There's an artist inside us all @lisafication - Tumblr Blog

magery hello,,!! i hope this isnt too forward but i discovered you via _maiqo on twitter a long while ago and have been absolutely enamored by your works ever since — your writing is an enormous inspiration to me and i sincerely hope that my works can one day match the same level of excellence.

you absolutely dont have to indulge me at all, but is there any advice you can give in terms of writing character studies? :’D if not its totally ok !! and anything works !! i just figured it’s worth a shot haha

Thank you very much! It's always lovely to learn that what I've written has meant something to someone. I appreciate it.

In an attempt to answer your question, I'll talk about how I think about and approach character studies. It may be that much of what I say fails to be useful to you, but I hope to be of some small aid regardless!

To begin, I think the most fundamental element of writing a character study—as a piece of fanfiction, though much of this can be applied without significant difficulty to orginal works—is to have a firm vision of who the character is to you.

This is separate from having a firm vision of who the character "really" is. Nobody can have that—every way we engage with media is coloured by our own values and perspectives, and that bleeds into the way we think about and write characters. This is sometimes a difficult dichotomy to balance against the principle of "they would not fucking say that", but to borrow some old and too-simplified physics, I think it can be useful to consider that a character is in many ways like an electron in an electron cloud. Their precise and perfect characterisation is not something that we can ever truly locate, but we can identify the area of narrative space it is most likely to be in.

The task of the character study, I feel, is to hammer down on the part of that narrative space that you find most compelling. To take the meat of their character and cook it the way you would want it served to you. A character study is not to please anyone else. A character study—or, at least, the kind of character study I write—exists for you to get your feelings out about the character you have been rotating in your brain onto the page. It also exists, of course, so that you can try to show those feelings to other people and hope they feel them too, but you will never succeed in actually capturing those feelings in the first place if you don't allow yourself to write your authentic vision of the character.

They don't have to be your blorbo, or your problematic fave, or your three corners of the OC design triangle, or whatever, but when you write them, for that space and time they do have to be yours. Otherwise, what's the point?

Once you have that vision, you can put them in practically any situation you like and as long as there's something in it for them to bounce off, you're going to be able to tell a story that reveals something about the character. If you look at the "plots" of a selection of my character studies, we have "one guy folds sheets, another guy asks him questions" as a plot, we have "a pair of exes talk across a tabletop after a party", we have "oh LAWD they FAWKING" like four and a half times, we have "retelling the plot of something else" twice, and we even have "two people on a helicopter flight for an hour". It's not really complicated stuff. It doesn't need to be. The character, or characters, just need to be in a situation where they're going to have some reason to think about, and maybe even talk about, whatever conflict or idea or relationship you find most compelling about them.

With that said, it should be noted that it's... well, for me, with the way I do things, it's very very difficult to conceive of writing a character study in any situation without a clear and central conflict the character or characters are grappling with. All of my character studies revolve around a problem a character has and how they react to it. And yes, "having a conflict" is, like, the quiddity of a story, the most basic plot diagram there is. But what I'm trying to say here is that even in the story I mentioned where two people sit in a helicopter and talk to each other, the story is intensely focused on the internal struggle one of those characters is having with the choices that led to her sitting in that helicopter and how much they do, or don't, make her like the person she's sitting opposite (both more and less than she knows). And that's the sort of thing that I think is key. The conflict, in my eyes, needs to be philosophically central to the way you view the character and what you want to say about them. It needs to be tightly intertwined into what you find most compelling about them—the thing that you just want to sink your hands into and squeeze, for good or ill. That's how you get to really show the world who they are and why you care about that.

After that, I really think that in a lot of ways it just comes down to the prose. How deeply can you write into your character's head? Are you colouring even your description of the world around them with the way they would see it—or are you taking the opposite path and presenting the character entirely through someone else's eyes, so that you can characterise them through the distance between what the other person thinks about them and how they present themselves? You don't need frame-perfect metaphors or the Inanna-Ishtar LGBTQIA+ sharingan-coloured prose to do that, but you do need to focus on writing in a way that expresses the character.

This does take focus. How much focus depends on how specialised you are into that style of prose, but it is focus nonetheless: you need to think of your sentences, each and every one, as tools to communicate something about your understanding of the character that you want the audience to know. Some of them will inevitably instead become vehicles to reach a point where you can communicate that understanding, but something as simple as what a character notices first when they walk into a room tells you something about them. Lean on that. Lean into that. After all, if you're writing a character study, the writing should study your character.

(Colour this advice with the fact that I am, as you've probably realised from reading my writing, very much a prose-focused writer. I have spent near on fifteen years, since before I even graduated high school, honing my prose for poetry of language and interiority so that I can write in the way I most enjoy reading. That affects what I value in writing, and it affects my opinion on the way people should write. I believe what I am saying is true and good and useful, because I have faith in the way I engage with my art, but my advice does not chart the sole and singular course to the ever-distant utopia.)

To tl;dr myself, my advice for writing character studies fundamentally boils down to to the idea that I think a character study is most potent when it presents a vision of a character that the writer has clearly obsessed over. That they have layered with their thoughts, their perspective, and their heart to the degree that it drips even from their prose. A character study with the confidence to say this is what I think is compelling about this character, and I want you to see it too.

I may not agree with it, I may think "They Would Not Have Fucking Said That", I may even think the writer has just invented an unsustainable interpretation of the character that demonstrates startling reading incomprehension and I can't believe I have to share the same fandom as these people.

But at the same time, I know people have thought and said that about my own works—and I'm still happy that I wrote them.

I have far more respect for someone who's written an entirely committed and deranged interpretation of a character that I think is Flatly Fucking Wrong than I do someone who presents me with the most milquetoast interpretation I can't disagree with. If I choose to read a character study, it's because I want to see you study the character. That's, as the meme goes, why I'm here.

So, really: focus on determining who you think the character is, write them the way you want to see them written, keep your prose tight to who you think the character is (not just "would they say that?" or "would they think that?" but "how would they describe that?" and "what would they see in that?"), and commit to the bit.

(If you've managed to read to the bottom—thank you for entertaining my rambling, and I hope it helped!)

#writing advice #fanfiction #magery #to briefly add my own commentary #I could not more enthusiastically agree with 'it's more important to write something interesting than something people won't disagree with'#there's a hater for everything #if I'm reading your work it's probably because I want to see what *you* have to say not what you think I want to hear

likeabxrdinflight

Azula and the Issue of Diagnosis- an Essay Which No One Asked For

With the avatar fandom resurgence, I want to talk more in depth about something that I’m noticing an increase of with the increased interest in the show- and that is the occasionally troubling, sometimes deeply ableist, issue of diagnosing of Azula.

What I tend to see most frequently is the use of words like “psychopath” and “sociopath,” often followed by “psychotic” or “narcissist.” Occasionally I’ll see someone refer to her as “schizophrenic,” and perhaps most troubling of all are the people using ableist slurs against her like “psycho” or “lunatic.” Even words like “crazy” in this context are a bit bothersome- it’s not a word I’m going to advocate banning from the English language, but directing it towards a character who’s visibly mentally ill has an unfortunate side effect of continuing to perpetuate stigma against mental illness.

It’s not cute.

So we’re going to talk about this today. Let’s talk about Azula, diagnosis, and mental illness.

My background

Before we deep dive, however, I want to state this plainly. I have a master’s degree in clinical psychology, and I am currently a second-year doctoral student in a clinical psychology PhD program. I’ve been in school a total of five years post-bachelor’s degree specializing in this field. I work in my school’s training clinic and have active therapy cases with a wide variety of diagnoses. I have patients who were easy to diagnose and patients where it took several months to decide what the most accurate label was. Like many mental health professionals, I have also had my own struggles with my mental health which I am not going to disclose today. But I have been in out of my own therapy since I was a teenager. In short, while I am still a trainee and still operate under the license of a supervising clinician, I know what I’m talking about.

Okay, let’s begin. The rest is under the cut:

Keep reading

#azula #azula meta #atla #avatar the last airbender #ableism for ts #mentions of mental illness #very good post op #this is a very educated perspective on a number of frustrations of mine with how people approach mental health labels #thanks for writing it

pallpokipoki

Transfems are trying to disempower afabs not so that amabs and afabs have equal group powers in queer/progressive/leftist contexts, so that there is no longer domination by any agab, but they are specifically trying to establish amab domination and therefore subjugate afabs because they fear that if afabs are not under amab control they will almost inevitably reconstitute themselves as a terf political force, and therefore reproduce transfem oppression.

The subjugation of afabs to amabs is therefore seen as a way of minimizing the risk of the terf threat, a way to keeping it under control.

You have to get it into your head that transfems see afabs, whether cis, trans or non-binary, as a terf threat.

lisafication

People uninterested in the unending internecine infighting that characterises parts of Tumblr may want to skip this post. I'm poking at another couple of essay concepts (not Coffin, I don't think I've really got enough information to usefully speculate on the dev update information yet, maybe with the next one), so those might be along soon. As a post, this is mostly the aforementioned internecine infighting with a brief aside on feminism attached. In addition, it was drafted in one take directly into this reply box, unlike my usual long posts. If that doesn't interest you, that's why I put the cut here.

