The Theoretically Annual List of the Best Games of the Year I DIDN’T Play Because I Couldn’t Have Played Them Because They Don’t Exist!

Well, its once again that time of year. When all the writers mentally check out for the rest of the holiday season and begin putting together their “best of” lists. Of course, that means it is also once again that time of year I, um, can’t really remember much about what games I played this year and already mentally checked out BEFORE everyone else did but feel compelled to try anyway. This year I’m giving myself a bit of a break. This year, I’m bringing you my list of the Best Games of 2018 I DIDN’T Play Because I Couldn’t Have Played Them Because They Don’t Exist!

Sea Otter Simulator

This is probably a game a lot of people who don’t exist expected to see on this list of games that don’t exist, because I’ve been not-playing it for months. First of all, let’s address the elephant in the room: YES, the game requires the use of additional peripherals, and that is gonna be a turn off for some. But trust me, stick with this gem long enough and you’ll realize how necessary and fun the OtterControl ProPlus Set really is.

The goal of the game starts simple enough, as a sea otter you must find food, avoid danger, find a mate, stop the war between the squids and the sharks, uncover the buried pieces of the Annunaki Template before humanity destroys the oceans, and engage in other normal otter behaviors. This is where the peripherals come in. The Whiskeradar you strap to your face? That interacts with subtle electrical signals given off by the game console and the accompanying app on your phone. This allows you to interact with otherwise invisible objects on the screen via touch and, as an added bonus, also allows you to play any compatible games with your eyes closed.

Your otter’s rock is the most important tool they will use, being able to open clams with it, put on rock-based puppet shows for the sea witch, or crack open submarine hulls. While I was worried the accompanying Rock Plus device would be gimmicky, I now can’t imagine playing any rock-based video game without one! There is absolutely no input lag, and every action you make with the Rock Plus is recreated smoothly and precisely on the screen. As an added bonus, the Rock Plus works with your Amiibo collection, allowing you to imbue your otter’s rock with the ambient energy of your favorite Nintendo characters.

Of course, the gameplay is only part of what makes Sea Otter Simulator so memorable. It is the evolving story, played out over several generations of otter, that sticks with you long after you finally grow bored with hunting for clams and sleeping while affixed to strong kelp braids which prevent you from floating away in the current. By focusing on the otter-sized view of the events, the game designers manage to make the convoluted story of metaphysics, environmental catastrophe and non-linear time progression feel approachable and fresh. It would have been so easy for this game to get bogged down in pretentious nonsense, but it never outlives its welcome or forgets that, at the end of the day, the player is here to be an otter and that the story should serve to aid that.

Skateboard Farmer

When this game was first revealed with the pitch “Harvest Moon meets Tony Hawk” a lot of us rolled our eyes. But the truth is that the final product is nothing like either of those games, and could better have been described as “Pikmin meets Mario Maker meets Jet Set Radio with a dash of Chao Garden.”

You play as a down-on-your-luck girl from the big city who, through a mysterious sequence of events and clerical errors, ends up inheriting both a run-down farm and an even more run-down skateboard factory. While growing crops, you soon discover that the plants, once mature, have a natural aptitude for skateboarding. You also learn that you can grow more than just skaters, but entire skate parks out of your crops. But since these parks are made of living, and fragile, crops and livestock, that means you need to make sure your farmer is running around keeping everything watered, healthy and growing while your veggies thrash. Its “thrash” right? The game is told entirely through pantomime so I didn’t actually learn any skater lingo.

Anyway, if you don’t keep an active role directing your veggie boarders and growing or harvesting the appropriate parts of your park, you can quickly find yourself in trouble. Before long you’ll be drafted into a secret resistance force against the corrupt government, and only you can direct your veggies to use their newfound skills to break into and dismantle the oppressive technofascist regime’s headquarters.

The delightful emergent personalities and procedurally generated faces of your veggies help sell the charm of this world, and the amazing soundtrack by Cibo Matto, who apparently reformed JUST to make this soundtrack and then go back to their individual projects, has already made its way to my everyday playlist. What really blew me away though was just how easy and fun it was to build amazing levels to skate. Keeping track of your squadron of skating veggies and the changing landscape of your skate farm felt like it would be overwhelming, but it was remarkably intuitive to balance things. Before long, I was going from making simple ramps over cows to complex, multi-tiered beanstalk roads entwining gravity-altering giant tomato stalks. The ability to astral project yourself into the waiting vegetable of another player and explore their creations transformed this game into a must-buy-if-it-actually-existed. Long after the Campaign Mode ended, I was still putting hours of nonexistent time into the endlessly creative work of the other players. The simple scripting engine you unlock in the late-game meant that enterprising players could create entirely new minigames within their shared farms, and I was surprised at how welcoming the community was to new players.

Artemisia Fulcrum: Time Lesbian

I know, I know, everyone is sick of high-concept indie dating sims at this point. But even so, this game would have been a highlight of the year if it had actually existed. Taking the role of Artemisia Fulcrum, a young theoretical physics student and bonne vivante, you must travel back into the past in order to aid various historical women in changing the future. Part simulation and strategy game, once you enter your chosen time period you’ll find yourself engaged in a number of short scenarios including coordinating the armies of Boudicca, helping Razia Sultana pass laws, and managing the funding of Hypatia’s research. Successfully completing these tasks will mean that history was changed and the woman in question did not die.

However, that is just the first half of each scenario, because despite what you may assume, you do not seduce or date any of the historical figures. Instead, once you return to your own time, you will find that there are new students in Artemisia’s class. These are all queer women or non binary descendants of the historical figure you saved, and THESE characters are who are dateable.

The game has 18 scenarios to work through, each with its own romantic storyline and original, but not tasteless, artwork to unlock. However, the publisher has promised additional DLC with even more historical moments in time to alter and women to date. There is also a spinoff releasing later in the next year that won’t happen, where you can play as Artemisia’s gay cousin Smitty, that will open up the formula for those looking for gay romance as well.

That Game Where You Play As Vivian The Cute Trans Ghost From Paper Mario

Remember Vivian? She was a cute character. I liked her. I don’t really have a funny jokey joke description for this. I just think that’d be a really fun game to play and it doesn’t exist.

Kestrel’s Flight: A Tale of Chivalry and Enlightenment

I’ve been saying that there should be more games about falconry for a LONG time, and finally this year my prayers were not answered when this game was not released because it doesn’t exist. Kestrel’s Flight is an amazing open-world fantasy sandbox that focuses on exploration, discovery and building connections to the game’s environment.

As a young falconer on the “Wind’s Pilgrimage” you travel from town to town, earning your keep by hunting or performing with your birds. You start out with a simple, common kittyhawk, but as you journey you can obtain other birds that may be rarer, more dangerous, or magical in nature. Building up a relationship with your bird is key, as it determines how well they follow your commands.

Travel is slow in the game, but rewarding. The environments are lush and diverse and there are many hidden secrets to discover. You may end up getting lost in the woods for days, surviving only on what you can forage and hunt for with your birds, only to finally stumble upon a new town, an ancient ruin or a fascinating hermit.

What is most interesting about this game is the morality system. While you cannot kill other characters with your bird, and you rarely meet genuinely evil people or moral quandaries, the game instead keeps track of your behavior in other ways. There is a certain moral code that falconers on the pilgrimage are expected to follow, communicated to the player through legends, art and songs, and failing to live up to this example can lead to people considering you a renegade. Pro strats: remember to always tip at least 20%, greet strangers on the road, always keep your promises, and never hunt more than you need.

Kestrel’s Flight Gaiden: Oh Shit They Done Did It

This spinoff takes place in an alternate version of Earth where the dominant sentient evolved from birds of prey, and now they have tiny trained animalistic humans that they use for hunting. Other than that, it is largely the same game.

The Untold History of Slimes

This essay originally appeared at Readyset Zam

For many adventurers, they are the first victory. Millions die every year to help plucky young farm kids reach level 2. But what do we really know about slimes?

Despite their iconic status, the humble slime does not have the same recognizable cultural background other roleplaying game staples such as the dragon, the vampire, or even the goblin have. There are no slime fairy tales, no viscous rogues and heroes we can all name, and yet they are almost always present in fantasy games. It is easy to assume the slime sprang fully formed from Akira Toriyama’s head into the RPG consciousness like a gooey Athena. But the slime does indeed have a rich history within our world and our imaginations.

Of course, it cannot be overstated how much Dragon Quest solidified (in a manner of speaking) the slime’s current role. Very few games have had such an explosive impact on fantasy games as Dragon Quest has. While Dragon Quest‘s impact is inarguably felt strongest in Japan, its success there has meant that its DNA can be found on games made in countries far away from its direct influence. The prevalence of slimes as RPG’s favorite punching bag following Dragon Quest‘s success is such an example.

The perpetually smiling, tear-shaped blob that first greeted adventurers is undoubtedly the most successful slime in history. With its big eyes and vacant grin, its delightful dollop-shape, the implied easy victory promised to new players, it’s not hard to see how this creature won so many hearts. While it was Dragon Quest that would make it famous, the slime was not chosen arbitrarily, and by tracing its lineage we can see deeper roots.

Dragon Quest was unapologetically inspired by the Western RPG Wizardry, and the slime in particular was chosen from Wizardry‘s bestiary to represent that ancestry. Wizardry‘s slimes are a very different breed than Dragon Quest‘s, however. While they have faces, they are not nearly so pleasant, and the texture they imply is less supple and jiggly and more molten and mucous.

Wizardry‘s slimes are, in turn, directly lifted from Dungeons & Dragons, which has featured slimes since the Basic Edition was released in 1974. These slimes are mindless, faceless monstrosities that melt flesh from bone and are based on two sources. The first is a natural phenomenon, a colony of single-celled bacteria known as ‘snottites’.

Snottites were first named in the 80s, but had been encountered by spelunkers long before. Named for their resemblance to stalactites made of human mucus, snottites can be a dangerous encounter for real world adventurers. They produce highly acidic wasteakin to battery acid, which drips down from above. This acid may have helped formed the huge caves they are found in, such as the famous Cuela de Villa Luz in Tobasco, Mexico. It is this dangerous acidity that inspired the subterranean, flesh-eating oozes of D&D.

The other ancestor of the D&D slime comes from classic sci-fi. The most famous sci-fi slime is, of course, 1958’s The Blob. The titular slime arrives on a fallen meteor, and then proceeds to digest and devour a small Midwestern town. By the end of the movie, the creature is a gargantuan mass of blood-red digested organic matter, and can only be temporarily stopped by freezing it in the Arctic Circle. Similar slimes that fell from space to wreak havoc have appeared in sci-fi and horror literature before, including Lovecraft’s The Colour Out Of Space, but The Blob was specifically inspired by a real world event. On September 27, 1950, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that four Philadelphia policemen described an unidentified object falling to Earth. When they investigated, they found “a domed disk of quivering jelly, 6 feet in diameter, one foot thick at the center and an inch or two near the edge.” The jelly dissolved at their touch, handily leaving behind no evidence, and the story became a minor media frenzy.

While never as popular as Bigfoot or UFO sightings, “star jelly” events, where a meteor crash leaves behind an unidentifiable goo, are a relatively common occurrence. 20th century sightings are nearly always associated with the cultural zeitgeist of UFO sightings and alien abductions, but unexplained star jellies (occasionally given such wonderfully evocative name as astromyxin, star shot, caca de luna, and witch’s butter) can be traced much further back. Scientific debates about the origins of these unexplained slimes can be found from the 13th to 19th centuries.

The most popular theories identified star jellies as a fungus or half-digested frog spawn vomited up by birds or polecats, but other scientists and philosophers got more creative. Scandinavian folklore considered them to be the familiars of witches, or sometimes the vomit of other such beasts. Medical texts from the 13th century describe star jelly as the remains of fallen stars and suggest using it for treating skin conditions. The English philosopher Henry More wrote in 1656 “That the Starres eat… that those falling Starres, as some call them, which are found on the earth in the form of a trembling gelly, are their excrement.”

Star jelly, it was decided, was the excrement of passing stars, which proved that the stars were not only alive, but also ate. Many other poets and philosophers agreed, and wrote extensively on the phenomenon indicating that life must exist outside of our own planet. Where there was slime, there must be life.

This connection between slime and life is built into the word itself. “Slime” comes from an old Germanic word for ‘mucus,’ which itself is derived from the Latin for ‘mud.’ Greek philosophers, and later medieval alchemists, believed that the slimier parts of our anatomy (mucus, blood, bile, and semen) were what gave life to otherwise inorganic bodies. When Aristotle observed insects emerging from the wet earth, he puzzled as to how life could spontaneously arise from nothing. He adapted the ideas of earlier philosophers including Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Empedocles who all agreed that some form of primordial slime must have been the catalyst transforming not-life into life. In The History of Animals, Aristotle gave this slime a name: “pneuma.” Pneuma is the vital heat, the coming-together of the five elements that allowed life to exist. The fetid, rotting ooze of the swamp or compost heaps that insects “spontaneously” birthed from was not pneuma itself, but its by-product. Slime was both the origin of life, and the result.

