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, “The die is cast.”
In today’s vernacular, we refer to a metaphoric Rubicon as the point of no return. Children “cross the Rubicon” into adulthood, isolationist governments “cross the Rubicon” 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 didn’t cross it some ways back.
The thing about points of no return, the reason we worry over them so much, is it’s 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 “under threat.” That we are “at risk” of descending into authoritarianism. Few are ready to say that the threat has arrived. And I’m referring to myself as I say that: I’m not ready to say it’s arrived. No one wants to call it prematurely. The Right screams that “the Left” - 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 “worrying.” But I don’t say “they are saying this in preparation to kick down your door and bash in your teeth.” I want people to listen to me. I don’t want to sound irrational, and I don’t want to sound like them. And… I don’t 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, “Is 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?” And we would have said, “No question.” 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 “reasoning with the Right.” 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 Administration’s 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 don’t 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 “this will never happen on our watch,” they will divert the river south to make it true.
It’s losing a little ground on a dozen fronts every day. It’s seeing so many lines crossed you can’t even remember where you used to draw them. It’s the readiness to give up on things being better and just wanting them to be quiet.
I can’t tell you if that moment has come. I don’t know how to call it any better than you. So, instead, I’m 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 don’t show up in my comments saying it happened years or centuries ago - you’re not wrong, but cynicism is acceptance. I’m 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 won’t 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 don’t have to have an answer yet. But think on it. Cuz we haven’t been doing it.
As a leftist, the futures I envision are full of possibility. I am fond of saying “there are a hundred ways forward and only one way back.” 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 don’t know if that future is likely, but I know it’s possible.
That’s 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, you’re having a discussion with a coworker about healthcare. (Actually, let’s go ahead and drop the pretence: you’re having a discussion about trans healthcare.) He says puberty blockers should be banned because some study said they're dangerous. And you’re a thoughtful person, so you look it up.
Only when you do, you find the study doesn’t 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 wouldn’t support his argument. “Dangerous” could mean a lot of things - a little? a lot? low risk, high risk? Maybe one study isn’t enough to go on. Hell, maybe it’s bogus for a whole host of other reasons! Maybe it’s written by people with an obvious agenda, or contradicted by a better study he’s ignoring. So you go back and tell your coworker, “Hey, the study doesn’t say that, and even if it did, y’know…” But he simply repeats “The study said they’re dangerous.” He’s not just wrong… he’s
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, ‘We are committed to not doing that.’ And… that’s it. The more you insist, ‘Hey, these policies aren’t being followed, the problem still exists!’ the more you become the problem.
The document is a dummy argument, a substitute for the real one: ‘There’s a problem’ Vs ‘No there isn’t.’ This isn’t a conversation about what some document says or doesn’t say; it’s a conversation about power.
When your coworker cites a study that doesn’t support his argument, he’s using that document in a similar way. He’s not reading it; just pointing to it. ‘This piece of paper means you have to listen to me.’ 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.) He’s not using evidence to inform his position; he’s decided what his position is and he’s pantomiming evidence to support it.
It’s almost as if we’ve stumbled into The Sorcerer’s Apprentice! Little Mickey’s put on the hat and declared, “I know how this works! You stand up, all big and tall, and say ‘I have a study that says you have to do what I tell you!’ That’s how you always play it. Well, this time I’ve got a study, so you have to do as I say!”
And you can tell him, “That’s not how this works, Mickey: it’s a study, not an incantation. It has to actually say what you claim, and it has to be a good study.”
“Ohhh, look at you moving the goalposts! Look at you gatekeeping! Deciding which studies count and which ones don’t. Well I believe this one’s every bit as good as yours, and I believe it proves me right!”
And is that what he believes? Maybe. Maybe not. Remember: The Card Says Moops - you can’t prove he doesn’t believe that. And for the purposes of ‘You have to listen to me’ that’s 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 he’ll move on to another, and you’ll only be undermining the scientific method in his view: if studies aren’t always to be trusted, if even quack science can get peer-reviewed, who’s to say your studies aren’t as bogus as his? And that’s if he doesn’t change evidence entirely - ‘Okay maybe I can’t prove puberty blockers are dangerous, but this study says trans kids have high regret rates; this one says they’re unhappy; this one says they’re brainwashed!’
He’s understood the rhetorical function of science, but not the substance. Or perhaps he’s 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, ‘Look! It doesn’t say what you said it does! What’s the matter, can’t read?’ 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 hasn’t 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 you’re 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 don’t want to do. But he won’t say that out loud because he knows that’s socially unacceptable. ‘I want the government to force people to do what I want with their bodies no matter how many of them die in the process,’ is an opinion that isn’t likely to make friends. So he substitutes the document for the thing he really believes. “It’s not me. It’s just science.” 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 he’s not the person he thought he was, or that his friends and colleagues expect him to be. (And you might too - let’s 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 he’d 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 it’s 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 someone’s word, trust that a pattern holds, because the video’s due before the end of the month if you want to charge your patrons and make rent!
…sorry.