I am, as a rule, leery of 'calling out' specific people due to the nature of social media, but if you put something out there on a platform like Tumblr, you are implicitly granting other people the right to respond and I'm in a foul enough mood to exercise it. Make no mistake, for all this post pretends at progressivism, it is absolutely not by any means. It's just appropriating language in a manner that is becoming far too common in online circles. No, rather than anything 'progressive' this is quite literally trans-exclusionary radical feminism cloaking itself in socially progressive language using a bit of rhetoric to make it harder to accuse them of that without risking backlash. Thankfully, if I were concerned about such a thing, I simply wouldn't post at all. Not the colloquial sense that everyone uses to describe 'transphobes that don't hate gay people' either — don't get me wrong, this guy is absolutely a transphobe — but the real thing given a lick of paint. How about I do a quick word replace here, without that coat of paint? Altered words are in bold. "Biological males are trying to disempower biological females not so that biological males and biological females have equal group powers in [choose your context], so that there is no longer domination by any sex, but they are specifically trying to establish male domination and therefore subjugate women" Well, imagine that. Really, my main surprise here is that the words 'female socialisation' aren't mentioned in the post. Then again, given the type of gender essentialism on display, perhaps I shouldn't be. We’ll circle back around to this later though, to establish some context I'm going to give a brief overview of feminism, a few different types and what makes this specifically Actual TERFism. As this is brief, it will not be entirely precise, but it'll do. (I have some self-interest here, as a trans-inclusive radical feminist myself I would prefer the people using 'radfem' as a shorthand for 'transphobe' stopped). Feminism as a basic premise is 'believing in the existence of gender-based oppression' and 'believing it is something that should be righted'. That's all. Most 'not real' feminists that people try to disclaim are, unfortunately, real feminists. It's not a hard bar to reach. Now, the difference between various stances is on where that oppression comes from and, following from that, what the most appropriate remedies are. Liberal, or 'mainstream', feminism believes that discrimination comes from the halls of power — governmental bodies, laws, courts etc. — and seeks to remedy gender oppression using political and legal reform. Marxist feminism, on the other hand, believes that women's liberation will come from the dismantling of the capitalist system — it is those systems that lead to gender-based oppression. Radical feminism, on the other hand, believes almost the opposite to Marxist feminism — rather than capitalism leading to the patriarchy, it believes that the patriarchy leads to capitalism and exploitation. It is the original sin, so to speak, the most fundamental form of oppression from which all others stem. Now, radical feminism is not specifically trans-exclusionary, as I mentioned above. Indeed, much of early radical feminism was, if not strictly trans-inclusive due to it not really being in the discussion at the time, at least trans-friendly in interpretation and goals. As an example, I'll quote The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone (1970):

The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.

Trans-exclusionary radical feminism's roots have quite a long history, in large part growing out of the SWERF movement in the feminist sex wars. Indeed, a number of modern TERF luminaries made their bones, so to speak, as part of the anti-pornography feminist movement. I would like to go into more detail here, but frankly I'm not qualified nor inclined to do the reading for this post. TERFism can be defined as a form of radical feminism that holds to either strict gender essentialism or the idea of a 'universal female experience', usually characterised by an insistence on the centralisation of biological difference or the centralisation of 'growing up female'. If that seems familiar, well, to finally circle back around to this godawful post and the discourse it sprang from...

The reason I made the word replacements I did is that 'AFAB' and 'AMAB' are literally just the modern way to say 'biologically female' and 'biologically male'. That's what even progressives used to do prior to the language being appropriated by transphobes and more widespread knowledge of intersex folks. If you're using these terms as identity markers in an argument similar to the above you are erasing people's choice of gender — including your own — in favour of the supremacy of biological sex in order to support a radical feminist position that "AFABs" (remember, this just means "biological women" when used as an identity) must have solidarity with each other against "AMABs" (which is, of course, 'biological males' in this context). This post is taking a radical feminist stance, that of the primacy of the patriarchy, and combining it with the primacy of biological sex as an identity marker. Which is to say, trans-exclusionary radical feminism. So whenever you see someone talking about AFABs or AMABs, try substituting in 'biological female' and 'biological male' for those words, to find out what they're really saying.

Or, to put this entire post in the way I would have if I were smarter and made better use of my time: When's your detransition scheduled, OP?

#using progressive language to mask social conservatism and bigotry is my least favourite part of modern discourse #and there's some stiff competition there let me tell you #transphobia #trans exclusionary radical feminism #transgender #transmisogyny #unlike prior long posts this was entirely written in one take in the tumblr editor #so it's going to be significantly less polished than usual #to be clear basically everything here is simplified it's all very messy in reality #but it doesn't change that OP is full of shit

for the love of god if anyone reading this ever ends up in a position where they're running a social media site never try Posting Through It as a PR stratagem to address controversy

#someone confiscate the man's login keys #content moderation #photomatt #come on man hand off your account to your PR team

I'm very excited to read your takes on patriarchy influencing their relationship (I'm going to dig through your posts to see if you've already addressed it), but would you please share your thoughts on the difference between "Andy" and "Andrew"? You're an incredible thinker and I absolutely loved the Very Normal Analysis essay.

Fair warning this is off the top of my head and will be lacking my usual justification but my thoughts are...

I think the precise differences are kind of unclear — Andy is described as 'spineless' but it's not really well communicated as to what he even means by that. We can speculate, but that's all.

I don't actually think that matters though, because the important thing is that 'Andy' is who he wants to leave behind and 'Andrew' is who he wants to be. We see two outcomes here, one for Burial and one for Decay.

In Decay, Andrew has bought into his own hype, he is a self-hating guy who's going to try and kill the sister he views as responsible one day.

In Burial, he's much more comfortable with himself and just, generally, a more pleasant guy. But they're both Andrew, right? Just different forms of him. This is going to get into quite speculative territory but...

I would say the big difference there is that in Decay, neither him nor Ashley are really putting Andy away, they're still reading their relationship as being like 'Andy and Leyley's', where the bossy little sister pushes around the doormat elder brother.

In Burial? He's more comfortable with himself and open to reinterpreting his and Ashley's relationship (to put it delicately), he's... well, buried Andy, instead of dragging his decaying corpse around.

That's my take right now anyway, I might have a different one next month!

#tcoaal #the coffin of andy and leyley #not the most sober posting

I love your, and some others’, analyses on TCoAaL. Now, about a week or 2 ago, I got the thought in my head that maybe Ashley’s portrayal could qualify her as, if not a manic pixie dream girl, a darker variant: a manic pixie nightmare girl. At least based on the info in the MPDG article on TVTropes. The neuroses and possible personality disorders wouldn’t be negated, of course. Could I have been onto something? Might I have been cooking, or was I just burning a cup of water?

TV Tropes is a viewer-oriented classification of devices or cliches, so the answer is that if you think you saw something, you did.

The manic pixie dream girl trope is an observation of a particular aesthetic implementation of what I will begrudgingly call 'the Call to Adventure' even if I think the idea of the monomyth is broadly full of shit. It's a (usually) flat (as in, static, no character arc) character type that acts as a force for change upon the protagonist and (usually male) his situation.

Given that, what you're looking for is... If you view Ashley as the force for change upon an Andrew-centred narrative and follow the thought all the way through, what does that have the story say? That's more or less how I'd apply the lens, anyway.

I don't generally like TV Tropes for analysis myself because it misuses academic terminology I will die mad about this orients itself from a generic crowd-sourced 'viewer' perspective which can be informative to read about but I don't generally find super useful to apply critically.

#I don't have a huge amount of respect for most of tv tropes critically #some of the articles had someone who knew what they were talking about write them #others... less so #it's a pretty good site for synopses but I wouldn't use it for media critique unless you're making very specific arguments #and even then you need to keep in mind it's a bizarre lens that doesn't make much sense from most critical perspectives #disclaimer: written while intoxicated

Hey, did you notice that Ashley looked like she's tearing up when she brings up ____ death during their fight in episode 1? She looked like she's on her limit too there.

Ashley's a very expressive person yeah — she has a great deal more expression sprites than Andrew, just to begin with, and her emotions are... generally written all over her face. I don't personally think this is a read of Nina's death having affected her greatly but I think it's a plausible indicator that she's, well, not even really in control of herself in this scene.

#asks #tcoaal

Pleaseeeeee analyze tocoal and Andrew and Ashley more. I think you really gotta hit hard on the hammer that only Andrew can save Ashley. In the sense that in every single possible route Ashley is obviously going to die. Other than one thing and one thing ALONE.

A) Andrew stops pretending to be like “Andy” IN VERY CRUCIAL MOMENTS.

option A) Andrew fully buries Andy and also stops blaming Ashley

option B) Andrew doesn’t pretend to be scared when he has to shoot the hit man. Hes levelheaded and calm as fuck for everything, he obviously would’ve only chose to shoot all the bullets if he was just Trying to act like he was scared. why else would someone empty an entire magazine when he doesn’t even blink at the thought of murdering three people?

In decay Andrew seemingly kills himself after killing Ashley bc he doesn’t want her to be alive if he can’t have her. OR Andrew gets killed by Ashley with the gun. which would ONLY have those bullets if he hasn’t felt the need to “be Andy” and empty the magazine. If he had chose to allow himself to be Andrew (his true self) the decay route branches off too Ashley killing him (her breakdown is so good but she doesn’t say she’s joining him.)

But yeah! Both cases only Andrew can save Ashley and make sure she’s alive but he has to be Andrew for all of his choices.

