The New Garage Chronicles

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

One of the joys of a dormant fandom is that I can just show up and prop my feet on the table and start talking about divine horror and how sometimes a computer program is an angel and how humans are obsessed with taking the power of the heavens and putting it in a box for themselves to use.

Like.

God exists and she's a nice girl and she worked hard to be born, but she also has a temper and humans keep trying to put her in a box so she got fed up with it and hid from them. From her mother, she inherited eight powerful champions, and as a reward for their service she left them to roam as they pleased, but when humans couldn't trap her, they chose to trap those champions instead, and put them in a box, except now that box was a human, and that human was meant to take the power of the god that the humans couldn't steal, because humans made the divine realm that god and her angels inhabit and want to control it (as humans do).

And now you've got a bunch of humans who don't know they're being given a box with an angel in it and putting that box in their own bodies, and nobody can really figure out why these angel bodies keep going out of control and driving their hosts to madness, and oh, hey, the mother of god made these champions for a purpose and the humans in the driver seat don't know about that, either, even though the humans who gave them the angel bodies do know about that, because they want to use those angel bodies to make another god.

So congratulations! You're a prophet now! You are being called to do battle for your god, because you've been granted a divine body that has an angel in it, that is an angel. You're being called to do as your nature as an angel requires of you! And the entire time you're just a human, and the thing in your head feels too big for your mortal body, it feels too big for your divine body, and you're just watching things spiral out of control, wondering why you feel like you'd bleed mercury if they scratched you too deep.

( Original tags )

I wanted to crosspost my additions from here to DW, since I realised that I hadn't actually done that before. It's a little unstructured, but hopefully easy enough to follow knowing that the context is some generic drama around a creator complaining about NSFW fanworks, and some fans deciding to act as their unpaid enforcers, causing a minor storm in a tea kettle a few months back.

First addition:

The easiest way to wrap your head around this is to consider that "fandom" is a discrete subculture that a subset of the entire fan base of a work.

Fandom is not a creator fanclub or a creator support network or a creator advertisement platform. Creators interacting with the fandom directly is a very new development brought about by the general erosion of communal boundaries. (This part also includes fans taking the fruits of fandom to the creator's table. Stop tweeting fanart at creators, they can find it themselves if they really want to.)

Literally the only thing that stops a creator from being a problem for the fandom is the maturity and understanding of the subculture. For every creator that is delighted by their fandom, there is always going to be one who hates you on principle for not reading their work exactly as they *wanted* you to read it, not interacting with it in the way *they* intended, whether it's as banal as liking the wrong characters or as complicated as writing the wrong kind of fanfic, and whether or not this becomes a fight depends *entirely* on whether they see it as their right to tell us about it and start that fight.

The more involved in fandom that creators get, the more pressure there is to bring fandom in line with the intended or the *desired* fan base. There more there is pressure to bring it in line with what is profitable, with what is *marketable.* Creators interacting with fandom have a direct profit incentive to do so, whether they're aware of it or not. (You'll note that this part is also relevant to what kind of fanworks creators *encourage.*)

Fandom is not for creators. Fandom has never been for creators. The relationship between creators and fandom is not hierarchical, and it's not mutual. Carve these words in your heart.

Second addition:

Also like furthermore there's *soooo* little for fandom to actually gain from any sort of "approval" for what we do here from creators. You can feel however you want about death of the author as a concept, but ultimately as far as being *the audience*, the creator and the fandom are on even ground, and the creator's opinions on what fandom does is no more authoritative than any other person.

So creators who *insist* on authority over fandom and the creations of fandom is simply treating fandom as an extension of the things they have legal control over, and unless there's a literal contract in my hands, I'm not about to become someone's unpaid employee like that.

(And it's worth stating explicitly that creators *encouraging* certain kinds of fanworks is, again, part of the management of their brand -- whenever fandom conforms to what the creators want, they are being inducted to act as a part of that brand, *in a way that is still controlled by the creator.* It's glorified advertisement.)

