it was an ending! It was a climax. You returned to the starting point, blew up the villain, and reunited with the love interest. Even in air quotes, it was the way you expect stories to end.
Monkey Island 2 intentionally denied you that ending. Refused closure. Told you all the events you just witness, and the events of the previous game, may never have happened. I originally played the game on its "easier puzzles" mode, and, when I got to the end, thought there must be a proper ending if you play normally, but nope. Spent a solid year stuck on Part II, refusing to get a hint book, before finally getting back to the ending, and thbthbthbthbthb. Fuck me for caring I guess.
The joke of The Secret of Monkey Island is Monkey Island having a secret is brought up in Part I, so you expect it to be relevant, given the game's title and all, and then, once the plot kicks into gear, you get focused on Elaine's kidnapping and the rescue mission and confronting LeChuck, and it's not til sometime after you finish that you think, "Wait... they never told us the secret." I don't think it's even mentioned after Part I.
Monkey Island 2 never lets you forget its macguffin. You are searching for the treasure of Big Whoop. No one knows what it is, but it's what you're after. There is no distraction, no romantic subplot that takes over your attention. Hell, the game makes it clear that Guybrush's obsession with being the kind of famous pirate who would look for Big Whoop has ruined his relationship and annoys his friends. The game hinges on Big Whoop. But, once again, you never find out what it is, and it's not an "oh that's funny" moment that hits you an hour after you play; it is, as Cobain would say, a denial.
And then Gilbert left LucasArts, the series was continued by other developers, and whatever resolution he had in mind for the MI2's putative "cliffhanger" ending was left to our imaginations for thirty years. Until now.
So the question is not whether, in Return to Monkey Island, you will finally find the secret. You oughtta know you're not finding that secret. The question is: which kind of cop-out will Ron give you?
And what Ron has done is kind of amazing: he has found a cop-out ending that is, for the first time in the series, emotional. He has made the denial of closure resonant. He has gone meta that quiet, knowing way that most Neil Gaiman stories are meta: yes, this is a fun story about pirates, but it's also a story about stories about pirates. This is Guybrush, the guy who couldn't shut up about the greatness of his adventures in Monkey Island 2, telling his son a story. He's not telling it because the ending is exciting, because the Secret of Monkey Island is so mind-blowing once revealed. He's telling it to relate to his son.
The ending is a big nothing. It's a joke. Elaine walks up when it's over and says "you tell that story differently every time." When your son presses you to tell him what the secret is, the game gives you six dialogue options with different answers. It doesn't matter what the secret is. And, unlike when a young Guybrush found the empty chest of Big Whoop, this time he knows it. He has a family and a storied life. That's the treasure a lifetime on the seas brought him.
Some people hate this ending. But, maybe for the first time, I'm on Ron's side of a polarizing ending. Monkey Island has always made me laugh; even the mixed bags that are Escape and Tales find chuckles somewhere. And the developers who are not Ron Gilbert have attempted pathos before; Tales went so far as to let Guybrush die - like, not fake his death like in Curse but legit die - but the results were mixed. This is the first time Monkey Island has given me feelings. Ron Gilbert, the man who told stories deep-fried in irony, who gave me the finger for expecting them to resolve, finally, all these years later, gave me feelings. Maybe he could only do it after thirty years, once a sarcastic parody of a pirate game starts to feel nostalgic simply because it's been in your life so long. But he did it.
And just when you think the game is wrapping up... it turns into Monkey Island 2.
Suddenly you have a ship and a map of the surrounding seas and a whole bunch of new islands to check out. It's that enormous sprawl from Part II of LeChuck's Revenge.
It's a bit cheeky to get to what feels like the end and think, "huh, I guess this game is a tight 7 hours," and then run aground on the game's surprise second half.
The player's (presumed) familiarity with the series becomes a playground for the designers. You expect insult swordfighting, so you laugh when LeChuck gives you two comebacks in a row and then just punches you. (It's also cute that Guybrush and Carla the Swordmaster can only converse while swordfighting.) You already know the potion that takes you to Monkey Island requires a pressed human skull, so of course this time it's Murray; "pressed" is his default emotion! You expect Guybrush to fall off the side of the plateau and get bounced back up by a rubber tree, so you laugh when Guybrush keeps jumping up and down on the bit that broke before only to have it stay solid, and then later when he gets kicked off you think "ahahahaaa, he's going to land on the rubber tree!" only to find him twisted and mangled having landed on... a rubber tree stump.
LeChuck's Revenge was such a departure from the first game that you can see, in Curse, how the new developers wanted to course correct. This is a trend, I've found: an IP comes out that is widely beloved; the first sequel is the same team doing something weirder and more ambitious, and is met with divided response; then the series it taken over by fans of the original who, instead of being weird and ambitious, ignore the first sequel's innovations and turn the original entry into a formula. I guess what I'm saying is, much as I enjoy it, Curse of Monkey Island is the Jurassic Park III of the series. (See also: Myst.)