I think this is an interesting way to look at it! I would perhaps look at Andrew's use of the gun as a more basic expression of fear, in conjunction with his fear of consequences and blame, rather than specifically 'being Andy', but otherwise I think this is a fun and plausible perspective. I would put forth in response to this the idea that Andrew has killed Andy with his choice in Episode 2 on both routes, the potential idea that Burial vs. Decay is about whether they can bury him or insist on dragging his decaying corpse around. Similarly, perhaps Leyley has to die too, so they can be buried in a coffin together — and whether or not Ashley survives that is an open question.

I'm not entirely sold on that perspective myself, but I think it's worth considering in contrast.

#asks #tcoaal

do u have a picture of the part where it reveals Andrew has been faking his nightmares? i never saw that in the game and google is failing me

Yup, here you go!

#asks

Digging Graves for your Morals; Or, The Ethical Problem of Outlawry

Hello, yes, I am here again. This one is shorter, I swear (it’s under four thousand words, even). If this is the first post from me you’re seeing, this is a follow-up to my prior essay posted here on the game The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, although it should be able to mostly stand alone.

At the end of my last essay, I touched on both the game’s nearly uncompromising moral scepticism and relativity, but I didn’t really dig into it. I outlined that the game only textually frames actions as ‘morally bad’ in the context of a morality set by the society and the world that has treated them as no better than farm animals raised for the slaughter. Well, I have a lot to say on the topic of ethics on the topic of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, so buckle in, this one’s going to talk about the social contract, moral scepticism and everyone’s favourite topic: Mrs. Graves.

As usual, this was originally posted and formatted for on Sufficient Velocity and you can perhaps more easily read it there. Spoilers abound, and my content warning from last time still applies.

She’s not too hot on either ethics or her mother

The Meat of the Matter

Since a lot of this is optional or otherwise missable information, let’s review the premise the game gives us. If you’re already aware of all of this, I apologise, it won’t take long.

First off the bat, the quarantine at the start of the game was a hoax-driven money-making scheme of which you can pick up more-or-less all the relevant details of. This is entirely missable and by the time it’s possible to discover, our protagonists have better things to dwell on and have dialogue about, so I’ll give you a summary of what you can deduce from reading the notes and thinking about it.

The quarantine is an organ harvesting operation, as per some documents you can discover in the wardens’ office. They entrap the residents, test their blood types and starve to death those they deem surplus to requirements — alternatively the starvation itself could be their method of ‘preparing the harvest’, there’s evidence in both directions and it hardly matters — harvesting the organs of the others for sale. As our protagonists are AB-typed, the ‘universal recipient’ or ‘most selfish blood type’, they’re some of the first on the chopping block.

If you read through the newspapers and the documents in Mr. Washing Machine’s car, you can discover that ultimately ToxiSoda are responsible, and a similar thing is happening in a different city under the guise of a ‘chemical leak’. Should you further investigate matters, you will find mentions of the ‘man behind it all’, the doctor, or the Surgeon, as the fandom have been referring to him — you may recall Mrs. Graves mentioned someone similar! Yeah, he’s the guy who runs ToxiSoda, who are themselves partners with the water company that faked the parasite outbreak in the first place.

It’s all a life insurance scam, apparently

How much the details of the operation matter is something open to interpretation — it might just be something for players to figure out and Episode 3 will not cover the Surgeon at all, or he might play a major part; it's not particularly relevant to this essay. What matters is that it happened at all — indeed, it’s fairly easy to justify Ashley and Andrew in everything they did in Episode 1 (flashbacks aside), arguing that if they’d made any other decisions they’d have died — an argument that the victims dug their own graves, even if the Graves siblings put them in them. How correct that is is a matter of debate, but that you can make the argument at all matters, and we’ll be returning to this later. In my last essay (and again in the introduction here), I made an analogy to farm animals, raised without love and for slaughter. Let’s put a pin in the ‘for slaughter’ part for now and take a look at the ‘without love’ part.

That’s right, it’s time to meet the parents.

As Andrew notes, there are significantly more compelling reasons for you to say that

They Fuck You Up, Your Mum & Dad

They really do.

Our charming protagonists are, as with many things depicted in this game, an exaggerated, almost farcical example of this phenomenon — one that’s just grounded enough to still feel very real, just like the siblings themselves.

The late and lamentable Mrs. Graves is just the same: originally a teen mother, hopelessly out of depth with two difficult children — even if one was good at masking it — and an unreliable, emotionally unavailable (at least to their children) partner who can’t hold down a job, ends up foisting them off on each other and doing a Parental Negligence because she simply Cannot Cope. That’s the real part. The part where she gets paid off by an organ harvesting operation to leave them to die, that’s the borderline-farcical exaggeration that throws all the nooks and crannies of her character into sharp relief.

Mrs. Graves does not have a good relationship with either of her kids. Having self-admittedly fobbed the job of raising Ashley off on her son, to the degree that they did not even celebrate her birthday as kids, both of them hold differing degrees and types of resentment for her.

For Ashley, it’s hate — perhaps not quite so clear cut as that, as it’s her that calls for the eulogy and she shows some potential signs of discomfort while cleaning up her parents’ corpses, but by and large, it’s fairly simple and straightforward, as usual for Ashley. The sentiment is not exactly unreturned, either.

This brings Ashley’s heart great delight!

The most clear incident raising her from everyday ‘neglectful’ to ‘wow she wanted nothing to do with this kid’ is the optional ‘birthday cake’ scene, obtained by finding the present in Ashley’s first ‘transitory world’ dream, in which we see Ashley’s birthday and the founding of a lemon cupcake tradition between Leyley and Andy. She has received nothing from her family, notes that her ‘friends’ would say they were busy before she even told them the schedule and Andy takes her out to buy cupcakes with his pocket money.

This scene gets a callback in Andrew’s dream later. Just remember to Ask Nicely, rather than Kill Her.

Parents of the year, everyone.

So with Ashley it’s as straightforward and obvious as she herself is — she hates her mother, her mother hates her. With Andrew, as with Andrew himself, it’s a fair bit more complicated. His mother is a much more nuanced figure, who is believable in her role as an unfortunate teen parent who was trying her best. He has a degree of trust in her against, seemingly, his own good judgment In her conversation with Andrew, she acknowledges her fault in raising him and seemingly sincerely tries to offer him a ‘way out’, an olive branch.

I think many people have had relationships where they might say this

This scene in particular intrigues me, because she is acknowledging fault in a way that Andrew strictly avoids doing — and well, there’s nothing Andrew likes more than a good way to avoid acknowledging any fault of his own. With her dominant relationship over their father as a model for Andrew to draw comparisons to his own relationship with Ashley with, it’s no surprise that the narrative resonates with him to the point of ‘Accept’ being many people’s first completion.

Of course, that’s not all there is to it. There is a fascinating contrast with her later conversation with Ashley, where she — despite accusing Ashley of brainwashing Andrew — refers to Leyley and Andy as ‘two psychos’ and states that she always knew they were responsible for Nina’s death and that, implicitly, they owe her for not turning them in.

There's something about mother-daughter relationships here that I just do not have the time or reading to dig into, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, when Andrew interrogates her on her possession of their death certificates, she has… an interesting, plausible story about a life insurance scam and claims that she really did think they died in the fire, implicitly denying the claim that she sold them. It’s entirely possible that she’s describing the details of the ‘scam’ correctly — you can even buy that she genuinely does care for Andrew in some way, if not Ashley, but her claim about being an honest, grieving parent shocked at their deaths… doesn’t add up?

This is a very normal reaction to your supposedly dead children showing up in your house.

As Andrew himself notes after hearing her story, she’s full of shit. This gets into speculation, because there are a few ways to read this, but the most plausible ‘gist’ is that she and her partner were paid off in money and jobs to not raise a fuss — the surgeon she mentioned is almost certainly the founder of ToxiSoda, remember?

The overwhelming difference in presentation between how she speaks to Andrew and Ashley invites investigation — and when Andrew turns down her offer and tells her he isn’t interested in her offer in Decline, her reaction isn’t… despair, it’s shock — and well, there’s a good reason for that.

Why do you think she did it in the first place?

This is the happiest we see her

Well — it’s so she can finally fit into society. That white picket fence, that idyllic 1950s life — hell you can call it the American Dream. She wants that, or as close to it as she can get — the working-class teen mother, living in poverty, aspiring to the middle-class. It’s a very common, very real and very grounded motivation.

And to that end, she effectively sold off her children. It’s no wonder she can’t fathom why Andrew wouldn’t choose the same.

That’s the part that makes you think — just like the deaths in Episode 1, well- maybe the siblings are justified here, too. It’s a weaker argument, but it’s still one you can make under many common moral paradigms today — what goes around comes around, all that jazz. Just look at how awful she was to Ashley.

She’s finally found what she’s been striving for.

Here’s the thing, here’s the thing though — what, reasonably, could she have done? Andrew and Ashley briefly highlight this in conversation about Ashley’s ‘friends’ in Episode 1 — was she supposed to fight gunmen to try and break them out? Throw food to the balcony from four stories?

Moreover, as she herself says to Andrew… would anyone really have been able to do better than her in her position? She was seventeen when Ashley was born, living in poverty with a partner who couldn’t even remember Andrew’s name when he was a kid. Anyone would have had difficulty, let alone with these kids.