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 coworker’s study is he’s using it to claim trans healthcare is dangerous, and he’s wrong. He has a comeback for every way you could try to convince him, but he’s still wrong. You can’t prove trans healthcare is safe by gesturing at studies, because the opposition won’t read them. And will write their own studies. You can’t prove it with peer review, because they’ll game peer review. You can’t call them liars because they’ll insist they’re sincere. There is no rule they can’t pervert, no system they can’t twist to their advantage. You can’t just appeal to things that signify “reason,” at some point one of you will have to do some actual reasoning to figure out who’s making sense, and, well, it’s 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.
‘I 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 they’re not because on the off-chance you actually care about evidence here’s 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 I’d support your right to take it if you wanted.’ Now you’ve avoided the trap of arguing about what some document says. You’re focusing on the second, deeper part of the doublewrong instead of the first. You’ve 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: ‘The study says they’re dangerous!’ This is not a technique for winning arguments. It’s 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, “Why Don’t You Respond To Criticism?”
There’s a lot going on in that question, more than is obvious, and it’s worth understanding.
First is that the question is not only directed at you. It exists as a marker, showing up in your Q&A’s, 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 it’s 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, it’s meant to make you question whether there is some legitimate criticism out there in the din of people screaming at you. You’re 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 isn’t really “why don’t you respond to criticism?” 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, “Why don’t you respond to my criticism?” They’ll let it sound like you’ve been ignoring everyone, but they mean “why are you ignoring me?” 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 person’s 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. There’s a decent chance your critic doesn’t actually consume enough of your work to have seen it. But it’s maybe even more likely that they are aware of your counter-argument - possibly one of your fans directed them to it - but don’t consider a response legitimate unless it is directed at the critic. Covering it in a different context or on a different platform doesn’t count. They are owed a statement they can respond to directly, because they want the argument to continue. Really, the question is, “Why don’t you respond to my criticism on my terms?”
Finally, even if you did respond to them by name, it’s 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 you’re 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 “correct” 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 they’ve ever tossed your way, and, in the same breath, make fun of you for talking too much. Because they don’t want to move on from “Why Don’t You Respond to Criticism?” As a rhetorical tactic, it’s pretty ace. To announce, before the argument is even stated, that it is thus far undefeated? ::chef’s kiss:: Because any response you make will keep the focus on you and not their argument. “It’s not worth responding to.” “Well why should The Accused get to decide what is and isn’t worth responding to?” “I have responded, repeatedly.” “Well why didn’t you respond in this particular way?” 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 isn’t exactly what four eels in a trenchcoat would say? “I’m not even wearing a trenchcoat”? 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 wouldn’t 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 can’t even prove I’m 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, “why haven’t you responded to _____,” ask: do you know what _____ is, do you yourself agree it’s a valid question, and are you sure it hasn’t already been answered? And don’t repeat the question unless you’ve 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 “Smart Music” 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)’s 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 “mad dated,” mad dated. It is saying “lmao” 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 don’t think Michael Bay followed that directive (I’m not rewatching the movie to find out), but that is how long this was the “Smart Music” 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 I’m 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 Lannister’d 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 “Smart Music;” 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 song’s 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 - you’d have to be a hack to not already know! This was the soundtrack to the blind cave salamander level of Earthworm Jim 2, there’s no coming back from that! I mean, the association with Tallarico Studios alone… It’s 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 it’s 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 you’ll 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 don’t worry - he’ll be Bach.)
7. Air on the G String, Bach/Wilhelmj
Told ya. It’s not that she isn’t a beautiful piece of music, and it’s 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. You’ll still hear from her now and then; she crops up, like a lucky penny. And you’ll smile, every time, but you know the stars in your eyes are not present joy, but nostalgia. A fondness for what was and what could’ve been - what should have been. Why - why couldn’t 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 would’ve 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. Didn’t exactly come out of nowhere - it’s been here the whole time - but you didn’t see it coming! It’s like that time I went snorkeling, and I wondered, “Where are the fish?” 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 hadn’t 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, that’s the one! The really pretty one. I knew it’d 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 we’re talking about here. This is that one TED Talk about how everyone loves classical music they just don’t know it yet. This was all over Anatomy of a Fall. Are you sure you wouldn’t 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 can’t 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 “Smart Music” 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 “Smart Music” is not ranked by quality; they are all, as a baseline, masterpieces. They are ordered, instead, by their possession of antipodal qualities. Beethoven’s Fifth may be a beautiful piece but it’s too well-known - to the casual listener, it reads only as “classical music.” Vltava is a beautiful piece, but it’s not recognizable enough - to most, it will read only as “music.” Pachelbel’s Canon works in too many contexts. Mozart’s Lacrimosa no longer works in any context but “Shit’s About To Go Off.” The Song that Represents “Smart Music” 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 “Smart Music,” and were I a gambling man… Bach’s Prelude in C. And I’ll tell you why: it appears in the Netflix series Bodies alongside Chopin (#6), mirroring Satie’s dual appearance in The Queen’s 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 Person’s Alternative to Schubert (#2). You may feel I’m 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 can’t do it. It can’t be allowed. Don’t 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 Wright’s Cornetto Trilogy. I flirted with making a video about it ages ago, had a draft of a script, but ultimately decided it wasn’t about anything except “here’s a thing I like, and here are its (I thought) very obvious themes.” 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 “multiple.” It’s not a lot. But it’s more than one! And that’s 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 that’s 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 it’s out of spite.