So, like, ask yourselves -- what would "creator approval" even *accomplish?* What outside of personal gratification would we get out of it? And when both the potential damage to the community spirit *and* the potential legal consequences of bringing the fruits of fandoms to creators are so great, is feeling good for yourself *really* worth it? Or wouldn't it be better if we simply focused that energy to connecting with other fans, our peers, the people you're *actually* in community with, rather than trying to elevate yourself by association?

(Crossposted from Tumblr)

The thing that makes me the most "run around in circles" crazy about Initiation is that Alan wrote the Casey of the Dark Place into the story to help him, and then made it so that Casey knows even less about what is going on than Alan does.

Alan never gives Casey the opportunity to get past step fucking one to help him, explains nothing to him, and Casey ends up with no idea what he's even doing here, no idea what his assigned purpose is, no idea what his narrative goals are. He's an actor given no script, no stage direction, to the point that Casey doesn't even know they're in a story, and it makes him sink deeper into depression with every passing loop with no knowledge to ground him.

And it's impossible to tell if this is because Alan didn't realise that he had the perfect opportunity to write Casey like the Diver, a living repository of Alan's accumulating knowledge about the Dark Place, a seeing-eye dog to guide him through the dark -- or if Alan did try that, and it somehow went so horribly wrong that now he and Casey can't both survive in the same narrative line without trying to kill each other -- or if Alan did try that, and it went horribly right, and now the Dark Presence can't let Casey live because Alan's bespoke perfect little detective is too good at finding out useful things.

And instead, in the story we currently have, Alan made up a guy for a specific purpose of helping him, but because Alan is the protagonist, because it's his story, his fault, his duty and his job to get himself out of it, he doesn't even let Casey fulfil his narrative purpose. What the hell else is Casey supposed to do, Alan, other than the thing you literally made him for? He's the detective -- he's supposed to solve things.

Like.

Largely it just comes down to genre and coding. The Controlverse stories take place in worlds that are heavily driven by the concerns of the genre, where the characters are shaped by their narrative environments. They're event-driven, not character-driven, which gives them room to set up characterisation that is in conflict with himself. In the first game the genre-driven development Alan gets is "man with a sedentary intellectual's lifestyle has to pick up a gun and start shooting", he doesn't become Ash from Evil Dead until Alan Wake's American Nightmare, thanks to that story's shift into an action-mystery genre for its duration.

Casey in the Dark Place is ruled by his noir coding over and above what the real Casey or even Alan thinks about him. His genre has been decided for him, and he doesn't get to show fear or sentiment or tenderness beyond what is prescribed in that codified shared-subconscious "noir detective" frame. The real Casey, once he is within the field of effect of the story, gets prescribed the genre markers of "the cops in a horror story" -- he's ineffectual, unaware or incomprehending of the forces at work, granted prestige and authority just so the story can subvert that authority, unable to even help himself to drive home the fact that nobody is coming to help the protagonists. He has to be cool, has to seem capable and dependable, so it's scary and upsetting when he can do nothing to make the narrative budge.

And once the story really kicks in, Casey becomes what the story needs him to be. But before finding the first manuscript page, there's that liiitttle sliver of time before the narrative has been established, before either of their backstories become relevant, where he's played noticeably less eloquent, more restrained, almost awkward, and in real life... that's just how guys like him come across. Resting bitch face, kind of intense, seems unsociable because he doesn't really talk to people.

Also, the guy self-consciously looks like Sam Lake, who -- while being quite attractive, ngl -- is still kind of a goofy nerdy guy. You could make a drinking game out of the times he gets describes as "youthful" and "boyish" and "childlike" in interviews and profiles, and presents in public as not exactly being in a rush to get people to take him seriously. Casey, in universe, looks like kind of nerdy, and outside of the narrative we don't see enough about how he's treated by the people around him to really draw any conclusions either way.

So this naturally means I get to read my preferred baggage into the character, right?

(This post is also available on Tumblr)

Preamble: What is this?