First island: map, ship, crew. Then a stretch on a boat. Then a new Island. Then a (usually short and lackluster) confrontation with LeChuck. There will be some variant of insult swordfighting. You will have to decipher an obtuse map. Everything that made the first game unique will be repeated. This is true of Curse, and much of it holds for Escape and Tales.
Return knows this formula has been established, knows you have expectations. And anywhere the player has expectations, they can be confounded.
Who Guybrush is is more relational than in games past. His marriage to Elaine (properly written as the most competent person in the room, finally) seems like it could be in danger, as she becomes steadily more aware of how amorally Guybrush is acting in pursuit of The Secret. LeChuck is framed for the first time as a foil for Guybrush, as the two start to resemble each other the more obsessed each becomes with beating the other to the prize. (One character says of their enmity, "you deserve each other.")
These are, of course, both handwaved in the end. Elaine confronts Guybrush with his misdeeds, but just asks whether The Secret can possibly be worth all the questionable things he's done. (She's not fussed that her husband is amoral, she married a friggin' pirate.) The LeChuck confrontation is a big nothing because, right when you're about to confront him, the cop-out rug-pull happens. Guybrush not telling his son what The Secret is shows that he clearly learned the right lesson and did not turn into LeChuck. The game simply elides the inevitable confrontation-and-epiphany moment; why does the game need to show it to you if you already know it's coming?
And it's just nice to see Elaine and Guybrush... be together. They get together at the end of the first game and are broken up in the second, and she spends the next three getting damseled over and over. Serialized stories are always bringing romantic pairings together and splitting them up, because reuniting is easier than the drama of maintaining a relationship. (I mean, how many times have Nathan Drake and Elena broken up between games?) The moments where you get a sense of Guybrush and Elaine's relationship, how little time they get to spend together because he's a pirate and she's a professional do-gooder, how he adores her like a goddess and she adores him like a puppy.
Beats the hell out of Tales' ill-advised love triangle with a "human-again" LeChuck.
On another note, it is interesting that, for all the effort the game makes to not contradict the canon of the non-Gilbert games, it doesn't mine them for content, either. Murray is the only character from Curse onward to make an appearance. Morgan LeFlay got a passing mention in mine. But there's no Cap'n Blondebeard, no Edward Van Helgen or Cutthroat Bill, no Ozzie Mandrill, no Pegnose Pete. Meanwhile, seemingly everyone from Monkey Island 1 & 2 show up. There are the obvious ones - The Voodoo Lady (finally given a name), Wally, Stan. But there's also Otis and Carla, and the Scumm Bar cook, and Herman Toothrot is in a cave, Kate Capsize gets a mention, I'm pretty sure "Apple Bob" is the skeleton who pops his head off in the first game (now voice by Rob Paulsen, great choice), Cobb is still in the bar with his Ask Me About LOOM button ("I'm more button than man")... come to think of it, I think even the LOOM seagull who stole your map piece in MI2 gets a cameo. Narrative economy, I guess - if you find skeletons on Terror Island, they might as well be the Men of Low Moral Fiber, right?
While it would be interesting to see Ron and Dave Grossman's take on some of those characters, many of whom have, I would say, unrealized potential - they do a bang-up job with Murray - it's clear this is about wrapping up the story they started back in 1990. It may be improbable that half the people you meet are people you already know, but... it's good to see them all the same.
hey, i don't know if you're the person to ask, but i was recently rewatching your CO-VIDS series and was wondering: how do you come up with ideas to write about? I've wanted to do more writing in a non-educational/academic context(re: not something a professor assigned me) for a while but I have a really hard time coming up with ideas for what to write about, topic wise. any advice?
(ps: your content is, without exaggeration, probably my favorite thing on youtube, thank you so much for making the super cool shit you do)
Things I think about.
Sometimes a video is just a place to put thoughts. I played Life is Strange and couldn't stop thinking about how the second half was in a completely different genre from the first half and how that seemed intentional. I played The Walking Dead: Season 2 and was really bothered that hardly anyone was talking about the abuse dynamics in Clem's relationship to Kenny. I noticed that Dr. Horrible mapped the superhero/supervillain archetypes onto the bully/nerd archetypes as a means of inverting your sympathies, and I was bothered that Penny's role as The Love Interest is kinda flat and disposable in both those stories. Basically, I just go through my Box of Opinions and share anything I think might make a good video. Things I love, things I'm conflicted about, things I find myself thinking about a lot - that's all juice for an essay.
Things I want to think more about.
Sometimes a video is an excuse to research something. I knew I wanted to make a video about Fury Road, but I also wanted an excuse to watch like 40 action movies and read a bunch of essays about action movies and read a bunch of feminist film theory. Sometimes you can't justify obsessing over something you like unless you can convince yourself it's a form of productivity. So long as there's a video at the end of it, you're technically "working."
Things that matter.