Her evils are — they’re not any deliberate action, but rather… prompted inaction. She didn’t have the emotional energy, resources or plain capability to properly parent her children, she didn’t have any solutions to their murder of Nina in a state so blatantly hostile to its underclass, she didn’t have a way to connect with Ashley and she took the money rather than fight a futile and likely suicidal battle against a corporation and its armed goons in a dystopian setting.

Ashley, notably, does not deny this.

Her sin is the one we’re all, I think, guilty of — that of not trying hard enough, that of inaction in the face of difficult tasks, of not standing up on principle because it’s just too much that day and you don’t have the spoons, you’ll do it tomorrow (no you won’t). It’s a petty, everyday kind of evil — that of not doing enough.

Is that enough to condemn her? Certainly, there’s a pretty manipulative read of her that likely has some truth to it — in the locked door in Ashley’s dream in ‘Decay’ you can discover that she has a ‘not-hatched’ tar soul — but consider that lens — the game won’t make up your mind for you, so you’ll need to choose that for yourself.

The dad is interesting in terms of negative space — but he’s mostly important in that he doesn’t matter, so I decided to not fit him in here. He has art, though — just no sprite, because, well, he’s never mattered to either sibling.

The Contract We Call Society

Right, it’s time to get a little bit Theoretical in here. Not much, but a little. Social contract theory is a complex topic with a lot of nuance, much of which I will be eliding in the name of not writing a twenty thousand word paper on semiotics, law, and anthropology, but the short analogy is… the idea that as long as you play by society’s rules, as long as you are a good citizen, a good person, the state, or the community, will take care of you.

In a number of ways, the harshest penalty levied by many historical states and legal codes was not death, but rather the criminal status of outlawry, a practice that’s cropped up a number of times in history — the practice of no longer being protected by the law. This meant one could be killed or worse with impunity — you were no longer protected by mob justice and, while overexaggerated as a term of reference, certain texts from Medieval England refer to outlaws as bearing a wolfshead, ‘for the wolf is a beast hated by all folk’. Never minding that wolves are actually delightful, this was a time when wolves were actively hunted and sold by people — and the same was intended to happen to outlaws. They were ‘fair targets’ as far as society was concerned, no longer to be treated as your fellow citizens.

This was the gravest punishment on the books, for most of these legal codes — something saved for those who had broken the social contract so completely that there could be no turning back (civil outlawry is… a bit different, that’s not the topic here). Among others, a modern critique of the concept is that it offers no incentive for improvement, no incentive to change or to cease harming society — if an outlaw has none of the social contract’s protections, what reason do they have to obey… any of the social contract? If that seems familiar, well, let me ask you this:

What if the state or community fails its end first? What responsibility does the innocent outlaw have to that contract?

It’s an interesting phrasing, that the world is better off.

It’s time to talk about the incest, and part of why it’s there. The cannibalism too, but that’s less impactful here. If you’ve seen me elsewhere, you might have seen me say that the incest is a load-bearing narrative pillar — in large part due to it being a critical facet of the siblings’ relationship, but in another large part due to it being an equally critical part of how the game uses taboo.

A taboo is in this context something that is considered repulsive and to be avoided by society. It’s a more complex term than that — you can also use it for certain sacred actions or utterances that are only permitted to certain people, for example — but that’s what it is here. Swearing, premarital sex, BDSM and murder are, approximately from weak to strong, some example taboos held in modern Anglospheric society.

Strong taboos are a staple of horror — they shock, they disgust, they draw people’s attention and it’s that last one that’s critical here. Incest is a very strong taboo — while I am absolutely not segueing into its historical context, the very well-established Westermarck effect gives it a certain timelessness and immunity to desensitisation that most other taboos don’t have — murder, to contrast, is a taboo we’re largely desensitised to in modern media and works of modern media have to put in actual work to make a murder seem horrifying — through atmosphere, cinematography, evocative prose etc.

And this is important because the use of taboo I’m covering in this essay is that the incest is used to invite judgment — it is so ingrained as a ‘wrong thing’ in people’s brains almost regardless of background that it forces the player to engage with the work morally. And that’s where the fun starts.

I’ve mentioned before, very briefly, about the juxtaposition of tone between the Burial & Decay endings, contrasting with the very monstrous difference in morality. Burial is remarkably light-hearted — they play around with the drain blockage, they joke about their mother’s personality and this is further exaggerated on the Love path, where Andrew is much more comfortable with casual contact and the two make a game out of how far they can throw their parents’ skulls, the humour is directly contrasted against their abhorrent actions.

I’ll be real Ashley is far more merciful than I, I’m shuddering at the thought of that gunk in my hair

In comparison, Decay is… bleak. I’ve seen it being referred to as being ‘emotionally sandblasted’ and, yeah I think that’s fair — it’s uncomfortable, it’s heavy and it’s just not fun. And this is the route in which, if you chose Trust into Accept, Andrew has bought into the narrative that his mother’s offered — that he can fit just fine into society if he wasn’t stuck, if not for Ashley — the route that ‘fits’ most closely to the social contract, to Andrew feeling the guilt that we think he should and hating the monsters that they’ve become, as the social contract deems them. Given the pains the game takes to attach the player to the protagonists, this normative moral ending is very easily interpreted as the bad ending.

And well, isn’t it?

Thing is, as mentioned above, the social contract has never held up its end for them. The game takes careful pains to point out to a viewer that they’ve never had the life that society promises people, so why do its moral standards apply?

The game invites you to judge the characters, and in the same motion, asks you from what principles you judge them, making a pretty good guess in that, like most people who haven’t spent a large amount of time navel-gazing and reading some very boring books by very dusty old men, they come from the society around you.

Love even has Ashley express this sentiment directly after the incestuous dream — she asks you — well, Andrew, but this is also something for the player to mull over — why this is what’s engaged your morality or sense of revulsion, rather than the desecration, cannibalism or murder.

Andrew and Ashley are both very funny and very fascinating in this scene.

And that’s the framing that it casts all of its own moral judgement in — even the ‘tar-soul’ aspect is… well, it’s unclear what it even means. Mrs. Graves was a ‘not-hatched’ tar soul, after all. Other than that, it’s society and the world being better off without them, rather than any kind of assertion of objective morality. Due to the present of ‘soul colour’, we’ll presumably see the game make some moral statements in Episode 3, but as it stands?

It’s nearly completely morally sceptical, in and of itself — it’s not interested in moral assertions or education, it’s interested in making you question your own morals. Deconstructive (not that kind), rather than dialectic, to be mildly pretentious.

It uses taboo and shock to invite moral judgement, but then uses tone, charm and our instinct to look for the happiest end for our blorbos to get you to recognise that these are principles you yourself brought into the game, rather than any it’s handed you.

To summarise: you’ve brought these principles in from society, but what do the siblings, the protagonists, the villains to the world, owe society? Enough that they should follow them? It failed them first, after all.

Closing Thoughts

This one is a bit less energetic than the last, tragically — my sleeping schedule is the stuff of nightmares recently, I love windy weather. Wait, no the opposite. Huge thank you to everyone who commented on the last one, you are the wind beneath my wings and the main reason I managed to get this out this week.

This essay is a bit more interpretative than my last one — certainly, there are alternative readings and I’ve been toying with the idea of deliberately taking a reading I don’t like very much and writing from that perspective as a demonstrative exercise recently — mostly that you shouldn’t just take my word for things!

Otherwise, if the last bit at the end seemed murky, I apologise — I did try to write a more detailed version, but firstly, it was three thousand words and secondly, I re-read it the next day and I could not understand what the fuck I was talking about. Personally, I blame Derrida — suffice to say that I strongly recommend playing through it with an eye towards considering culpability, morality and why you think certain characters are more or less forgivable than others, and for what deeds. See what you get out of it.

I managed to keep one particular thread open to wrap up with here — I try to keep speculation on Episode 3 content to a minimum in the main essays, but it should be fine here — you might have noticed that I refer to Episode 1 and Episode 2 being on something of a spectrum of justifiability, with the siblings’ actions being ‘more’ justifiable in Episode 1 and ‘less’ justifiable — but still justifiable if you try — in Episode 2.

To continue the thought of the happiest ending being the one in which they step the furthest away from common morality and to further jar the viewers’ sense of morality by contrasting societal morality and blorbo-oriented morality, Episode 3: Burial could continue this trend in having a major victim be someone who, well, has done nothing wrong and isn’t even guilty of bystander syndrome.

I wonder if there’s any good candidates, someone who’s sweet, harmless and will indisputably be an innocent victim…

…I’m sure she’ll be fine

#the coffin of andy and leyley #tcoaal #analysis #essay #ashley graves #andrew graves #mrs graves #nnnnot sure what the next topic will be #might do a deranged take on purpose #this one and the last one have been very grounded #I'll get to my asks tomorrow #probably #I've been busy sorry

double--blind

(SPOILERS) Ashley, self-esteem, and starvation

So, I adore Ashley. She's this intensely toxic, vicious, cruel, manipulative girl, and her psychology gives me hella brainworms. Andrew's not the only one whose head I wanna crack open and root around lol. She's thrown away the world just to keep her brother by her side, and she'll continue to do worse and worse for the same reason. She's pretty awful! I've been thinking about why, though. How did things get so bad? How did her soul get so dark?