Aristotle’s writings helped give rise to one of the wackiest eras of natural history, when the scientific method was still being developed and alchemists played fast and loose with observations. During this time, many natural philosophers became obsessed with unlocking the secrets to life itself in the form of artificial lifeforms called humunculi. The ultimate goal of these alchemists was to become closer to the divine by accomplishing the same feat God did when creating humanity. The secret, they all thought, must lie in slime. Texts written by those who would later be considered the fathers of science describe such horrifying recipes as mixing feces and human semen in the womb of a horse to create pneuma capable of generating new life. Various combinations of organic slimes were mixed into jars and tubes in hopes of generating tiny beings capable of divining the future and unlocking the secrets of creation. Even when the humunculus fad died down, the associations between slime and life would live on in those later poets like William Somerville, who stared down at the mysterious slime that had no doubt come to Earth from beyond:

Swift as the shooting star, that gilds the night

With rapid transient Blaze, she runs, she flies;

Sudden she stops nor longer can endure

The painful course, but drooping sinks away,

And like that falling Meteor, there she lyes

A jelly cold on earth. (The Talisman, 1740)

Of course, the true origins of star slime are far more terrestrial. Slime molds are a loose collection of 900 species, many of which are only vaguely related to each other. Originally thought to be a kind of fungus, today we know slime molds to be various protists, a diverse and ancient kingdom of life that had long ago given rise to the kingdoms of plants, animals and fungi.

In general, slime molds can be divided into two groups: cellular and plasmodial. Cellular slime molds spend most of their time as single cells, not slimes at all. When something in the environment forces them to act, such as a lack of food, many of these cells will form together to create a single mass. In this state, they are more easily able to detect food via airborne chemicals and move towards it like a giant amoeba. The Gelatinous Cube, perhaps the second-most famous slime in games, is a perfect example. A creation of Gary Gygax, the cube was originally a tongue-in-cheek explanation for how ancient dungeon corridors could be so pristine and littered with gleaming treasure rather than rotting corpses. This cube would’ve originally been a collection of single cells that came together out of desperation and now moves through the dungeon to pick it clean of everything from mosses to halflings.

Where the D&D slime is an example of a cellular slime mold, the Dragon Quest slime would be plasmodial. Rather than a collection of cells joined together, a plasmodial slime is essentially one giant cell. Encased within a single large membrane is the cytoplasm and nuclei of many cells. The adorable, unblinking eyes of a Dragon Quest slime may in fact be nothing more than specialized nuclei we’ve been projecting a face onto all along.

Most people do not consider slimes to be intelligent, thinking creatures. However, slime molds are capable of amazing feats of cognition, despite not having a nervous system. Tests have shown that slime molds are capable of solving mazes, finding the most effective distance between two points, and even finding the best way to facilitate movement between multiple points. In 2010, oak flakes were spread out on a map to represent Tokyo and surrounding cities. When a slime mold was added, it created an efficient network of slime between the food sources that eerily resembled a map of the existing train routes between the cities. Slimes are even shown to possess a kind of memory, able to learn and anticipate patterns in their environment. The results of these experiments have led to new theories about the evolution of intelligence, and how “lower” cognition may predate the evolution of the brain. These cognitive feats are not just useful for scientists, but have also been used by artists to create “living paintings” where slime molds are dyed different colors and then coerced into taking various shapes and patterns.

Slimes exist to effectively fit whatever shape they need to survive. It is no wonder that the fictional slime did the same, finding its way into a mold that would ensure its cultural survival as effectively as possible.

Glitch of the Eternal Return

When I was a child, I used to dream about the courtyard of Peach’s castle in Super Mario 64. In the game, you are kept from leaving Peach’s property by steep, slippery hills and invisible walls. But just beyond the barriers was the question “what if?” I had a reoccurring dream of being in Mario’s shoes, but able to fly over the invisible wall, just higher than the programmers had planned someone to jump, and soaring beyond. Each time I’d make it over, I’d find the same thing: an endless opaque ocean stretching infinitely in all directions, the surface only broken occasionally by the stray tentacle or fin of the creatures swimming beneath. More than one of these dreams ended when I, or the occasionally companion, dove too close to the surface, only to be snatched and devoured by the unspeakable horrors existing just beyond the veil of the simulated world I knew from the waking world.

Of course, there was nothing actually beyond those invisible walls, because that is all that the programmers had put in. At least, that was what I assumed. Unlike reality, or my childhood dreams, games were static worlds of objective, logical rules, code and absolute limits. Of course, it turns out that those limits are not always as static as we assume. Super Mario 64 has a whole hidden inner world of alternate timelines, cryptids lurking out of sight, and ways of altering the reality around Mario from outside. In the now famous “A-button trick” video by Scott Buchanan, it was revealed that by gaining enough speed, Mario could break beyond the boundaries of the level and be placed in a parallel dimension, while still tracking his placement on the real level. Broken free of the confines of his original world, the player could then force Mario to keep gaining speed and break further and further out into newly created parallel levels that the game keeps track of even if the player can not see them. The ultimate goal of doing this was to position Mario in those parallel universes until one was created where he could obtain enough height and speed to return to his original world and grab the star, thus letting the player complete the level with the least number of controller button presses. A lot of work for something so unnecessary, but somehow that only made the process more evocative and compelling to hear about.

Even older Mario games have their hidden worlds. In 2014, speedrunners Lord Tom and Tompa discovered a glitch that allows them to jump straight to the end of the game in record time. Technically, what they are doing is performing specific movements that place specific numbers into the game’s memory based on the locations of enemies and Mario’s movement between pipes until the game is inadvertently forced to start dragging random bits of code and fit it into a place it was not intended. This is what results in the garbled mess on the screen and the confused game deciding that where Mario is supposed to be is the last room of the game. But in practice it looks like they somehow allowed Mario to enter a secret, glitched-out hidden world underneath the part of the game we are meant to see, where Princess Peach was secretly waiting all along. In a digital katabasis, Mario descends into the underworld beneath his reality to find that which should not be there. It is almost mythical, like a Sumerian epic.

The fact that these glitches are merely misplaced bits of numbers and confused programs desperately trying to produce something that works doesn’t make them less magical. Years after my dreams of the ocean beyond the bounds of Mario 64, I would discover that it was not just fancy. The ocean is real. Through several different methods, it is possible to deposit Mario in a vast hidden ocean underneath and outside Peach’s castle, identical to what I had dreamed up (minus the monsters). It was startling to perform this glitch for myself and swim about in my own dreams. Now, this is simply a coincidence of course, but can you imagine the feeling of discovering a that a place you invented in your childish imagination and exploring it for real? It felt like somehow the connection between myself and the game got blurred. It felt a bit magical.

What is it about glitches that is so alluring? The chink in the game’s armor, the tiny moment a player can slip through and perform miracles, the misstep that brings about the end of all things until reset? Performing a glitch is like performing magic. They are forces beyond what is expected, normal and solid that can be dangerous for the players that stumble upon them. For those that intentionally call upon them? The risk of destruction or corruption can also bring great rewards. In Final Fantasy VI, attempting to have Relm, the magical artist, paint an invisible enemy can result in an inventory full of the rarest, most powerful items, or it can erase all of your saved data. A speedrunner can use the death of their character to beat a game faster than keeping them alive ever could. A pokemon trainer can generate the mysterious Missingo, a new pokemon made of bits of broken code, that offers its captor tantalizing rewards and mysteries even as it threatens their data. They are all unnecessary, if one simply wanted to cheat there were far simpler methods. Objectively, they are hardly worth the risk, but they let us do things to the worlds inside those games that actual mastery of the game’s intended mechanics couldn’t.

Video games take place in simplified simulations or abstractions of the real world. They cannot contain the magnitude of the world’s banality, and so they are ruled by absolute systems. Even if they are made by illogical, biased apes, they still at least follow those rules they are programmed with. In the case of most games, it is considered ideal for every experience within the game to be the same for every player performing the same action. There is a comfort to those limitations, especially in older games that appear even simpler due to technological limitations. But by performing the correct sequence of movements and events, we can break that. We can warp this perfect, simulated reality and create something new. Its the kind of magic we often dream of being able to wield in our own world.

A lack of knowledge makes the real world appear a frighteningly chaotic place, where every shadow hides a demon and god plays dice with fate. A little knowledge makes it seem a lot more ordered, revealing the well oiled machine and delicate organization that keeps the world turning. A lot more knowledge reveals our world to not nearly be as ordered as we hoped. Our bodies are barely held-together meat and synapses that can fail for any reason and natural selection only led to their existence because our ancestors managed to get laid before their bad genes interfered. Our societies are full of needless suffering and starvation, and the natural world gets thrown into chaos over slight chemical changes. The idea of order creating a natural tendency toward perfection rendered more absurd with each passing year. The idealized world people often dream of, whether expressed as a dichotomy between science and superstition or one between the sacred and the profane, is a lie, and that fact is rather terrifying. Thankfully, we are capable of creating our own, simpler worlds.

We are drawn to glitches because they allow us the experience of simulating the sacred and the profane from a world that has neither. Through them we can become sorcerers in a way no one can in the real world. Like the holy men of old, deliberately shattering their bodies and allowing them to be remade by forces outside their world, the game is broken, its code tricked into destruction and delusion, rebuilt as best as it can by the unseen programming, and if it survives it can accomplish the impossible. To the uninitiated, our actions in the game and their outcomes appear miraculous. We summon chaos into these worlds through practiced and ordered evocations, whispered mantras and rituals made of precise button presses and movements. The myriad Marios and other protagonists become our familiars which we use to enter that spirit world and drag secrets back into the game’s reality.

Glitches like this cannot exist in other media. A character in a comic book can never exit the boundaries of the panel unless drawn that way, and even then they will always remain doing so in the exact way the artist intended. A reader cannot “break” a book by reading a specific sequence of pages. Someone viewing a painting in a museum cannot break past the frame and manipulate the “parallel dimensions” beyond. Digital media can “glitch” occasionally, as in record skips, distorted pixels or lines on old vhs tapes, and they can be chaotically beautiful in their unexpected outcomes. But these glitches are different from game glitches in the relationship between them and the audience. The audience doesn’t create the glitch seen when a DVD gets warped or a cord is plugged into the TV incorrectly the same way they evoke the glitch in a game. Even stumbling upon a game glitch accidentally is an interactive process.

All art involves a conversation or relationship between the audience and the artists, but glitches allow the player to bypass the artist entirely and converse directly with the soul of a game.

What the audience takes with them from a glitch will be different than what they take from their conversation with the artist. Anyone can debate the meaning and merit of a work of art (not everyone can do it WELL, but anyone can), but how can you debate the meaning of a glitch? The glitch itself is an aberration, at best a mistake that the artist was too lazy to remove, it has no bearing on the meaning of the work. Some require such convoluted steps to achieve that the original artist couldn’t even have been aware of it. A glitch can be unholy in that it is a place in the game not within the plan of the creator. It can only be achieved by rejecting the creator and becoming a demiurge, building something new with material created by another. But just like the demiurges of mythology, those creations are hardly as sustainable as that which they steal from to create. The results of the glitch are rarely more than destruction for the pixelated creatures and avatars of the game. Even when they lead to rewards, those rewards are always only one step away from the death of your current play session, or worse your stored data. But the rewards of finding, performing or understanding a glitch may not lie only in the outcome within the game. The act of performing the glitch can have more meaning than the results of the glitch itself.

Because of their nature, there is something else glitches can create other than cheats and methods of completing exceedingly niche challenges. Glitches can be used to change more than just the code and the solid world within the game. There is space for the glitch to create experiences that last even after their immediate effect or after the game has been shut down. Glitches can allow the audience to break the boundaries between them and that simulated world within the game. The popular Youtube series Monster Factory by the Griffin and Justin McElroy is based around abusing a game’s character generator to create absurd characters. For games that do not have a robust-enough editor to create uncanny enough beings, the hosts utilize glitches and cheats. Sometimes they use both the chosen game’s mechanics and glitches and forces outside the intended experience. The most famous example of this is the breakout character Final Pam from their Fallout 4 episodes. Fallout 4 is a game by Bethesda, whose games often do not even have the veneer of order and logic other games have. It is incredibly easy to break a Bethesda game without even trying, so of course when one is actually trying the results can be far more dramatic than in other, more competently programmed games. The Final Pam series ends with their titular creation growing so powerful, and rendering the game so unplayable, that she breaks past the boundaries of her own game, revealing an endless expanse of empty plains and ocean.

The McElroys leave her there, drifting further and further away into an ocean that does not exist within the normal game. The space she exists in now is a strange, liminal space. It was created by their breaking of the game, but at the same time it is not their creation. It is part of the game and also does not exist anywhere within it. It is there that their creation, Final Pam, is allowed to become “free” of them, and potentially appear anywhere else. The McElroys warn the audience that she can now emerge in any game, at any time.

Of course, it is a ludicrous idea to accept at face value. Final Pam cannot leave her actual game. Both she and that magic-seeming ocean she has been set adrift in stop existing once the game is turned off. But that is where our own imagination takes over. Just like me and the world beyond Peach’s Castle, audiences create their own spaces for characters like Final Pam to continue on from. In this example, we utilize the magic of the glitches, and the magical spaces and stories they create, not to help us beat the game or gain power for our avatar, but to create a performance and encourage others to join in. A new space for play is created, linking the imagination of each viewer to the broken version of this one game.

Glitches can be used to challenge a game in a new way, experience things hidden by the developers, engage and master a game on a deeper level, or create new stories and bring them out of the game’s boundaries. But there is another use for glitches that deserves a more in-depth look. Glitches can create more than just magic or stories, they can create visual art. Today, hopefully, I’ve convincingly argued that glitches are where magic happens. Next time, I will argue that glitches are also where art happens as well.