A lot the more political work is just trying to understand things that feel important, and/or things I feel morally obliged to comment on. I made Why Are You So Angry? because #GamerGate and the harassment of Anita Sarkeesian disgusted me, and I wanted to say something of value about them. I started The Alt-Right Playbook because Trump got elected, and I didn't understand how that had happened. In both cases, there were things pressing on my mind that I needed to wrap my head around, to write my way out of, and to say something of value about. I wanted to figure them out, and share what I figured out with other.
Those are the main driving forces for me. Odds are you don't have to "come up" with anything, you already have lots of thoughts and opinions. Just write some down and go from there.
The first new Alt-Right Playbook since just after the pandemic began. This video was started two and a half years ago, and languished in various states of production through a severe back injury, an ADHD diagnosis, a case of COVID, and the general stress of living in ongoing crises of health and democracy. With the help of guest artist Micael Schuenker Alves and script consultant Isabelle Felix, The Cost of Doing Business is now, finally, public.
My Patreon has taken a hit in the last few years, so, if like this work and can spare some money to keep it coming, please back me on Patreon.
Transcript below the cut.
Say, for the sake of argument, thereâs this⊠call him a âprovocateur.â A conservative who makes his living off of being a public figure, saying scandalously evil things in public because controversy = attention and attention = brand recognition. He gets his writing gigs and interviews and guest spots sometimes because people agree with the awful things he says. More often, itâs because he gets views. His economy runs on engagement, and hate-clicks are still clicks.
One revenue stream is speaking engagements. The college campus circuit. Fans at, letâs say, UC Emeryville invite him as a guest lecturer. But UCE is, broadly, a progressive campus, which means his presence would likely provoke a lot of outrage, maybe even a protest.
And a protest would be pretty flippinâ sweet.
Protest means local news coverage. Maybe more than local. Hell, the conservative media machine loves taking stories like this and blowing them up to national importance. If he plays his cards right, he could get his words in front of millions of people instead of just the student body of UC Emeryville. Of course heâs gonna take that gig.
But the progressive students at UCE are wise to his tricks. Theyâve seen him pull this stunt at other UCâs - Stockton, Bakersfield, Vacaville - so they make the decision, âWeâre not gonna protest. Weâre just gonna let him speak. Let the boy stamp his feet. And, in a month, no one will even remember he was here.â
As the date approaches, and the provocateur sees heâs not getting the response he wants, he starts hinting things on social media, trying to bait a reaction: âPsst, psst. Hey. Iâm gonna make jokes about the Holocaust. Iâm gonna say Americans treated their slaves well.â Nothing. So he ups the ante. Makes it personal. âIâm gonna put up pre-transition photos of your trans students. Iâm gonna out the queer students Iâve seen on Grindr. Iâm gonna name which of your students I think are illegal immigrants.â
Student bodyâs like, âBro, do your worst. Nobodyâs falling for it.â Until one studentâs like, âHold up⊠heâs gonna dox immigrants in front of his audience of white nationalist gun nuts⊠and weâre just gonna let him? You know some of his fans were in Charlottesville, right?â
What weâre seeing here is a game of chicken between one group of white conservative reactionaries and one group of - letâs be honest - mostly white liberals, for whom the stakes are who gets paid attention to. The provocateur doesnât have the ammunition nor the optics to attack privileged liberals directly, so he pokes and prods at various social minorities whom privileged liberals are supposed to care about until he gets a reaction. Going after people of color is a pure Xanatos gambit for his fans - either they get a protest and a national audience hears their reactionary rhetoric, or thereâs no protest and they get to fuck with some immigrants. And, because white liberals are largely ignorant to the threat posed to those immigrants, white liberals are not great at assessing the full scope of the danger. Often enough, this remains, to them, an argument about ideas and principles. To them, they are but words. (Until someone gets hit by a car or shot and then itâs âwho could have predicted?â)
The provocateurâs animating force is not hatred of people of color, itâs hatred of white liberals, just as white liberalsâ animating force is less advocacy for people of color than moral victory over conservatives. Neither side acknowledges people of color as entities in this fight; theyâre viewed as tools for getting white people what they want, and their suffering is viewed as an âacceptableâ byproduct. Youâve maybe heard the phrase, âIn the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team, they are the ball.â Well, in the game of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, minorities are not the opposing team, they are the cars, store windows, and newspaper kiosks that get wrecked when the home team loses. Or when the home team wins. Itâs the Eagles Fan view of oppression.
And, make no mistake: weaponizing or disregarding students of color is still racism. But itâs racism of a kind most white people have trouble recognizing - or, to speak with a sharper edge, that white people often refuse to acknowledge. From the white provocateur who does not hate minorities directly but is willing to utilize the hatred of others to get what he wants from some white people - who says âI will hurt them a lot just to hurt you a littleâ - to the white liberal who does mental gymnastics to not come out and say âthat is a Black and Brown sacrifice Iâm willing to make,â racism is not always a passion. But it is tolerable. Usable. Easy to disregard.
In a white supremacist world, it is the cost of doing business.
Let me make it clear: nothing about this is okay.