We don't know everything (I'm waiting for those new eps patiently aND CLAWING AT THE WALLS AND FROTHING AT THE MOUTH but whatevs y'know whatevs I'm normal. I'm fine), yet what information we have been given is bumping around my brain like a DVD screensaver on hyperdrive

It's clear from the start that the roots of Ashley's issues lie in her horrible, neglectful upbringing, but it's hinted that even those outside of her family felt the same abt her. I'm lowkey even betting we'll learn later on that she was ostracized by her peers somehow. However, what's most disconcerting, I believe, is how little she was when the results of this alienation are first made apparent to us (bc kids aren't dumb; they notice this stuff oftentimes instinctively, impossibly young, before they even know what it means to be hated), and how devastating the consequences were.

(There's something decidedly childish abt her dream sequence in the "questionable" route—filled with crayon scribbles and rabbit plushies, the metaphors simplistic yet profound—which really hammers in how these sentiments are things that have made a home in her since childhood. Formative subconscious truths.)

Growing up unloved and noticeably unwanted by virtually everyone around her likely left her with a gaping hole in her heart that she'd spend the rest of her life trying to fill. She'd make friends, but she'd always worry that they'd leave her, that they'd betray her, nothing tangible or weighted enough in their connection to trust in its persistence. Why should she expect otherwise? Not even being bound by familial ties ensures affection if her parents are any indication.

Every lesson she'd ever learned had always taught her this: you are easy to abandon. You cannot love and be loved by virtue of your own worth.

You have to rip their affection from their clenched hands if you want it so bad.

#yes exactly #we share the same breed of brainworms I see #I didn't get to dig into this in my essay quite as much as I would have liked but Ashley's mentality is so... childlike #it's almost simple and straightforwardly illustrated for you in crayon and plushies #whereas you have to really dig and dig to see what andrew's about #and he's the one that's so insistent on growing up and no longer being 'andy'#but does he even know who andrew is without andy #there's some kind of metaphor for adulthood in there #if you squint #the coffin of andy and leyley #analysis

lisafication

This post is uh, extremely normal I swear

So hello yes I am absolutely On My Bullshit regarding my new favourite game.

That’s right, it’s the cannibal incest game, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. And I’m here to shove five thousand words of pretentious analysis down your throat because, and I do not exaggerate, I think it is one of, if not the best written game I have ever played. And I have played a lot of games, including Baldur’s Gate 3, Final Fantasy XIV and Undertale, to name a few narrative luminaries to come to mind.

That wordcount is not an exaggeration. My brainworms are extremely powerful and now you can share them with me as I walk you through my insane skyscraper of inference-driven analysis.

Or you can click away. I really wouldn’t blame you, it’s quite a lot.

Content Warnings: …Yes?

(To drop the bit for a moment, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley covers extremely disturbing material and challenges you to examine aspects of living in this world that many have taken for granted all their life, it is not a comfortable game, this will cover similar topics and will often echo the game’s unremitting scepticism on basic principles of society and humanity and you should look after yourself first. My Content Warning is framed as a joke, but it’s also quite real in that the game is designed to make you uncomfortable and there’s no shame in that not being for you.)

This was originally posted on and formatted for Sufficient Velocity, and you can probably more easily read and discuss it with me here.

With that said, let’s dig in. I have had to split this into multiple posts because tumblr will only allow so many images.

She’s excited, are you?

It’s All About Ashley

It really is, isn’t it? I mean, for approximately eighty percent of the total game as currently released and the entirety of Episode 1, you’re in control of Ashley, just as she’s in control of her and Andrew’s relationship for 80% of the game, up until the various ending sequences where it begins to slip. The only other characters who really matter at all in and of themselves are Andrew and her mother — and the former is under her thumb, and she eats the latter. It’s all about Ashley. Even her obsession with Andrew is, ultimately, about Ashley.

But who is Ashley? What is Ashley? Why is Ashley, even? Let’s take a look.

Ashley as presented to us in Episode 1 is very straightforward, so let’s list off the traits we’re given — she is malicious, she is fearless, she lacks empathy, she doesn’t have anything resembling a conscience, she demands Andrew belong to her and her alone, she has him at her beck and call.

In Episode 2, we’re ostensibly shown how she has him at her beck and call— she leverages the threat of reporting Nina’s death over him and had him swear to be with her forever. We’re shown that even as a child she was “just, like that” — but as a child, she hadn’t learnt to live with it yet, to laugh at the farce of it all.

Yeah, exactly like that!

And she does this throughout Episode 1 — The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is a remarkably silly game much of the time, finding moments of absurdity and levity against a backdrop blacker than pitch — and most of the time, your internal narration is coming from Ashley and the jokes will not-infrequently come at her own expense.

She will later get negged by her human sacrifice for her poor ritual circle drawing

Her reaction to being told that her soul is as dark and viscous as tar is “You guess you already knew that” — it’s confirmation to her, not new information. Ashley knows who she is. But who taught her this? There’s layers to this, nothing in this game is as simple and straightforward as it appears at first sight, which is why I’ve been obsessing over it for days.

While it’s common in fiction, the truth of the matter is, most ‘bad people’ really do think they’re good people. But Ashley has never once thought of herself as a good person — or perhaps better put as a person worthy of love — as we learn across Episodes 1 & 2, with our flashbacks to Andy and Leyley and the VERY VERY QUIET!!!

I really wish I had space in this essay to talk about this, but I’d like to touch on these being traits usually more easily forgiven in young boys than young girls at some point.

If she removes all other options, only then can she expect him to like her.

This is something that is echoed in the modern day — her seeming self-assurance is easily shaken and she reaches out to the world — usually Andrew — to affirm and validate her, soothing her insecurities, using any tool she deems necessary. Even when her life is on the line when Andrew has her by the throat at the climax of Episode 1, the only ‘compelling reason’ she can give Andrew to not kill her is her ability to soothe his nightmares. When he tells her there are sleeping pills for that…

Most people would have a bit more to argue for their existence.

While she, unlike Andrew, acknowledges having had friends before the quarantine… you know she’s got a point that they didn’t even bother to answer her calls, that was clearly not something the state was interfering with given Andrew’s calls with his mother and his girlfriend, and given her general demeanour it’s not hard to imagine that… they weren’t ever very close. When we see her and Nina talk in the infamous ‘box scene’, it’s clear that Nina doesn’t like her very much, despite Andrew’s assessment of Nina as being one of Ashley’s friends.

We see further support for her general lack of companionship in her dream sequence in the Burial route — Leyley and Leyley Alone. No matter what you do, you can’t place the pink plushy at the family table, the flowers won’t bloom if you give the Julia and Nina plushies her own as a companion instead of Andrew’s — and if you’re bold enough to go for the ‘incest route’, in the ‘Love’ room you see that no one ever looks happy to be with her in the childlike depictions of her history, nor is she happy in turn, save for when she’s with Andrew. In a bit of heavy-handed metaphor, the player then overwrites all of these tense, upset, hard moments with Andrew, having him fill in for everyone else in life — and happy with her.

Once Upon A Lousy Life…

THE END

And that’s why she needs him to affirm her, because no one else ever has and no one else ever will. It’s even included in their comic beats — when the siblings are getting along well, they’ll often play a game where Andrew dramatically overpraises Ashley while she demands more; it’s a comedic bit but I mean — it really does matter to her!

For the record, she opened a door. She gets a little heart in a speech bubble after this exchange.

We have a great example of this dynamic, that of insecurity and affirmation, in Episode 1, after Andrew has killed for her, butchered for her, his girlfriend broke up with her, he’s seemingly thrown his entire life away for her… she’s still insecure over her relationship with him, she’s uncertain of her control and she needs him to reaffirm it for her.

This is her victory, surely?

Andrew affirms her once, with his usual dead-eyed look.

But she's still not so sure.

He actively reaches out to affirm her again with cheer.

Look how happy she is!

While it’s most obvious and clear cut here, it’s hardly the only case. Let’s look back to the aftermath of Andy and Leyley and the VERY VERY QUIET!!! (I’m not using the other name). Leyley is, after similarly extreme acts — he murdered a girl and hid her body for her — convinced Andy doesn’t like her and she needs this leverage to keep him around, to meet her basic needs for survival. Because that’s what this is — she receives no care of affection elsewhere, so she forces it out of the only source she sees available through the means she sees as necessary.

I really hope we see some of their earlier childhood in Episode 3

What exactly made her like this? Was it just neglect, or something more specific…

She needs this to be the case because otherwise she doesn’t believe he’d stay.

This pattern repeats throughout — Ashley’s insecurities are hit on and she reaches out to Andy to affirm that she is not alone, and she will use any and every tool to exploit her ostensible control over him and force him to be what she needs him to be — and as long as she has that, as long as she is everything to him and it’s not possible for him to leave, she’s happy. As long as she thinks he loves her in her very particular, very peculiar view of love, she’s content, come what may. As long as Andy and Leyley are together, they can take on the world.

Let’s talk about that view of love, because there’s always more layers to unpack here I’m only scratching the surface with this essay — Ashley consistently refers to anyone else Andrew may have befriended or spent time with as a whore, a slut, a bitch — highly gendered insults that bring to mind the idea that he’s cheating in some way. But it’s not even about sex — when Andrew mentions that their parents had friends, she accuses them of cheating on each other in the same way!

There’s a lot to unpack about Ashley’s view of femininity and the role the patriarchy plays in their relationship.

