okay.... so I'm six episodes into Malevolent and I'm losing my mind about the meta framing of it all. metatextually INSANE work is happening here
to start off with, our protagonist, Arthur is blind. and the only things he sees are what is narrated to him by the entity in his head. Which, when you're listening to audio fiction, is your exoerience. You only know what you're being told. So it's soooo easy to Be Arthur as a listener!
And then, additionally, because Arthur has an entity inside his head, both Arthur and the Friend In Head will sometimes refer to themselves separately and sometimes refer to the two of them as we or us. Our body, our eyes, etc. So like, again, as the listener—we are doing this, our life is in danger, etc.
The separation between protagonist and listener is basically as small as it can be in an audio format!
And then, there is the little interlude between 5 & 6, ep 666 "a message for you" in which I learned that patrons of Malevolent were getting story chunks ahead of time and choosing what Arthur was going to do!!! Which, the Arthur + Entity situation makes so easy, any time they have a difference of opinion in what comes next, it's easy to imagine it being put up to the patrons!! Which is another way to close the distance between protagonist and listener in a really fascinating way
And then, in ep 6, the Friend in Our Head expresses concern that too many weird things are happening. Friend and Arthur are meeting too many weird people, too much is supernaturally afoot, and Friend feels like they're being set up, like something is controlling them or putting these people and obstacles in their way.
And YEAH. BUDDY YOU ARE IN HORROR MEDIA. Bad things and strange people and evil people and weird things ARE being setup for you to run into! The author is putting them in your way! And in this particular case, your actions are also being outsourced to the patrons. You are in fact controlled by two separate entities, one of whom is actually a crowd!!
The layers happening from a framing perspective are craaaaaazy, I didn't realise I was headed into a deconstruction of audio fiction and yet!! here we are!!!
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