The Accidental Trans Narratives of Rumiko Takahashi

It is difficult to downplay the impact of Rumiko Takahashi on her medium. She has multiple smash hits under her belt whose influence can be traced across comics and animation. For a generation of American fans, her creations Ranma 1/2 and Inuyasha alone were the platonic ideal of “anime” for years. Her style was unavoidable, and her craft undeniable, yet for all her commercial success and popularity, she doesn’t often get her due in discussions of comic history in the West. She has been nominated for an Eisner lifetime achievement award no less than 3 times now, but has yet to win. Part of this is in the reluctance of some Western comic scholars to fully deal with the impact and influence of specific Japanese artists rather than a vaguer “manga style” that can then be either waved away as a “fad” or used to prioritize Western artists who “popularized” certain aesthetics over the original artists. Part of it also has to do with the fact that Ms Takahashi’s work is often thought of as “girls’ comics” and the unfortunate reality is that media “for girls” tends to be undervalued despite critical or commercial success it may accrue. Anyone growing up during the early days of Adult Swim will remember the bumpers, dripping with contempt for their own audience and show, agonizing over how Inuyasha was almost single-handedly keeping them afloat when it wasn’t a cool guys’ show. It didn’t matter how much action, boobs, or violence her work had, some Americans simply couldn’t see it as anything other than “girly.”

If there is one aspect of Rumiko Takahashi’s work that has been given attention in the west, it would be the gender dynamics of her martial arts farce Ranma 1/2. For queer people of my generation, Ranma 1/2 was often the first exposure to what the kids today call “gender feels.” Ranma 1/2 arrived in the US right at the start of the book store “manga boom” and its 38 volumes were a Borders staple. The plot of Ranma 1/2 revolved around the titular Ranma Saotome, a martial artist who is cursed to turn into a girl whenever exposed to cold water, and back into a guy when drenched in hot water. Ranma’s father (who turns into a panda due to the same curse) arranged a marriage between Ranma and his best friend’s tomboy daughter Akane, who is a martial artist herself that claims to despise men. Through a series of accidents and misunderstandings, Akane and both of Ranma’s forms end up picking up an increasing amount of desperate love interests and stalkers, all getting in the way of the classic “will they, won’t they” romantic drama. The comic features many of Takahashi’s calling cards, such as sudden cut-away gags, ever-escalating farce, martial arts parodies, paraprosdokian jokes, and Archie comics-esque love triangles. But what Ranma is most known for is the “gender bending” humor. It was this reason that so many pre-transition kids were dawn to the comic. Behind the cute characters, wild action and humor there was the promise of escapism for something many of us weren’t really ready to address.

And yet, Ranma 1/2 actually made pretty poor escapism for most trans readers. Ranma despises his curse, and many of the stories revolve around his attempts to lift it or resist the idea that it makes him “less of a man.” Many of us readers couldn’t help but wonder what Ranma’s problem was. After all, what boy WOULDN’T want to be a hot girl instantly if they had the option haha, I mean, right? The answer, of course, is “cis boys” and “haha you really thought you could fake your way into being a boy” but still… Ranma wasn’t an ideal to shoot for. He obtained his “womanhood” by accident and it didn’t really change that he was a man. He made use of femininity to win martial arts battles (and he absolutely enjoyed wearing the clothing and playing the part beyond that) but there was still never any question as to his “real” gender or to the rest of the cast’s ability to accept it. At best, Ranma was cis boy who learned to like wearing girly clothes, but ONLY if it was in the body deemed appropriate by everyone else. There’s quite a few jokes about people who know of Ranma’s curse suddenly becoming scandalized because “girl” Ranma was suddenly hit by hot water and now “boy” Ranma was caught in the same dress they had no problem with him wearing a second earlier.

In theory I suppose this just goes to show the absurdities of trying to define even fictional gender by way of biological essentialism. Ranma is always Ranma no matter what their appearance, and any “masculine” or “feminine” trait others try to pin them down with are just as reflected in every other character. But in practice, it could be frustrating how little our own experiences, fears or desires were reflected in Ranma. I don’t want to make the mistake of extrapolating my own experience as a “universal trans” one, but talking to other queers of my generation who grew up as “Borders mushrooms” in the manga aisle makes it clear to me this was not just a personal trend. For a lot of queer people of my generation, Ranma was a rite of passage, but one that you outgrew and replaced with the myriad actually and intentionally queer works that came out since then. This fact had felt like well, WELL worn territory in queer anime fan discussion as well, without much more that needed to be said.

So consider my surprise when I found there WAS a character from Rumiko Takahashi’s earlier work that DID make a good trans analogue. Perhaps too good of one.

While Ranma and Inuyashi are the two most famous in the West, Rumiko Takahashi’s first hit had just as big an impact. Urusei Yatsura set the template for a number of anime conventions that would follow. It has been cited as the first examples of “moe” and “tsundere” (which are anime nerd terms that refer to specific ways characters illicit feelings of affection from their audience). Its stylish use of limited animation, strong character posing and layouts, and its beautiful backgrounds were a big influence on Japanese animation to come. It even impacted Western animation, thanks to the circulation of VHS bootlegs passed around art schools and universities. Its cult status among animators, and animator’s tendencies to wear their influences openly and strongly, meant that even cartoon-watching Americans who grew up without any exposure to anime would still find some of its characters and aesthetics familiar.

Urusei Yatsura also set the template for Ranma and Inuyasha’s later “will they/won’t they” relationships and for the over-the-top farce of Ranma. The plot revolved around halpless pervert Ataru Moroboshi, who is simultaneously the luckiest and unluckiest boy in the universe. In the first story, while saving the world from invasion in a game of tag, he accidentally ends up engaged to Lum Invader, the tiger-skin bikini clad alien/oni princess. Originally, Lum was only going to make this one appearance, with the engagement being a sudden over-the-top and unexpected gag ending that is forgotten by the next episode (another Takahashi calling card), but the character proved so popular with readers that she was brought back by the third story and became the focus of the series. The central source of drama in the series is how Lum tries to woo Ataru, who tries to avoid admitting he cares for her while simultaneously hitting on every other girl in the series. Like Ranma, Urusei Yatsura has almost three dozen volumes of comic under its belt and a sprawling cast. While most of the core characters remain in focus for the entirety of the series, its normal for others to drop in and out of favor. Some characters turn up for just a chapter or two, never to be seen again, while others might make a reappearance years later. Still, its surprising for a new character to become “promoted” to the core cast too quickly. Yet around halfway through the series, one character manages to show up and almost immediately become a member of core cast for the rest of the run. She is also the character that led me to write all this in the first place, Ryuunosuke Fujinami.

Ryuunosuke feels like a trial run for the later Ranma. She’s a martial artist who looks quite a bit like Ranma to begin with, but more than that almost all her stories revolve around gender-based farce. First introduced as a guy having a violent, martial arts-fueled falling out with their father, it is quickly revealed that she is really a woman whose father has been trying to raise as a guy. All she wants to do is wear a dress or a sailor suit uniform to school and be recognized as a woman, but her father insists that she instead be his male heir and that he will not let her dress as she likes unless she can defeat him in combat. When I first got to the Ryuunosuke chapters, I saddled up for standard Ranma-esque farce. But then something unexpected happened as I read more of Ryuunosuke’s struggles. Ryuunosuke’s antics and tragic farces didn’t feel like those from her later manga descendants. It felt like a comic farce about an actual trans woman.

Part of the distinction is in the lack of fantastical elements. While Ranma is suddenly cursed with the occasional “wrong body” after 17 years of cisdom, Ryuunosuke grew up with an abusive figure telling her she had the wrong body and mind in spite of what she knew. Ranma is a man turned into a woman, Ryuunosuke is a woman who society will not let express that. While Ranma’s goal is to return to the body and social position he lost, Ryuunosuke’s goal is to feel comfortable being, and then be recognized by society as, a woman. Ranma’s story is based around someone stumbling into wacky gender hijinks. Ryuunosuke had that thrust upon her from before she was old enough to know what gender was. Wether Ranma is “truly” a boy or a girl depends on the gag that needed to be told, but either way Ranma would be a cis man or “magically” a cis woman. There was no question Ryuunosuke was a girl, and the question of her being a cis or a trans one was immaterial. Trans women are not men who SUDDENLY become women after a lifetime of being men, they are women who were told they were men and had to learn to see through that lie.

One of the most common forms of early Ryuunosuke story involve her trying to learn how to be more feminine from one of her classmates, only to have them misunderstand and assume she is a handsome man asking them out on a date. I’m sorry, but this whole premise is already extremely trans. Trying to make friends with, or even date, women who embody traits you want to convey yourself is an INCREDIBLY common early trans experience. Its not always easy to sort out which are feelings of attraction and longing for someone and which are feelings or longing to LOOK or act like someone.

On said date, Ryuunosuke becomes fixated on the act of eating a girly-looking parfait. Consuming something that society had held up as “feminine” and therefore “not for you,” no matter how innocuous it seems, is often a terrifying step for newly-out trans women. The fear of being “exposed” if you reveal you “like things like that” is very real. As is the fear that admitting you like something only “stereotypically feminine” will be used to prove you’re not “really” a woman, but only posing. Of course Ryuunosuke isn’t a woman because she likes parfaits and other “girly” things, or because she likes fighting and other “manly” things. But being able to say “I am a woman AND that means I can like what I like or not” feels both good and terrifying at first after a lifetime of being told that everything you are drawn to paradoxically proves you are not a “real” man OR woman.

Before Ryuunosuke’s gender was revealed, it was hinted at by Ataru’s strange reactions toward her. See, Ataru is a giant pervert who is incapable of doing anything other than hit on every woman he meets. So NATURALLY he felt strangely drawn to hit on this “strange boy.” Even after Ryuunosuke came out as a woman to her new school, Ataru was the only boy who’d consistently hit on her. The fact that Ataru kept trying to grope her was “PROOF” she was really a woman! Yet that was in no way comforting proof to Ryuunosuke, because Ataru is a gross piece of sexually harassing shit. So the only masculine presence in her life (and in some stories, the only person period) that unequivocally accepted and treated her like a woman was a creepy chaser who only wanted to sleep with her. That is also, you guessed it, EXTREMELY FUCKING TRANS. It is hugely depressing when you’re in a position where you know you’re only being gendered correctly as part of someone’s fetish or desires. That you’re having your fears and insecurities used against you to try and convince you to accept yourself as nothing other than a sexual object. The potential excitement and joy Ryuunosuke might feel at being gendered correctly becomes tainted because of who Ataru is and how he then treats her, and it serves to only drive her further away from being able to make the kinds of changes in her life that she can.

There’s also this whole exchange. As someone who has only recently started to be gendered correctly by strangers, I can tell you that, 100% objectively speaking, without any hyperbole or irony, this is the single most accurate depiction of a trans girl reacting to being gendered correctly on the street for the first time in the entire history of sequential art. It is difficult for a sequence of panels or the character therein to become MORE trans than Ryuunosuke has here.

Because Ryuunosuke isn’t “meant” to be trans as we would describe it today, this means that her transness isn’t a joke. Ryuunosuke still suffers many indignities, but the humor is not directed AT her the same way Takahashi would later direct jokes AT queer characters. Anytime overtly trans or queer characters appear in Ranma, it is to be made into jokes in a way that is very different than the gags above. The fact that Ryuunosuke stumbles into being a trans analogue actually helps her be a good one, because it means that she’s the only queer character created by the author that isn’t then being torn down or mocked. Instead she’s a character the author actually has sympathy for, even as she puts them through ridiculous farcical situations… at least until Ryuunosuke stumbles into being TOO queer.

Make no mistake, Ryuunosuke becomes queer. As. Hell. Which is no small feat considering some of the horrors of Rumiko Takahashi’s cartoon sexual politics in the 80s and 90s. Several stories are based around other cast members, often older women authority figures like Sakura the school nurse above, trying to help Ryuunosuke “become a true woman” by getting a boyfriend, only to be stymied by her “confused” interest in women. Her inability to like any of the boys presented, as well as her accidentally stumbling into crushes on other girls, is presented as just another gag, but there’s a sinister edge to it too. The idea that she will only ever be seen as a woman if she’s a straight, and sexual, woman, is one that real queer women have unfortunately had to hear for before. The fact that it always comes from authority figures, and the fact that her true desires get used against her, are equally painful. These are all things queer trans women have thrown at them. Any time Ryuunosuke is honest about her attractions, it is thrown in her face as abnormal and something to be used against her. Of course, its totally ok for legions of underclassmen girls to have a crush on her, because its seen as a normal, temporary thing. She’s just an “unthreatening guy” that those younger girls will outgrow their crush on and graduate to “real men” soon enough. Anytime a character like, say, Shinobu accidentally reveals they may return Ryuunosuke’s feelings, it is played for laughs and dismissed as an aberration just as much. Rumiko Takahashi teases the idea, showing Ryuunosuke and Shinobu out on what appear to be dates and standing together in group shots, but when it comes time to end the series they must dutifully be paired off with “appropriate” matches. this means Shinobu gets stuck with a weird, completely left-field stalker in a magic bunny costume (look, its comics) and Ryuunosuke gets an even worse fate.

Before the series ends, Ryuunosuke is paired off with the daughter of her father’s friend in the kind of wacky arranged marriage story that would become Ranma’s bread and butter. Throughout the farce, Ataru keeps commenting on how strange it is that he doesn’t want to molest this new woman. Of COURSE this ends up being “evidence” that Ryuunosuke’s betrothed is actually a “man raised as a woman” by a shitty dad who wanted a daughter in an inverse of Ryuunosuke’s backstory. Even more “of course” this new character is played not as an accidental trans man, akin to Ryuunosuke’s accidental trans woman, or as a queer woman herself. Instead, the character is played as a “perverted crossdresser” who is able to beat Ryuunosuke in a fight and tries to trick her into “taking advantage” of him. Everyone around them approves of this, as of course this is the “perfect” match for Ryuunosuke. Like many other pieces of queerbaiting fiction to come, it is perfectly alright to dance around the idea of queerness, but when push comes to shove it has to make sure everyone is paired off nicely and that the “deviants” are kept apart so they can at least masquerade as “normal.” It fucking sucks, in other words, and thankfully we don’t need to suffer more than one volume of this before the series ends, with poor Ryuunosuke suddenly demoted to a background figure for the last storyline.