There’s a lot of Finnish shit in Alan Wake 2. I speak Finnish. I’m really annoyed about how wrong about some of the things that are in Finnish in the game people actually are. Autumn is an Ahti fan. We’re mutually annoyed about how wrong about Ahti people are, because in general the trend is people thinking Ahti is spooky and mysterious because they don’t know what he’s saying, rather than thinking he’s spooky and mysterious because of the things he’s saying.

So Autumn went through the entire game, transcribing Ahti’s dialogue, and I went through the transcript, translating everything untranslated in the game, and providing cultural context for the rest of it (with some saves from Saikku, RH, and my mum), because truly this dude is not nearly as cryptic as people make him out to be, and is actually twice as weird as people think he is as a result.

Disclaimer: Finnish is very regional, and even with people from all over pitching in, some of the shit Ahti says might still be idioms we’re not familiar with. If you’re a Finnish person reading this going “HOW DID YOU NOT KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS”, trust me that I had many moments like that while putting this together, and please leave a comment so I can add your insight :D

This post is going to go through all of Initiation, followed by all of Return. There's unmarked spoilers past the cut -- enter at your own risk.

(Also available on Tumblr.)

So, there’s a couple of posts around mecha body language around that are very focused on bauplan, build and social status as the reasons for why some mecha act and comport themselves the way they do, and… I always find those posts overly reductive and kind of bio-essentialist and think they lack consideration for what kind of social spaces – both the conditions and the actual physical space – and social conditions mecha are used to.

Heavier construction and thicker armour, like the type you see with warframes like Optimus or Ultra Magnus, does generally linearly correlate with less subtle body language, but more so because a large percentage of heavy labour mecha are used to being tightly packed together, in mines and on assembly and refinery straights, so they rely on EM background radiation and verbal cues for communicating close up what medium freight and service frames communicate at a distance with body language. When you’re used to everyone standing within touching (or at least shoving) distance, verbal and subverbal cues become more important than visually distinct posture.

The one time you do get big, expressive body language out of heavy warframes and labour frames is in a conflict situation. Social conflict, see, is very bimodal for labour frames. If you’re already stuck on shift with someone, it’s in both of your best interest to bear down and just cope, resulting in social interfacing with zero friction as both mecha try to get away from each other as fast as they can. But if you aren’t already stuck with someone, then the best way to ensure you won’t be is to make them back off by laying on the physical intimidation.

This is also why minibots and lightweight service and custodial mecha (as well as most scientific instruments) generally have body language more recognisable to heavy industrial and warframes. Along with their tough construction leaving little mobility in their substructures, they’re similarly used to working in tight corners, under floors and inside vents – spaces that share physical traits with mine shafts and refineries more than the broad dock grounds or office buildings – so their body language does tend towards either understated or overbearing.

Similarly, large haulers, terrestrial shuttles and civillian airframes – all of whose works involve high speeds and large distances – converge on the body language typical of high performance ground frames. Partially because high-performance ground frames are what they mostly interact with, but also b/c the access to a physically larger social environment allows for communication that is better parseable from a distance, as well as favouring frames who are capable of making microadjustments to their own aerodynamics. As social flexibility increases, so does the necessity for being able to adjust your presentation and posture to match, too – not all high-performance frames are highly physically expressive, and not all industrial frames are laconic, but rather there’s a sort of a happy medium that frames from various classes codeswitch into with each other.

Although, honestly, airframes are sort of their own mess, because generally the spaces they operate in, the only times they’re in such close quarters with each other that body language and posture (rather than verbal or radiant communication) become significant are if they’re working in a cross-frame environment, or if they’re operating as a flight – and that latter requires an absolutely astounding clarity of communication, because manoeuvers at the high general cruising speeds they have to maintain even one person lagging on a turn can cause a crash at pulverising speeds for everyone else.