The Cornetto Trilogy is three movies: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s 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 Kieślowski’s Trois Couleur films, Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge, which were based on the colors and themes of the French flag (I don’t 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 that’s where people get stuck. Because “schlub finds himself protagonist of a genre film” 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 It’s a Wonderful Life if Clarence were Christopher Walken as the angel of death (that… that makes it sound good, it’s not, don’t 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 haven’t seen all of these movies, but if you’ve seen any, I bet you have assumptions about how the rest end: even though “Adam Sandler acts like a child” 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 don’t blame people of a certain age for seeing the first act of Shaun of the Dead and thinking “I know where this is going.” 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. I’ma take you through these movies one by one - we’ll talk about the manchildren and the expectations set by the genre, and then we’ll talk about that last-minute swerve and what it means. And then you’ll tell me I’m right and apologize!
Shaun of the Dead:
Shaun is a man in his twenties. What kind of manchild is he? He’s the slacker.
What is his problem? He needs to sort his life out. Shaun doesn’t know how to take action. He hasn’t advanced since college - he’s 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 can’t make a reservation, he can’t manage a calendar, he’s 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, he’ll 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 “am I gonna make rent,” “is my girl gonna take me back,” “is my roommate gonna kick out my stoner buddy who’s crashing on the couch” become meaningless, and it’s immediately clear what’s really important, what matters. Then I’d know exactly what to do. It’s 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? He’s the hall monitor.
What is his problem? He can’t switch off. He is a hypercompetant police officer with a rulebook where his brain should be. He’s so good at being a cop that he’s spotting and unraveling crimes even on his day off. He can’t 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, “Mmm. A fastidious police officer who can’t have fun? How is that a manchild? Sounds pretty grown-up to me. You’re reaching, bud.” Ohhhh ho ho, smartass, do you remember this scene? [bar scene] Yeah! Nicholas Angel has a five-year-old’s notion of law and order. He’s still playing cops and robbers.
And that’s a problem, because then: an action movie happens.
It doesn’t 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. That’s a judgment grown-ups can make; I mean, they’re the ones who wrote the rules in the first place. So be lenient with shoplifters, don’t hassle people for speeding; this isn’t the Big City, you can use your better judgment. But Nicholas never got past doing whatever Mom & Dad said; obedience, and trusting whoever’s up the chain, is his entire moral framework. He can’t accept that bending the law could be more righteous than following it.
But also maybe there’s 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 he’s seeing things where they aren’t.
The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: either there’s nothing going on and he needs to chill out about procedure, or the department is corrupt and he’ll have to go rogue like it’s Point Break - and this is how he experiences Point Break. [“paperwork”]
No matter what, he’ll have to bend the rules, which he constitutionally cannot do.
The World’s End:
Gary is a man in his forties. What kind of manchild is he? He’s the delinquent.
What’s his problem? Pfffft. What isn’t 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 didn’t even finish, and he’s been tumbling downhill ever since. He’s spent his life ruining everyone who knows him until there’s no one left to ruin but Gary King. So now it’s 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, it’s all he’s 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 Gary’s youth have been forgotten. You can’t actually go back because that place doesn’t exist anymore.
And then: a sci-fi movie happens.
Turns out the town’s been taken over by aliens, and all the people who couldn’t conform to their new order have been replaced with robots! That’s why no one recognizes them! And that’s why the pubs all look the same: the aliens are homogenizing everything! And it’s clear, if they can’t get Gary and his friends to play ball, they’ll 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 group’s already five pints in. The genre forces him to confront his shortcomings: sooner or later he’s gonna have to give up on recapturing his youth and do what’s 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 what’s 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 “robot” is the PC term.
So, yeah, if you turned the movies off there, I could forgive you for thinking that’s where they’re 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 he’s in a zombie movie and, at first, tries to play the part - his survival plans are miniature hero’s journeys with him as protagonist, wherein he’ll save the day by neatly confronting all his flaws. He’ll 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! It’s 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 doesn’t save his mom: his stepdad apologizes, resolving their conflict for him, and then survives in zombie form but Shaun’s 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 doesn’t save the day, just manages not to die long enough for the military to show up.
But… well, Liz wanted adventure and now she’s had enough for a lifetime, so… she’s 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 don’t get eradicated, just folded into normal life, so Shaun can mindlessly play video games with his bestie forever, and it’s not a problem that bestie doesn’t have an income cuz he doesn’t need food or shelter.
