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[milosyard]

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[maincharactercast]

Main Words #12: Terra Formars (again forever) and Amnesia

Last time on Main Words

Our hero was growing tired of going page by page through chapter 0 of Terra Formars, his initial ardor from the first week dried up. Morale sagging, he decided to just push the article out without much thought. A greater writer with better self control would have scrapped that piece in favor of a superior concept, or just moved on to a different concept or way of discussion of the piece. Our hero is a bit daft and prefers to allow the audience to see everything, using every part of the article, good or bad. The process is as important as the content to our hero. He did, after a fashion, spend a bit of time meditating on what happened, and came up with a few theories about why the quality of article/his interest waned.

Theory 1: The indefatigable hero had some physical or mental degradation after the first article's marathon duration. It was a long article, and went into excruciating detail. Lots of typing, deleting, and rethinking, and typing. It is understandable for even one as intrepid as our hero, our word wizard, our bastion of literature, to stop feeling the same feels he felt before. A single manga chapter, no matter how neat, can only engender so much conversation. Exhaustion sets in, our hero needs sleep.

Theory 2: Everything after page 13 is not as good as what comes before. Maybe the quality of the chapter drops off as soon as the reveal occurs. The translation could get worse, the scan could get bad, the art could just be crappier.

Theory 3: Our hero doesn't like anything beyond page 13. He could have personal reasons for disliking the story or art or what have you, and it could be reflected in writing. Maybe he thinks the story wasted its reveal too soon. This theory is the subjective version of number 2.

Hero here. The real answer goes 3>1>2. It's not like anything gets objectively worse, the art and translation are the same. It's the same chapter. So what happened? The answer comes down to my views on horror and getting spooked, as well as the manga-fication of the story when it doesn't seem like a good fit to me. I should tackle those separately, they are large topics. I'm not going to split the article or anything, that would be silly. Who wants to read 2 consecutive articles on the same thing?

I don't know all that many people with strong interest in horror films, books, or whatever, so most of my experiences in the genre come from randomly choosing to dive into various, normally well regarded, entries. I've seen the original Nightmare on Elm Street and a few crappy films like White Noise and Prom Night. I've watched more of the Scary Movie movies than I have actual scary movies, now that I think about it. Not a movie person in general, so that is mostly irrelevant. In terms of books, I've finished 90% of Lovecraft's work (I lost track of what I've read, so I gave up on reading it all), and dabbled in Clive Barker and King. Not a ton here either. I've played Amnesia and some of the sequel, as well as a couple of the precursor Penumbra games, the Dead Spaces (not real horror), and a number of really crappy horror games for under 50 cents each. For manga, I've gotten about halfway through Monster, finished Battle Royale, Berserk, Claymore, Gantz, maybe a couple more. So mostly reading, and mostly manga in the reading.

I don't actively seek out more horror in my life because it doesn't hold tremendous interest for me. I have nothing against dark themes in whatever, kill off characters and only have bad things happen all you want. My problem with most horror works is one of duration. Long form spookiness is maybe the hardest genre to pull off successfully. The only scary thing that scares me is the fear of the unknown, the tension that comes from not knowing. In Terra Formars, the first dozen pages are the only ones for the entire series in which the reader doesn't have any real idea of what is happening. There could be anything waiting on Mars for the characters, especially with only the knowledge that humans sent moss and roaches out there. The thrill built by page 12 is ruined by showing the thing so soon. First rule of horror is or should be: don't show the thing unless you have to. Unlike other genres, which have magical elements like less disposable characters, optimism, and not being locked into a given course of action.

The public response to the two Amnesia games serves to reinforce my point here. The first game was released, and everything was good. People loved the atmosphere, the spooky ambiance pervading the everything until the ending (the end scene was real bad). I didn't mind the lack of closure, at that point I was ready to be done with the game. There were bad dudes in Amnesia. Like, unkillable, make-your-character-go-insane-if-you-look-at-them bad. The game used the insanity mechanic to try its hardest to hide the bad guys from the player as long as possible. The sound changed when they showed up, and they made terror shadows, and you had to go run and hide, or just run. The player was in perpetual fear of getting clobbered by shadows the whole game. I understand that the bad guy AI was poor and easy to trick, and once you got over the initial fear of the guys and learned the system, it got less scary, but they showed up infrequently enough for me to avoid that.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs started out in a similar fashion. First person exploration, creepy steampunk, unknown baddies who had something to do with pigs. Then it showed the player the monsters, and the whole thing felt cheapened somehow. It only takes the first third of the game before you have to run past fully visible enemies who knock you out rapidly. And it kind of sucks. The game isn't terrible on its own merits as a different adventure game, but it isn't an Amnesia game to me. Using fear of the unknown effectively vs not. The first time I got caught on geometry while walking past a monster in the unavoidable critical path in the second one was the point I stopped playing. Let me hide. Asking myself, ‘who used these chairs and where are they?’ is more interesting than seeing a lady in one. 

Oh yeah, and that water monster part in the first one is one of the best chase scenes I've ever experienced. So everything after page 13 is just a slow descent into becoming a generic manga with powerups and super characters. The first two BUGS missions have pretty much the entire crews being wiped out immediately both times. And it was good. Speaking of good, the page 13 face is still the best. The real issue is that after the first BUGS mission fails, the manga turns into an action series. Every character has a spirit animal/bug that gives them powers, then the roaches get powers, then the people get more combination powers, then the roaches use weapons, then the Chinese, then the roaches go to Earth. Which is cool and all, but not what I want when it is spook'o'clock. It just turns into Hunter x Hunter. No one wants that. The horror is gone once the author has to balance letting characters survive long enough to explore their powers and make them interesting with killing them off to stay in genre. It certainly is a different type of tension, though not a welcome one for me. Our hero loves purity of intent.

Kenton

Our hero (spoiler)

And since I forgot to say this over a month ago, the answer was cooking.