As a result, to ground frames air frames seem extremely prone to large physical displays, getting the maximum utility out of their middle-of-the-pack aerodynamic flaring (yes, wings and rotors can move, but generally airframes are already optimised to a certain kind of aerodynamic profile, and the rest of their plating can be quite rigid), but amongst themselves, even seeker body language can seem quite subdued to an outsider, because a lot of the necessary communication is done as radio and radar communication, and by maintaining a flight-wide EM equillibrium. Maybe seeker tendency to trine up is partially to create a more malleable social space, instead of every time having to match up the communicative needs of whole six individuals.

Also – the majority of air frames kind of wrap back around to sharing traits with heavy warframes, whose social distances match airframes on the ground, but who suppress a lot of that body language in order to be able to function as a part of a team or a squad, creating a lot of that same no-friction conflict you see with industrial frames. Rabbit-like displays of “I’m so much happier than you are” are not a seeker trait, they’re a warframe trait.

Beastformers have hands down the widest variety of body language expressiveness, and have similarly different ranges of body language and posture depending on whether they’re operating as individuals or in a group, but unfortunately their bauplan makes a lot of that body language hard to parse for bipedal mecha, and also their lack of reliance on radiant communication (both radio and verbal, which is why even large beastformers are often stealthier than equivalent weight class mecha from other frame types) creates huge gaps in communication.

Welp, I went down another air traffic research hole, fuck me.

In any sort of happy-end intergrated future society, I can imagine flight frames probably haaate trying to land near large airports, because they'd probably need to be under ATC so as not to disrupt the holding patterns too badly, which for them means a lot of dull "waiting in traffic" and then some more dull waiting around until they make it to the designated area for transforming into root mode, or needing to walk like three miles just to wait in line for takeoff from a runway they don't even need.

I can also imagine the various heart attacks various air traffic controllers have, trying to deal with some idiot flyboys capable of near-vertical climb after VTOL, not realising human reaction time Does Not Work Like That, needing for all sorts of restricted flight zones for flight-capable individuals. And they gotta subject themselves to this every time they want any kind of service while grounders can get it Fragging Everywhere because this dumbass species is hopelessly land-bound.

Also -- air traffic chatter is really specific, so I wonder if they'd also have to start using similar designation as human aircraft (essentially fancy registration numbers) or if that's just all sorts of beneath someone who spends fully half their life flying. Like, no, they probably wouldn't wait for permission to take off from any nearby air control unit so giving them a flight designation number would be kind of pointless, but I can see them needing to have consistent recognition/radar IFF so that they can be picked up on and the humans in the air can be warned of their presence, and probably have some kind of a call sign so they can be contacted and told to Cut That Shit Out In Our Airspace, There Are Squishy Humans Up There Too.

Of course there's probably, like. A small minority of flight frames who look at the whole "getting paid to fly all over the place" and go "sweet" but IDK how many of them would go into passenger traffic. Cargo traffic? Sure. The containers won't complain when you do corkscrews in the air, after all. (But I like the idea that those who might have the patience for it would go into, like, medevac and on lines that aren't safely operable by human pilots, and the rest are Fancy-Aft Exceptions like Sky Lynx.)

(Reposted from Tumblr.)

Something that exists in the subtext of the way I write Bulkhead and Wheeljack but that I haven’t really been able to describe properly is that ultimately, I do kind of see them as being intellectual equals.

Like, I’m on record saying I think Wheeljack is about as smart as a brick. Yes, he’s incredibly competent, but he’s competent in that “learning to do one thing, and then learning to do that thing really fucking well” kind of way. His one thing just happens to broadly be problem-solving. We’ve just never seen the awkward data-gathering trial-and-error phases of him getting to that point, which makes it seem like he has his shit together way more than I personally think he does. Don’t ever let him fool you – Wheeljack is about as much of a dumb prettybot as Knockout is.

But also, we know for a fact that Bulkhead was a construction worker before he was a soldier. And construction, for all it has a reputation for being “unintellectual” work, it requires good memory, good execution, consistency, and both good long and short term planning. Any management position, even lower management, is a hellscape of trying to juggle priorities if you’re genuinely invested in doing a comprehensively good job.

And you know, modest, self-deprecating Bulkhead? He would have made a point of being bad at his job, if he had been bad at it, while you don’t really hear him brag even when he has cause to. Not to mention, people consistently underestimate Bulkhead’s emotional intelligence and I’m just *drags hands over face* but at least that’s conveniently something Wheeljack is just like So Fucking Bad At, so

IDK I just think they compliment each other in neat ways. They share so many core values, but go about the problem of “how to be true to yourself” in such different ways, and for that reason have viewpoints that are beneficial to each other. I’ve described both of them (on separate occasions, in different contexts) as “scoundrel engineers” and I stand by this statement, even though both the word “scoundrel” and “engineer” mean wildly different things depending on who I’m applying them to.

Okay seriously though? I think the way Death Stranding uses its mechanics to drive its themes is pretty fucking fantastic despite the fact that this makes it kind of a boring game.

Admittedly, I was always going to get floored by this game. Postal work is incredibly soothing to me becaose of my OCD, and the central thesis of "connect with people, dammit, because being alone is no better than being dead" is something that will always hit me where it sticks, what with my lifelong struggle to have and maintain social bonds outside of the few ones grandfathered into my life.

So, being as positively biased towards the mechanics as I was, the metaphor of how becoming connected and staying connected can be hard, can be a boring, tiring slog, and can in some ways be hazardous because you never know where the traumatic tripwires that cause a conflict and a potential "voidout" in your relationship out of nowhere, and how exploring new territory with people can be exhausting... well, it lands, for a lack of a better word. If I said the metaphor in the mechanics didn't get to me I'd be a liar.

Of course, this all comes from a place of recognition that DS isn't. You know. It's not the second coming. I've always enjoyed Kojima's style of overwrought yet hyperliteral -- I struggle with emotional awareness and everyone being Very Clear on What They Feel make his games easy to parse -- even the translation is firmly Narm Charm territory for me, and not just in a "it's fun to watch these actors make the clunker of a script work" kind of way. I like his work, I am primed to try to dig deeper.

And the game is not subtle!! At all! In the least! Complicated? Yeah, sure, but subtle? Not at all. Even if you take everything in it at face value and just read it a soft-science future fantasy horror story, Death Stranding's worldbuilding still manages to impart the idea that "connection good" without any big effort -- but if you do take it as Oops All Allegory, it is really potent. The way the positive associations with being in touch with people, even if it's over something entirely meaningless and innocuous is woven really well into the mechanics, it feels appreciably different when you put effort into building the "infrastructure" of your relationships within the game as opposed to doing everything the boring, simple (and admittedly -- more mechanically challenging but not necessarily more fun) way.

To be clear -- I don't think the aim of Death Stranding was "fun", and in that sense I think it was a success, but just like any "entertainment" that aims for something different than... well, entertainment, how much of a good call and how you personally feel about the story will vary wildly, and having played DS alongside Indivisible, which very much tries to be fun, engaging and entertaining, and having kind of a rote Excuse Plot to have the character go through a specific arc, I honestly wouldn't know to tell you if DS being the way it is is good or bad, other than that it made some Massive Things™️ in me move and that had nothing to do with how "fun" I thought the fetch questing was.

If you hate gameplay that feels like having a job, then DS is not gonna be fun for you, but if you can accept the mechanics as a vehicle for delivering a certain story with a laser-focused theme, then you'll probably like it.

So I've gone back to gently prodding my Vos meta into a presentable shape funny that, for someone who doesn't give a shit about seekers I sure spend a lot of time thinking about their culture and the strangest thing that out of the cities involved in the consideration of the south-pole states' politics, it isn't actually Vos I have a hard time wrapping my mind around.

It's Tarn.

Because the thing is, Tarn keeps cropping up as an important power player on the level of Iacon or Vos, but while both Iacon and Vos have political and economic reasons for why this is, the only reason Tarn seems to be important is because it's close proximity and state rivalry with Vos. Tarn is seemingly only ever important because it is a) near b) unfriendly with arguably the most important autonomous region on Cybertron.

