Emesis Blue & Postmeta Art

We live in a media driven society. Our most famous celebrities star in our favorite movies and TV shows, our politicians are elected by whose propaganda-adjacent advertising campaigns were the most effective, even our youngest children are put in front of screens which permanently alter their brain chemistry. In a world where all of us must abide by systems that force us to sacrifice our whole lives at jobs and all of our free time managing our non-guaranteed shelter, food and health, we have to find solace in something easy to consume and easier to distribute. When your work day is done, what better way to wind down than by putting something on the television for your tired mind to be lost in? 

The history of media is almost as old as our most ancient civilization. It has evolved to become a very complicated, interconnected system of referential pieces. Martin Luther wrote the 95 theses critiquing the Catholic church in 1517. Papers at the turn of the 20th century critiqued films of the blossoming industry of cinema. Musicians preached an anti-war message throughout the US invasion of Vietnam and Korea. Now, there is an entire video sharing platform where independent videographers, filmmakers, editors, artists, and thespians may share projects with their own views and opinions. YouTube is home to a number of genres as defined by the internet communities who participate in them. Critiques, reviews, essays and more, all in video form by people who are unbound by contractual restraint and free to express their personal feelings.

Those who rise to the top of this massive, competitive industry are those whose feelings resonate with the most people. Oftentimes, it can be difficult to pin down exactly what something is saying, but the fact that it invokes a primal emotion tends to indicate that it resonates with the experiences of the viewer. Many experimental films have stood the test of time despite having unclear messages, or perhaps being made with no intended message at all. Eraserhead, The Holy Mountain, A Serbian Film and more are difficult for viewers to get through due to their subject matter and presentation, but have remained among the most influential movies ever produced. Many analyze them, try to derive meaning from sequences of abstract or even nonsensical images. These things disturb us on a greater level than just their superfluous design. There is a deeper message that these films convey which lets them stay with viewers for longer than just the night they watched it. This, obviously, brings us to… 

Team Fortress 2.

It’s a silly game, truly. It detaches itself from its predecessor with a cartoony artstyle, quirky dialogue and somewhat developed characters. Each of the nine playable classes is fleshed out in a series of, “Meet the…” videos released by Valve. These little nuggets of cinematic gold characterize each mercenary through an expert use of comedy, receiving further depth in the official Team Fortress 2 comic series for fans hard enough to the core to read through. However, this content was sparse and separate from the main game. Players who wanted to experience more stories involving these characters had to make some themselves. 

Fanfiction is a very common aspect of any online community surrounding media. People will inevitably want more from products than its producers can produce. The one thing that set TF2’s fanbase apart from others is that Valve released a tool that allowed users to stage scenes using assets from all of Valve’s games: Source Filmmaker. Valve has famously stopped releasing accessible mainline entries in their franchises for a decade now, with Dota 2 in 2013 being their last non-spinoff/non-VR release. Their older releases still maintain a decently high level of popularity despite minimal updates. One of the main reasons they stay so loved is because of Source Filmmaker. SFM gave fans a creative outlet to contribute to their favorite Valve games when Valve themselves weren’t. These videos can be indistinguishable from the professionally made animations Valve produced if given enough time and effort.

Something happened to Team Fortress 2’s mercenaries as the fans took the creative reins from Valve. The same thing happened to many other IP’s, most famously Sonic the Hedgehog and Garfield. When an internet community puts their twist onto a neglected franchise, it usually turns out experimental. There are things that small internet communities can get away with that large publishers seeking the widest audience can’t risk. TF2’s characters took on insane personas that spoke in broken sentences edited together from their existing voice lines. For every SFM video there was, there were two Gary’s Mod videos with rougher animation and wilder content. These videos broke every law of physics that these characters should abide by for the sake of surreal, mildly horrific humor. Fans eventually stopped associating TF2 characters with their in-game personas, replaced with odd inside jokes like Sandvich, Spycrab and Surprise Buttsex. 

