Tag: art

Humanity’s Eyes

A poem by Leland for Rale.

When I was born I was betrayed

My mother tried to kill me

For I was born wrong

Sickness marked me all over

I was a cur a curse a wanton filth

She thought a kindness was death

She threw me to the desert

But the desert men found me

Took me and raised me

As a second hand slave I was raised

A child of rejection and poverty and begging for scraps

I ran between the stalls of the desert men, not unhuman enough to kill, not human enough to love

We roamed through the desert

I stayed mostly with the children of the grit

Marred and scarred and blackened and raw they would not hit me

As I got older, the sickness that flaked my skin grew harder and tougher

Stranger by far, long thorns grew from me, and my eyes became a fetid yellow

I began to be called the demon.  The demon they whispered, no longer in contempt, but also in fear.

As my muscles grew thick and crusted like a humanoid crab, my eyes began to wander

I hated the world as the world had hated me

But there was one little girl who treated me with kindness

The daughter of the leader of the desert men

The daughter of their sultan

She was a kind girl with a horrible scar on her face from an injury from when she was a baby

She had one eye that was emerald green

She placed bowls of water out at night

I knew they were meant for me

Her emerald eye reminded me of the eyes of my mother

I felt that my mother had killed herself and she had been reborn, 

Now she was here to take care of me like she never had before

I got older and older and I never stopped growing

The other boys stopped growing, but five years later, they stood at my shoulder

Then they stood at my chest

Then they stood at half my height

The fear in the desert men’s eyes grew

Their deep religious belief in the martyr was being pushed

They began to talk about the “Demon among them”

I watched the little girl grow up.

She was beautiful

And kind.

Long brown hair and that emerald eye

My mother’s eye

She started to leave food behind with the water, and flowers, and then a lock of her hair.

I kissed it and nuzzled it and tried to breathe it inside of me

And I would watch her from the corners of my eyes.

As I roamed through the tent filled trading stalls, resting on my knuckles, clawing into the dirt with my back feet.

She came one night

And touched my face

Not afraid.  Not like the others.

She held my face that night

And she cried 

Her one eye pouring sweet and salty tears onto my mountainous, grotesque frame.

The people came the next night.

Her father came the next night

The torches came the next night

They told me to leave.

They pointed towards the desert

The said go anywhere but here.

My humanity had run up in their eyes

They owed me nothing

The savior owed me nothing.

I crawled into the desert

The aching moon at my back

The harsh sun on my face.

I walked through the desert, lumbering like a barge as the heat cracked my skin like stone

I licked rocks for water

I smelled foul nests of bugs using my strange and sensitive nose

I ate the creatures

While I thought of her

My mother reborn who abandoned me again.

As I walked into the heat of the sands

And the ice cold nights

I realized I was never human.

And I no longer wanted to be.

Part 2 here.

Top image: “Hazeen’s Man of the Clouds”, by Rae Johnson

A Smiling Man

“Do you see what you’ve made, my dear? Parity. As above, so below. The Deep has always been a mirror, but even I can admit it is a dark one. But you! You have darkened the heavens, made one great blackness of the whole affair! As below, so above, and tell me now: Are black sea and black sky one and the same?

“It depends, you say. They are alike as voids to shout into, but throw yourself along with your voice, and you shall know the difference. One will accept you, begrudgingly, perhaps, in its cold, airy breath. The other will pour into you, unrelenting to your separateness, ceasing only when you, too, are darkness.

“But I’ll let you in on a little secret: That will, that relentless, violent churn, that everything that will suffer no scissor, no duality, no self amidst others–it is nothing but a lie! Darkness is darkness, nothing is nothing, a mirror is but a trick of the devoured light.

“Ah, but another secret: Lies are to be cherished.”

Top Image: The Smile, concept by Rae Johnson, commissioned for War Torn/Rale

Getting Back

Apologies for the prolonged silence. I’ve been sick as well as traveling a lot recently (still not quite done), and writing has been even slower than usual. That said, I still have a little content for you while I’m wrapping up the main fare. See the final draft of Names above. I posted Rae’s original concept test some time ago here, and I think it’s absolutely wild to see how far it’s come.