Now, the weaponizing of minority suffering is employed against many minoritized groups - I could be making this video about transphobia or homophobia, and, while many details would differ⊠I wouldn't even have to change my intro. Samuel R. Delany (yeah, yeah, take a shot) argues that misogyny is the oldest bigotry, and, therefore, the model on which all other bigotries are based. Iâm focusing on institutional racism as my chief example, first, because this is America and the cup runneth over; second, because, in the 2016 election, the greatest indicator a person was going to vote Republican, more strongly correlated than being registered as a Republican, was racist sentiments; and, third, because racism is a fundamental building block of fascism and a primary means of sowing discord on the Left, but weâll get to that.
I am going to curb my reflex to try and make every Alt-Right Playbook some kind of definitive statement; I do not have the last word on American racism. If you want to hear about American racism from the people who experience it, hereâs a book. Hereâs five books. What I bring to the table is: I have, at this point, several decadesâ experience being white. And, in trying to explicate white supremacy, it is sometimes worthwhile to look at it from the inside. So my focus will be: What does whiteness mean to white people?
American racial discourse has four principle (white) characters.
On the far right end, youâve got the guy white people picture when they hear the word âracistâ: your klansman, your neo-Nazi skinhead, your suit-and-tie ethnonationalist. This guy knows heâs a racist and heâs proud of it.
Next to the white supremacist, youâve got the white collaborator; the politician, public figure, or businessman who does not agree with the white supremacist âon paperâ but will seek out their votes, attention, or money.
Next to the collaborator, youâve got the white moderate: people who ostensibly believe in racial justice as an end goal, and are somewhat committed to bringing it about, but only with the cooperation of the white collaborator. It wouldnât be fair to do it without their consent, you see, and thus the white moderate spends a lot less time opposing collaborators than âappealing to their better natures.â They tend to operate on behalf of people of color rather than with them.
Plainly put, the âCost of Doing Businessâ maneuver is this group [collaborators] using this group [racists] to attack this group [moderates] using people of color as their weapon of choice. It is white supremacy in the form of three groups of white people fighting amongst themselves.
Finally, on the far opposite end, youâve got the honest-to-goodness anti-racist. Where the racist will support white supremacy, and the collaborator uphold white supremacy, and the moderate seek to reform white supremacy, only the anti-racist is trying to get rid of it. And even they are not free from racial bias! And, if you tell one of them âyou are not free from racial bias,â itâs not guaranteed they will react well! Itâs just, if youâre trying to fight white supremacy, theyâre the white folks you have the best odds with.
Now, this little chorus line is not how white people typically frame the situation. We usually think of racism as binary: there are racists, and there are non-racists. In that framing, the provocateur is someone whose allegiance we get to debate. He willingly sacrifices people of color without personally hating them; does that count as #racism? This âdebateâ lasts approximately the rest of your goddamn life, which should be evidence enough that the frame is wanting.
In todayâs framing, there are several shades of racism and there is anti-racism. There is no ânon-.â
Now, before we map the choreography of how these four types interact, first a quick note on how most white people think about whiteness. Short answer: whenever possible, they prefer not to.
Whiteness in America: is it vanilla? No, itâs fior di latte. Nothing but milk and sugar. Where non-whites are flavors, we are the base. In the same way one does not hear oneâs own accent; British people have accents, but we speak English "normal-like." If you havenât built your whole identity around being white, you probably donât think about your whiteness very often, and perhaps even feel uncomfortable when one points it out. For it is the white experience to passively, unconsciously conceive of oneself as a kind of raceless default.
This is privilege. Indeed, this is part of what makes privilege privilege: itâs the identity thatâs treated as a norm. The one you donât have to think about. A movie with an all-white cast is widely perceived as being no way about race. But thatâs not true of one with an all-Black cast.
Identities being treated as defaults makes institutional racism difficult to understand, even for well-meaning white people. âHow can I be racist if I donât identify as a racist? How could I be part of a group I never opted into?â It sounds like racism without racists. But let us reflect a moment: would âa group one never opted intoâ not describe a minority? People donât choose to be gay. And, while people also donât choose to be straight, being straight is ânormal.â People donât âcome outâ as straight, or have complex codes for signalling heterosexuality (that theyâll admit to, at least); in lieu of other evidence, straightness is presumed. But if people clock you as gay - or even think theyâve clocked you as gay - then you stand out from the background. It makes you more visible, where the appearance of straightness makes you less so. Makes you âthe everyman.â
Of the many identities one may have, at any given time on any given axis there is typically only one default, whose rules operate differently to the rest. The more of these ânormalâ identities one has, the more accustomed one is to being the default. The idea is foreign that people might group one not by how one thinks of oneself, but by how one is perceived and by how one impacts others. It gets hard to fathom that, any more than whether or not a light-skinned Mexican gets to be white is up to them, whether or not you fit the definition of racist isnât up to you. The boundaries are not policed from the inside.
