#metatext
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people being so hellbent on saying "your choices don't matter that's the point of the game" about deltarune is like if people played the undertale demo and proceeded to say "in this world it's kill or be killed that's the point of the game" like. hello
#logs#deltarune#utdr#AND THE LEAPS PEOPLE MADE AFTER SNOWGRAVE like ohhh its not YOUR choices LIKE YES THE FUCK IT IS#metatext
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like, ok. disco elysium is mostly about bigger things than personal morality, and it is too smart to be interested in asking whether kim and harry are "bad people," because people cannot be ontologically bad* even if being a cop is very close, and the distinction in itself is a carceral conceit, it's not worth talking about in any model worth talking about. and that's probably part of the point, and part of the point is that There Is No Ethical [PLAYTHROUGH OF DISCO ELYSIUM]; existing in a world like revachol, or ours, and getting to stay morally decent, let alone while in the kind of positions of power kim & harry inhabit, is impossible but more to the point it's also a dangerous fable. it is a dangerously incorrect way to approach the ideas that the narrative is offering you.
*or good!
& that said, insofar as disco has anything to say on personal morality, i think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of the next world mural:
it is too late for us, and it is also too late for these two mean-hearted cold-spirited, bullying old cops; we have seen too many ages of the world already, we have failed to rise too many times. it is too late for true love and it is too late for good men. it is too late to be forgiven. "you can never save anyone nor can you atone for your sins", &c, "you shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again."
WREAK HAVOC ON THE MIDDLE CLASS
it is too late to be good men. harry and kim are never going to be able to be good men, because you can't fix what they've each done to people, or the kind of trigger-happy control-hunger that leads them to bully and steal and coerce, or the various steam-kettle pressures (racialized, in kim's case) that pushed them to become these people (pressures which are unlikely to let up any time soon, either, and hence why it's so unconvincing to pretend they're ever going to stop being cops.) and yet, you know! and yet! you can't aim for "redemption" because it's a bankrupt concept, and you also cannot pretend that you can just walk away from any of these things; not in this world; maybe in the next, not in this one.
but that isn't a message of despair, any more than disco is ever doing a message of despair! be vigilant i love you. you can go home again, as long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been. kim and harry are really not the point although by definition it is true for them as well -- but IS THERE A CHANCE FOR THEM TO GET BETTER? is functionally equivalent to asking IS THERE A CHANCE FOR ANY OF US TO GET BETTER? or even more fundamentally WILL THE RETOUR EVER COME? and the only answer disco has for us on this front is, i don't know, well will it???
#disco elysium#de#metatext#id in alt#yes this has been bugging me since my failure to cohere to a point in the tags of the previous de post. three hours ago. :/#in conclusion wreak havoc in the middle class#or rather#it is not your duty to finish the work (true love is possible only in the next world) (whether you live or die you will never be forgiven)#but neither are you at liberty to neglect it (WREAK HAVOC ON THE MIDDLE CLASS)#i am talking myself around a tautology a LITTLE bit here but they are unanswerable questions because we havent ANSWERED them yet you know
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My family and I are currently rewatching Toy Story 2 and once the movie got to the part where Woody discovers that he was the star of a famous 1950s puppet show, I spent a lot of time wondering what happened to the series between the cancellation and the then-present time of the first two movies.
Was there ever an animated spinoff during the Dark Age of Animation? Hanna-Barbera, Filmation and DePatie-Freleng did make a lot of animated spin-offs of live action properties during those times (such as Gilligan's Isle, Tarzan, Batman '66 and Planet of the Apes) so it'd make a bit of sense if Woody's Roundup got similar treatment.
Were there any attempts at making a big budget Hollywood movie in the 80s or 90s? The 90s were chock-full of adaptations of old TV shows from the 60s and 70s so again, it'd make sense if Woody's Roundup was optioned at one point. Maybe the movie never happened in that universe because it fell victim to Development Hell and some of the crew or cast jumped ship over to the 1995 Buzz Lightyear movie?
#toy story#toy story 2#woody the cowboy#woody#woodys roundup#stinky pete#jessie toy story#pixar#disney pixar#hanna barbera#depatie freleng#filmation#film theory#film theories#lightyear 2022#meta#metatext#show within a show
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ABSOLUTELY LOVE YOUR CONTENT OH MY CROWLEY I FINALLY FOUND MY MORPHEUS DEALER
Ahem, anyways. I have a question about Sandman but idk if you'll know the answer, so please bear with me. Let's say Morphine and reader are cuddling, and reader falls asleep. If Morpheus visits them in their dreams, would his body stay holding them or not? I'm assuming being an Endless, he'd be able to stay cuddling them in the waking world while visiting them in the Dreaming, but I wanted to hear your input, as well.
Oooooh, good question!!! Personally, I think that no, he can’t be in both places at once. Cause hear me out, but while for mortals, the dreaming is a place your subconscious/soul goes where you sleep, it’s an actual place to morpheus. He can’t go there subconsciously, because it would be the equivalent of a person literally being physically in two places at once, and that’s not really his speed (at least that’s how I interpret it). He may be connected to the dreaming while he is on earth, but he is not IN IT while he is on earth
So while humans fall asleep to get to the dreaming, he basically teleports to the dreaming. Again, not a Sandman expert, but that’s definitely how I’d say it works.
But omg, the idea of him being with you physically cuddling as well as spending time with you in the Dreaming, is just absolutely adorable. And even if I don’t think it would work in terms of canon, fanfiction is specifically about breaking past the limits of canon :D
Appreciate the ask @legalize-arson and I hope I have a decent answer <3<3<3 if anyone has any other opinions, feel free to comment or reblog with your thoughts :):)
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Metatext - Adora and Mind Control
(Apologies folks, this one is going to be kind of long and rambling).
While it’s mostly died down, I do still occasionally see people invoke the idea that in SPoP, Adora was magically mind-controlled by Shadow Weaver to justify why she was so okay with, eg, Shadow Weaver threatening to kill Catra for "disrespect” in the pilot.
And (a) No. Like, I can’t control what you put in your fanfics, but that’s just bullshit. If Adora was meant to be mind controlled in some supernatural way, the show would have told us.
(b) I do understand where the idea comes from, but, well. Indulge me in a digression. Let’s talk adaptation history.
The 80′s Cartoon
For anyone who isn't aware: In the 80's cartoon, Adora is a Horde Captain, and thinks the Horde are the Good Guys because Shadow Weaver has been mind-controlling her since she was a bitty baby. Over the course of the TV movie/pilot the mind control is broken, the truth that the Evil Horde is Evil is revealed to her, and she joins the rebellion.
It's serviceable and fun, within the constraints of being an 80's Filmation cartoon.
But those constraints are why mind control is part of the story. Genre convention and broadcaster standards required that the Good Guys be unambiguously Good and the Bad Guys be objectively Bad. There is no space in that moral rubric for a Hero to have motives beyond a compulsion to "Do the Right Thing", or have a non-standards-compliant idea of what the “Right Thing” is.
So to have Adora start the story with the (obviously, objectively) Bad Guys, they needed a way to explain away A Good Person doing Evil Things; their answer was Magic Mind Control. Sure, Adora was the one walking and talking and leading enforcement gangs, but she’s not responsible, because the magic is forcing her to be like that.
Breaking the mind control is a bright line moment, in which Adora instantaneously transitions from being a Powerless Victim to being a Hero Who Does The Right Thing.
And this works as a metaphor, largely because Adora is the only character who explicitly grew up in the Horde. While 80s!Adora is an adult in-universe, she’s still intended as a surrogate for the child audience, and the conflicts she faces come through that frame. Children are dependant on their caregivers to filter and contextualize information, and sometimes those caregivers are shitty people who use that power to their own ends. Mind control isn’t a terrible analogy for that. It’s simplistic, but, you know. 80′s Filmation.
The SPoP Pilot Pitch
Again, if you haven’t seen it, there’s a “Story Bible” floating around that was the original pitch for the series. It’s a fascinating insight into how the sausage is made, but the relevant parts are:
Adora (and only Adora) is still Mind-Controlled into thinking the Horde are the good guys
Catra has been cast as, not just a fellow Force Captain(who is Bad and revels in that Badness), but as a childhood friend of Adora’s.
And that’s. Hrm.
It’s not bad per se, but putting these two idea together makes “mind-control” less an analogy for abuse and misinformation, and more a form of special pleading.
It says that while others raised in a bad environment will accept that badness as normal and acceptable, it would require supernatural compulsion to make Adora do the same.
And because that compulsion is supernatural and external, pitch!Adora is, once again, granted absolution. No matter what she did under the Horde, at the end of the day, it wasn’t her fault.
But while this was a central element of the original pitch, it was dropped at some point during the show’s development.
And that’s where it gets interesting.
2018 SPoP
In the show as aired, the below are still true:
Adora is still weirdly compliant, and treats the Horde as The Good Guys even when they’re being openly, indisputably awful in front of her
Catra is still her peer, still someone who has grown up in the same environment
But, in addition:
The metaphors for abuse have been replaced with actual mundane abuse
Adora is no longer the sole target of said abuse
SPoP!Adora is manipulated and lied to, yes; but she is not uniquely so. Catra knows no more than she does - she is, if anything, slightly more in the dark.
And yet Catra knows full damn well that she is being mistreated, that Shadow Weaver is petty, manipulative, and unfair.
So why doesn’t Adora?
=======
And this is where the great disconnect happens, where a segment of the audience demands an explanation, a revelation of the secret reason for Adora’s awful behaviour. Adora is The Hero, so she must be A Good Person! Why is the show messing this up?
=======
Which is a failure to understand that the lack of an answer is the answer.
The show fails to grant Adora absolution because there is none to be had. There is no excuse, no trick, no double-top-secret easter egg buried in the background that explains how Adora could not have known, that she was but an innocent babe compelled by forces beyond her control.
SPoP!Adora never gets a bright-line moment of transition between helpless thrall and agency-imbued hero because there was no transition to make.
Adora was abused, yes. She was manipulated, and lied to, and hurt. But for all the power Shadow Weaver had over her, all the pressures applied, she was never mind-controlled. From start to finish, from the earliest flashback to her dreams of a better future, Adora’s agency and her choices - all of them, good and bad - were ultimately wholly her own.
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"It wasn't until I had helped to kill a man that I realised how elusive and complex an act of murder can actually be." – TSH, p. 254
versus
"But for now, one thought, one voice: 'How easy it was.' How simple. Anybody could have done this. There is no mystery to death." – Party Monster.
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Story Integrity
While it's a neat idea, and can be a powerful driver for stories that include it, I always find that having unstoppable destiny as a natural law/force in stories rubs me the wrong way.
In particular the points that directly eat into character agency, either directly (like the headaches in Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story) or with catastrophic force (like the destruction of universes where "things don't follow canon" in Spider-Verse - frankly I hope that the universe destruction shown in Across ends up being caused directly by a villain and isn't the natural law Miguel presents it as).
It seems cruel, really.
If you're omnipotent enough to puppeteer entities who believe themselves self-determining, you should spare the extra effort to fully hide the ways in which you control them, from them.
In some ways this schism is a metaphor itself; The gulf between reality as it is understood by humanity through the stories we tell ourselves, and reality as it is understood by humanity through the experiments we perform and the deductions we take from those experiments.
Those of you telling me that those experiments are also stories we tell ourselves, yes, you're very clever, shut up.
People have different metaphors for what life is, and relatedly for what God is, based on their own preferences and day-to-day experience. God as Father showed up in patriarchal society. Life as a series of critical canon events shows up in the comic book movie.
...I think the other thing that bothers me is the way really blatant meta-text like this waves the author's hands in front of the reader's face. Reminding the reader that the character is In A Story by having there be story-based rules with "real-world" consequences is just as immersion-breaking to me as when someone screams, "But this isn't one of your stories, this is real life!" in, y'know, a work of fiction.
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As my previous post intimates, I haven't gotten very far in House of Leaves yet, but I think one of the main reasons I'm enjoying it so much is the meta-ness of it. The fact that it's a horror story about a horror story that takes advantage of its format, rather than being just another spooky tale.