Part of the perspective change was to put that extra emphasis on the piece’s namesake (pun unavoidable), but in fleshing it out, we were also able to lay some groundwork in determining what Ka used the camps for, and with that came conceptions of the roaches, of labor systems, of facilities built at harbors atop muddy banks that slowly shipped the dead and rotting offal the Bloodfish’s forces gathered back to his citadel.

Top image: Names, by Rae Johnson, commissioned for War Torn/Rale

Something About Tortoises

“What happened to that Sevenfold Gyre post you said was in progress?”

Totally still in progress, but words are hard, and it’s been really slow going. Not really writers block, since a little has been getting done every day, but it is not a fast process. The character sketch posts were meant to be a delaying tactic, but they are not proving to be quite enough.

Oh well, here’s another: Les Marquains magically bound within a painting inside his house. At a point some time after the death of Ka, he disappeared leaving behind a house bereft of all the magical curiosities it had held since his grandfather’s glory days. None could say what became of him and his treasures until he resurfaced, forty years later, not a day older than when he had last been seen.

Top Image: Concept of Les Marquains in hiding, by Rae Johnson, commissioned for War Torn/Rale

Character Sketches 3 (and the Barabadoon)

I’ve written a sparse little about the Saraa Sa’een on this blog so far. The name was originally used by the peoples of the Endless Dunes to describe dangerous exiles, criminals, or singular enemies of a society, but in the time following the Dereliction, it came to refer to a particular monster, an animate sandstorm that would arrive in a village, murder and torment its inhabitants for days, and then leave as suddenly as it came. Though the creature’s origins were uncertain, the danger it posed was clear, and an order (perhaps a cult) formed among the peoples of the Dunes to hunt the beast and protect against its onslaughts. This cult, named for a beast of myth (perhaps one of the Old Gods, perhaps a baseless legend), was known as the Barabadoon.

The Barabadoon was, at any given time, led by three gifted mages: The Nose, the Whiskers, and the Tooth. Of these, the Tooth was the fighting force behind their cooperation as well as the face of their order, and at the time the Saraa Sa’een was finally defeated, the title was held by this man:

Alikazan, Tooth of the Barabadoon.

Images: Concept sketches of Alikazan, Tooth of the Barabadoon, by Rae Johnson, commissioned for War Torn/Rale.

Character Sketches 1

As a side-effort to our main pipeline of artwork, we asked Rae for their interpretations of a number of characters in our timeline. Here is Le Markhan (or Les Marquains, in the Riverlands tongue), from She-Lord of Ka! He’s looking a little svelter than he ought (he was not a thin man), but it’s a work in progress. I’m a huge fan of the imagery Rae brought to these pieces. Enjoy!

Things Worth Trying

A review of Catherine.

I find it’s much easier to write when I have someone to be mad at.  To that end, take a look at this.  If I were in the mood to be kind, I would describe that as an informational review, and including it saves me a certain amount of effort in describing the thing I intend to explore a little more critically.  In case my dichotomy doesn’t read: There will be spoilers. If you are the type of person that cares, go play the game first. All good? Let’s begin.

I.

Catherine is a game about cheating, or, more particularly, it’s a game about how well-established social morals around cheating interact with “modern” ideals of how romantic relationships look.  The scare quotes are because the game’s (c. 2011) interpretation of modernity probably solidified around the late 90s and is at least a little different from what things are like today (accord variance for local culture as you will), but understanding that difference helps resolve at least a little of the cognitive dissonance you get when socially average (read: complete loser) protagonist Vincent wakes up massively hungover next to naked, beautiful, and not at all hungover Catherine after a night at the bar and immediately internalizes it as his fault.  Frankly, there’s a good argument that it is, but there is conspicuously little examination of what, by even more modern standards, is essentially date rape.

I’ll be clear: I’m not saying that I wanted that examination–God knows I get enough of it from modern media–but its absence is a good marker for where this game is coming from.  More broadly, there is a lot we can glean from what Catherine takes for granted.  In context, Vincent is characterized as a fairly together person who is going through a weird time in his life, but anyone looking at this by Western standards is immediately calling bullshit.  Vincent is a raging alcoholic in a clearly dysfunctional relationship, and that his behavior is normalized is telling, but before you get angry at that, slow down, have a drink yourself.