There’s also the fact that these comics are only readable in English through very old and unofficial fan “scanlations.” This means a lot of subtext and nuance may be lost or changed. When Ryuunosuke exclaims “I’m not a perv, got it!!” in response to accidentally letting slip her crush on Shinobu, we the modern Western reader do not know the original Japanese context, but we also do not know the original fan translation context either! Who translated it this way and why? With official translations there are sometimes notes or interviews to explain why certain words or phrases were chosen, or how stories might end up changed through localization. With unofficial work, that kind of information can be a lot more difficult to find unless the fan translator explicitly includes it in the released work, and even then it can be very ephemeral as these comic scans are passed from sketchy website to sketchy website.

I should note that I’ve talked about the relationship between these works and a certain subset of Western queer reader in the context of a fairly specific time period, but I am not able to comment on its original context. LGBT people in Japan are not new, not even just the T. At the same time, Japan’s history and relationship with marginalized queer groups, and with the representation of those groups in media, is not identical to countries in the West. It would be reductive to either ignore the reality that queer people have always existed in Japan, or to ignore the fact that Western ideas about representation and gender are not always directly applicable. That is why I am not here trying to examine Rumiko Takahashi’s work from a lens of “how does it fit in the context of Japanese LGBT history?” The history of LGBT issues in Japan is a much bigger topic than I am qualified to cover, and there’s no shortage of brilliant Japanese LGBT already discussing that history and that context. I wish it was easier for us in the West to access and share the work and writing of queers in other countries, especially when the dominant anti-queer voices of all countries so often conspire to keep us from doing so. I don’t come here to bury Urusei Yatsura, or to make grand proclamations about Rumiko Takahashi’s feelings (either back then or today) toward any LGBT issues. I don’t personally believe that Rumiko Takahashi ever set out to write a “trans story”, in either a positive or negative way. I highly doubt it even crossed her mind back then other than as a wacky “unrealistic” thing to be laughed at. But at the same time, there is value in rediscovering and reclaiming older work. As noted earlier, it does not matter if Ryuunosuke is “truly” cis or trans. In her, Rumiko Takahashi inadvertently stumbled onto a formula that even well-meaning allies intentionally trying to write trans characters screw up on. Studying why Ranma attracts but fails to resonate, and why Ryuunosuke works despite her era and creator’s intentions can provide clues on creating new, intentionally queer work. More than that, there is value in examining how non-queer, even conservative and cruel work can, and is, given new context by new groups of readers that find it.

Rumiko Takahashi’s characters rarely get closure, even when their series end. Like ambiguously queer, teenage Charlie Browns, they are destined to keep repeating the same failures over and over until they or their creator dies. Ryuunosuke never gets to wear her clothes, or feel comfortable describing her needs without needing to clarify she is not a pervert, or accept she can give up on her horrible father. That is the strange, existential tragedy of many comedy comic stars. But Ryuunosuke is fictional, and the readers who draw meaning from her gags are not. Ryuunosuke doesn’t need to do any of those things, but many young women do.

These stories came to us divorced from their original context, and were adapted into a new context based on the need of the reader. The audiences of those bookstores and scanlation websites were secretly full of marginalized queer kids, adrift after the intentional destruction of their own history, the suppression of their culture and the deaths of their potential mentors. We were forced to rebuild without even the knowledge that there had once been something beautiful built before, something that we would have inherited if not for the hatred our country had for us. Accidental trans narratives and niches within subcultures are a form of survival. Ryuuunosuke’s true closure will be in the creation of new stories, the celebration of new trans artists and creators, the reconnection of disparate queer cultures, and in future readers having the space and history to feel comfortable being whatever kind of woman they need to be.

The Occasionally Annual List Joffe Makes Where She Spends More Effort on Coming Up With a Title Than the Content of Said List of the Games of 2017

Its time again to bid goodbye to literally the worst year of our age and look forward to an exciting, hopeful, brand new year. One where anything can happen and that is only highly likely to be worse rather than absolutely guaranteed. That, of course, can only mean one thing: End of Year Lists from beloved social media icons and critics. Also I do some kind of nonsense too. As usual, I haven’t been able to play a lot of the expected big releases this year due to moving, changing jobs, being poor, being sad and being poor. However, I did get in more than usual. I even got an actual current console! But even so, rather than try to list my favorite games that came out this year out of the small sample I have, I instead will be quantifying a different game experience. Here is a list of digital animals and creatures I interacted with positively this year.

Seiken Densetsu 3 Bird

Like many RPGs, this game had a town that was overrun with evil forces, and naturally my party drove those evil forces away. The oppressive music changed to the sweet tones of Little Sweet Cafe, and children once more roamed the streets with impunity. More importantly, the lack of evil soldiers meant this little bird could return. Perhaps realizing on some subconscious level that I was responsible for its improved environment, the little bird began following me around. No matter where I went in town, the little bird followers. It also made cute “peep peep” noises when I interacted with it. Very nice! However, the game loses points for how my characters were unable to interact further. There was no animation of them perhaps petting the bird on its little head, nor was I able to obtain any bread crumbs, peanuts or french fries which I could feed to it. As such, I must give this bird the lowest possible rating: 10/10

Poochy

Yoshi’s Island is basically the most perfect platform game ever made, so naturally I played it again this year. Its just that good. Many people who have played it will remember Poochy, the goofy dog-creature with the strange face who Yoshi and Mario can ride across hazards and use to destroy enemies. However, not everyone knows that Poochy is not a mere power-up, but a very good boy. By tossing one of Yoshi’s eggs at Poochy, the player can play fetch. Poochy is not very good at returning the eggs he chases after, but it is still adorable to watch him bat it around. Simple, but effective. 10/10

Memmec

I picked up the Shovel Knight Treasure Trove a few months ago, and it is a delightful collection of games with great design, character and gameplay. The most recent addition to the Trove, Spectre of Torment, is a prequel that puts you in the role of the undead Spectre Knight as he recruits evil minions for his mistress, the Enchantress. One of the creatures of his home base is a small napping creature that resembles a treasure chest called the Memmec. You can’t interact with it much at first, it just sits there like many of the other monsters. Spectre WILL pet it if you force him too, which is very good. However, there is an even more fun way you can interact with it. If you use your scythe on the pile of crystal balls, you can shake one loose and hit it toward the sleeping creature. Suddenly it springs to life and excitedly chases the ball! What separates this from Poochy above is that the Memmec is better at batting the ball back to you, and can communicate its needs and intentions to you through body language. If its jumping around playfully and pushing the ball to you it wants you to bat the ball away so it will chase it. If it has arched its butt into the air and is wagging its tail, it wants you to hit the ball to it so it can juggle it in its little paws. Extremely good communication and attitude, I definitely played with it long after I obtained the minor monetary reward for doing so the first time. 10/10

Odyssey Shiba

Super Mario Odyssey is a game filled with unbridled enthusiasm and imagination. Mario’s adventure sees him traveling to worlds with styles unlike any he has seen before, and interacts with friends and foes of all kinds. More importantly: there is a dog! A dog you can play with! This shiba inu, likely based on Miyamoto’s own beloved dog, is a very very good pup. For one thing, it can help you find hidden treasure and earn Power Moons and blah blah blah the important thing is how it will run around with you and chase after your hat like a frisbee! Its very good at frisbee! It also wears lots of little hats, and even gets to visit the moon. What a good dog! Sometimes it will show up in your airship and do tricks and make cute noises if you throw your hat at it. 10/10

Mimikyu, Ribombee, Mareanie, and others

Pokemon is a game about making creatures hurt each other for profit, but luckily in Sun & Moon there’s another way you can interact with them called Pokemon Refresh. Not only can you pet them and feed them delicious colorful beans, but you can also groom them and help care for them after battle. You can provide medical care for sick or poisoned creatures, wash off the grit or untangle their hair, fur or leaves. Some of them also have special actions like high-fiving you! I do have to knock off a few points for the fact that they’re only dirty or in pain in the first place because of the player’s actions, but even so 10/10

Several Dolphins and a Narwhal

Endless Ocean 2 is a great underappreciated game about diving and having really tense feelings of dread despite the fact that its a harmless game where the sharks who WANT to bite you aren’t even allowed to and so only slap you with their tail. Still, you FEEL how spooky it is to dive into an empty abyss, even when you know nothing is there. Luckily the game offers distractions from the endless horror of the ocean. Many distractions! Grow a reef, take photographs, find sunken treasure, solve archaeological mysteries and, of course, domesticate some sea mammals. The first two dolphins you get are free, but the others require you to do some detective work. For example, you can’t just convince ANY narwhal to leave the Arctic Ocean for your South Pacific home, only one with a legendary red horn that is maybe the reincarnation of an ancient warrior. That takes some work. The payoff is you can then swim with your cetacean partner. If you’re not up for that, you can also sit back, relax, and instruct them in various tricks. Use the wiimote to toss them fish! Finally the Wii lived up to its potential! Get good enough and you can put on live shows for money but isn’t bonding with such a majestic sea creature its OWN reward? 10/10

Super Mario Primer and Playlists

It is astonishingly easy to take things for granted in terms of media and canon. There are certain “cultural touchstones” that we are expected to absorb even without seeking them out. Often, instead of talking about or critiquing these touchstones, we end up assuming the most important aspects are already exhaustively known and absorbed by everyone long ago through said cultural osmosis. This is especially true among nerds, where often the “price of entry” into subcultures was consuming specific media. But being aware or adjacent to these touchstones is not the same as actually engaging with them. Even absolutely ubiquitous icons are new to someone, and concepts of “canon” can be intimidating for outsiders. Why do a primer on Mario? Because while everyone is as familiar with the character as they are with Mickey Mouse or Snow White, not everyone has played the games or knows where to begin to find value in them beyond the commercial.

Why does Mario matter? The simplest answer is in Mario’s role in defining multiple genres and mechanics in games. Mario’s first appearance in Donkey Kong heralded the first videogame with a story told in cutscenes, and one of the first mainstream games with an actual narrative at all. Mario’s first NES game brought us the scrolling platform, and became the template for one of the most common and popular game genres. Super Mario 64 brought 3D platforming and videogames to the forefront. In addition, you also have Mario headlining spinoffs that have now become etremely common such as the kart racer and “party game.” But in some of those cases, Mario was not the first, just the most successful. There are also plenty of Mario games that are not “firsts” or forerunners to anything that were still successful or interesting. Was all of that success from Mario’s status as an cultural icon like Mickey Mouse or Citizen Kane? Or is there something specific to Mario games that matter and resonate beyond their status and history? Is there a specific thread between the myriad Mario games, despite their differences?

I’ve written about a single, specific instance of Mario design philosophy before, the Marrymore Suite in Super Mario RPG, and its role in surprising players who think they figured out everything and push against what they assume are the limits of the game. Mario games are infamous for moments like these, going all the way back to the first NES game where players can discover Warp Zones and infinite 1ups by pushing against what first appear to be the games’ boundaries. Mario’s designers have always spent a lot of time trying to imagine where their players will try to push back against, and then rewarded them for trying. Sometimes these rewards are nothing but a cosmetic nod, such as the trick to making fireworks appear when you beat a level, but the fact that they come from the player’s experiments and inventiveness helps them resonate.

Recently, Nintendo has described this design philosophy as “kishotenketsu” which is a literary term from classic Chinese and Japanese writing. The original kishontenketsu was a four line poem, but also came to describe a literary style for developing a story. The basic explanation is that you introduce an idea, develop the idea, twist the idea or introduce something seemingly unrelated, and then conclude it by tying the twist back to the original idea. An example by the Japanese poet Rai San’yo goes:

Daughters of Itoya in Motomachi in Osaka.
The elder daughter is sixteen, the younger daughter is fifteen.
Lords from many provinces kill you with arrows.
Itoya’s daughters kill you with their eyes.

The first line introduces the idea (ki) in this case that there is a man Itoya and he has daughters. The second line develops this further (sho), giving us more information about the women. The third line seemingly twists (ten) the poem by introducing a new and seemingly unrelated idea about how warriors kill people. The last line concludes and explains the connection (ketsu), connecting the daughters and their power of seduction to the power of the warriors.

Over time, this tradition has been applied to other mediums from longform narratives to philosophical debate and arguments (it is particularly popular as a format for developing gags for four panel comic strips). Its use in describing Nintendo’s design philosophy dates back at least to Mario Galaxy in 2007, but it is hard to know if it was an active part of the development process on earlier games or if it was merely a literary term that was adopted by designers to describe their process after-the-fact. But whether or not it was adopted later, it makes a useful tool for describing how ideas work in Mario games.

Applying kishotenketsu to an entire Mario game doesn’t tell us anything. Instead, it should be applied to each idea, mechanic or activity in a game. For example, let’s use it to analyze something as simple as the basic jumping mechanic in the original Super Mario Bros.

Ki: Mario can jump on enemies to defeat them.
Sho: Some enemies are covered in spikes, which defeat Mario if jumped on, forcing him to avoid them.
Ten: Bowser, the last enemey in a world, is covered in spikes but MUST be defeated.
Ketsu: If Mario can jump PAST Bowser and grab the axe, he can cut the bridge and drop Bowser into the lava.

In more recent games where the kishotenketsu idea was applied more directly to its development, it can show how new ideas or mechanics can be introduced and played with in a game without taking over or wearing out their welcome. Lets look at an example from one of the minigames in Super Mario Galaxy, where you use motion controls to roll a ball through an obstacle course.