So! Okay. Going again from right to left: this is where we find the titular Alt-Right. Whatâs novel about the suit-and-tie ethnonationalist is how they break from the iconography of racism. Their goal, like that of many racist people, is to attack and oppress people of color, but in such a way that the white establishment will let them get away with it. The average white personâs shorthand for a racist is still primarily the klansman and the neo-Nazi; respectively, a rural, working-class white nationalism and an urban, working class white nationalism. The Alt-Right is the gentrification of white nationalism. Their pocket squares and MBAs and $90 haircuts short out the white moderateâs brain because they still associate white supremacy with white trash. Racism is worse than evil, itâs common. Itâs why they insist reactionary conservatism is propped up by the white working class in flyover states despite all evidence to the contrary. The Alt-Right canât be as bad as everyone says, because who ever heard of a racist going to Harvard? (Harvard.)
The Alt-Right bridges the gap between white nationalism and the rest of white culture, using class signifiers to gain access to the political and social capital of the more mainstream collaborator and getting the moderate to treat them not as someone to be ignored but someone to bargain with in good faith.
The collaborator finds value in this relationship because, regardless of oneâs position on it, racism works. A police officer may not be personally racist, but, when itâs the end of the month and they need to hand out a few more tickets to make quota, itâs safest to do so in a low-income neighborhood where the average driver canât make their life hell by hiring a lawyer, and, due to decades of racist redlining, most low-income neighborhoods are disproportionately Black and Latine, sooo⊠And a prison warden may not be personally racist, but racist white people are approved by jury selection more often than people who think the justice system is racist, so Black and Latine people are the easiest to jail and private prisons get more funding when theyâre full, sooo⊠And a conservative politician may not be personally racist, but Black and Latine people predominantly vote Democrat, and, since theyâre disproportionately imprisoned, if the politician denies convicts the right to vote, they are more likely to get reelected, soooâŠ
Now, these people frequently are self-identified, card-carrying racists. My point is, for this system of incentives and rewards to operate, they donât have to be. Any of them may, but none of them must. Racism exists and itâs efficient. And, in a capitalist society, where cops are competing for promotions, private prisons are competing for contracts, and politicians are competing for votes, if an unethical behavior sees a higher return than the alternative⊠then ethics are a luxury. There are hundreds of examples of businesses that claim, in periods of prosperity, that they prefer to do what is right over what is profitable. But what tune do they play when prosperity ends? Every boom has a bust - since 1900, the US has spent one out of every four years in recession. And, in the lean season, not using this generations-old system built by white people to advantage their descendents is a liability. A values-based business typically goes one of three ways: compromising their values to stay competitive, getting bought by someone who compromised their values to stay competitive, or sticking to their guns and facing a higher risk of going out of business. Many choose to do the right thing, and some even survive. But thatâs beating the odds. The market trends toward the optimal strategy.
No one ever went broke appealing to the ignorance of white people.
The collaborator treating nonwhite suffering as the cost of doing business also works rhetorically. The average conservative citizen doesnât know anything about the Syrian Civil War, but they know the refugee crisis is something the Left seems to care about. So demonizing refugees is mutually beneficial for pundits and politicians who want to rally their base by spiting liberals and for white supremacists who want to mainstream racism against Arabs. The average conservative citizen doesnât understand epidemiology, but they donât want to blame their own party for letting a million die of COVID. So calling it âthe Chinese virusâ is mutually beneficial for pundits and politicians who want to deflect blame onto a foreign nation and for white supremacists who want to mainstream racism against Asians.
Yet, despite their blatancy in collaborating with white supremacists, and having eerily similar goals to white supremacists, the collaborator maintains that they are, themself, ânon-racist.â Their decades of opposing affirmative action, right to assembly, police reform, fair voting efforts, redistricting, funding for public schools, prisonerâs rights, religious tolerance, shutting down Guantanamo, accessibility for non-English speakers, immigration, investment in low-income neighborhoods, decolonizing school curricula, Indigenous Peopleâs Day, putting Harriet Tubman on the twenty, kneeling, ending the drug war, or withdrawing from the Middle East are framed as problems of implementation. âWe agree with the aim of closing the racial wealth gap, just not like this. We agree with the aim of Latin-Americans entering the country, just not like this. We agree with the aim of peaceful protest, just not like this.â
And, if we on the Left are to ask, how exactly are we supposed to get this without this, oh, coming up with that solution? Thatâs our job. And, if itâs not getting done? Itâs because we havenât come up with a solution they like yet. And probably what they donât like about our solutions is that we implied the problem was racism. âYes, white people are over-represented in dozens of industries nationwide, but have you considered that itâs a fluke? Pitch me a solution for it being a fluke.â The Collaboratorâs white supremacy exists in the negative space. They agree racism exists, they agree we should oppose it, but they disagree that any individual thing youâre talking about is an example of it. Getting a Republican to identify an actual incident of systemic racism is like trying to point at your shadow with a flashlight.
And itâs reasonable to ask, Jesus, how far can these guys push the envelope before the rest of the establishment calls them what they are? But, if youâre waiting for the moment a white moderate agrees mainstream conservatism has done something unacceptably and unequivocally racist, youâre underestimating how long white people can equivocate.
Thereâs a lot to say about the white moderate. And Iâm about to be that lefty who expends as many words complaining about liberals as he does fascists, but, look: as much as this series is about the tactics of the Far Right, it is at least as much about how the Center Left is susceptible to them⊠and complicit.
So, okay. When Democrats lose an election, what happens with the white, liberal, pundit class? Well, thereâs suddenly a lot of chatter about how to talk to your racist uncle over Thanksgiving, about how liberals in red states can contact their representatives, about the value of debate. âThis is our fault,â they say. âWe let this happen because we didnât have enough conversations with white conservatives.â You hear a lot more of that than talk about how the gutting of the Voting Rights Act cost a lot of the Left the right to vote, and what could be done to guarantee their representation in the next election. In fact, you hear more about how that kind of talk is alienating to the white conservatives who supported gutting the Voting Rights Act, about how reaching across the aisle is gonna mean easing off race talk, at least for now. POC representation is quickly reframed as a critical long-term goal, but, in the present moment, while we are competing for elected office, guaranteeing the minority vote is a luxury.
Whatâs prioritized is that the people who suppressed the Black vote in order to win elections not be made to feel that they are racist.
Because, I mean, what if they genuinely believe the Voting Rights Act unfairly targets Southern states? Or even if - and Iâm saying if here - they did do it to suppress votes, if hurting Black people isnât their goal, and theyâre just trying to win elections, is that really âracist?âÂ
Moderates are very cagey about breaking out the R-word for a fellow white person.
See, thereâs this other definition of racism that most white people learn in grade school: racism is when you say mean things to other kids about skin color and it hurts their feelings; racism is about cruelty. And harm done by white people, therefore, isn't racism if isnât cruel; itâs merely ignorant. Or apathetic. But ignorance and apathy can be reasoned with; you just gotta sit down and hash it out. As long as it takes. Real white supremacy is about emotional distress or interpersonal violence; itâs uncommon, itâs unpopular, and itâs a hearts and minds issue.
What this definition leaves out is any notion that white supremacy is about power. That white people who disavow racism still live longer, get paid better, get arrested less often, and are typically in position to negotiate with whomeverâs in power. That this society was built for The Everyman, and being The Everyman confers power upon you.
When children of white moderates get older and first brush up against this definition, wherein white supremacy is not small but all-encompassing, where it can be cruel, but is at least as often indifferent, and where every white person in the country is bound up in it and privileged by it whether they want to be or not, and will never, ever experience it themselves - where itâs not about feelings but power - how often do they say, âoh, maybe the definition I grew up with was simplified for 9-year-oldsâ?; or, âoh, maybe the definition given to me by white grown-ups was less complete than the one a Black grown-up mightâve givenâ? And how often do they say, âyou canât just redefine racism?â
Right out the gate, the white moderate is possessive not just of their whiteness but of the very definition of racism.
In the definition they know, racism exists only over here. And the white collaborator is a compatriot who shares their ultimate vision for the future, but has simply gone off course somewhere. And they donât see themselves as flawed individuals with a long way still to go; theyâve already arrived! Theyâre the destination everyone else needs to get to! Living proof that white supremacy can be easily and painlessly opted out of. They canât see collaborators as opponents because there is no definition of white supremacy that includes collaborators and doesnât also include them.
And this is critically important: they donât want to start thinking of themselves as white. They donât want the constant awareness of oneâs race or how oneâs race is perceived â you know, the things the rest of humanity deals with. And who would want that? Iâll tell you who wants that: Nazis and klansmen want that. Theyâre the only ones who like thinking about whiteness every day. So, white moderates cling to the other definition, the comfortable one. They may be more or less willing to collaborate with people of color, but mostly in ways that donât foreground their whiteness. White-as-default is one concession that can never be made, in part because itâs the one that canât be spoken.
Their ideal is a kind of Big-Tent Antiracism, where victory comes by winning over reactionary conservatives. This might strike you as odd, given that reactionary conservatives have seen many victories in the last twenty years, none of which came by winning over us. White supremacists bolster their numbers by finding little, disgruntled pockets of America that have not, heretofore, engaged much in politics and radicalizing them to the cause, and then pitching themselves to white collaborators as a demographic now large enough to sway a narrow election. If moderates wanted to counter this strategy, they might look at who out there is sympathetic to progressive causes but isnât voting, maybe because they donât feel liberal candidates represent them, or maybe because someone just happened to shut down all the polling locations in their neighborhood. And, you know, mathematically, thereâs probably a lot more disenfranchised people of color who match that description than racist white people who arenât already Republicans.
But that strategy would mean doubling down on anti-racist talking points instead of easing off of them. It would mean a willingness to alienate some white people. Itâs⊠giving up on them. Itâs admitting a significant percentage of American whiteness is not on the side of racial equity. It means thereâs a definition of racism where it isnât fringe, but common and pervasive, and where addressing it requires thinking about their place in it. It means asking why they feel more affinity for white people who oppose them than people of color they claim to agree with. Why the votes of the former have to be earned but the latter are expected. And, since all that seems intolerable, they fixate on the kinds of gestures that feel like moving in the right direction but run very little risk of arriving anywhere. âHow about, instead of defunding the police, we give them more money than any Administration in years, but, also, Juneteenth is a national holiday now. Something for everyone!â
The Left has the numbers to leave behind white centrists who slow down anti-racist efforts, and it doesnât because white moderates donât want to. They and the white collaborators are supposed to be in this together, and they are⊠just not in the way they think.
The irony is that the Right feels no affinity for white moderates whatsoever. They hate - and I mean haaaaate - white moderates. Smug pricks always talking about unity whenever they win an election. âReach across the aisle?â That's what you say when youâve lost and you want the other guys to make concessions they donât have to makeâyou donât do it when youâre in power! Are they trying to humiliate us, or did we really lose to a bunch of clowns who donât even know how to win right? Debasing themselves in front of minorities just to get their votes when they clearly arenât going to do anything real for them. Christ, at least white supremacists are honest!
The Right will threaten POC sometimes just to call the white moderatesâ bluff.
Racism must be understood as more than a set of individual beliefs and feelings, but as a tool for achieving political ends, first and foremost because claiming otherwise is both factually and morally wrong. But also, without this understanding, white culture canât recognize the stakes.
Fascism exists in a state of permanent conflict. Things like declaring an indefinite state of martial law, suspending elections, or executing members of government, are justified on the grounds that the people are in danger and need to be protected and mobilized. This isnât unique to fascism: between the Cold War, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror, the US has been in some form of ongoing conflict for the last three generations, but: youâll note the Cold War didnât end on a battlefield, it ended when the Soviet Union collapsed in on itself. Communism, terrorism, and drug dealing are patterns of behavior, and they wax and wane, often for reasons outside our control. Geopolitics may someday shift such that terrorism becomes less prevalent, or that lowers the demand for drugs.
Communism can be fought with diplomacy and economic sanctions because communists can choose not to be communists anymore. And fascists have no use for soft power. To justify a military dictatorship, they need an opponent that wonât just go away on its own one day. It always come back to identity politics because Black people canât stop being Black; theirs is a number that will not be reduced without the hard power of violence and displacement.
Fascism begins by stealing populist targets from the Left: they focus on elites, corrupt businessmen, weak-willed politicians, subtly shifting focus away from leftist critique of systems to types of people. But, sooner or later, they settle on something unchangeable: race, gender, ethnicity, religious background. The bigotry is localized to the regionâs existing prejudices: in Nazi Germany, it was Jews, Jehovahâs Witnesses, Roma, Slavs, Black people, queer people, and people with disabilities; in fascist Italy, it was Slovenes until Mussolini invaded Libya and Ethiopia and so demonized their citizens as well; in the US, the Klan and the American Nazi Party targeted African-Americans, Jews, and Catholics, queer people, and immigrants; Spain under Franco tried to determine the exact racial makeup of the Spanish people so they could cast out those with the âwrong mixture of bloods.â
This is why the Far Right has gone all in on transphobia of late, by the way. It has joined Islamophobia on the outer rim of acceptable bigotries. On some level they know trans folks arenât just cis people in disguise, that desistance is rare and conversion therapy doesnât work, because it trans people could just stop being trans⊠they never would have picked them for an enemy.
This is where it starts. This is why you should have no patience for anyone saying âwokeness is dividing the Left, we should focus on class.â Theyâre not attacking us on class. Theyâre trying to sell themselves as better on class than we are. Where do you think that fairy tale about âblue-collar whitesâ comes from? They want you to believe that they, and not the socialists, are the path forward for the downtrodden. Thereâs a reason fascism started popping up all over Europe right after the Russian Revolution; Mussolini got his start beating up socialists in the Po Valley, on the grounds that he was defending not wealthy elites but struggling rural farmers who didnât like the socialist takeover of their industry during the biennio rosso. The fascist goal is to harness and redirect class resentment towards a scapegoat. They come at us on identity. It always comes down to the shape of the human skull.
When a provocateur shows up on a college campus to talk about âideas,â itâs not a debate. Thereâs no special sequence of words that will defeat them [expecto patronum gif]. This is a show of dominance. They are presenting themselves as white compatriots to be reasoned with rather than agents of white supremacy to be opposed. In that framing, the stakes are attention, the weapons are words, and people of color are not players but tokens on the game board. And they are checking whether you will submit to that structure.
They donât care about ideas. They care about power.
And power is what beats them. They tell you four hundred people showing up in protest is just free news coverage. But when four thousand show up? They cancel. Thatâs power. And, in absolute numbers, most events they canât rustle up four thousand supporters, but we can, provided cishet non-disabled white dude lefties (like myself) havenât told all the Rightâs biggest targets their struggles donât matter. (And, itâs worth mentioning, cops fuck with protesters less when some of them are white.)