The zombie apocalypse doesn’t make Shaun sort his life out, it changes the world til he doesn’t 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. It’s 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 don’t 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 he’d 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 doesn’t make Nicholas bend the rules, it changes the world til he doesn’t 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, he’s gonna reject help at first, but sooner or later he’ll 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 you’re 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 that’ve 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 they’ve been replacing people with robots is some people are too fucked up to go along with it.
And here’s 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 he’s 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 it’s the best of the three. Some friends who’ve 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, you’re not wrong, I get it, I really do. But can we just… not “but” but “also” can we… can we also admit that this ending is… this is Space Brexit.
Like, literally it’s an alien invasion but symbolically this is Gary rejecting the adult world of rules and authority and doing what’s best for the community and that’s how Brexiters view the EU. And people keep telling him “Gary, this is in your best interest” and Gary says, I don’t want my best interest! I am registered in the anti-Gary’s Face Party and I will cast my vote by cutting my nose! I choose to do what’s bad for me.
And, like a true Brexiter, he chooses for everybody.
Now tell me that’s 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 don’t 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 it’s what Adam Sandler would do?
So there you have it. I rest my case.
“Okay Ian. Why does this matter?”
…what was that?
“You’ve made your point: these movies aren’t about growing up or taking responsibility. So what?”
Uhhhh.
“Bring it home for us.”
…
“Why do you care so much?
[breath]
I wrote the first draft of this script when I was around Shaun and Nicholas’ age, and “so what?” is why I shelved it. Now I’m Gary’s age, this video’s been in the back of my brain the whole time, but I got this far and “so what” is where I got stuck, again. This is why the CO-VIDs came out quicker, cuz I let myself end with “so that’s interesting!” and got on with my life. But there’s clearly something sticky here, more than “someone is wrong on the internet.” (Also, to the YouTubers I’m vaguebooking, who said these were movies about growing up - I’m way more annoyed at the folks I’ve 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 “cultural weight.” I could put on my social justice hat and talk about how the “crisis of adulthood” doesn’t 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 that’s all legit, but here’s the real deal: I’m 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, you’re 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 “that’s a movie about growing up” is more than a mistake, it’s a refusal. It’s trying to “fix” the movie by fitting it into a more familiar shape, so it doesn’t say what it says, so Gary isn’t who he is, who he chooses to be.
I’m being cheeky when I say this because he’s a fictional character, but saying Gary grew up is enabling.
Gary says there’s no freedom without the freedom to ruin your life, which is the problem with alcoholics and libertarians: it’s not just your life, Gary! You live in a community, a culture, and an ecosystem! Your actions - everybody’s actions - impact other people! That’s just the way the world is! You can’t shit yourself at the bar without other people having to smell it. We’re all fuckin’ connected, man! You don’t want anyone’s will imposed on you; you spend the whole movie imposing your will on everyone else! You say humans don’t wanna be told what to do, and then you decide humanity’s 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 that’s 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 doesn’t 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 he’s made peace with that world and is ready to integrate. But that’s not what happened! The thing he was escaping doesn’t exist anymore! He literally destroyed it!! People died! Probably millions! Now he lives a happy life LARPing as Omega Doom - no I don’t expect you to catch that reference! He doesn’t 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 that’s 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 World’s End is my least favorite, and I don’t like the ending, but I don’t think it’s bad that I don’t 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 that’s why The World’s 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 don’t think it’s valid to pretend it didn’t happen.
In the context of the trilogy, we see that Shaun’s immaturity is mostly a problem for Shaun: he would be, at worst, a footnote in the lives of the people who love him; “yeah, I liked Shaun a lot, but I couldn’t carry him through life anymore.” 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 that’s a thing police do). If the world hadn’t changed to turn their flaws into strengths, they would still be relatively harmless. Gary is what happens when immaturity isn’t 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 - it’s why some people drink, and it’s why some people would like to drink with Gary. But if that’s not just your Friday night, not just your twenties, but that’s your life? There is a destination at the end of that road, and it’s 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 I’m not telling you to hate Gary for it; I’m not saying Gary can’t be forgiven. In fact, seeing it for what it is is the only way Gary could be forgiven, because, if he “grew up and took responsibility,” there’s 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 don’t grow up, it eventually becomes a problem. There’s 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 doesn’t. And I think some of us boys saw that and said, “no, noooo, they did grow up! all three of them!” rather than say, “haha! hahaaa! ……………shit.”
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, you’re 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: that’s the Gish Gallop! The debater makes point after dubious point, and, if the other debater doesn’t rebut every single one, they will appear to have lost the argument. These points don’t have to be good or hard to disprove, there just has to be a lot of them.
Oh, but what’s this? The liberal candidate seems to have come prepared! That’s new! They succinctly and efficiently dismantle each of their opponent’s arguments, offering a clear rebuttal to every single one. It’s obviously not the first time they’ve heard this particular gallop. So, the conservative’s petard has just fully hoisted them. [“What a hoisting!”] They’ve 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 can’t 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 driver’s seat? Are audiences fooled by this? Are liberals that easily snookered? The answer may shock you!