Ki: Instead of a normal level’s gameplay, the player must balance the wiimote upright and move it as they wish the ball to move.
Sho: In the first of these levels, Rolling Green Galaxy, gives the player the chance to learn these new controls and how they work in the space within the game.
Ten: The second is part of an otherwise “normal level”, Melty Molten Galaxy, and requires the player to use the controls in a completely different set of environment expectations.
Ketsu: The last of these levels, Rolling Gizmo Galaxy, is once again an isolated, dedicated space, but is much more difficult. The player is required to have used and understood the different uses of those mechanics from the previous environment, and apply them to the more difficult version of the first level.

New mechanics, power-ups and minigames in later Mario games often use this format to keep them from overwhelming the rest of the game. The player has the chance to try something new, to use what they learned from that in a new setting, and then to demonstrate a mastery of the concept at the end. The various creatures and objects you can possess in the recent Mario Odyssey are a great example of this. There are many different forms you can take with their own unique moveset and mechanics, and many of them could easily have entire games built around them, but rarely will you use them in more than two or three worlds, including the extremely difficult post-game world which forces you to use almost all of those movesets in new or challenging ways.

In many cases, the “twist” is one that the developers have anticipated the player to bring themselves. For example, lets look at the previously mentioned secret warp zones of the original Super Mario Bros.

Ki: Mario moves left-to-right along a 2d plane and can jump on blocks.
Sho: The level is bordered by blocks, showing the limits of the level.
Ten: A skilled player may figure out how to jump in a way that lets them reach these borders and advance past the “normal” part of the level.
Ketsu: If the player is already this skilled, they probably do not need to play all of the earlier, easier levels, so we reward them with the ability of skipping past those levels to the next challenging part of the game.

It would be a mistake to look at kishotenketsu in this context as a strict formal, however. It is not to be mistaken with the kind of checklist one sees on TVTropes or over-eager film students who have just read Campbell for the first time. Rather, it is a way of thinking about how to build on ideas. What makes Mario games so appealing is in their ability to surprise while still building on logical, expected ideas. These ideas can reappear between games as well, and taking the time to learn the language of levels, mechanics, enemies and power-ups that build up this larger world can provide additional rewards.

Of course, while the series’ mechanical narratives are based around surprising twists and synthesis, the same can’t really be said for the stories. The basic premise of nearly every Mario game will ALWAYS be based around the classic Popeye cartoons Shigeru Miyamoto enjoyed while working on the the original games. Mario-Peach-Bowser mirrors Popeye-Olive Oyl-Bluto and always will. But even within that confined, unsurprising story, the Mario games have been able to apply the techniques of developing an idea, twisting it, and then bringing it back around to create something new. Instead of applying to the story, the Mario games can use those techniques to create compelling characters and personalities. The Paper Mario games introduced versions of familiar characters with their own surprising quirks. Despite being stuck in the simple, immutable world and story, they all have unique personalities and interactions. The formerly identical masses of creatures Mario fights or rescues revealed themselves to be surprisingly diverse and interesting. Super Mario Galaxy had the same “kidnapped princess” story as all the others, but it also posited a Mario world with multiple, sentient universes that grow, die and give birth to new versions of themselves based on the actions of those living within them, all watched over by the nigh-immortal daughter of Mario and Peach from another, long-dead universe!

Unfortunately, Miyamoto himself is notoriously skittish about going any further than that. After the second Paper Mario game, he handed down a mandate for future Paper Mario games that would mean no new characters and a much more uniform style. The sequel to Mario Galaxy dropped the entire concept of multiple universes like a hot potato, and Rosalina was demoted from breakout cult-favorite costar to a mere easter egg. Of course, Miyamoto’s mandates against these changes seem mostly to come from anything that may possibly interfere with the Popeye-esque dynamic of the stars, rather than the presence of anything unique itself. Mario Odyssey uses unique and alien environments and characters (at least, alien in terms of their connection to Mario) to create the same sense of surprise as his other games. The twist of seeing the cartoonish Mario in a “real” human city or alongside a Jurassic Park-style T-Rex first creates a sense of shock, but is then built upon and developed in a way that makes it feel natural and connected. There is still room to surprise, even within the extremely strict narrative confines.

Its also possible that the simplistic nature and design of the story itself is what has allowed fans to project a great deal of nuance and pathos of their own. Twitter’s fondness for reframing Bowser as a misunderstood, hunky, put-upon single father or Peach as both secretly endlessly-competent and endlessly-kinky are good examples. The combination of strong visual designs with strong, consistent mechanics often evoke interesting ideas for different players. As I’ve argued with other games, giving players the space and freedom to create their own ideas and narratives often makes them connect stronger to them, even if the game’s intended story is pretty barebones or jejune. The fact that Mario’s world is so mechanically meaningful means that the player is invested in inscribing it with their own literary meaning rather than abandoning that aspect entirely, and in that case Mario’s lack of anything beyond “hero/victim/brute” may work to its advantage.

Playing a good Mario game is like a conversation with the unseen developer. You put forth your own ideas and see how the game responds. Did they anticipate it? When those moments and ideas connect, and your idea was something the developers DID expect and respond to, it is a fascinating kind of communication that really can’t exist in any other commercial media.

Playlist: If you somehow are only able to play 5 Mario games ever, these are the ones that will best help you understand what a “Mario game” IS.

1. Super Mario Brothers (NES, Super Nintendo, Gameboy Color, Wii/Wii U Virtual Console): Despite its age, it is remarkably fun and compelling still today. If nothing else, its first level is a master course on designing a level that teaches a new player what to expect and how to react to new information much later. Super Mario Bros is the rosetta stone for understanding the language of countless videogames.
2. Super Mario Brothers 3 (NES, Super Nintendo, Gameboy Advance, Wii/Wii U Virtual Console): A huge, sprawling game that introduces new ideas or new applications of old ideas in virtually every level. It also hides many secrets ranging from shortcuts and hidden power-ups to the tiny easter eggs and challenges that would come to later define the appeal of the series.
3. Super Mario 64 (Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, Wii/Wii U Virtual Console): Super Mario 64 may be just as influence and important to the history of its medium as the original Super Mario Bros. Without it, we simply would not have the videogames we do today. While its camera controls can be frustrating, it has managed to remain fun and playable while many other early 3D games have not. Instead of completing levels in a linear order (warp zones aside) the player has to search the levels, and the large castle that serves as the game’s hub, and accomplish various tasks to earn Stars. This more open-ended approach to level design defines the series’ present state.
4. Super Mario Galaxy (Nintendo Wii): Super Mario Galaxy takes a dizzying concept of playing Mario among conflicting physics and geometries in outer space and makes it approachable. Most players may not even realize how wild things have gotten due to the skill in which it teaches them to play and react. It even introduces a tragically underused concept for asymmetrical multi-play where a second player can interact with the environment through the wiimote while the first player controls Mario normally. While not as open-ended as its predecessors, Mario Galaxy’s levels are tightly designed and full of interesting ideas. While its direct sequel is probably the better designed game, the first Galaxy is probably the more important in terms of its boldness and energy.
5. Super Mario World 2 – Yoshi’s Island (Super Nintendo, Gameboy Advance): While it would go on to spawn its own separate Yoshi franchise, here it was still very much a Mario game. Yoshi’s Island is a visual delight, pushing the limits of the Super Nintendo hardware to their ultimate limits and looking fabulous even today. More than that though, its immaculately designed levels perfectly showcase that kishotenketsu philosophy in action. No gimmick outstays its welcome and no level repeats itself needlessly. It is a playground of ideas and experiences ripe for exploration, with an innovative twist on managing both the player’s life and the time limit in a way that encourages both risk-taking by newcomers and high-level play by experts.

B-Sides and Experiments: These games include interesting attempts at tacking the same problem as the previous games in different ways.

1. Super Mario Brothers 2/Mario USA (Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Gameboy Advance, Wii/Wii U Virtual Console): Often referred to as “not a true Mario game” because, frankly, it wasn’t originally a Mario game. It was a different game made by the same team, with Mario and friends conveniently slapped on for the American release. Make no mistake though, it is a more proper sequel to Super Mario Bros than the “Lost Levels” which was little more than a grueling, cruel “master version” of the original game. Instead of punishing hardcore players, THIS version of Mario Bros 2 introduced the concept of exploration and adventure to the franchise that would ironically go on to define the series more than the “true” Mario sequel. There’s a reason Shy Guys, Birdo, Bob-ombs and other creations of this game went on to appear again and again while Lost Levels’ Poison Mushrooms and windy chasms did not.
2. Super Mario World (Super Nintendo, Gameboy Advance, Wii/Wii U/3DS Virtual Console): It was a tough call between this or Super Mario Bros 3 for the previous list, and while 3’s sheer inventiveness won out, World should not be ignored either. Aside from the addition of Yoshi, the charismatic rideable dinosaur everyone loves, World helped bridge the open exploration of Mario Bros 2 with the gimmicks and twists of Mario Bros 3. You cannot get from the NES Marios to Mario 64 without Mario World’s work in joining the competing philosophies.
3. Super Mario Sunshine (Gamecube): Much maligned by people who never played it but read too many old game websites, Mario Sunshine may be the single most underappreciated game in the franchise. A sequel to Mario 64 that attempts to do a (very slightly) more complex story, it also moved Mario toward a true “open world” style game. The game takes place on a single location, Isle Delfino, and while it is still divided into multiple levels, it is always doing so within the context of this world it has created. Mario is given a complex new series of abilities with a combination jetpack/water gun and the first appearance of a rideable 3D Yoshi, but does not let this complexity overwhelm it. It also has a number of challenges based solely around Mario’s traditional jumping skills from Mario 64, and those are among the most tightly designed platform levels of their era. To be fair to its critics, it does have one huge glaring flaw: the post-game blue coin hunt is an abysmal, unfun chore that seems to be there only so the number of “Shine Sprites” to be collected can be identical to Super Mario 64’s Power Stars. But that alone does not warrant the scorn this otherwise inventive game receives.
4. Super Mario Land 3 – Wario Land (Gameboy, 3DS Virtual Console): Like Yoshi’s Island, this game would go on to spawn its own franchise. But at this point in Wario’s life, his game still clearly stated MARIO Land on the box. Mario’s previous Gameboy outings were scaled down versions of his normal adventures, visually interesting and distinct but largely unsurprising in their design. Here, the development team began twisting expectations and creating something new. Instead of trying to be a hero, Wario is simply trying to get rich. The coins you collect no longer reward you with extra chances, but are the reward themselves. You replay levels and search for secrets not because it will help you do good deeds or save anyone, but in the pursuit of avarice, be it Wario’s for gold or the player’s for fun.
5. Super Mario 3D Land (Nintendo 3DS): The 3D World/Land series began as a response to ANOTHER Mario series, the “New Mario” games that took Mario back to his 2D platforming roots. Those games were usually competent, but unexciting. The 3D World/Land games, however, strove to find a balance between the different competing ideas of what a Mario game was. While 3D like Mario 64 and Galaxy, they are viewed from a fixed angle and are built with the “get from the start to the exit” formula of the 2D games rather than the semi-open exploration of the latter. The result are two Mario games that are significantly better at showcasing and evolving the “classic” feel than, ironically, the intentional throwback the “New Mario Bros” series represented. 3D Land, for the 3DS, slightly edges out World for the Wii U on this for the completely and utterly fair reason that is I never owned a Wii U.

Spin-offs, Rivals and Descendants: More than maybe any other franchise, the Mario series has had more spin-offs, copy-cats and direct responses to it than almost any other. Here are the most interesting examples, that either take the lessons from the main series and apply it to a new medium or that rebelled and created something new and shocking in response.

1. Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega Genesis and, frankly, almost every modern platform you can think of): Sonic was the original “Mario-killer.” He was fast, cool and extreme while Mario was “classic”, methodical and safe. Mario levels were designed to be explored and mastered, while Sonic’s were designed to be raced through. Mario shrinks to small size when hit, and dies if small, forcing the player to be deliberate in their choices and strategies. Sonic can suffer near endless disaster as long he has at least one ring, which are as common as Mario’s coins. He even has a chance to recollect rings that he drops when hit. This difference encourages players to be a little less deliberate and embrace the free-wheeling nature of Sonic’s world. While it is all but unquestionable that, in the long run, Mario has won their competition, Sonic’s original adventures are extremely interesting and valuable to examine in how the encourage different kinds of play, or reward the same styles of play differently.
2. Super Mario RPG (Super Nintendo, Wii/Wii U Virtual Console): A joint venture between Nintendo and RPG wonder-company Squaresoft, this was the first game to look at Mario’s platform world from the perspective of a Role Playing Game. Despite the very different mechanics, it is a game that embodies the same ideas of developing and then twisting ideas, as well as anticipating clever players. Mario RPG’s world is delightfully packed full of secrets and rewards to uncover and experience, and showcases how even vastly different game genres can learn from each other.
3. Wario Land II (Gameboy, 3DS Virtual Console): Wario’s first outing without his rival’s name on the box takes his adventure to its logical conclusion. While superficially the same as any other Mario platformer, it completely drops the idea of “lives”, “game overs” or the very idea of a losing state. Wario is invulnerable now. If the player messes up, they merely lose a few coins but can continue as normal. This still rewards high-level play, because it allows skilled players to amass huge amounts of wealth faster, but it also allows newer players more of a buffer. But the game pushes that idea of invulnerability further. Some problems can only be accomplished by using enemies or environmental dangers to change Wario in some way. A Wario flattened by a weight can glide like a paper airplane, a Wario set-alight by a flame can burn barriers, a Wario turned into a zombie can collapse into a pile of bones and fall through certain floors. Wario Land II embraces the best of previous Mario games’ exploration and focuses on developing those ideas to their limit.
4. Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (Gamecube): CAN you do a Mario game with a compelling story? The basic story begins the same as any other, Mario is off to rescue the Princess, and the twists that come up in regard to that are not TOO twisted. However, what is really compelling about this game’s story is its characters. Mario is still a friendly-but-blank cipher for the most part, but his companions and foes are all unique individuals with their own stories, hopes and challenges. Even random background characters have personalities and surprising developments. The humor comes from the strong personalities of the characters, and the natural interactions and emotions that emerge from placing them in different situations. The story is merely a vehicle for exploring the characters and interactions of this world. All that AND it manages to still utilize the classic Mario design philosophy in its mechanics and level design.
5. Legend of Zelda (Any and all Nintendo system ever): Legend of Zelda is Nintendo’s sibling franchise to Mario, and while it represents an entirely different kind of game and story, it also focuses strongly on the kishotenketsu idea of design. The best Zelda games are remembered not for their fantasy stories, but for the worlds and challenges that build on Link’s tools and environment in the same way Mario’s do. Playing favorite or classic Zelda games with this in mind can be a rewarding experience.