It’s easy to get pissy at the message this sends to society (“relationships are oppressive, excessive alcohol and poor communication skills are acceptable”) or at the people who get pissy thereof, but the story is still (depending on your ending) one of a fuckboi slowly learning to be less of a fuckboi, so the vector is still in the right direction in my mind.  Instead, let’s talk about fairy tales and how the general public has a hot-garbage understanding of the underpinnings of writing.

II.

Has anyone else run into that asshole who, you know, actually says the words “show, don’t tell”?  Honestly, it’s good advice in high school, but thereafter it’s generally not a kind conclusion.  As with all advice, “show, don’t tell” has an implied context, and a fair amount of fiction falls outside that context.  Case in point: folklore. In myth, legend, fairy tales, it’s extremely important to the format that you don’t show what actually happened.  The story you’re telling is actually the story of someone else being told what happened, and putting aside that you literally can’t show things in that framework, even so much as trying would disrupt the tension between the storyteller and the audience, which is important regardless of how hypothetical each of those entities is.  Same thing with the historicity in Dark Souls, and more generally, same thing with any story where you’re calling attention to a source.

Catherine, of course, doesn’t have a problem with showing or telling, but instead of reading its hyper-media-coded characters and “fumbled gender stereotypes” as hokey, politically incorrect attempts at description, consider reading them as deliberate oversimplifications, the types of things a storyteller would include in a tall tale to drive home a central point or exploration.  Actually, that suggestion may be a little soft–that’s exactly what they are, or did you just ignore the introduction where the game told you that everything you were about to see was a TV show?

This is, of course, one of the reasons why the outrage over the game’s treatment of transsexuality is ridiculous.  You’re looking at a well-intentioned and inclusive piece (provided you don’t view Vincent, et al’s transphobia as aspirational–you shouldn’t), wrapped in 90s/00s language that simply doesn’t have the same words and concepts as the modern []-Studies crowd.  The criticism then translates as a critique on fashionability, which seems kinda petty.

Aside, though uncomfortably political: The game’s nightmare–the one that only affects men, including the game’s trans-woman–is ultimately revealed to be generated by a demon whose stated aim is to torment men who are not contributing to human reproduction.  Given that it is a targeted weapon controlled by a specific entity rather than an axiomatic validation of gender, I would ask the folk who are upset to contemplate exactly how woke they think Satan is (1). “Sounds stupid?” Yes.

III.

“I get that you disagree with these people, but what about the game?”

I’m glad that it exists.  I’m reading it as a serious attempt at literary exploration of a complicated but atypically well-defined social perception.  The very first review I read for the game back in 2011 described it as “mature”, and I think that’s on point. There are a lot of cheesy places that a game about horror and sex can go, but I think that a puzzle loop harnessing the metaphor of elevating oneself amidst horrific emotional storms and antagonism feels very true.  

It’s not perfect, of course.  It’s really not perfect.  I’ll defend the game’s extremely blunt characterizations as deliberate choices, designed for a purpose, but that doesn’t mean they all worked.  Vincent, in particular, was rough. His shortcomings were fine as a baseline, but then they became a one-trick pony for advancing the plot, and I started feeling like I was going through the worst parts of Romeo and Juliet all over again–the problems stopped looking insurmountable because they were, in fact, very easy to solve, and Vincent’s sheer incompetence was the only thing standing in the way, which is even worse because this is a game, and games are supposed to harness your agency rather than strip you of it.

Still, when the game did invite player choice, it made good use of it, albeit in the really opaque, Persona-style sense, and the use of survey questions about romance as a means to guide the events and endings of the game was pretty interesting.

Ultimately, did Catherine push the boundaries of games as art?  Eh, not really, but my view is that the medium is still young enough that we can afford to give out cigars, because the game really visibly tried.  It picked an interesting topic and explored it in a fairly novel way with decent attention to detail and literary device.  If it were written a little more carefully, if it made just a little better use of its medium (specifically not fumbling it at the moments where giving the player control is most important), it might have been an artistic achievement.  Instead it was just a solid game, but the effort did not go unnoticed.

Footnotes:

(1): Perhaps, cynically or otherwise, you feel closer to Satan than whatever’s on your particular Light Side.  In that case, replace “Satan” with “Hitler”, which is only less interesting of a thought experiment because you know a priori he was a bigot.

Top Image: Banner for Catherine Classic (the version I happened to play) on Steam.