You’ve just borne witness to The Reverse Gish Gallop, where an entire argument falls apart if any of it can be disputed. These disputes, again, don’t 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, fuckin’... really guys?? [W, Trump]) Some Democrat will be all “conservatives want to shut down post offices as a form of vote suppression; they’re 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 don’t use email, and, hey, maybe some of them like getting junk mail” “AH BA BA BA THAT’S IT THAT’S YOUR WHOLE LIFE NOW FOR THE REST OF YOUR CAREER YOU’RE THE ASSHOLE WHO SAID OLD PEOPLE LIKE JUNK MAIL.”
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 he’d make up games where we’d bat a balloon back and forth or whatever, and change the rules on the fly when it suited him. Because the rule wasn’t actually “you can only touch the balloon once per turn;” the rule was “Andrew wins.”
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. It’s a not about which story is true, it’s 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 haven’t 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."
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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 aren’t 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 doesn’t derail into another discussion about whether it should’ve 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), “Can’t you just, like, have your panic attack? I mean, this isn’t life and death.”
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 “it’s not life and death” crowd? They never claimed they are more inconvenienced than the person having panic attack! Content warnings ain’t life and death either! They made no attempt to frame this tradeoff as fair or justified. Only that, in the grand scheme of things, it’s 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 I’m keeping it.)
You see Didoing everywhere. Be as gay as you want, just don’t 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 isn’t hard if you’re 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. It’s eleven bucks a month! What, you can’t 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 it’s like to get a Twitter DM threatening to murder your entire family using a quote from Mission: Impossible 3. Yeah, he’s probably not gonna do it! But it can still fuck up your day; the goal is to fuck up your day. But the “it’s not life and death” crowd won’t understand, not because they don’t care, but because they don’t care enough.
But even that is letting them control the conversation. You’re 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 it’s 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 it’s okay for others to suffer for the convenience of the normals. Because it’s 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 you’re 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: “white privilege is a myth,” “there is no gender wage gap,” etc. etc. You would think, the greater the imbalance, the harder it is to deny, but it’s 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; “no, I don’t get followed around Macy’s like I’m gonna steal something, but is that really so important? is this life and death? don’t you have bigger problems?” (Which is a funny thing to say, because, according to white privilege: no! The bigger problems don’t exist!)
Didoing is foundational to the privileged mindset, because it’s one scenario where they will admit to the Didoee, “yes, I do have power over you… and you should just let me have it.”
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, you’ve been having a knock-down-drag-out online with a reactionary for weeks. It’s been going long enough that you don’t remember how it started, or, entirely, what you’re talking about. The argument seems to center around the nation of Israel. You’re 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 it’s 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! He’s been giving you every incivility you can imagine - and a few you’ve never heard of - since this began. It’s not helped by the fact that, while you know your position on ethnostates and antisemitism - they’re bad! - you don’t 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.
He’s just so rude and conceited and you’re 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. He’s still saying awful things about everything you’ve ever claimed to believe, but now it’s directed at a “them.” Liberals, commies, SJWs, what have you. But he’s not calling you any of those things. He’s treating you like you’re smarter than all those limp-wristed leftoids, smart like him. Better than them. It’s 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, you’re twelve or thirteen, it’s the mid-90’s, you’re 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 it’s 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: “You can’t get snakes from chicken eggs.” 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, “You Can’t Get Snakes From Chicken Eggs.”
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. It’s the belief that the truth is easily recognized, and that it’s always simple, because the world is simple, and, if you can’t explain it to me like I’m five, then you’re probably wrong or making things up.
This heuristic very hard to argue with. You’ve heard that same aunt claim the hole in the ozone layer is caused by sunspots. Now, we’ve 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 here’s the conundrum: the truth is “the hole in the ozone layer is caused by chlorofluorocarbons.” Not only is that a more complex sentence, it’s a more complex idea. If the ozone hole is caused by sunspots, then it’s probably been happening for billions of years, it’s not caused by humans, and we don’t have to do anything about it. It’s 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 it’s 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 there’s a floor to how simple the truth can be and still be the truth. Falsehoods don’t have that. There is no limit on how simple an idea can be when it doesn’t have to conform to reality.
You play the game of “who’s got the simplest argument,” liars win every time. You can’t get much simpler than “sunspots.” 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 there’s still hope for your cousins.
If you’re wondering what they do when confronted with something they cannot deny is complicated: well, that’s your fault. You, or someone like you, took their simple world and overcomplicated it. All the conspiracy theories and fingerpointing and screenshots they’ve 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 you’re trying to tell them, and, no, it doesn’t make any sense, but that’s 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 “a wizard did it.”
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, there’s this guy, this just real abomination, total scum-sucking garbage hole, who’s running for President. And conservative politicians, pundits, and voters have been laughing their asses off about him. “Oh my god, he’s such a disaster, he’ll never get the nomination, and, if he were to get the nomination, no one would ever elect him.” They trot him out as a punchline. But November 8th draws near and he’s still not out of the game, and the Left is banging on the walls, like, hey, that “joke” you’re giving free press to is saying some pretty scary stuff, and the Right is like, “Look, don’t waste your breath. We’ve already accepted that we lost this one, we’re certainly not going to bat for this guy, he’s going to lose.” 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, “Can’t do anything about it now, he’s the President.”
And when, four years later, you finally get his ass out of office, the Left turns to the Right and says, “Okay, now that he’s 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?”
And they’re like, “Oh my gawd, Heather, he’s not even President anymore! How are you still talking about this?”
I call this one The Slow Breakup. It’s 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, “Hey, is there something wrong?” And they just say, “Oh, sweetie, of course not, work is just running me ragged lately and I when I have time off I’m too tired to go out, and I get home so late these days I don’t want to wake you up by coming to bed.” And then one day you get home and their bags are packed and they’re like, “Look, we both saw this coming.”
(You know that thing. This- this happens to everybody, right?)
It’s always not happening until it’s already happened. The moment is skipped over where they would acknowledge they misled you, take responsibility for what’s happened, or, critically, where you could still do something about it.
Peel your eyes for this one, you’ll see it a lot. This is how conservatives jumped straight from “climate change isn’t happening” to “climate change isn’t man-made” (and now some are trying to jump to “maybe it’s a good thing”). Rhetorically, all these arguments mean the same thing: “We decided long ago what we were going to do. Nothing you say will change our course. This conversation is over.”
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 that’s where you come in: the lip of the stage - what theatre nerds call “the proscenium” - is where the fourth wall would be, and it’s your job to pretend it’s there. Or - let me rephrase that: it’s your job to ignore that it’s 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 who’s clearly playing Words with Friends, even you yourself, you are - and this is a nerd word again - “non-diegetic.” You’re here, but you exist outside the story.
That is, until…
[Picasso at the Lapin Agile]
EINSTEIN: My name is Albert Einstein
FREDDIE: You can’t be, you just can’t be!
EINSTEIN: Sorry, I’m not myself today. (fluffs up his hair so he looks like Einstein.) Better?
FREDDIE: No no, that’s - (pause for laughter.) No no, that’s not what I mean. In order of appearance.
EINSTEIN: Come again?
FREDDIE: In order of appearance. You’re not third. (aside, to audience member) Excuse me, ma’am, can I borrow your program? (to Einstein) You’re 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 “breaking the fourth wall,” and Steve Martin’s 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 it’s a kind of narrative transgression; you’re 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 [“Sorry I’m late”], Freddy makes a little wink to the audience [“You’re not late, you’re fourth”], 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 it’s broken later in the show [“When will you be there?” “When the play is over.”] it’s funny again! If the wall had stayed down, that joke wouldn’t 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 Casetti’s Inside the Gaze - or rather I read the glossary because it’s very dense Italian film theory and I was nineteen - was, what if you didn’t make that bargain when the lights went down? What if breaking the fourth wall wasn’t 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: “Am I a joke to you?”]. We’re currently living in a golden age of metanarrative where most major properties have folded the audience’s 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. [“pretty adorable”] Abed is a pop culture-damaged perpetual college student raised by his television, who loves TV to the point where it’s his primary metaphor for looking at the world. In other words, he’s 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 [“Phoebe and Chandler” clip], or when the new school year coincides with the conclusion of the previous season’s arcs [“self-contained capers” clip], or when it looks like he’s going to spend the day locked in study hall [“starting to feel like a bottle episode” clip]. In these moments, Abed Nadir is not breaking the fourth wall. He may not fully understand that real life doesn’t have bottle episodes, but this is real life to him. He’s not seeing the cameras pointing at him, he’s 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. “Cooperative Calligraphy” 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. [“This is totally meta” clip] The rules of narrative are not transgressed, and, yet, we are, all the same, constantly reminded that we’re watching a work of fiction.
This kind of interreference, in which a sitcom points constantly at itself, at other sitcoms, and at “The Sitcom” as a medium, can come across kind of masturbatory. David Foster Wallace argued that the pop culture reference in mass media serves three functions: “(1) to help create a mood of irony and irreverence, (2) to make us uneasy and so ‘comment’ on the vapidity of U.S. culture, and (3) most important, these days, to be just plain realistic.” 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 doesn’t talk a lot about what’s 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 “the frivolous Now,” 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 “frivolous Now,” 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 you’re 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 don’t even pretend not to be fake, and whose primary pleasure is in acknowledging the fakery?
Abed is, to me, a distillation of the modern audience’s 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 don’t 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 it’s 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 it’s 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 isn’t 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 I’m watching, I’ll 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.
Go Ron.
Design
The clever thing about Return's structure is how it apes, subverts, and expands upon those of Ron's other two entries. You spend a decent chunk of this game tracing the footsteps of Secret: Part I is on Mêlée Island, with the Scumm Bar and Otis locked in jail and its twisty forest surveyed with weird maps; Part II is on a ship to Monkey Island where you have to recreate the potion that took you there in the first game; Part III is on Monkey Island itself, with its banana tree on the beach and its giant monkey head and its incredible view from the mountaintop; and Part IV seems to be wrapping things up, as you hurry back to Mêlée because the place you needed to be all along is back where you started.
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.
Character
The Guybrush of Return to Monkey Island feels like a magic trick. He manages to feel continuous with every previous iteration of the character, none of whom felt continuous with each other. He blends the naïveté of Secret's Guybrush with the amorality of LeChuck's Revenge Guybrush, the wiseassery of Curse's Guybrush with the dipshittery of Escape's Guybrush. (I don't really remember what Tales' Guybrush was like.) You can see how this guy(brush) grew from the straight man of the first game, chilled out from the asshole of the second game, wised up from the fool of the fourth game. The series' inconsistencies now seem like one person in different phases of his life.
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, there’s this… call him a “provocateur.” 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, it’s 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, let’s 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 flippin’ 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 he’s gonna take that gig.
But the progressive students at UCE are wise to his tricks. They’ve seen him pull this stunt at other UC’s - Stockton, Bakersfield, Vacaville - so they make the decision, “We’re not gonna protest. We’re just gonna let him speak. Let the boy stamp his feet. And, in a month, no one will even remember he was here.”
As the date approaches, and the provocateur sees he’s not getting the response he wants, he starts hinting things on social media, trying to bait a reaction: “Psst, psst. Hey. I’m gonna make jokes about the Holocaust. I’m gonna say Americans treated their slaves well.” Nothing. So he ups the ante. Makes it personal. “I’m gonna put up pre-transition photos of your trans students. I’m gonna out the queer students I’ve seen on Grindr. I’m gonna name which of your students I think are illegal immigrants.”
Student body’s like, “Bro, do your worst. Nobody’s falling for it.” Until one student’s like, “Hold up… he’s gonna dox immigrants in front of his audience of white nationalist gun nuts… and we’re just gonna let him? You know some of his fans were in Charlottesville, right?”
What we’re seeing here is a game of chicken between one group of white conservative reactionaries and one group of - let’s be honest - mostly white liberals, for whom the stakes are who gets paid attention to. The provocateur doesn’t 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 there’s 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 it’s “who could have predicted?”)
The provocateur’s animating force is not hatred of people of color, it’s hatred of white liberals, just as white liberals’ 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; they’re viewed as tools for getting white people what they want, and their suffering is viewed as an “acceptable” byproduct. You’ve maybe heard the phrase, “In the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team, they are the ball.” 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. It’s the Eagles Fan view of oppression.
And, make no mistake: weaponizing or disregarding students of color is still racism. But it’s 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 “I will hurt them a lot just to hurt you a little” - to the white liberal who does mental gymnastics to not come out and say “that is a Black and Brown sacrifice I’m willing to make,” 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. I’m 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 we’ll 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, here’s a book. Here’s five books. What I bring to the table is: I have, at this point, several decades’ 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, you’ve got the guy white people picture when they hear the word “racist”: your klansman, your neo-Nazi skinhead, your suit-and-tie ethnonationalist. This guy knows he’s a racist and he’s proud of it.
Next to the white supremacist, you’ve got the white collaborator; the politician, public figure, or businessman who does not agree with the white supremacist “on paper” but will seek out their votes, attention, or money.
Next to the collaborator, you’ve 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 wouldn’t be fair to do it without their consent, you see, and thus the white moderate spends a lot less time opposing collaborators than “appealing to their better natures.” They tend to operate on behalf of people of color rather than with them.
Plainly put, the “Cost of Doing Business” 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, you’ve 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 “you are not free from racial bias,” it’s not guaranteed they will react well! It’s just, if you’re trying to fight white supremacy, they’re 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 “debate” lasts approximately the rest of your goddamn life, which should be evidence enough that the frame is wanting.
In today’s framing, there are several shades of racism and there is anti-racism. There is no “non-.”
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, it’s 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 one’s own accent; British people have accents, but we speak English "normal-like." If you haven’t built your whole identity around being white, you probably don’t 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: it’s the identity that’s treated as a norm. The one you don’t have to think about. A movie with an all-white cast is widely perceived as being no way about race. But that’s 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. “How can I be racist if I don’t identify as a racist? How could I be part of a group I never opted into?” It sounds like racism without racists. But let us reflect a moment: would “a group one never opted into” not describe a minority? People don’t choose to be gay. And, while people also don’t choose to be straight, being straight is “normal.” People don’t “come out” as straight, or have complex codes for signalling heterosexuality (that they’ll admit to, at least); in lieu of other evidence, straightness is presumed. But if people clock you as gay - or even think they’ve 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 “the everyman.”