Any kind of emotional engagement, any kind of commitment, any kind of life outside of your significant other is, to Ashley, cheating. Because that’s what she needs from Andrew, a seeming complete and total commitment, secure in her place as the only thing in his life, because she cannot understand anyone picking her if they have a choice.

This insecurity she has in her relationship is what drives her to empower the trinket — he can’t leave her as long as she can protect him with prophetic dreams, after all. She needs every kind of leverage she can get because until she succeeds in being everything to him, in devouring him so completely she has him in her thrall mind, body and soul she can’t be sure of herself — hell, her dream sequence in Burial has you placing Andrew’s signature green plushy, ‘the best thing in the world’ in a cage far away from anything else.

Ultimately, it really is all about Ashley — even her seeming obsession with Andrew ultimately comes back to her own insecurities. If she is everything to ‘the best thing in the world’, some of that ‘best’ must surely reflect on her!

But that’s enough about the more normal, straightforward and understandable sibling.

That was not a joke.

Andrew’s Rank 100 Deception

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he did not exist.

Let me explain.

You might have noticed that in the previous section I often use language such as ‘ostensibly’ or ‘seemingly’ to describe Andy and Leyley’s relationship, and there’s a good reason for that. From the beginning of the game through to its end, Andrew is lying to you, the player, without ever falsely representing or misinforming you about events that occurred.

The common, or obvious ‘initial take’ on Andrew as presented in Episode 1 is fairly straightforward. The game primes you to think this way, it frames things and strings reveals just right so as to make it very easy to overlook the incongruities it introduces in Episode 2. He’s a victim. Plain and simple, Ashley is his abuser and he is her victim and would be fine, a normal albeit kinda depressed guy without her.

It really is not a difficult conclusion to draw

You can go all the way through the game, have him try to accept his mother’s olive branch and enter the Decay route as a method for him to finally actualise his desire to get out from Ashley’s thumb and it makes sense, it’s a reasonable way for the story to go, given his character.

You see him this way because the game primes you in Episode 1 to view their relationship like Andrew does — he’s lying. He’s lying to himself, he’s lying to Ashley and he’s so good at it — Deception Rank 100 — he even lies to you. Without misrepresenting a single event or otherwise misleading you directly, the game gets you to buy into his preferred self-perception. Nina? Ashley. Julia? Ashley. The murders they commit in the course of the game? Ashley, Ashley, Ashley, it’s not his fault he’s not to blame he’s just a doormat at the beck and call of his demonic sister.

But he wants to be there. From the very outset, the very first puzzle, that’s made clear. Does anyone else remember this exchange, from right at the beginning of the game?

Ashley wants to investigate the music!

Andrew disapproves…

…Or does he?!

Like. Listen. Okay. You do not frown when saying ‘Nope’ and then smile when saying that you’ll instead tag along if they do it if your heart is at all in the no. That’s not an objection, that’s using Ashley as his excuse. Especially if you immediately throw her the balcony key that she could not possibly have gotten from you by force (more on Andrew’s ability to use force later).

This is the very first time you control both characters together with Andrew following Ashley instead of off on his own, the first adventure, the first puzzle!

But put a pin in that for now, let’s talk about his initial framing in Episode 2 first. Episode 1 has set us up to, generally speaking, believe the superficial framing of the siblings as portrayed in its promotional art:

The question that we then ask, right at the heart of it is… why is he a doormat? We explore this in his dream sequence in Episode 2, which does make it clear that the boy’s not okay but— it’s real easy, given the priming from Episode 1 to make you think that he’s the one with the originally functional moral compass, to think that that him being fucked up is damage done to him by Nina’s death and being bound to Ashley for his entire life. She corrupted him.

But, well, is that the case?

You're primed to ignore this as manipulation (which it is) but the best manipulation has some truth to it.

Precisely two things spur Andrew to action in the entire game, consistently — they are the fear of consequences and Ashley. And the first incident of that fear, the very first time we’re shown his seeming moral compass as a kid — the first time it’s really hammered home that it’s a fear of consequences rather than any true moral qualms is after Nina’s death. And why does he fear consequences here?

……

The ‘natural’ read that many take away from this sequence, particularly those who have only played Decay, is that Ashley browbeat him into doing this against his will, using emotional blackmail to overwhelm his objections, and then used the event itself to bind him to her forever as her personal doormat.

In a strict sense, this is true. But this doesn’t match up with the details, something the game uses shock to encourage you to overlook. That outburst is before any kind of threat has been made, and absolutely nothing either of them say anything about it being morally bad until Ashley weaponises ‘you’re a bad person’ against Andrew — morality didn’t seem to enter his mind or the equation at all until Ashley brought it up. More than that, his greatest fear and driving motivation even prior to that is, as shown above, being taken away from Ashley.

She, of course, recognises this and uses it against him. But she never needed to, it didn’t change anything about Andrew’s attachment to her, it was there to address her own insecurities.

Just like to touch on how a lot of his affirmations are preceded by him confirming her insecurities.

I adore this phrasing

There’s a second prong to this as well, to the question of ‘who really calls the shots here’ because — Andrew can, at any stage, apply an ‘ultimate veto’ of physical violence. The game is very clear to the player that that is on the table — even when they were children, when Andy swears their blood oath, he briefly considers killing her — and take note of how he ultimately got a ‘winning’ condition out of her by not specifying there wouldn’t be others and she is forced to accept that, there. Even outside of their most serious confrontations, Ashley is portrayed as having to convince, manipulate or otherwise coerce Andrew into going along with her schemes — she really can’t make him do anything, she doesn’t have the supremacy in violence and, to a lesser extent, capability that would allow her to.

Andrew, you are like ten years old.

The truth of the matter is, Ashley can only make Andrew do anything because he lets her. I don’t mean in the sense that I’m saying abuse victims let their abusers emotionally abuse them, I mean in the sense that he is clearly considering his options on the table and choosing to discard those that could stop her, or bring an end to any of this. He needs her.

But it’s true that he hates her, too. He has to hate her, because if he doesn’t hate her, if he isn’t forced to have done this, that means… he’s responsible. And nothing, at the start of the story, is as important to Andrew as avoiding the consequences of his own actions, not even Ashley. By the midpoint, he loves her, he hates her, he can’t live without her, he wants to kill her — by the end… well, that depends if you’re on Decay or Burial, but more on that in a bit.

A great scene to study for this dynamic is the climax of Episode 1, when Andrew grabs Ashley by the throat and considers strangling her to death. She’s pushed him too far with hurtful words and assault, and he’s seemingly had enough.

It’s still framed as a question of risk, of consequences happening to him.

Like, this is not the usual behaviour of someone who’s been pushed past their breaking point.

He tells Ashley that he wants to kill her, because she’s just going to throw another fit and that’s a risk to him. She is… not framed as being able to fight back (she does have a gun here, and more on that in a later essay, maybe). He’s so calculated in how he approaches his use of violence here, which isn’t at all what you’d expect of someone about to commit a crime of passion… but it’s very easy to overlook because of the abuser/victim narrative that the player fits his behaviour into the narrative that the game primes them to accept, brushing incongruities under the carpet.

At the start of Episode 2, we get to control Andrew for the first time, and the first obvious holes in his cover start to show. Some of this is optional — you only learn that he’s been faking having nightmares in order to share a bed with Ashley if you choose to go back into the motel room and check the bed, for example — but not all of it.

----

lisafication

This sequence is the first time we get to see Andrew’s internal monologue and boy is it fascinating.

She’s his Ashley, but he refuses to be her Andy — we see this most clearly in the blood oath scene, where he manages to ‘have it both ways’ — he’ll be her best friend forever, but there’ll be others and — I think it is generous in the most to suggest that he isn’t aware of her obsession with him, given his uncanny accuracy in hitting her insecurities when he’s annoyed with her.

He just doesn’t care — he barely cares about anything. We see him break up with his girlfriend and his chief concern is, as usual… dodging blame. It’s Ashley’s fault, why is he the one being held responsible — he’s not actually upset he’s just annoyed he’s being blamed at something that’s Ashley’s fault. You know, just like everything else. I could have written this essay entirely about that confrontation, so forgive me for referring back to the Episode 1 climax — what makes him ‘snap’ is Ashley telling him that it’s his fault not hers.

Andrew having a very normal reaction to being told his sister has been conducting a harassment campaign on his girlfriend and she’s breaking up with him. Incidentally, did you ever notice that there’s no way he could have heard those voicemails you see in Episode 2?

And that’s the one thing he needs her for, the one thing he tells himself — it’s all her fault. His biggest fault is that he’s an extraordinary doormat.

But he doesn’t have to stay that way. There are two major branching routes to The Coffin of Andy and Leyley — Burial and Decay. Which you enter hinges on whether Andrew chooses to Accept or Decline his mother’s olive branch — you may also enter Decay by choosing not to trust Andrew alone with their parents. While not the topic of this essay, it is notable that Decay may be entered into by a choice by either sibling, but you require both to make a choice committing, in some way, to the other to enter Burial.

In Burial, Andrew accepts that actually, he wants to be here. He uses his cleaver to threaten his mother about talking that way about Ashley, he jokes around with the corpses of their parents with Ashley, he is much more upbeat and — for lack of a better word, free. He repeatedly affirms his commitment to her, and ceases to attempt to pass any kind of moral judgment on her.

In Decay, he tells his mother he wants to accept, but he can’t — he’s stuck. He really wants to be normal, he wants to fit himself into the same slot in society that she’s crowbarred herself into but — he can’t. Ashley’s made it impossible, and he’s come too far. It’s all her fault.