As public perception of TF2 became altered by these niche YouTubers, the game itself underwent a bit of a crisis. Blizzard released Overwatch in 2016 as a much larger, more diverse Hero Shooter heavily inspired by Team Fortress 2. It had the cartoony artstyle, quirky dialogue and somewhat developed characters. Each character was fleshed out in video packages released by Blizzard and an Overwatch comic. Essentially, a much larger company just made a fresh game that represented more people that the company would pay more attention to than Valve had with Team Fortress 2 at that point. This revitalization of the Hero Shooter genre pushed other large developers like Respawn Entertainment and Riot Games to come out with their own. TF2 was seen as the old man game with all these young upstart series doing what TF2 did with a more effective understanding of the, “video games as a service,” trend that continues to dominate the market.

Players moved from TF2 to these alternatives over the next few years. This depopulation made two existing problems within the game worse: Bots and hackers. Bots made up such a large portion of the player base that #SaveTF2 went viral among fans wishing to combat the issue. Updates would come out tackling random exploits, but no progress on the bot issue was ever really made. These bots have been reported to spam hateful rhetoric including homophobic and racist slurs in game chat. Given how progressive Overwatch and its new wave of Hero Shooters presented themselves, these bots made TF2’s community seem like an even worse haven of bigotry. The hacker issue is mainly rooted in the Valve Anti-cheat (VAC.) It had been around since 2002, meaning that players had over a decade to figure out ways to get around its archaic system. Less players meant that a higher ratio of them were these hackers who dedicated too much time to learning how to mess with the game to leave now. TF2 seemed unplayable in comparison to the more well regulated alternatives throughout the late 2010s and early 2020s.

What seemed like the final nail in the coffin for TF2 was a source code leak that occurred in 2020. On top of all of the other factors pushing players out from TF2, it was revealed that simply playing the game could expose an unwitting player to malware. Team Fortress 2 became this wasteland of godlike cheaters among mindless zombies that worked together to attack people and invade their privacy, represented by twisted corruptions of the game’s original cast. All of the fun times that people had with the game years prior seemed to come to an end in a cataclysmic sequence of events worse than the last. 

TF2’s reality was completely distorted. Players could look back at a golden age over a decade ago where these problems could barely be conceived of. The game could still be fun if you went through the effort of finding servers unaffected by its litany of issues. As established, this world is one that leaves people with little energy. Why waste time trying to find safe servers to play on when there are so many alternatives with modern solutions which avoid these problems? It comes back down to ease of access, which is very important to most of the working class laborers of the world. 

This frustration, combined with the disruption of realism within the community’s fan-made content, inspired a group to action. There is a massive history known to millions of people, a history that ~100k people still partake in daily, which had never been put to art. It is only collectively archived in the minds of those who partake in the game’s legacy, be it playing the game itself or following the animators who made content for it long after Valve’s abandonment. These all collectively made up what people thought of TF2, but were never combined in a meaningful way. There was SFM/Garry’s Mod, then there was the game itself. This is what Fortress Films wanted to unify in their impressive passion project:

Emesis Blue

Emesis Blue is a fantastic representation of the progress fanmade media has made. People have been making their own video game content since before the internet gave it a worldwide platform. Players on old school cartridge based systems would tinker with their favorite games to create ROM hacks that completely changed its content. Sprites would be ripped by early 2000’s Newgrounds users who would create astounding animations with them. Even Valve chose to publish Gary’s Mod six years before they released Source Filmmaker because players could not stop themselves from trying to make their own content. 

Not only does it show how far the quality of the tools has come, but it raises the bar for the artistry that these pieces are made with. Emesis Blue is art. Many people have claimed that it’s a cinematic masterpiece deserving to be played in theaters. As much credit as Emesis Blue deserves, it is the natural next step in a further industrializing YouTube. Channels continue to make longer and longer videos, providing aspiring filmmakers with a space to release passion projects that would never be picked up by sound of mind producers. YouTubers have to make the most emotional pieces that they can to stay afloat among the 500 other hours of content uploaded to the site every minute. This crushing amount is supposed to be compartmentalized by the YouTube algorithm, though many professional YouTube content creators have claimed that it is a wildly irrational system that cannot be tamed. In place of trying to master the system, the best channels master their craft.

Following the human desire to organize, a genre began developing among the most experimental of these art pieces. Fans produced content for their favorite franchises, some of which evolved to accommodate all the angst that came with being fans of these series. Sonic the Hedgehog has perhaps the most famous fan community of any video game in history for this reason. Many young artists growing up into a confusing world used Sonic as a tool to vent their frustrations. It often came out very cringeworthy, giving Sonic fans the reputation they have today. However, the outlandish behaviors of the Sonic community have been deconstructed through comics like Tails Gets Trolled and games like Sonic Dreams Collection. Despite not being official, fans used canon characters to provide a meta commentary on the original piece.

This occurred again with Garfield. Though most people wouldn’t consider themselves fans of Garfield, there was something to be said about the success it received. That little orange cat is perhaps one of the most recognizable characters globally. The lack of depth compared to its astounding success inspired observers to create pieces that commented on Garfield's indomitable presence and the shadow it cast over Jim Davis as a cartoonist. The characters of Garfield and John Arbuckle are featured prominently in fan works like Lasagna Cat and those posted in r/ImSorryJon. Yet again, artists used pre-existing characters to create a meta narrative of their source.

Three for three, Emesis Blue followed this trend for Team Fortress 2. The chaos occurring in TF2 during the production of Emesis Blue was captured in the aggressive non-linear pacing. The unnecessary brutality of bots was captured in the hyperviolence of the film's most gruesome moments and in the throngs of mindless zombie-like monsters that pursue the main cast. Many entities, such as the Medic, defy the laws of the world to gain an unfair advantage like the hackers that plagued servers. 2020’s source code leak could be felt when Scout’s home was invaded and the multiple unsolicited phone calls Blu team received. All the while, the game being abandoned for fresher titles inspired the decrepit look of the classic 2Fort map.

Emesis Blue captured TF2 fans' frustrations and insecurities through a surrealist psychological horror. It was an unofficial piece of brilliance that added lore to a game that had been mostly forgotten by the people who made it and departed fans. Emesis Blue has the supreme luck of being provided assets directly from the games to express feelings about its greater existence outside of just its canon. It is also significant as a milestone in a new medium that seems to be taking off. There will be many more projects inspired by it utilizing the same core principles. As such, these pieces must be compartmentalized into their own genre:

POSTMETA - Being composed of storytelling elements belonging to a medias canon, such as characters and settings, which produces a narrative which provides commentary to the reputation the source media has in reality

Emesis Blue obviously is not the first Postmeta piece, but it marks a point where a coincidence becomes a trend. These works are indicative of the place that media has in our lives. Passionately followed media are taken from the hands of neglectful producers by an online fan base too vast to stop. Where companies fail to provide, the people will make up for it. They will also use that opportunity to capture the reality of that product as it influences people's lives, not just providing more escapist fiction to be consumed mindlessly. As people have sacrificed their time and money to make art more prosperous, it is able to say more about the human condition. Even through something as silly as a cartoony Hero Shooter, Fortress Films is able to bring out emotions within us that spark questions about our society. There’s something beautiful to that.

A miraculous thing has happened with TF2 in 2023. Though its player base was slowly decreasing in numbers since the release of its competitors, only a few months after the release of Emesis Blue did Team Fortress 2 break its peak player count at 253,225 in June of 2023. In a combined effort with fellow enduring YouTubers like Uncle Dane and Elmaxo, Fortress Films helped to bring TF2 to a level of popularity far surpassing that of its golden age. As of the time this essay is being written, Emesis Blue itself has over 8.7 million views and TF2 averaged over 100k players throughout the entirety of 2023, almost twice the number of players in its darkest periods. Art resonates with people, and it inspires people to action. No matter what the source is, how abstract it becomes, or even how relevant the subject is anymore, there is something to be felt in every corner of the world. Art about art does not devalue it, but simply gives it a value we couldn’t rightly calculate in a world where that didn’t happen. And a video about a game almost 2 decades old got that sentence to be written. Watch Emesis Blue, play Team Fortress 2, and enjoy the new wave of Postmeta art that it and pieces like it will inspire.

There is no discernable difference between legal work and organized crime aside from that in risk & reward.

In both fields, the people who are in charge see all those below them as expendable. If they don't move on within a few years, they'll find a reason to fire them or worse for cheaper, younger, more loyal underlings. They are for profit organizations that will find any way to maximize income and minimize output. Even working a legal job comes with it's ethical questions, such as providing labor to mega corporations that utilize slavery and sweatshops to get things done. In both instances, people have to work then because of the life they were born into. One life just means a short lavish lifestyle while another is long and mundane.

It is not ethical support an economy which is employed to help the most amount of people because fascist members of the ruling class will do everything in their power to ensure that the majority is a demographic they belong to, unafraid to utilize genocide to ensure that position.

There is a definite power imbalance within the world that has been baked into the global system by way of colonialism. There are groups of people who are on the verge of extinction because of another groups imperialist greed. As such, supporting the most people can be defined as supporting the majority, and has been employed as such for centuries. Even looking at the United States, as the majority white people gets smaller and smaller, changing to Christian, straight or cis Americans at any point in history to define a new majority which the ruling class could maintain the status quo. White supremacy has only been on the rise as fragile European Americans know what horrors await them if they turn into a minority, based on the historic treatment of minorities in the US.

Being a member of a smaller group does not give the bigger group any right to mistreat them.

Neurodivergence is Psychological Horror

Psychological horror is the only genre that has ever accurately captured the experience of autistic, ADHD or otherwise neurodiverse people. Effective psychological horror gets its audience to question reality, often leaving an ever present sense of dread instead of relying on jump scares. Neurodiverse people live in a world wherein it's systems are made for a different neurotype. This means that culture, etiquette and language constantly feels a few steps ahead of the neurodiverse. Everything around us feels like it's racing past, blaming us when we don't keep up. Sometimes that blame can manifest as genuine harm, and I think that is the root of our obsession with psychological horror. We live in fear every day that someone will punish us severely for something we didn't understand because everyone assumes that we make the same assumptions about the world that they do. The truth is that our minds come to conclusions that most people find absurd, and many of us have suffered abuse in retaliation for our authentic reactions. Psychological horror is drenched in mystery, usually. Trying to figure out the truth about what happened, such as with Jacob's Ladder, or constantly being discredited when you're at risk, like in the Invisible Man. These movies describe an experience where people don't know who they are, who the people around them are, what world they live in and what experiences they're going through. This is the neurodiverse experience. Neurodivergence is psychological horror.

A game master provides two things for a campaign: A fun challenge and an escapist fantasy. The most effective GM utilizes one to bolster the other. A fun challenge can immerse players more in the fantasy of their character or the game world, or a characters actions in world could lead to a challenge to overcome. However, providing no challenge can hinder immersion and failing to uphold the fantasy aspect means you might as well play a board game if all you care about are rules.

TV sucks now. As everything started to move towards streaming, shows are treated basically like big movies where editors choose a timestamp around every hour to divide the episodes. Like Heartbreak High for instance. I really want to like this show, and I feel like I will once I'm finished with the season. But it's paces in such a way that I hate all these characters and feel like we get such small, incremental progress through the story. They don't get through enough development to feel like a well rounded, satisfying story for each individual episode I have time to watch and feel static for days at a time as I'm trudging through it

Snapchat is a cesspool app and I wish I was in a higher age group to warrant never using it again. The promoted stuff is always just the worst TMZ nonsense. Like, there's all these posts about Selena Gomez, "explaining her weight gain." Like fucking WHAT. Who is entitled to an explanation about that? Who is focusing so much on it to the point where they notice it? Who the fuck is Selena Gomez?? This kind of garbage is especially harmful when you consider how many kids use Snapchat. Like, that's the teenager communication app of choice, and they're being bombarded with clickbait and toxic ideals. Sickening.

I think there should be psychological evaluations before people are allowed to get into sports. Some folks just aren't mentally capable of handling a super fit body. Particularly men feel really entitled to anything they want after they find either a small amount of athletic success or simply make their bodies look more like the, "societal ideal," with a six pack and big biceps. Especially combat sports. Like, how do you get into fighting as a living and still feel the need to punch down? Off the top of my head, Andrew Tate and Floyd Mayweather are two big examples. I would think that being at a high level of professional competition, at least for Mayweather, would come with a level of discipline. That is a key tenant of any martial art, so why does it seem to get lost for people at the top of the mountain?

Is Elder Scrolls antisemitic? I mean speaking purely from Skyrim where the Thalmor could easily be seen as a supplement for the jew-world-order kinda stereotype. That, and the empire kinda being seen as the ultimate good guys despite literally being Imperial. I dunno, just spit balling here

White people never seem to care more about the ethics of their actions than the comfort those actions give them. They will actively recognize the moral pitfalls of their own actions and still proceed to do them. Whenever this is brought up in a civil manner, that civility is utilized to allow the conversation to fizzle out. It took me a long, long time to understand how people could be so hot headed about these issues, because I've never felt so unacknowledged in my life than when I've tried to speak on my beliefs past 2020. That was the beginning of my social education and I have felt more isolated from society now than ever before. Yes, my coworkers were talking about buying the Harry Potter game, how'd you guess?

It's funny to think about how imperialist/capitalist the old editions of Dungeons and Dragons are. Like, let's talk the XP system. You level up because you squash all opposition to you. The stronger the enemy, the larger the spoils of war. Then, going back even further when Gold Pieces counted for XP, you literally cannot get any more capitalist than that. The more capital you control, the more powerful you become. Now take into consideration the rising popularity of the Milestone System in 5e. I honestly don't remember the last time I joined someones game that used XP. The only one that I participated in was the first game I ever ran, and I never did it again. People now, including myself, value the role play aspect of D&D much more than the game aspect. Using the tools at your disposal to find peaceful ways to resolve conflict should not be rewarded less than maming all life in your path. I think that's what has led players to favoring Milestone: People as a general population are starting to value ethics and morals over conquest and gain. We can judge societies cultural trajectory based on the kinds of fantasies that are trending amongst tabletop players. In this essay, I-

Why is some information too personal for people to know? I have illnesses, disabilities, disorders, trauma and past experiences that explain the way I behave, that explain why I interact with you the way I do. Why is it taboo to explain my behavior? It will effect you and you might as well have the knowledge I have such that you can empathize and work with me. Is it just because these people are my bosses, teachers, coworkers, acquaintances that they don't want to empathize with me? I suppose having empathy or sympathy for the people you're trying to exploit would make it hard to exploit them. We wonder why we have no sense of community when we can't even share the struggles we go through every day such that they can be accommodated.

Looking back at alot of the things I've posted, I feel like I should clarify: Take my generalizations with a grain of salt. Sometimes, I cast a real wide net on some more nuanced issues because I get so wound up thinking about them. I'm going to try to be a more considerate going forward, at least to people who deserve it.

There is this common trend in porn comments that has always made me feel gross. Obviously, you've got your regular creeps saying all the awful shit they'd want to in their fantasy. But then there's a surprising amount of them that really don't like hearing womens pleasure noises. I think it's a signal of someone who truly sees women, especially the ones in porn, as nothing more than sexual objects who exist for their pleasure. It's always bothered me because that's always the part of sex I liked the most. It's just hard to understand why anyone could be apathetic to their partners desires when they could easily just jerk off and not hurt anyone. But then again, I guess I don't understand the desire to hurt anyone either

There is nothing men fear more than to be ostracized by men. Men know better than anyone else the cruelty of men, because they are the only people who can silence entire demographics of people through brute force. That's why, I think, so many progressive AMAB people wind up becoming nonbinary. Mandom is defined by submission to hierarchies and social customs out of fear of humiliation and violence. Therefore, many nonbinary people use their gender identity as a means to separate themselves from a cruel gender community they don't agree or wish to associate with. Not to generalize all nonbinary propel, but this is certainly an internal monologue I have every few weeks when considering my gender identity. Am I nonbinary or do I simply not want to take responsibility for my genders crimes?

The thing about the woke M&M thing that's so funny is that the wrong people are doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Yes, Mars should be boycotted, but not because they put girls on a package. They only did that as a marketing stunt to distract from the fact that awful chemicals were found in M&Ms that are lethal to the human body. You just gotta take one step back to before the "Feminist" packaging and then the boycotting would be justified. I don't know if they did this packaging to make amends for their mess up or if they knew that people were going to freak out over it like they did, which would distract the nation from the bad stuff they do. Either way, it's a megalomaniacal corporation so they need to be held accountable for the right things.

JAS just need to go the fuck away. We know what kind of people Jericho, Hager and Guevara are, and it doesn't make me want to see them anymore. I want that Garcia singles push now so he doesn't get too fucked up by the influence of these assholes.