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 “normal” 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 isn’t 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. What’s 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 person’s 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 moderate’s brain because they still associate white supremacy with white trash. Racism is worse than evil, it’s common. It’s 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 can’t 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 one’s position on it, racism works. A police officer may not be personally racist, but, when it’s the end of the month and they need to hand out a few more tickets to make quota, it’s safest to do so in a low-income neighborhood where the average driver can’t 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 they’re full, sooo… And a conservative politician may not be personally racist, but Black and Latine people predominantly vote Democrat, and, since they’re disproportionately imprisoned, if the politician denies convicts the right to vote, they are more likely to get reelected, sooo…
Now, these people frequently are self-identified, card-carrying racists. My point is, for this system of incentives and rewards to operate, they don’t have to be. Any of them may, but none of them must. Racism exists and it’s 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 that’s 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t understand epidemiology, but they don’t want to blame their own party for letting a million die of COVID. So calling it “the Chinese virus” 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, “non-racist.” Their decades of opposing affirmative action, right to assembly, police reform, fair voting efforts, redistricting, funding for public schools, prisoner’s rights, religious tolerance, shutting down Guantanamo, accessibility for non-English speakers, immigration, investment in low-income neighborhoods, decolonizing school curricula, Indigenous People’s Day, putting Harriet Tubman on the twenty, kneeling, ending the drug war, or withdrawing from the Middle East are framed as problems of implementation. “We 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.”
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? That’s our job. And, if it’s not getting done? It’s because we haven’t come up with a solution they like yet. And probably what they don’t like about our solutions is that we implied the problem was racism. “Yes, white people are over-represented in dozens of industries nationwide, but have you considered that it’s a fluke? Pitch me a solution for it being a fluke.” The Collaborator’s white supremacy exists in the negative space. They agree racism exists, they agree we should oppose it, but they disagree that any individual thing you’re 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 it’s 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 you’re waiting for the moment a white moderate agrees mainstream conservatism has done something unacceptably and unequivocally racist, you’re underestimating how long white people can equivocate.
There’s a lot to say about the white moderate. And I’m 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, there’s 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. “This is our fault,” they say. “We let this happen because we didn’t have enough conversations with white conservatives.” 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.
What’s 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 I’m saying if here - they did do it to suppress votes, if hurting Black people isn’t their goal, and they’re just trying to win elections, is that really “racist?”
Moderates are very cagey about breaking out the R-word for a fellow white person.
See, there’s 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 isn’t cruel; it’s 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; it’s uncommon, it’s unpopular, and it’s 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 whomever’s 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 it’s not about feelings but power - how often do they say, “oh, maybe the definition I grew up with was simplified for 9-year-olds”?; or, “oh, maybe the definition given to me by white grown-ups was less complete than the one a Black grown-up might’ve given”? And how often do they say, “you can’t just redefine racism?”
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 don’t see themselves as flawed individuals with a long way still to go; they’ve already arrived! They’re the destination everyone else needs to get to! Living proof that white supremacy can be easily and painlessly opted out of. They can’t see collaborators as opponents because there is no definition of white supremacy that includes collaborators and doesn’t also include them.
And this is critically important: they don’t want to start thinking of themselves as white. They don’t want the constant awareness of one’s race or how one’s race is perceived – you know, the things the rest of humanity deals with. And who would want that? I’ll tell you who wants that: Nazis and klansmen want that. They’re 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 don’t foreground their whiteness. White-as-default is one concession that can never be made, in part because it’s the one that can’t 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 isn’t voting, maybe because they don’t 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, there’s probably a lot more disenfranchised people of color who match that description than racist white people who aren’t 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. It’s… giving up on them. It’s admitting a significant percentage of American whiteness is not on the side of racial equity. It means there’s a definition of racism where it isn’t 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. “How 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!”
The Left has the numbers to leave behind white centrists who slow down anti-racist efforts, and it doesn’t because white moderates don’t 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. “Reach across the aisle?” That's what you say when you’ve lost and you want the other guys to make concessions they don’t have to make—you don’t do it when you’re in power! Are they trying to humiliate us, or did we really lose to a bunch of clowns who don’t even know how to win right? Debasing themselves in front of minorities just to get their votes when they clearly aren’t 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 moderates’ 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 can’t 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 isn’t 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: you’ll note the Cold War didn’t 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 won’t just go away on its own one day. It always come back to identity politics because Black people can’t 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 region’s existing prejudices: in Nazi Germany, it was Jews, Jehovah’s 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 “wrong mixture of bloods.”
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 aren’t just cis people in disguise, that desistance is rare and conversion therapy doesn’t 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 “wokeness is dividing the Left, we should focus on class.” They’re not attacking us on class. They’re trying to sell themselves as better on class than we are. Where do you think that fairy tale about “blue-collar whites” comes from? They want you to believe that they, and not the socialists, are the path forward for the downtrodden. There’s 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 didn’t 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 “ideas,” it’s not a debate. There’s 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 don’t 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. That’s power. And, in absolute numbers, most events they can’t rustle up four thousand supporters, but we can, provided cishet non-disabled white dude lefties (like myself) haven’t told all the Right’s biggest targets their struggles don’t matter. (And, it’s worth mentioning, cops fuck with protesters less when some of them are white.)
(It’s also worth mentioning racism affects 58% of the working poor, so there can be no class solidarity that doesn’t address it.)
This [white moderate] isn’t who needs to win. This [POC] is who needs to win, and, if you’re white, you need to be over here [antiracist]. I’ve 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. There’s 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 isn’t 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.