(Itâs also worth mentioning racism affects 58% of the working poor, so there can be no class solidarity that doesnât address it.)
This [white moderate] isnât who needs to win. This [POC] is who needs to win, and, if youâre white, you need to be over here [antiracist]. Iâve collected as many resources as I can find by POC on what they need and want from white allies, and put them in the down-there part. Thereâs a plurality of opinions on this, so I recommend reading more than one. It may not always be a four-thousand-strong protest; every direct action is unique, and must be strategized in concert with the people most affected.
But what I can tell you is, when business gets done, white folks need to split the check. A movement cannot be antifascist if it isnât antiracist.
I'm going to do Norco a disservice by talking about it in the context of a bunch of other adventure games, so let's flag this up top: Norco is probably the best adventure game released in the 2 1/2 years since Kentucky Route Zero wrapped, and, unless my feelings change as I sit with it longer, probably going in my list of best adventures ever made.
KR0 comparisons - and Disco Elysium comparisons - are... well, not unavoidable. I could talk about the game on its own terms, and I will, and I'm sure the developers will appreciate that. I know it must be annoying to release something so beautiful and original and have everyone compare it to a thing from a few years ago. But everybody's doing it. And I'm going to do it, too. Sorry.
Being an adventure game nerd, it's intriguing and exciting to map the ways certain games steering the genre's course. I described Tacoma as a second-generation walking sim, and I would say the same of What Remains of Edith Finch - games that would not exist without Dear Esther and Gone Home, yet building something bigger off their backs. You don't often notice which games are merely great and which are inflection points for a genre until you spot them showing up in other games. Playing Norco and Citizen Sleeper back-to-back is the moment I realized KR0 and Disco Elysium are new inflection points. Adventure games are a little different now.
Given Norco was in various staged of development a full four years before Disco Elysium came out, it's difficult to point to it as an influence. It is at least as likely that Fellow Traveler saw the success of Disco and KR0 and fished around for something in development that coincidentally had a similar vibe.
But the vibes, man. They're inescapable.
From Disco, you've got the subtle worldbuilding, detail-infused and lived-in; a reality like ours but different in ways you notice slowly. You assemble a party like in a roleplaying game and have turn-based battles with HP and healing mechanics. (Citizen Sleeper was, like Disco, built around throwing dice.) You have a "mindmap" for keeping track of plot details that inescapable resembles the Thought Cabinet. You have the mix of drama and humor. (Though, where Disco often played up the contrast between sincerity and wackiness, Norco blends them, being by turns a comedy and a melodrama with neither feeling out of place. You may talk about family tragedy with the girl at the bookstore just before launching her cat into space, and that's just life on the bayou.) From Kentucky Route Zero you've got the southern rural poverty, the tall tale-inflected magical realism, the love and specificity with which the game characterizes oddballs. From both, you have the bone-deep weariness with capitalism, with life during climate change, with death and indignity in the name of profit; having little faith in humanity but faith in humans.
You see why it's hard not to compare them?
What Norco does - its trick, its trump card - is make it look easy. I know it couldn't have been, but Christ.
Norco is about family. You are a girl coming home to small-town Louisiana after your mother's death from cancer. You left home young and never came back, throwing your phone into the Rio Grande. Your brother is a fuckup who pulled his shit together to care for your mother, and it's anyone's guess what'll happen to him now. And he's gone missing.
Norco is about the future. You may not realize it until you run into the family robot in the back yard. This is a world where minds are stored on hard drives so they can live beyond death, but most people can only afford cheap versions full of pop-ups.
Norco is about place. An alternate place, I'm pretty sure, where the history of Louisiana diverged at some point from ours, in ways that are sketched and alluded to but never concretized. But similar enough: small, regularly flooded towns towered over by oil refineries, poisoning the air and water, holding wealth that goes all the way back to slave plantations. Full of people hustling and making do, self-described private investigators who never seem up to more than drinking and gossiping, drifters who hide in the woods and periodically blow up oil pipelines for political and/or mercurial reasons, stuffed monkeys who win staring contests, assholes who won't let you into the corner store without a fight or a bribe, kids whose whole day can be taken up with a turtle they found on the sidewalk. You know the devs went to high school with these folks.
Norco is also about secrets buried in swamps. Norco is about cults of angry white boys in polo shirts. Norco is about the bloodline of Jesus Christ. Norco is about space aliens and rockets to God. Norco is an embarrassment of riches.
How on Earth is this Geography of Robots' first game?
Norco ends in just the right place. At least, I think it does? I apparently got the "secret" ending on my first try, so I dunno what the normal ending is or how it lands. But my ending left just the right amount of questions unanswered. It ended a story that knew when to sit with a heady idea and when to lead with the gut. When to be prose and when to be poetic. Some plot points demand answers, but some aren't about answers, they're about people. They require resolution, not explanation. Geography of Robots have announced that this is the first part of a planned trilogy, and I hope future episodes explain only as much as is needed. That they raise as many questions as they answer.
But, at this point, I'd be looking forward to anything they do.
