Blazer-Sharp, Prattle-Ready, Brainless Steel Samurai Banana

An attempt to systematically describe the tropes that form this complex of mythmaking that informs a great deal of low-brow pop culture in works like Spawn, Lady Death, Doom and the Jesus versus Satan fight episode of South Park.

I'm sure there's other analyses out there, possibly with a better name, but until I see I think I'll try to regularize this term.

There are three worlds: Heaven, Earth and Hell.

Heaven is the place of Good and Law and Light, often associated with blue and white and gold; Hell is the place of Darkness and Chaos and Evil, often associated with red and black and green. Earth is the place of struggle between these two primal domains.

The struggle is explicit and physical, involving godlike, often shapeshifting beings using actual physical weapons against each other.

Humanity is naturally aligned with the Good, but can align with Evil through extreme moral corruption of some kind. They can also take direct part in the fight in a limited fashion.

Both realms are inherently hierarchical and often roughly symmetrical in their structure. The hierarchy in the realm of Good, however, tends to be much more explicit and unforgiving which is often a driver for entities to defect to Evil even though in actual practice the hierarchy there is no better.

The ultimate masters of both realms are almost always male and the entire cosmos implicitly patriarchal.

It is often repeated that the master of Good is the creator of the universe and the master of Evil lives only at his mercy; however, in the vast bulk of the struggles described in the stories there is almost nothing in the conduct of the parties that supports this over a much more symmetrical, dualist interpretation.

The Iron Prison (also Black Iron Prison, Cold Iron Prison) is a self-perpetuating complex of institutions, sentiments and associations that constantly ensnares our minds and preserves them in a state of unending fear, anger and violence.

It is the duty of every person to do what is in their power to tear down the bars of their own Iron Prison and, whenever they become aware that they may be doing so, to stop acting as a warden of that Prison to others. This duty may override utilitarian concerns, especially if those utilitarian concerns themselves constitute a call to feed the Prison.

Any institution or doctrine, however originally good or well-intended, can be incorporated into the Iron Prison. It may sometimes be necessary to cut oneself off from an institution, no matter how good its works or its origins, when it has been inextricably absorbed into the Iron Prison's works such that the institution's agendas cannot be furthered without also furthering that of the Prison; anything of value and uncorrupted may and ought to be carefully salvaged.

While the Prison itself seeks to force and flatten all personality into fungible lifeless copies of its own image, its actual effect on people - or rather its circumstantial ability to affect people - is unique to every person. One person may be forced, on pain of becoming one with the Prison, to abandon an entire institution that another can work within and adequately resist the corruption of all their life.

Destruction is never the Prison's goal, even if it is a necessary and obvious everyday consequence. It always seeks to preserve, to protect, to put everything into its right place under its control. To conserve.

There is no possibility of an ich/du relationship within the parameters of the Iron Prison. In its ideal form all exchanges must either be forced, or transactional and backed by force.

The Iron Prison is fundamentally an institutional reality. If every person were to disappear from the earth, the Iron Prison would have no existence whatsoever, no matter how dire the material consequences it leaves behind. The material world and the persons formed in it are fundamentally good.

The Prison can thrive wherever there are people and rural traditional life provides no inherent protection (and indeed the isolation of such life can greatly exacerbate it). It is, however, far more difficult to break free of the Prison when more of your supply chains depend on it.

A paradox: the easiest way to let the Prison consume you is to be dependent on its products; the second easiest way to let the Prison consume you is to be consumed by your zeal not to be dependent on anyone else in order to protect yourself from the Prison.


[Decided to get a few thoughts down about certain key elements of my moral outlook. Figured no more would be more fitting than the diegetic anniversary of a work dear to my heart where someone is tempted with the offer to save many people's lives in exchange for directly enabling the Iron Prison at the cost of everything she believes in and loves.]

For a couple months after I first played Life Is Strange I'd gone back and forth about recommending it to steorra since it seemed to so unreservedly represent that kind of friendship that's been the subject of a few posts here.

After eventually finding my way into Pricefield fanfic I decided maybe not.