Super Mario Odyssey: I’ve intentionally avoided putting the newest Mario game on any of these lists as it is still VERY recent and we all need time to best process and understand its place alongside its predecessors before making any, even entirely subjective, pronouncement about where it fits the rest. However, it is still an excellent game and a great example of the design philosophy I’ve described. It could easily be played either to get an understanding of what makes a classic Mario game work well OR as an example of how classic Mario ideas and designs can be applied in new, exciting ways.

Its 2017, Let Gene Have A Crush On A Boy

When Bob’s Burgers first began airing back in 2011, it was a pleasant surprise. A new Fox animated show that not only wasn’t horrible, but managed to actually be funny and have a great deal of heart. In hindsight, that shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise, as series’ creator Loren Bouchard had previously helped create Home Movies, one of the funniest, earnest and underappreciated adult animated shows of all time. At the start of its eighth season, Bob’s Burgers is nothing short of a phenomenon. A critical darling with a massively devoted fanbase, the show has hit that sweet spot all animated sitcoms have dreamt of reaching since the early Simpsons first showed the way.

I would argue that the success of the show is largely due to its focus on strong character-based humor. Most sitcoms, animated or otherwise, tend to use their characters as vehicles for whatever joke is wanted, rather than letting the jokes emerge from the characters themselves. Not to beat up on Family Guy too much, but it IS the classic example of a bad gags-over-character show. Can you define Peter Griffin’s character in a concrete way other than “dumb fat guy”? He has no specific dreams, hobbies, interests, fears or neuroses. He will simply become whatever is needed to facilitate the joke the writers and animators want to tell. Modern Simpsons too often falls into this same pattern, where once specific characters like Homer or Lisa end up acting completely contrary to their described natures if it means being able to tell a specific joke. South Park is no better, with its characters changing personalities and motivations episode to episode in order for the writers to fit whatever pet issue, jokes or bigotries they want into their mouths. There isn’t necessarily a problem with doing wacky joke-based shows as opposed to character-based humor, but the latter tends to develop a very strong and dedicated connection to its audience in a way other shows struggle with. The last big, successful animated sitcom that focused strongly on character-derived humor was Fox’s King of the Hill, whose best episodes came from the show’s creators putting a character in any wild situation and understanding their motivation and behavior well enough to let the humor flow from the character’s natural reactions. If I say “a Peggy episode” or “a Dale episode” you automatically have an idea of the kind of humor and tone the episode will have. Bob’s Burgers follows that tradition, with the creators strongly invested in understanding and drawing humor from the differences between how, say, Bob would react to an absurd situation compared to how Tina would.

But this post isn’t meant to be an overview of what makes this show so beloved by me and other fans who think like me. I just want to highlight the importance of the show’s strong characterization before I get into the one thing about the show that’s gotten stuck in my fan-craw.

The core cast of the show are all unique and relateable in different ways. There’s slovenly, but dedicated and surprisingly brilliant Bob himself. Its easy for me to identify with Bob’s desire to create and share his gifts artistically despite getting so caught up in himself and his worries that he sabotages his ability to do so. He can make the fanciest high-class burger in existence, but he also can’t dress himself nicely or do anything with his restaurant to get people in the door to eat said burgers. I identify with his wife Linda’s unbridled enthusiasm and inability to not get caught up in other peoples’ joy. I identify with Louise and both her feeling of being smarter than everyone else in the room and her letting that feeling screw herself over. I definitely identify with Tina and both her weird confused, awkward sexual awakening and her refusal to let that confusion stop her from enjoying things. Then there’s Gene.

Gene is, superficially, perhaps the simplest character on the show. He’s the fat, loud, “random” kid. The one who screams when excited and makes fart jokes and wants attention. But there’s a lot more to Gene than that. More than anyone else on the show, Gene understands himself and loves who he is. He is not simply seeking attention, but is seeking to share himself with others. He is immune to embarassment or shame. If a gag or a credits sequence calls for a character to dance without reservation, it will call on Gene. There is an unbridled joy to Gene’s physicality. We should all be as lucky to love ourselves and own our bodies as much as Gene does. Gene’s strong sense of self doesn’t stop there. Like Tina, he’s approaching the age where kids start thinking about subjects adults have tried to keep them from, but while Tina’s thoughts swarm around butts and erotic fantasies, Gene leaps headfirst into fluid gender expression.

“We’re working girls now! Deal with it!”
“You’re a girl?”
“Yes I am!”
“No he’s not.”
“TELL THAT TO MY VAGINA!”

 

Gene gleefully jumps back and forth between identities, but not just for “haha wacky joke” purposes, but out of his natural, established character. When Gene appears in a dress for a bit, its not just out of “haha boy in dress” but because he clearly feels comfortable in one. When Gene describes himself as one of three sisters its not just a joke, its how he seems to view himself within the family. Gene is not just fluid in his gender identity either, but in his emerging sexual identity too. Gene jokes about and expresses attraction to all kinds of people, and always with the same enthusiasm and lack of implied judgement. The humor comes not from WHAT Gene says as much as from that enthusiasm. And yet, its never used as anything OTHER than humor.

 

With the show so clearly defining the motivations and expectations of the characters, its hard to imagine that if Gene came home from college and said “I like boys” or even “I’m a woman” Linda and Bob would react poorly. In fact, Bob’s voice actor himself, H. John Benjamin, has said in interviews that not only does he think Gene is likely queer, but that Bob would absolutely accept it. And yet, for all the jokes the show is willing to make about Gene possibly being queer, it hasn’t ever done anything beyond that. For a show full of heart-felt moments, none of them ever really touch on this aspect of Gene. What’s perfectly acceptable for overt jokes or unspoken subtext is still not available for “real” stories.

Some people are likely already angrily thinking “oh, how dare you! Gene’s a kid! He isn’t thinking about those things!” Except, we’ve already had episodes about his crushes. If his on-again crush Courtney Wheeler (who like many women and girl characters on the show is voiced by a male actor) had been a boy instead of a girl, literally nothing else about their episodes would have needed to be changed. Not a single one of their jokes or story beats is dependent on Gene having a crush on a girl or vice versa.

“But kids don’t know if they’re gay!” If that were true, kids wouldn’t know if they were straight either. “Straight” is not a default position that all kids are in until the suddenly wake up queer. Queer and questioning kids exist, and queer and questioning adults have memories of their own queer crushes. Likewise, not all kid crushes are sexual in nature, and the assumption that acknowledging any kind of queer crush means you are “sexualizing” kids is the kind of rhetoric that further marginalizes queer people in our culture. Queer people are assumed to be primarily sexual or fetishistic because most straight people refuse to acknowledge or interact with any other aspect of us.

The show has had no problem putting queer characters in the background or for examples of “local color” before, and in general has managed doing so better than its animated prime time ancestors. One Thanksgiving episode had a gag where Bob accidentally ended up in an increasingly awkward flirtation with a gay butcher at the supermarket. The joke is not a simple “haha Bob’s being hit on by a gay guy” though, the laugh isn’t at gay peoples’ expense. The humor comes from Bob’s awkwardness and embarrassment at having to buy so many turkeys being exacerbated both by it being misinterpreted as desperate flirting and also it ending in rejection. The butcher being overwhelmingly polite and sympathetic about the whole thing feeds into that (“Hey, don’t let this stop you from trying. I know a lot of guys that are into ‘sloppy bears’”). Bob isn’t embarrassed about being mistaken for gay at all, but for being mistaken for someone who can’t cook. The core of the joke itself works no matter what gender or sexuality the butcher is. An earlier episode featured Bob befriending a group of trans women sex workers, and while it had a lot of unfortunate jokes, it also specifically built its story around the idea that Bob liked these women, considered them good friends, and that he did not doubt or devalue their womanhood at all. A one-off character from the same episode, Marshmallow, has since become a reoccurring character. Marshmallow is never directly stated as being trans, but its damn strongly hinted that she is. She’s also a valued member of the community whom the other characters consider admirable and attractive. She also doesn’t ever do anything but make brief appearances to deliver a joke.

Its great to see queer characters appear in media as something other than jokes, but honestly its also great to see queer characters in media that can make jokes. We know when the joke is meant to be at our expense and when its not, trust us. In real life, us queers can be dumb, goofy fuckups and good lord do we want to see that reflected in the dumb, goofy fuckups we identify and laugh along with. All of us queers grew up with shows we loved, but had to tolerate insulting us and telling us we weren’t human, and the fact that not all shows come with that caveat is pretty huge. It feels GOOD to have queer characters in all kinds of genres, mediums and stories who are finally “allowed’ to be funny for reasons other than mocking real-world queer people, or worse, providing a smokescreen for “gay panic” bullshit. It feels GOOD to feel ourselves and our lives not laughed at, but invited along to laugh at the absurdities of the larger world with everyone else. But we also notice which stories we’re not invited along to.

Bob’s Burgers clearly likes playing with the idea of Gene being queer, and its done some great comedy around that theme. Gene might realize he’s gay or a woman or a gay woman when he grows up, and that unstated but undenied possibility is used to connect the character to underrepresented fans. But eight seasons in, and in the world we are living in today, its getting kind of cowardly to leave it there. I don’t say this to attack the show, but because it is clearly a show that cares about its characters and its audience. If a character can make queer jokes, they should also be allowed to make other queer stories. If we’re real enough for comedy that doesn’t aim to hurt, but to elevate and connect people’s experiences, then we are real enough for the rest of it as well. If you want to dance around it, you need to sometimes be willing to SAY it.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō

The “manga boom” and “bust” that defined American nerd fandoms from the late 90s to the early 00s is a weird phenomenon. US comic sales were dipping, and the big companies alternated between “we have to copy this anime thing as much as we can!” and “this is a stupid fad for little girls who’ll never read REAL comics like ours.”  In the end, the bubble did burst, a few publishers went under, and the massive manga sections at every commercial bookstore receeded a bit, but it was never a true “bust” like many western comic people were hoping. If anything, the post-manga bubble market remained more vibrant and sustainable than what Marvel and DC are trying to deal with today. That isn’t to say the manga market isn’t precarious, or that everything is roses for publishers, creators and fans. Debates over scanlations, fan-entitlement and how manga gets selected for release over here could fill up several blogs by people with a LOT more specific knowledge on sales, publisher history and localization policies. All I really know about the subject comes from when I was most into manga, at the height of the boom, and how much I really, REALLY wanted someone to pick up and published Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō in English.

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō, or “Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip” (or sometimes just YKK), is a slice-of-life science fiction manga, written and illustrated by Hitoshi Ashinano, that ran on-and-off from 1994 to 2006. Despite winning awards, recieving critical claim from US comic critics and developing a good-sized fanbase overseas, it has never been officially released in English. Its setting can be described simply as “the most relaxed apocalypse of all time.” Alpha, a fully human-like robot, runs a small cafe in post-acpocalyptic Japan. Some untold ecological catastrophe has left most of the world underwater. Yet, life continues. There are only a handful of humans left, but they continue living as best they can. Despite the implied horrors that have come before, the tone of the manga is perpetually upbeat, chill and light. Alpha’s rural commuity is the kind of place where you know all your neighbors, despite the closest one living miles away from you. The early chapters focus on the day-to-day activities of Alpha. One chapter might revolve around her repairing a broken porch, while another focuses on her recieving watermelons from a neighbor. Some chapters cover only a few minutes worth of time. The pace is decidedly slow, despite the fantastic setting. The world has ended, but everyday life goes on.

In between these moments, the reader is able to piece together this new world. Everyone is friendly and the tone is light, yet we see Alpha has a gun with her. Just in case. Money still exists and has value, but we never see any form of government and outside of Yokohama, no one seems to really charge anyone else for anything. People maintain gas stations, mopeds and small trucks in their community, but the roads aren’t maintained and there’s no guarantee of mail delivery. When a storm knocks down her cafe, Alpha scavenges lumber from abandoned houses. Almost everyone outside the city is either elderly or a child. The only non-urban, non-elderly adults are nomadic wanderers, taking odd jobs or living off the land. Street lights serve no purpose anymore, and most are underwater, yet they still turn on every night. Someone or something is generating power for them. Alpha describes paying someone for electricity, but that it is a distant country she doesn’t even know the name of. 

Alpha is an amazing technological marvel, yet humanity lives in pretty humble conditions. Scooters and trucks do not have the same self-powering systems Alpha does, and still run on dwindling supplies of gasoline. Robots in the world were built to last and to do so sustainably, taking in energy from food and organic fuel, yet the ecological disaster is clearly based around the man-made disasters going on in our own present day. As we see glimpses into the past, we see that the world was already over and the land was already slipping away into desert and ocean when Alpha and her other siblings were being developed. Sustainable technology insured that something would last after humanity, but it came too late to change things and save the world humanity knew. Yet the world’s ecology is recovering in its own way. New species of insect and fish exist, and new ecosystems have emerged. Some, like the mysterious and immortal Misago, are likely the result of human technology. But even the more “natural” things that emerge take their influence from the long-gone human civilizations. Trees and giant fungi emerge in specific patterns where roads and cities used to be. Mushrooms grow into the shapes of humans, replicating the exact faces of those long gone. Is the world recreating the lost cities? Did humanity leave another devastating imprint onto the world, deeper than they realized? Or is the planet expressing some kind of sorrow at the approaching loss of humanity? Can the planet we see as having been destroyed, or the planet that emerges from that destruction, be something that sees us not as destroyers to be wiped our and scorned but as something to be mourned and remembered? Or are people (and the reader) just seeing what they want to see from a broken world?

Hitoshi Ashinano is very good at capturing the small, subtle changes in nature. He is able to evoke strong feelings of wind, temperature and even moisture from his sparse inks. His simple, but specific, characters stand out strongly against the more detailed backgrounds, but are able to convey subtle shifts in emotion just as well. Like many of its manga contemporaries, YKK’s panel transitions drawn more from Japanese film and theater than Western comic readers are used to, with a focus on naturalistic montage and changes between moments, moods and symbols over changes between actions. The illustration and comic storytelling techniques work together to highlight the naturalistic and environmental themes of the story.

So why bring in robots? Why add such a fantastic element to such a slow-paced, naturalistic story of societal collapse? The manga is not just about the twilight of humanity, but the rebirth. It is the kind of post-post apocalyptic story, where the mystery is in what comes next and not what was lost, that I’ve previously analyzed in Legend of Mana. For that, we need the new generation. That is the robots, the children of humanity. That is also why these robots have no fantastical powers. Their most impressive technology, such as acchieving sustainable energy through food intact and developing emotions and identities through experiences, do nothing more than replicate what humans can do.

There are no shortage of stories about adolescense and puberty in cartoons and comics. Its a well-worn path, and for good reason. Its the transition from child to adult, and while each person’s version is unique, they all follow along related patterns and themes that can make even very specific stories and imagery feel universal. But its not the only moment of transition in our lives, and its not even necessarily the biggest. Alpha never had a “childhood” like her human friends, yet she is still an adult. She has already gone through that first, mysterious transition. We are not reading the story of a child becoming an adult, but rather the story of an adult becoming a different kind of adult. When we begin, Alpha has no thoughts beyond the present. Her owner has left, and given her the freedom to do whatever she’d like. Like many young, largely pampered, adults finding themselves free for the first time, its hard for her to see anything other than a grand, open canvas. Time is sprawled out in front of her, and the world feels like it will always be there. Alpha does not yet have the mature sense of loss and mortality that everyone most learn, and considering she is essentially immortal its not going to come easily. This is why her relalationship with the only children left in the countryside is important. We don’t see any of their adolescent struggles or transitions, we instead see Alpha coming to terms with the fact that the world will move on even if she doesn’t (or can’t). 

The pace of each chapter never changes, it is always a very slow, single moment in time. But the space and time between each chapter increases as the series goes on. When in the first volume, the time in between a chapter may be only a few days, by the end its several years. Ironically, as she becomes more aware of her immortality, Alpha becomes more connected to the passage of time. The awarenes that the humans she loves and treats like family will one day die, the awareness that eventually the sea will overtake even her cafe, the awareness that freedom to make choices is not the same as freedom from having to choose, these concepts are all forced upon her by the inevitability of time, even as she wants to do nothing more than enjoy the simple life of her country cafe. 

This development is conveyed strongest in the relationship between Alpha and her camera. One of the only other major pieces of advanced technology in the manga, the robot camera has a lens made of the same material as a robot’s eye and allows Alpha to take 3D pictures that she can then view as though it were through her own eyes again. When she first recieves it (a gift from, and the very last contact she will ever have with, her mysterious owner) she is reluctant to take a single photo. The thousands of images the camera can store seem so limited compared to the endless moments she experiences every day. How is it possible to capture a single one? But as time goes on, and more of the world and people around her change, she learns the importance of those pictures and those memories. Her friends will not always be there for her to look at. The countryside will not always be the same. Even herself, the immortal robot, changes. The last chapters of the series show her taking photos every day, capturing the world around her and herself so that she can remember them even after this twilight age has ended.

It is not just her relationship with time that define’s Alpha’s transition from adulthood to adulthood, but the change and development of her feelings and connections to others. Early on, she meets Kokone, another robot who works as a courier. Robots can transmit data through ports in their mouth, which is also how Alpha controls her camera. One thing that society evidently lost during its collapse was the internet and wifi, and so electronic data has to be sent via robot. If you want to send your robot friend an email with a bunch of picture attchments, you hire a courier to make the journey to their place and kiss them. The concept is introduced as a silly, comedic element. This kiss is, for them, nothing more intimate than a usb cord, and yet after their meeting, its all Alpha and Kokone can think of. Kokone is the first to really question how what they experience is at odds with what their unread history and manuals state. They shouldn’t be dreaming, or building crafts, or having moments that touch them emotionally, or falling in love, and yet they are. They are exceeding their original design, creating new feelings and emotional connections from experiences like humans do. Its never stated why robots were made, and why they were made to mimic human appearance and vulnerability so effectively. The robots are treated like any other person, with rights and feelings, and yet Alpha still once had an “owner.” 

People go through many followup adult adolecenses and transitions. There is no true endpoint to life, every epiphany and identity merely leads to the next starting point until death finally ends things. The adult adolecenses queer people go often end up feeling a lot more unique and novel than they actually are. They kind of have to end up feeling that way, considering how society tries so hard to keep us from our own history, peers and mentors. We don’t get the luxury of always being able to explore our feelings the way “normal” kids are expected to. We don’t even always get the luxury of having the opportunities! When those opportunities emerge, there is no guarantee they will be at a time or environment where we get to “compare notes” with a larger history and culture. Alpha and Kokone have inherited a largely empty world without a sense shared of history, either with other robots or with other queers. They are forced to build everything, from the definitions of how they feel to how they eventually live, as though it were brand new. When Kokone begins exploring the archives of robot history, all she can find are a few tantalizing clues locked behind academic, bureaucratic and economic gates. Queer relationships are already existing in a post-post apocalyptic world, and Kokone’s search would not be so different if she were a modern day lesbian rather than a future robot.

In the end, the fates of the world, of humanity and of the nigh-immortal lesbians left with the pieces are not revealed. The future of this world is left as mysterious as its past.   The only certainty in YKK is found in the moments lived and read, and those moments but not always the same. Comics are not thought of as being an “interactive art” the way games are, but the story of a comic cannot exist, much less progress, without a reader to fill those gaps between panels. The mysteries of this world are not as important as the answers a reader creates. Apocalypse is the end of a point of view as much as it is the end of the world. The classic canard “it is easier to destroy than create” forgets that every act of creation is a destruction, a deliberate choice to make one thing real and all other possibilities not. A slow pace is still a pace. Even in a world of daily moments, where one can get lost in the repeated actions and moods, people change. Even in immortality, we can’t stop choosing to grow.

Final Fantasy 7

When I wrote about Final Fantasy V being the secret environmentalism Final Fantasy, I knew the elephant in the room with that claim would be Final Fantasy VII. After all, VII is the one where you start out as the member of an eco-terrorist group, and your primary villains for most of the game are an evil corporation unsustainably monetizing the lifeblood of the planet to power their machines. How can you that NOT be the environmentalism Final Fantasy? Well, just as V’s themes of responsibility, environmental collapse and hope within nihilism are supported by the game’s characters, world and mechanics, VII’s characters, world and mechanics quickly leave the “materia as peak oil” window dressing behind to focus on a different theme. Final Fantasy VII is the existential identity crisis Final Fantasy.

Despite their shared label, there’s actually quite a diverse range of differing doctrines by existential philosophers. One shared idea is that the central virtue of the movement is “authenticity.” An idividual suffers pain because of the disconnect between authenticity and their desires. People want the world to make sense, and so the reality of an absurd world without inherent meaning fills them with dread. Peoples’ actions and experiences are what define them, and the disconnect between what they do and what they think or feel also causes them this painful dread. People want to see themsleves as heroes, and so the fact that other people may see them as something else threatens their very sense of self. In existentialism, it is up to every individual to give meaning to life, rather than the concrete morality or value prescriped by society, religion, or other organizations. However, it is also up to every individual to deal with what it means to be such a powerful individual in a world shared by everyone else with the same power. In a western world trying to find meaning after the horrors of WWII, existentialism proved quite popular, and went on to influence disciplines far beyond philosophy, and 90s video games were no exception.

Japanese rpgs of the Playstation era would go to the existentialism well quite a lot, both to directly borrow from its philosophers or take indirect influence from its descendants. Square’s own Chrono Cross built its narrative around the main character becoming trapped in a Satre-esque nightmare of being regarded as their moral opposite, Persona used its Jungian archetypes to facilitate teenage drama about identity, and countless Tactics games took inspiration from the anti-war and anti-colonial writers of or following the movement. I don’t think its unfair to say that Final Fantasy VII’s explosive success, both economically and critically, helped solidify this trend among its predecessors. 

Existence preceeds essence. Identity is defined by the reality of what an individual does and how the world responds, not just what the individual feels defines them. Now, anyone familiar with FF7 is probably already thinking “yep, I know where this is going, Cloud.” After all, the identity Cloud presents for over half the game is challenged and eventually revealed to be false. His cool aloofness and badassery merely a projection, a false identity he doesn’t even remember creating anymore. In the end, it is revealed that he was a simple dork who, after suffering a traumatic experience, began internalizing and copying the mannerisms of the cool, fallen friend who had earlier saved his life. By the end of the game, his fractured mind and memories are restored and he accepts both his true self and the potential within that version of him to become the person he really wants to be. But Cloud is far from the only character in Final Fantasy VII projecting a false mask. Once you look deeper, every character carries this kind of existential crisis that defines them.

Barrett uses a mask of anger and rage to hide his own guilt and self-hatred. Red XIII tries to project maturity to mask the fact that he’s actually the youngest member of the group. Cait Sith is literally a rebel sympathizer pretending to be a Shinra spy pretending to be a robot cat-and-yeti. Cid projects the appearance of being another, even angrier version of Barrett not to mask guilt or issues of self-esteem, but how consumingly empty his misanthropy is. Even the optional characters have created their own comforting false selves. Yuffie appears to be the carefree, money-and-materia-happy thief, but this is to mask her frustration as a victim of Shinra’s colonialism. Her home country of Wutai lost a war and was reduced to little more than a vassal state fit only for vacationing foreigners who want to experience something “exotic.” Why does she really want the party’s power? Why to make Wutai strong and independent again! But admitting that means admitting Wutai is defeated and weak, and worse requires the help of these outsiders and their power, which is something Yuffie is not capable of doing when the party first meets her. So the only-watching-out-for-herself silly teen thief persona is created to justify to herself what she needs to do. Her actions are still working towards the goal she desires, but not in an authentic way, and it is not until she confronts and honestly engages both her new allies and her familial ties in Wutai that she is able to truly become a member of the party and obtain her most powerful ability.

Vincent, left immortal and sometimes-monstrous by Shinra science, tells the party he shut himself away as a penance for failing to prevent the events that led to the creation of the big villain Sephiroth. He takes on the role of the sorrowful, tragic hero, who failed to prevent his love from being stolen by the wicked scientist Hojo and fooled into becoming the mother of the world’s greatest monster. But anyone looking at the whole backstory (at least pre-sequels, which is going to become a common caveat) would note that Vincent was never really in a position to prevent anything. At best, he was a Shinra grunt with delusions of being closer to the real power players of the plot, merely adjacent to the backstory rather than active in it. He IS optional, after all. His guilt is not really over how he failed to stop Hojo, but over how he never actually COULD have stopped Hojo. But what kind of tragic hero redemption would THAT make for? Better people think his self-pity and inaction is due to something “worth” feeling guilty over, than admit he didn’t actually matter all that much back then (and that Lucretia didn’t love him, of course).

The most interesting cases aside from Cloud are found in Tifa and Aeris, arguably full co-protagonists with Cloud. Tifa grew up with the real Cloud, and is who first recruited him to Avalanche. She knows all too well that the version of events he shares with everyone is bullshit, and worse that he’s far too confident about every ridiculously wrong thing he says. Aside from the equally untrustworthy Sephiroth, she’s the only character alive who can counter Cloud’s narrative of past events with the truth. Yet despite all this, she remains silent, never challenges things and confides this in no one. The player can see that its weighing on her, and yet up until it becomes impossible to do otherwise, she keeps her accurate memories to herself. Why?

Tifa’s projection is one of support and normalcy. For various reasons, she simply does not trust herself, and so she copes by positioning herself to boost others. She’s the mother-slash-sister of the group, the calm collected voice of reason to everyone else’s anger and weird hang-ups. This serves her well for awhile, until her long-lost friend (and potentially more?) Cloud shows up, shortly followed by Sephiroth, the guy who murdered her hometown and set most of her psychological issues in motion. So Tifa, who deals with her existential issues by making herself a supporting character in other people’s stories, starts to run into the problem of Cloud’s version of the past not making any sense. Tifa distrusts herself so much, and her comforting identity is so wrapped up in supporting Cloud, that she essentially gaslights herself. Unlike the others who project a comforting but inauthentic fantasy to mask their existential fear, Tifa’s dread comes from her inability to trust in her own authenticity. Tifa knows who she is, but either doesn’t trust that to be good enough, or doesn’t trust the world to accept it. Eiter way, she’d rather maintain the illusion that the person she’s supporting, and thus validating her own existence through, is capable and in control than risk shattering it by acknowledging her real, objective memories. Notably, Cloud’s psyche is only saved by Tifa stepping forward to take ownership of reality, and in her own capability.

Aeris is unique in that she isn’t really projecting any kind of false self, but rather has everyone, including most of the players, projecting on to her. Considering her role as a healer, her “useless” holy materia’s appearance as the deus ex machina, and her tragic and (at the time) unexpected death, she tends to be remembered by most players as a virginal, sweet, naive young girl. One who loves flowers and being nice and romantic. She IS nice and likes flowers, of course, but she’s also a ratty slum kid who flirts, makes dirty comments, scams jerks trying to pick her up and has no problem making her feelings absolutely clear. She is absolutely nothing like the standard, demure healer girl jrpg players expect from the genre, and yet that is what they project onto her. Replaying the game after you know the plot twists to come makes it pretty clear how early on she realizes that Cloud is a false identity, and is specifically acting out the mannerisms and behavior of her dead ex-boyfriend Zack. Unlike Tifa, she doesn’t keep it “secret” because she doubts herself, but because frankly she has more important things to do regarding the fate of the planet and can’t spend all her valuable time helping Cloud the lost baby tip-toe around reality. She eventually leaves the party and ends up both saving the world and dying because, as much as she cares for Cloud and the other lovable fuckups of the party, she knows she can’t accomplish anything while holding their hands. The planet is saved because Aeris is authentically free from illusions, and Aeris dies because the party is, at the time, too weak to do likewise.

The larger mechanics of the game and the world it takes place in support this reading. While past Final Fantasies often focused on character customization through various systems (the jobs of III and V, the espers of VI, etc) the characters always had their own unique qualities as well. A knight is never going to be as good at spells as a black mage, and even if you abuse espers enough to give Relm an attack equal to Cyan’s she can’t equip his katanas to make use of it. But in VII, the characters of your party are virtually identical ciphers. Each character has their unique class of weapon, but the stats are largely the same. The deciding factors of a character’s stats and role in combat is not their stats or weapons, but their materia. Pretty much every character has the same capacity to be a fighter, a healer, an agile thief, a tank or any other role. The only tangible difference is in the characters’ limit breaks, the special attacks they can unleash when they take enough damage in combat. The only character who has stats built towards a particular role is Aeris, who will always be built with less fighting and more magic in mind. But, as noted earlier, Aeris is the only member of the party NOT trying to project the image of someone they think is cooler or more successful. Everyone else is a blank slate for you to work with because they lack Aeris’ sense of identity. Its also just another tip-off that something may happen to this character, so the player should keep an eye open.

Like V’s environmental themes, VII’s themes of how one presents identity and reality become more obvious once you know you’re looking for them beyond just Cloud. Shinra is an obvious example, with their public face as the good capitalist philanthropists and their literal paying of actors in Niflheim to spend their entire lives pretending to be people they are not. The Shinra corporation also makes a good villain for these themes because its an enemy with a changing face. When the Shinra president dies, his son simply takes over. The Shinra your party faces may be constantly changing with whatever board member you currently battle with, and that obscures how getting rid of these individuals who identify as the system is not the same as getting rid of the system. The question this should raise is, why do we then think that even getting rid of Sephiroth will get rid of the larger system threatening the planet?

VII’s ambiguous ending refuses (until the unneeded sequels anyway) to give a definite answer on if humanity survives with the rest of the world. The ultimate white magic is released and empowers the planet to remove all toxic and harmful variables. This includes the dark magic meteor set to crash into the planet, but it may also include the humans who spent their whole existence unsustainably harvesting the planet. The party can claim that it beat Sephiroth and the Shinra board members, but they didn’t actually fix any of the systems in place, did they? Everyone is still using power that has to come from somewhere, and that is draining the planet. They didn’t fix the fundamentally broken things inside humanity that apparently prevented them from acting in their own best interests. VII raises the question of whether the idea we can save the world is just another false identity, on a massive cultural scale. Does it matter if we think and feel that we’re getting better and capable of change if the planet itself knows better? Does the image we want to present as heroes matter if, when given the option, objective reality categorizes us as toxic and removes us? Even scarier, if we’re NOT moving forward and fixing problems, does that mean there’s any point, beyond our own egos, in attempting? How can we both deal with thse harsh realities without giving way to a selfish nihilism? Since (again, until they ruined it with sequels) the ending requires the player to decide and justify what happens to humanity, it requires the player to answer that question themselves.

In the end, what FF7 has to say about environmentalism is in terms of how existentialist ideas of identity impact our ability to deal with environmental issues. Over and over again, we find ourselves as a species embracing comforting lies to avoid harsh realities. Make no mistake though, “humanity is evil so there’s nothing we can do” is just as much a fantasy as “humanity is good and we don’t need to worry.” We’ve broken our own planet beyond what any species we’ve ever known is capable of, and the planet that comes from doing so is going to be one that a lot of people won’t survive. In a mere 14 years, we may be looking at a United States that is mostly desert and large parts of Europe that are uninhabitable. This is a painful future to think about, and our natural inclination is to escape having to do so. But its a reality that will still come, no matter how we choose to ignore it. We don’t have the luxury of solving this problem by spamming summon spells or just by admitting we’re overcompensating nerds, but there’s nothing wrong with bits of media that remind us how important it will be to face this reality sincerely. Accepting the difficult reality of what we can’t change, what we can’t avoid responsibility for, and what that means for our world requires cultivating an authenticity we’re not well versed in on a scale we have even less luck working with. But wether its on a personal or global scale, that existential pain will only abate when we face it with that same authenticity.

Final Fantasy V – Hope in a time of environmental crisis

Most people would consider Final Fantasy VII, with its opening party members being an environmental terrorist group and its focus on materia as a metaphor for fossil fuels, as being the most overtly environmental-themed Final Fantasy. However, despite its place as narrative window-dressing, these themes take a backseat to themes of identity, performance and the conflict between how you and others perceive yourself. I would argue that, rather than VII, the Final Fantasy that is truly most about environmentalism is Final Fantasy V.

The world of Final Fantasy V was split in two millennia ago. An evil being emerged from The Void, the primordial chaos that is both nothingness and the potential to be anything, and became such a threat that the power he unleashed could only be destroyed by splitting reality in two and forcing The Void between them like a prison. Today, neither world realizes that the other exists, or that they were originally one, and on their own both worlds have inadvertently been leading themselves to destruction.

Like in VII, one of the driving conflicts in Final Fantasy V is the over-consumption of a finite resource. The kingdoms of the first world extract energy from the four elemental crystals in order to power technology and live easy lives. While the power of these crystals is considered to be limitless by short-sighted and short-lived humanity, their increasing reliance on that energy eventually weakens the crystals enough that they can be shattered. As the elements of the world are intrinsically linked to the crystals, this means that the world is going to slowly collapse. Air will become thin and polluted, fire will refuse to burn and the world will grow cold, the earth will become fallow and crumble, and water will grow stagnant and filthy.

It turns out that the crystals serve a second function, that of sealing away Exdeath, an evil warlock from that second world who longs to achieve the power of The Void. When he tried to destroy his world, four heroes from his world drove Exdeath to the first world and sealed him away. Naturally, the denizens of that second world are pissed that the thoughtless people of the first world abused their crystals’ power and allowed Exdeath to return and threaten both worlds.

But as the party explores the second world and learns the true history of Exdeath, it becomes clear that the situation is not quite that simple. The second world is not innocent, and the creation of Exdeath himself is directly related to their own environmental catastrophe. In this world, the people discovered that the Forest of Moore contained trees that could absorb and process “evil spirits.” The people dealt with destructive monsters, evil wizards and the most repulsive criminals by sealing them inside the trees of this forest (in particular one large, great tree at the forest’s heart) and allowed the forest to purge them of corruption. Of course, the concentrated evil energy was not destroyed any more than plastic or radioactive waste is in our world, and slowly the forest itself would become increasingly corrupted and evil itself. In time, a branch of the great tree became so infused with the discarded evil spirits that it formed a being of nothing but corrupting, destructive urges. That being was Exdeath, the evil tree-warlock behind the party’s troubles.

So improper psychic waste management lead to the creation of a being of pure radioactive evil, how does the world deal with it? By burying it in someone else’s backyard. Imagine if that chunk of plastic in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas was also sentient and wanted to twist your flesh into an untenable form of abstract terror. Imagine that the drinking water in Flint is not only still dangerously toxic, but that by trying to even use the tap, the water becomes increasingly self-aware and hungry for your degradation and death. Of course, they don’t bother to tell anyone, or give them instructions on how to make sure the sealed evil doesn’t awaken, or mention that they used the source of that world’s life-giving energy to do all this. While the first world’s sin is of unregulated resource extraction, the second world is guilty of a hideous form of environmental racism. Both worlds end up doomed because of their separate failures of conservation, and in the end are forced together for survival.

For a game rightly remembered for its light-hearted atmosphere of friendship and camaraderie, Final Fantasy V is undeniably dark. From the very beginning of the game, we are told that when a crystal shatters, the long-term effects on the world are irreversible. The shattered wind crystal means the air quality of the entire planet will simply get worse and worse, until it is possibly too toxic to support life. As each crystal shatters, it becomes a race to mitigate a dying world rather than a quest to save it. When Exdeath attains power over the Void and begins banishing entire populations to realms of unending horror, the game doesn’t tell you “oh, they’ll be fine, don’t worry.” Because its an early Final Fantasy game, we trust things will be alright in the end, and they are, but strictly speaking the narrative of the game is that each place lost to the Void is gone for good, condemned to an existence of undying horror. At least one species ends up functionally extinct by the end of the game, and even that doesn’t get undone during the happy ending. There is no false hope presented here, and while the game doesn’t explore the world that can be expected to come, that reality of a cold, polluted, dying world existing even after you defeat the evil warlock is there for players to consider.

Nihilism can be a destructive tendency, especially when it gets wrapped up in selfish narcissism. There are certain things we cannot change or save, and it is easy to give up on everything in the face of this. Its almost comforting to give up in that circumstance, to mock those who cling to hope and use life’s lack of meaning as an excuse not to create meaning yourself. This is the kind of “college 101” nihilism that most of us are familiar with, the kind that not simply acknowledges a lack of innate purpose or hope, but that actively seeks to prevent such things from being created. Nihilism is a terrible ethos, but then, so are most things we tend to use as such. As merely another tool or lens to be used as needed, nihilism can be something different. Facing the reality that the world as we know it is “doomed” and will change into something different is important. Acknowledging that there is no inherent value to life or our world allows us the opportunity to create and examine value ourselves. The world as we know it IS over. Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is higher than it has ever been in the last 650,000 years, and a national parks social media account merely pointing that out is considered an act of rebellion. On a global level, we’ve passed the tipping point of climate change and a lot of people are going to suffer and die in this hotter world. On a national level, we have a president emboldened by literal nazis and an opposition party that is more intent on procedure than opposition. On a personal level, I will probably end up losing my insurance pretty soon, as well as many of the slight lgbt protections we worked so hard to win over the past decades. We can’t walk back from the damage we have done to the environment or from the political failures of neoliberalism and the resulting rise of fascism. But the reality that things are bad cannot be an excuse or a crutch. Only by allowing nihilism to be a tool to foster compassion, introspection and realism can it be anything other than a source of apathy.

While Final Fantasy V doesn’t shy away from the reality the world will still be doomed, its focus is on hope and finding meaning in fighting regardless. The ending, where everyone’s friends and hometowns are returned from The Void and both the world and the crystals are restored can be seen as a deus ex machina, or a generic happy ending (after all, only Final Fantasy VII really explored a potentially apocalyptic and unhappy ending, and even that was eventually walked back from in order to cash in on sequels). It can also be seen as a just reward for how the party continued to fight, regardless of the reality of their situation. Exdeath succeeds, even in death, in returning creation to that primordial Void, but the Void is not merely nothingness but potential. The drives of the party to find meaning, even when everything is lost, is what allows a world to be born out of that Void. Notably, the world that returns is NOT the status quo, but a new synthesis of the two worlds that must remember and deal with the consequences of what has happened. The idea that this happy ending is in fact earned rather than given is enforced by the narrative fake-out that results if one or more of your party members is at 0 hp when the final blow is struck against Exdeath. In that case, the party member does not have the strength to return from the Void, and the ending is changed to show their friends mourning them and the repercussions of their absence on the new world. The game treats them as dead, up until the very last moment of the ending, when they are shown to have been struggling against the Void even in their weakened state. All struggle is rewarded by the game’s narrative, no matter how weak or futile.

Still, in the real world, a truly happy ending IS a fantasy. We can’t expect to be rewarded overtly with a return to normalcy just because we didn’t give up. But the reminder that nothingness contains the potential for somethingness is important in this age. There is always time to create meaning and purpose, and to fight for that. We can’t stop the hotter world we’ve created, but we can support the people who must live through it and create new models for a society that can do so. We can’t undo Trump (even impeaching him just leaves the equally terrifying prospect of president Pence), but we can obstruct and mitigate damage, and create new visions of a future that opposes fascism. It may not be as flashy as setting up a loop of mimes dualcasting Holy while equipped with the Sage’s Staff, but in our world its what we’ve got.

 

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