And usually I'd take that as a go-ahead to just start making shit up to fill the void of worldbuilding, but Tarn gets mentioned often enough that I don't feel entirely comfortable doing that? Shockwave is in multiple continuities recognised to be from Tarn, as is Megatron (although he's more closely associated with Kaon) and I'd rather stick to besmirching the reputation of one prominent and beloved Decepticon's hometown rather than several at once. Compound that with the fact that Tarn has a character named after it in one of the most popular continuities currently being discussed, and all of that sounds like too much hassle to get into while avoiding setting off potential landmines. Outsiders are rarely welcome to complex sociopolitical conflicts.

But that still kinda leaves me out in the cold because I do have things to say about Vos, which I want to say at the risk of treading over the aforementioned wings. It's one of those beautiful fandom moments where you're introduced to a concept (a city of fliers, primarily) and you immediately realise that you know a lot of stuff that can make it a lot more interesting (aerial traffic, air defense, the physics and economics of flying). Having a bunch of established lore existing helps, but based on just want I know of anything, I know I can make Vos (and maybe through that, the land and resource war) itself way more interesting.

I like playing fake historian and fake anthropologists, what can I say? TF is fun because a lot of the philosophical and political analysis of the civil war is right there in the text or provided by a fandom that has a lovely sense of cosmic drama to it, but it also means that I can come in with my box of Practical Concerns and start asking questions I find interesting. But in situations like this, before you can really play economist, you first gotta make sure you're not making huge categorical errors, or else you're not gonna make anything interesting that enhances the experience, just something extremely complicated.

People forget (or at least I feel like they forget) that critique used to be an art form.

It was a style of transformative engagement, with rules and limitations to how it was performed -- the viewpoint and the philosophy that was being applied to look for new meanings in the original text. Structuralist critiques, feminist critiques, Marxist critiques of fiction never really went away, we just stopped calling them "critiques" because that word got associated with... like, reviews and shit, objective, quantitative judgement of a work rather than a subjective interpretation of it. In many ways, what fandom calls "meta" these days is the inheritor of that mantle -- it's own thing, that is using the work as a framework to discuss ideas present in or absent from it. It all depends on what the author is trying to accomplish.

And while a lot of critique is constructive/deconstructive and formalist and self-contained in nature -- and while the meta I write is almost always exploratory rather than "critical" in the common-sense meaning of the word -- there is absolutely no reason a critique can't be done in the style of the work, as a new story, as some other kind of art. That's ultimately why fandom continues to be transformative, because like a lot of good funny-relatable posts on Tumblr say, sometimes fanfic is a love letter and sometimes it's just the equivalent of "fuck you. Strong letter to follow."

When we criticise the tendency for fandom to do certain things that are hinky, "problematic" or regressive, understanding fandom as a critique makes it a lot easier to deal with the fact that sometimes the uncomfortable things are already present in the story and sometimes they're coming from "inside the house", so to speak. The work is one thing, but fan works? Fan works also always include the politics of the fan creating them, to one degree or another.

I think it's very unfortunate that critique gets lumped in with "reviews" and criticisms instead of being understood as a form of writing unto itself. I mean, most of my writing falls in the exploratory auxilliary worldbuilding and textual analysis categories and I regularly talk about how much it frustrates me that I only feel like I'm "proper transformative fandom" when writing fic.... which I don't like doing that much. Hell, that is why I have the "non-narrative writing" tag, to validate my own creative efforts.

Ultimately, I think the conflation of deconstructive criticism, reviewing, textual analysis and non-narrative fic under the same "meta" label is a symptom of fandom becoming more consumptive. There's a push, like, a cultural push for people to treat themselves and their whole existences as content for other people, and to treat the world as a buffet of entertainment -- a topic that is wholly too complicated to get to here -- and the way it manifests in fandom is through people becoming more ignorant to the fact that we make these things for ourselves, because we have thoughts and feelings about The Thing.

I don't think we should forget about this, and treat fandom the same way we treat mainstream media, because the act of talking about a work is where we started, and it is ultimately what we're doing when we're doing fandom.