But then this interview happened and I've been reminded of why I considered making that recommendation all over again:

“I think the thing that hooks most people, myself included, is the beautiful friendship between Max and Chloe,” says Chamlis. “Now, before everyone freaks out, I am absolute Pricefield trash through and through. But there is a lot to be said for that feeling of having a best platonic friend. Someone you can rely on completely and that you would do anything for. Something a lot of people can identify with having when they were kids but probably not any more since they are adults, which, of course, adds to the feeling of nostalgia that the game invokes as a whole. I have had a Chloe Price in my life in my younger years. I've also had a Rachel Amber in my life. Hell, I've even been someone else's Chloe Price for a little while myself. But I think everyone, no matter who you are, has a little Max Caulfield inside them. Everyone can identify with Max, either within themselves or with someone close to them.”

So, content warnings (which are kinda self-explanatory as to why I'm not ultimately actively making any recommendation): sexual assault, rape culture, suicide, implied genocide, blasphemy, aggravating loose ends everywhere, everything kinda cranked up to 11, prominent problematic character with all too familiar name.


As a much more general and unreserved recommendation, last week I discovered (through someone I was following on Tumblr for LiS-related reasons) Daughter of the Lilies and it's an excellent, if slowly updated, webcomic through and through.

Content warnings: graphic violence, genocide-related themes, weirdly overzealous cuss censoring

(Random personal aside: A couple days before discovering DotL I'd just decided to give up on reading Kill Six Billion Demons and was wondering if I'd been too depressed to care about any of the characters or what was happening. DotL felt like it filled in exactly the void I was feeling in K6BD and more.)

Trying to make sense of a disturbing implication in a disturbingly ambiguous relationship.

( Irrelevant to anyone who isn't a fan of the game. Also CSA content warning - you can even say there are some very frank discussions in this. )

For indeed, when we came to Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were troubled on every side. Outside were conflicts, inside were fears.

Nevertheless God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming, but also by the consolation with which he was comforted in you, when he told us of your earnest desire, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced even more.

I know I've made comments like this (not all of them on this blog) about a few games already, so to deal with that:

1. the Mass Effect series was far, far more explicit with this. I kinda feel it's almost less effective for it, though it still remains a baseline for me as a videogame that can be read as an allegory for Christ.
   
2. what I'm seeing in LiS completely blows what I've seen in Doom out of the water.
   
3. there are zillions of games out there that go "descend into underworld, defeat its ruler, save the world, emerge victorious" and that without a lot of other Christ-pointing imagery is generally not really worth spending a huge amount of energy over.

For contrast, here are a few games where I don't read this kind of allegory, which I enjoy or could reasonably be expected to enjoy:

• Anything in the Quake series
  
• Half-Life
  
• Diablo, to the point of actively refuting any such reading
  
• Jill of the Jungle, Crystal Caves, classic Duke Nukem, really any of the old golden-age shareware platformers
  
• Cave Story
  
• Final Fantasy 6
  
• LiS: Before The Storm, if I were to understand it as a work on its own independent of LiS, focussing only on Chloe and Rachel's relationship and Max as just a background character
  
• Freedoom
  
• Doom or Freedoom with Hideous Destructor (in retrospect I'm a bit surprised how I'd decided to specifically reject this reading by making a perverted version of it part of the big bad's villain speech)
  
• Any of the new Doom games from 2016 onwards (there is still some to the extent they resemble the original Doom 1 and 2, but all the other stuff tends to water it down greatly)
  
• The Baldur's Gate series (which may have distinctly Christian or post-Christian themes of redemption and sacrifice, but no allegorical reading easily presents itself)
  
• Tell Me Why, at least what little I've seen of it. The twins are too equal and symmetrical in their relationship in a way Max and Chloe are not.

A great deal of "but what about", "but she doesn't", "Harold, they're lesbians" can be answered fairly simply that I'm not even beginning to aim for a perfect 1:1 here.

( the spoilers begin here )
~

While compiling this list someone on Facebook shared a meme attributing to C.S. Lewis: Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good. Anyone who's read how Lewis uses the word "unselfish" in The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters is on alert at this point, especially upon considering the prospect of knowing someone else's highest good.

This is inspiring for me as I write this, but not likely in the way the meme-maker intended. Instead I'm just reminded of all the unselfishness described in those books and why the evil organization in the last Space Trilogy book is called "NICE" and what I wrote here:

The photo is the Ring. That, and not Max's time travel power on its own, is the Ring's true temptation: to make things right again, for everyone, for the world. Even if it means betraying your best friend and consigning her to a miserable death, angry and alone - and worse: turning everything that would have redeemed her soul into something not demonstrably better than "it was all a dream". All to maintain the power structures of the status quo, albeit bringing a few of its chaotic aspects to "justice".