It's like my favourite movie, The Wizard of Speed and Time. It's a movie about how hard it is for main character Mike Jittlov to get the movie he wants to make made because of various obstacles Hollywood puts in his way. The special effects of the movie all add something to it, even the cheesy ones, and you find out at the end that the entire movie was, in fact, the movie Mike's been trying to get made all movie.
#house of leaves#the wizard of speed and time#meta#metatext#medium bending#i love it when someone makes a thing that can only be done in the media its being made in
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Observation: fans love that old Infocom packaging, but they do not love my writing about it. It's always the least popular of three posts about a game.
What can you do? My approach is to treat everything (game, packaging, even hints) as a single, received text.
I think this approach estranges old fans, since I think some of those packages are quite bad:
"That’s to say nothing of the text itself, whose vain strivings toward hilarity typify the post-folio 'lord frambozz flatwit bweh heh heh' humor so characteristic of many of Infocom’s rereleases."
Ah, well. I can't lie.
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youtube
#2013#2023#music#spectrum pulse#album review#Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds#push the sky away#experimental rock#video essay#metatext#memory#lies
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given that a part of chapter 3 seems to be mob themed ("that cathodes crew" + the shadowmen) what if tenna was like.. aunt tenna. to also carry the family theme that queen and king had. scary mob boss lady please please please please you're nothing
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I ONLY HOPE HE WON'T LOSE SIGHT OF HIS OWN FUTURE CLEAR AND BRIGHT
i fucking KNEW we'd seen that eye opening animation somewhere before. anyway given how omnipresently pafl is about the jenny holzer lesson of "protect me from what i want" we should really have expected it but OH BOY HAS SHE GOT HER WISH! oh boy does this kid know where he's going now! oh fucking boy is there absolutely no shard of doubt in him anymore about the path forward from here! the image of the future is not unstable... it is clear and bright . it is brighter than the most relentless sun. it is bright, bright, blinding,
#i know we've made this point before but i only just tracked down this little visual execution of that point#'in a dream you saw a way to survive / and you were full of joy'#pafl#parties are for losers#metatext#ive been going crazy about convergence all day i swear
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Hypothetical for you all: If you learned that your entire life was actually a component of a grand, cosmic narrative, and you were destined to marry the protagonist of existence, then die tragically to act as motivation to make them bring about some global utopia, would you play along with your pre-destined role? Or would you try and sieze your destiny more directly, consequences be damned? What precautions would you take to ensure/delay the meeting? And, most importantly: if you do choose to get married, what kind of tragic end do you try to orchestrate for yourself to fuel their character growth?
Note that you don't know who the protagonist of existence is or what they look like, and you don't know when or where you're supposed to meet them and fall in love.
Tl;dr: You learn that all of life is a play, and you are merely a performer... literally. You're destined to marry the protagonist of existence and die tragically to start their character arc that'll make them a great hero, though you don't know who they are or where you'll meet them. Do you go along with your role, or do you try and pursue your own destiny? Why? What do you do to prevent/ensure you meet life's protagonist?
#hypothetical#writing prompt#tw death mention#doomed by the narrative#romance#metatext#metatexual wankery
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one thing i think is really interesting is how sometimes storylines are tied up so well within a canon that they dont get discussed as much.
i wanna hear ur examples!!!
this isnt a great one because there are too many variables but like. Cirilla from The Witcher is a super important character but even in the text, her story is a closed circle
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Metatext - Want
Want, in the language of SPoP, isn't a passive or reflexive state; it isn’t about thoughts or feelings, about weaving beautiful dreams of perfect worlds.
Want is not waiting for someone else to bring your unspoken visions into reality, hoping that the universe will eventually drop happiness into your lap.
Want is not passive, it is active.
To want something is to strive for it, to make it a guiding star of your life. It is reaching out and risking being hurt for the chance to bring something new into being.
What we want is found, not in our dreams, but in our choices.
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struggling a lot with Art and Character Designs so time to break out the Metatext Doodle Zone
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