In Decay, Andrew hates Ashley. He is bitter, angry and suicidal in the aftermath of their parents’ murder and refuses to play around with her or even share a bed with her any more. He wants her dead and Ashley receives a vision of him killing her — something she can only avert with her gun, which is the topic of a hypothetical different essay.

Remember that chatter about double suicide back in Episode 1…?

Here’s the thing, here’s the thing. I said it was all about Ashley earlier and it is — we talked about how even Ashley’s obsession with Andrew ultimately was driven by her own self-perception and insecurities, which caused it to develop into the all-consuming codependency it is at the start of the game. In short, even Ashley’s obsession with Andrew is about Ashley.

And it’s the same for Andrew’s obsession with Ashley — at least, to begin with. He needs her to blame, he needs her to spur him to action, he needs her to validate his worldview and he needs her to belong to him. But, but, but-

In Episode 2, Andrew chooses whether to believe his own lies or not. In Decay, he commits himself to acting how he ‘should’ in his role, his love for Ashley becomes hate and he genuinely, truly, wants them both dead — Ashley is freaked out by the change in him, and when she asks him what he wants, he tells her he wants to lock her in the boot of his car and drive into the ocean.

On the other hand, in Burial he acknowledges that actually — he’s exactly where he wants to be. He doesn’t need her to validate him, he just wants her, he wants to make her happy and he wants to be with her — in the Love branch of Burial, this can obviously manifest in the infamous ‘incest route’.

But the one thing that stays the same across both is that even if he hates her, he can’t live without her, he needs her in a way that arguably, if she ever like, addressed her insecurities… she wouldn’t need him.

He wants to possess her, to have her belong to him completely, he needs her like he needs air which is similar yet contrasting with Ashley’s desire to occupy every possible facet of his life as exclusively hers to validate herself. He wants to own her completely, she wants to be everything to him. They’re not quite the same. And like, that’s a strong statement, but, keep in mind-

Andrew wants to fuck his sister.

Even if you don’t go Burial, even if you don’t take the ‘I know what I’m about’ option… this doesn’t change. We’ll assume that this is not Fire Emblem: Three Houses and that player choices do not retroactively alter character beats or retcon anything — at most, events may be recontextualised.

And uh, listen. I’m just going to let these screens speak for themselves for a bit.

Immediately following the above, he’s shoving it all to the back of his mind where it may fester with all the other thoughts he wished he’d never had. That’s more or less a quote.

Why is your hand there, Andrew?

Why are you asking your girlfriend to wear your sister’s hairstyle?

Which is, apparently, a common event.

Hm.

This is part of a dream.

I’ll be honest there is a lot and like, I encourage and invite you to go back over the game yourself if you find yourself disagreeing. I think the big clincher is that, given our premise that characterisation isn’t retroactively altered is… I’ll be honest Andrew, this is not what someone who is shocked and disgusted by the thought of sleeping with their sister looks like.

Mmhmm, so mortified.

Moreover for once — he needs Ashley to actually veto him. Usually, she needs to coerce him into things, she needs to get him to give her the okay, through whatever means she has available. In this? It’s the opposite — he’s begging her to say never because he knows that if she doesn’t he won’t be able to stop this future from coming true himself.

If you don’t believe me, I invite you to play the game for yourself — you can see so much more on a second playthrough than you did the first, and I think the game is actually quite heavy-handed with this, once you’re actually looking for this.

Given that, and given his pretty extreme reactions to Ashley’s very transactional attitude to sex — another thing I could talk about but I would prefer this stay below 40 pages — it feels that he needs Ashley to be his but he doesn’t want to be exclusively hers. At least, not in Decay, and perhaps not in Burial, either.

This is from Decay, and from a certain perspective, she’s not wrong.

If this rambling has sparked any neurons, I hope it’s this one:

Who’s really in control here? Who has agency, and when? I hope to hear your thoughts before the next time I get around to this. Until then…

Fin.

Closing Thoughts

I need to wrap this up because we are already over thirty pages long, but…

Wow, what a game, these two really are just, the Worst People Alive making each other worse as they circle the drain and Andrew is just, possibly one of the most fascinating characters I’ve ever seen, he’s so awful and there’s so many layers that I just, struggled to articulate or fit into this five thousand word long essay it could have been four times this long if I’d had the energy. Don’t get me wrong, Ashley is my favourite but as a good friend put it, I want to dissect Andrew in a lab.

I have so many thoughts on this game, it has activated my neurons like no game has before. I could talk about agency, culpability, gender roles, the impact that the game’s near-absolute moral scepticism has upon the player when you attempt to morally interrogate it and even more stuff, honestly. We’ll see how much feedback and how many responses I get because, ultimately, I write these to be seen. If I wanted to just develop my brainworms in peace, I’d stick to Discord. One thing that I really did need to touch on but this was just getting way too long so I’l leave it here — isn’t it interesting that the most cheerful ending, the most upbeat one is the most monstrous by our own standards? The siblings revel and find an enormous amount of humour in the murder and cannibalism of their parents, while we’re shown that the path that they’re on will lead to them ending up in bed together.

Meanwhile, Decay, where Andrew hates his sister and himself and wants them both dead as, honestly, most people would consider the ‘moral’ thing to do in his situation is… miserable. It’s bleak, it’s deeply uncomfortable and emotionally ravaging.

But- here’s that last thing. When the game tells you the siblings are bad it’s always in the context of society, or the world being better off without them. What do the siblings owe that society? They were raised without care or affection — the parents are another thing I wish I’d been able to cover here — and given the bare minimum to survive. If they’d acted as society wished and expected them to do in Episode 1, they’d have been left to die and used as literal meat in the organ trade.

The comparison to farm animals raised for slaughter seems obvious. (You heard it here first, the message of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is to eat vegetarian!)

And honestly, they’ve charmed me. If being fucked up little monsters is what makes them happy then, well.

Love that for them, really.

#the coffin of andy and leyley #tcoaal #I could have written so much more #essay #analysis #very long post

This post is uh, extremely normal I swear

So hello yes I am absolutely On My Bullshit regarding my new favourite game.

That wordcount is not an exaggeration. My brainworms are extremely powerful and now you can share them with me as I walk you through my insane skyscraper of inference-driven analysis.

Or you can click away. I really wouldn’t blame you, it’s quite a lot.

Content Warnings: …Yes?

This was originally posted on and formatted for Sufficient Velocity, and you can probably more easily read and discuss it with me here.

With that said, let’s dig in. I have had to split this into multiple posts because tumblr will only allow so many images. There will be spoilers for all endings.

She’s excited, are you?

It’s All About Ashley

But who is Ashley? What is Ashley? Why is Ashley, even? Let’s take a look.

Yeah, exactly like that!

She will later get negged by her human sacrifice for her poor ritual circle drawing

I really wish I had space in this essay to talk about this, but I’d like to touch on these being traits usually more easily forgiven in young boys than young girls at some point.

If she removes all other options, only then can she expect him to like her.

Most people would have a bit more to argue for their existence.

Once Upon A Lousy Life…

THE END

For the record, she opened a door. She gets a little heart in a speech bubble after this exchange.

This is her victory, surely?

Andrew affirms her once, with his usual dead-eyed look.

But she's still not so sure.

He actively reaches out to affirm her again with cheer.

Look how happy she is!

I really hope we see some of their earlier childhood in Episode 3

What exactly made her like this? Was it just neglect, or something more specific…

She needs this to be the case because otherwise she doesn’t believe he’d stay.

There’s a lot to unpack about Ashley’s view of femininity and the role the patriarchy plays in their relationship.

But that’s enough about the more normal, straightforward and understandable sibling.

That was not a joke.

Andrew’s Rank 100 Deception

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he did not exist.

Let me explain.

It really is not a difficult conclusion to draw

But he wants to be there. From the very outset, the very first puzzle, that’s made clear. Does anyone else remember this exchange, from right at the beginning of the game?

Ashley wants to investigate the music!

Andrew disapproves…

…Or does he?!

This is the very first time you control both characters together with Andrew following Ashley instead of off on his own, the first adventure, the first puzzle!

But, well, is that the case?

You're primed to ignore this as manipulation (which it is) but the best manipulation has some truth to it.

……

She, of course, recognises this and uses it against him. But she never needed to, it didn’t change anything about Andrew’s attachment to her, it was there to address her own insecurities.

Just like to touch on how a lot of his affirmations are preceded by him confirming her insecurities.

I adore this phrasing

Andrew, you are like ten years old.

It’s still framed as a question of risk, of consequences happening to him.

Like, this is not the usual behaviour of someone who’s been pushed past their breaking point.

----(See reblogs for the second half)

#the coffin of andy and leyley #tcoaal #andrew graves #ashley graves #spoilers #multipost

going absolutely insane thinking about the juxtaposition of the Decay and Burial endings of The Closet of Andy and Leyley — in particular Love, of the Burial endings — and how the most monstrous-by-standard-morals outcome is also by far the most upbeat

#tcooal #the closet of andy and leyley #among other things #the cannibal incest game is an unironic 10/10 and I'm not sure what to do with that #It's been days and I'm still thinking about it what an absolutely cracked narrative #poking at an essay on it that will hopefully see the light of day soon #wrote the most deranged three thousand words of my life trying to explain my experience with trying to morally interrogate it #and that will not see the light of day #but something saner than 'let us examine the space between structure and genesis' hopefully will

double--blind

(SPOILERS) breaking down how obsessed Andrew is w/his sister bc he's a repressed lil liar and I'm going insane

This post got longer than I intended it to

1. He claims they don't spend enough time apart from each other to even begin missing her so he doesn't even know if he would, but just earlier in the game he was apart from her for probs like 30 mins tops to investigates some cultists and guess what???? He was already missing her 😒

2. Says "I thought you grew out of this touchy-feely crap" when Ashley asks for a hug, but earlier when he was cooking dinner, he was the one with the inexplicable urge to "pull this broody bitch into [his] arms and force her to stay until she smiles" 😒

3. Piggy-backing off the last screenshot: WHAT OTHER THOUGHTS, ANDREW??? yOU WERE JUST THINKING ABT HUGGING HER. WHAT DO YOU EVEN MEAN. THESE ARE SIMPLY INNOCENT BROTHERLY THOUGHTS ARE THEY NOT????? 🤨🤨🤨

#tcoaal #the coffin of andy and leyley #big fan of your analysis posts #and it's inspiring an essay of my own #watch this space?

double--blind

(SPOILERS) Andrew and plausible deniability, OR: mfer doesn't wanna be held accountable for his actions

This has been churning in my head for a while (I am mentally ill 🥴), but a large part of the driving force behind Andy and his actions is his aversion to blame. He sorta shares this w/Ashley (she's got quite a few rants abt how things aren't her fault), but I believe Andrew takes it just a step further.

I've seen many say this before, but from the start of the game, you'll notice that even beyond normal moral quandaries, Andrew's first objection to any horrific action Ashley proposes is usually a variance of "what if we get caught?". He objects not bc her ideas are ethically repugnant, but bc they could be found out as having done them, and he knows rationally that others know they're bad. This goes as far back as childhood with the Nina incident. He fears punishment and the threat of prison more than he apparently worries about what his crimes might mean for him as a person or what they might mean for the people that might be affected by them (save him and Ashley). This doesn't mean he doesn't feel guilt or have nightmares abt them, but they're not his first priority. Trouble's a pain to deal with, and the dude's low-energy.

In fact, most of his guilt seems largely self-centered. Like, no exaggeration: if it isn't about either him or Ashley (which is, in a way, lowkey also about him), then he couldn't really care less. Do you recall him ever expressing worry or remorse on Nina's behalf? Mourning her? We think Ashley's the one w/empathy issues, but Andrew's in the same boat imo. Self-preservation and self-interest is all that's keeping him seemingly amiable enough for polite society, bc for the most part, he really couldn't be bothered.

In his dreams, the victims of their murders are just bodies: interchangeable, holding no more meaning beyond the fact that they're dead. Any corpse's limb will do to replace the one Ashley cooked—never mind that they may be from different people—bc they're all the same to him. Even Julia, sitting in her dorm room surrounded by evidence of Ashley's harassment, gets no sympathy from Andrew. For the most part, he elects to ignore it all, and regards Julia herself with a detached sorta nostalgia tinged in no small part with apathy.

img txt: You'll never see her again. And the fact that it doesn't really bother you, bothers you.

(The only things of notable worth from her were the colored pencils on her desk, which he promptly takes from her to give to Leyley instead, and isn't that just some crazy symbolism right there?)

renthony

Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.

People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"

Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.

I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.

renthony

#this excludes writing pedo or incest.

If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it's allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn't like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:

No, actually, it doesn't exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, "oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it's morally okay now." The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.

Wes Craven's New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He's a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they're all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren't Freddy Krueger's fault.

Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, "oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!" The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.

Guillermo del Toro's film Crimson Peak didn't kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it's okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" isn't making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.

John Wick isn't making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death--the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!

Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you're into that sort of thing like I am.

Arcane didn't put grenade launchers in people's hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs--and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren't out there terrorizing New York City, because they're fantasy supervillains who aren't real and can't hurt you.

The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I'm not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn't gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.

It's all fiction.

None of it is real.

The characters are fake and do not exist.

Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.

renthony

[ID: a comment left by tumblr user msexcelfractal, which reads "Cool post OP, now do Birth of a Nation. End ID.]

Content warning: antiblackness, antisemitism, sinophobia, general discussion of bigotry and oppression

You really want to try and go there as if that's some kind of gotcha on the subject of dark fiction? Fine. Let's go there. I've got sources and free time.

Birth of a Nation is a horrific hate crime of a film. It is flagrantly racist and was connected to a surge in KKK membership. Nobody should watch that film for enjoyment. It's horrific. Nobody should be forced to watch it, either. You don't have to watch the film, and I don't recommend you do, unless you're actively involved in studying it for whatever reason. It's a bad, hateful movie.

I have not watched it in its entirety and I don't really ever intend to. There are Black scholars who have already broken it down and discussed it at length, and I don't feel I'm going to get anything out of the film that they haven't already covered. If I need to study Birth of a Nation in more depth for whatever reason, I'm going to defer to Black scholarship on the subject.

But if you tried to ban the film altogether? If you tried to erase it from existence? I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you. Banning Birth of a Nation does absolutely nothing to combat the racism that created it. It wouldn't stop racists from making racist art. It wouldn't erase the damage done by the film. It wouldn't go back in time and make it retroactively never made.

You know what banning it would do, though? It would strip film scholars of the ability to discuss it. It would prohibit people from talking about exactly why it was bad. It would inhibit honest conversations about what the film was and who it affected.

You know what you do with horrific bigoted art like Birth of a Nation? You have content warnings, like the one I put at the beginning of this reply. You don't spring it on people who don't want to discuss it. You don't put it on for people to watch without warning. You don't tell everyone you know to go and watch it and give it money.

You do things like what Warner Brothers did with their Tom and Jerry disclaimer:

“These animated shorts are products of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”

You damn sure don't erase it from history and pretend that ignoring it will solve bigotry. Censorship is not the answer, because censorship is always enforced harder on marginalized artists. You ban racism in film, you ban films by Black artists who are exploring the topic from their own perspective.

When the Hays Code banned "offense to other nations," you know what happened? It didn't stop racism in film, that's for damn sure. It instead gave bigoted censors a perfectly legal and easy way to shut down art by marginalized people, which they did gladly.

The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany resulted in the Reichsfilmkammer demanding the removal of all Jewish workers from Hollywood's European locations. American films began receiving heavy censorship and bans in Germany, and so American studios complied with the Reichsfilmkammer's demands in order to avoid legal trouble in Germany.

Despite the Nazi party's outright hostility toward Hollywood, the MPPDA office discouraged any negative depiction of Germany or the Nazi party. Germany had been such a huge market for American cinema that the Reichsfilmkammer's censorship codes for German films began impacting American-made cinema. Jewish representation in cinema all but disappeared overnight. Joseph Breen, the head of the censor board, was an open antisemite, going on open tirades against Jewish people. His censorship policies were flagrantly bigoted and only served to reinforce that bigotry on a systemic level.

In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe tried and failed to make an anti-Hitler film titled "The Mad Dog of Europe." The Hays Code was used to deny the film's production. On July 17, 1933, Will Hays himself ordered the filmmakers to cease and desist, all in the name of "not offending Germany."

Said Joseph Breen, "It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.”

Variety said about the subject, “American attitude on the matter is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market no matter what the inconvenience of personnel shifts."

Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actress, lost out on a leading role in the film "The Good Earth," due to the Code's explicit ban on interracial relationships. The leading man had already been cast with a white man wearing yellowface, meaning that Wong was unable to be cast as the leading lady and love interest, even though the characters were supposed to both be Chinese. The role instead went to a German-American actress wearing yellowface, who went on to win an Oscar for the role.

Censorship doesn't help anyone. Censorship does not protect anyone. Censorship does not prevent bigotry, and in fact only serves to reinforce it.

Anyone who read this far and learned something: being an independent media censorship researcher doesn't exactly pay the bills, so check out my Ko-Fi or Patreon if you learned something and feel generous.

My main sources for this post are:

Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, by Thomas Doherty

The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, by Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons

The Encyclopedia of Censorship, by Jonathon Green & Nicholas J. Karolides

Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code - Stephen Vaughn

Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mark A. Vieira

Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934), When Sin Ruled the Movies, by Mark A. Vieira

Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration, by Thomas Doherty

And since you made me talk about Birth of a fucking Nation, here are some additional resources for people who are actually interested in Black media history:

Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, by Nicholas Sammond

Archival Rediscovery and the Production of History: Solving the Mystery of Something Good - Negro Kiss (1898), by Allyson Nadia Field

Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque, by Lawrence E. Mintz

The Original Blues: The Emergence of the blues in African American Vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff

Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era, by Brenda Dixon Gottschild

Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen

Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott

The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville, by Prof. Kathleen B. Casey

Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. And the Long Civil Rights Era, by Matthew Frye Jacobson

Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture, by John Strausbaugh

A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary, by Geoffrey Jacques

Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers by Donald Bogle

The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film, and Television, by Tim Brooks

Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser

America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin

White: Essays on Race and culture, by Richard Dyer

Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara

Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, by Wil Haygood

Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, by Ed Guerrero

Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, by Donald Bogle

White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side, by James Snead

Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, by Nancy Wang Yuen

The Hollywood Jim Crow: the Racial Politics of the Movie Industry, by Maryann Erigha

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