The irony is, of course, that I myself was never able to accept the Christian faith until I gave myself permission to be a little selfish about my own salvation, whereupon everything began to make sense.

I've made snide remarks in the past about what I've described as the worst rationale for sacrificing Arcadia Bay: the insistence that all of my work, what I did as the player, have meaning. I still think it's a bad rationale, and best to downplay in light of so much better; and yet there's the echo of salvation even in that.

(Intro post here)

This is a scrap bucket for miscellaneous issues raised by the previous posts in this series.

( Read more... )

Conclusion

I think it's safe to say there is nothing conclusively disproving any alternate timeline's continued existence as a parallel universe, any more or less than we have in real life without time travel powers - but neither is there anything evidencing it. In any case, everyone acts like it's the final result that matters, because that's all they can ever hope to experience.

But I do believe that, based on what is portrayed in the game, no one - not even the player - actually experiences anything that would empirically support the continued objective existence of new timelines created through the focus. While a blazé heedlessness of their possibility is not called for and care should be taken while acting in a situation that one intends to "abandon" with an imminent focus, I do not believe any action should be taken that assumes their reality.

While doing more "moon" string searches in Lewis I find this perfect summation of the reasoning in my last post:

But the human mind will not long endure such ever-increasing complications if once it has seen that some simpler conception can ‘save the appearances’.

My own biases

The time travel stories I was familiar with as a child never postulated parallel universes, and only later in life did I see them become integrated into the fictional work as a way to explain away the grandfather paradox. I think the first might have been Mostly Harmless in which Arthur travelled to numerous alternate Earths looking for a home - which of course presumed constant, regular porosity between the parallel universes of the sort totally unseen in Life Is Strange.

Going from the summaries of parallel universe episodes in Doctor Who confirms my recollection that the parallel universe model became much more popular in the late 1990s and 2000s - in other words, all of Max's, Chloe's and Warren's lives. (Relatedly, the Simpsons episode summary below has always used the language of arriving into different realities; it was first written in 2010 with numerous edits since that preserve this language, whereas the episode itself aired in 1994.)

Other than the commentary by those three characters, everything in LiS is evocative of the older sort of time travel story, the kind which focusses on the magnitude of the unintended consequences of changing the past and generally either ignores the grandfather paradox or assumes the time travellers themselves are somehow insulated from it.

(The oldest, it seems from wiki, deal little with consequences of interfering with the past at all, but instead are about either only movement forwards in time (with or without hope of return to where they had started), or people going back only for their own edification or that of those they visit and either have no other effect on the past or at most find themselves to be forgotten contributors to historical events. No parallel universes in these, in any event.)



Two final timelines

For reference as to how the final timeline should look without Max's memory of that which has no longer happened, here's a summary of all ingame events from Chloe's POV.
( obvious spoilers )

(Intro post here)

We see two distinct time travel abilities in the game: focus and rewind. Max's questions of alternate realities mostly come up in the context of a focus, though there is no inherent reason why this cannot be a concern for rewinds as well.

It is possibe that Max creates a new alternate reality with each press by the player of either rewind button - or even every frame of a continuous rewind. This has consequences that are quite unfortunate, and I dare to submit both therefore and despite, unlikely.

( Read more... )


Conclusion

Everything about the way the story is written presupposes that no real alternate universes are created by the rewind, although at least one instance of it is mildly suggestive of such a creation in a manner similar to focus - which shall be dealt with in the next entry.

The final decision point in Life Is Strange is certainly a conundrum. The way it is articulated is much closer to what Saruman presents to Haladdin in The Last Ringbearer than the moment of weakness in The Lord of the Rings but the game is clearly more connected to the latter while missing both the originating quest to destroy the Power and the final moment of ultra-rational, involuntary eucatastrophe present in either. So I decided to see if drawing some parallels could help come to an answer.

( The Hella Ship of the Ring: obvious LS, LR spoilers )

Second picture

EDIT: And that same gun in video

EDIT2: But let it never be said that I do not like any new FPS, here's some Unfinished Swan: