singedsun

I had a whole post written up about how much work has sucked recently and how the stress of it has exacerbated the RSI in my dominant hand resulting in having to keep it wrapped up 3-4 days during the work week. But, I started that on SUNDAY and it's now just barely THURSDAY. So that's how my week is really going. More on specifics a little bit later in another post when I have more than the few bits of time I do have in the week hours to write things out. Like last week's new music post which is sitting half-written in my notes because I just couldn't get to it.

Even now, I've got a cold and I haven't even gone anywhere, I stay inside and yet I definitely have a cold. Thank goodness for the upcoming three-day weekend here.

ANYHOW. I did bring something lovely to share for all my negativity right now. I've posted work from Jacob Gellar before. He makes some of the most thoughtful youtube content using video games to talk about other things. In this instance, about forests. But also about poetry. And poetry about forests... there's a lot to unpack in this video. He talks through big concepts in a way that's easily digestible and they're very good. I highly recommend giving this a watch -- even if you're not big into video games. They're just a media used, as much as the actual woods are in a later part of the vid. Highly recommend.

Watch on YouTube

Things what I have finished recently that are not horror movies (caveat: some are horror games). For the basis of I don't have a lot to say about some of them and too much to say about other which would be spoilery, I'll do my best to keep these short.

Books:

I've been reading slowly this year because many of the books I usually read are audio books on my commute. Since I'm not doing that and I prefer to work to music than talking, I'm just not getting through them as quickly. But while the boys were here I did find it easier to pick up physical books while I was supervising their movie-watching or play time. [Books link to GoodReads]

Tyler Johnson Was Here :: a quick, engaging but rough read about a black teenage boy who loses his twin brother to police violence. This is an #ownvoices book and based on the author's life. This reads like a YA but honestly I think it only made the pace of the story move quickly and kept you well into the main character's head. If you're up for the subject matter, I'd definitely recommend it.

The Adventure Zone: Petals to the Metal :: I love the way they've transformed this show into a comic. It's got all the same beats, funny and bittersweet and the art from Carey Pietsch is lovely as always. Honestly I felt like this format worked pretty good for Petals to the Metal -- I found it hard to listen to and understand what was happening at some points during the podcast and this format definitely helps with that.

Faith: Taking Flight :: This is an original novel for Faith Herbert before she becomes Zephyr. If you're not familiar with her character, Faith/Zephyr is a fat, queer superhero who appears in her own comic from Valiant Comics written by Jody Houser. You can find that here The book is written by Julie Murphy who also wrote the novel that spawned the Netflix movie, "Dumplin'" last year. I LOVED this. It's amazing to read about a positive superhero, who's not just a big pop culture nerd but fat and queer. This also reads a little like a YA novel, both given the modern language, the character engagement and the ages of the characters in the story. I LOVED THIS and I really hope there's more.

TV:

The Umbrella Academy :: I blew flew the whole second season this past weekend. I loved it a lot and appreciated the nuanced approach to the growth of these characters. It's easy to see how their childhood formed them, and it's touching how their interactions as adults. I also really appreciated how they changed Vanya's character in this arc. I have not gone back and read the comics again yet, but I plan to break those out soon to do that.

Video Games:

The Last of Us 2 :: I cried more at this game than I have during any other piece of media I've consumed this year. That's not a bad thing I don't think, just for me a way to see the powerful impact of the story this game was telling. I cannot state how much I love this game and it's predecessor. Few games get to me the way this one does. Boy was it LONG though. I kept finishing story arcs and finding a new one just around the end of it. The way these games do soft and quiet moments are exquisite and contrast the violence just so well. There's a quote Troy Baker repeats from a fan during the Retro Replay series for TLOU 1 that's basically that the game is worth it for "the giraffe moment". And I think TLOU 2 (for me) has a moment like that too. I'm looking forward to replaying this sometime in the future.

The Walking Dead: The Final Season :: Because I guess I'm not enough of a glutton for punishment, I decided to finally pull this out to play. I love Clementine so much. I will always wish for more time with her. I loved how the decisions you make in this game are forming AJ's personality. I don't know if I'll go back to replay this to see the other outcomes. The route I chose was difficult, but I liked the end result. Also this game giving me the opportunity for a sweet f/f relationship, yes please and thank you. Back to back games with zombies and loving girlfriends.

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune :: I got the remastered first three Uncharted games from my brother-in-law and needing a different vibe, I broke this out. This is a 2007 game that I never played and I almost wish I would have now. It's a quick game by today's AAA standards (about 7 hours) but the story is tight and controlled and you can set your own pace to explore (but not too much). It's more fun than I expected it to be. I've already broken into Uncharted 2. I don't know much about it other than people love it even more, so I'm looking forward to it.

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That's it for now I guess. I've started reading Brooke Bolander's "the only harmless great thing" novella. It's strange already, so we'll see how it goes. I've still been watching a BUNCH or horror movies (both good and bad) so expect another post about those soon.

With everything upset at home, I haven't had a chance yet to join in on the sunshine_challenge posts. I keep meaning to start and then by the time I would normally sit down to write, I'm just exhausted. So while I do like this year's colors theme and want to participate, fair warning that I might be drawing these out into August at this rate.

RED

Maybe it's cliche but the color red brings to mind, Little Red Riding Hood. I loved that story as a kid. I'm not sure what appealed to me, but I always had a taste for the macabre as a kid so maybe that's it. I've written a fair bit of what qualifies I guess as fanfiction using LRRH as a backdrop, or as an AU opportunity. In fact, there's a whole, big fic a friend I wrote for Dragon Age like a million years ago, using it as a backdrop for a gender-swapped AU. But that's not specifically what I wanted to talk about.

Instead, let me talk about The Path. A video game from Tale of Tales, a little indie video game design team that made a few very atmospheric games, though I think this one was the most popular. The Path is a game about Little Red Riding Hood, only 'Little Red' is six sisters who go out from their mother's house one at a time to visit their grandmother. Each girl has a different 'red' name: Scarlet, Ginger, Ruby, Robin, Carmen & Rose, and they're different ages (each about two years a part). There is a goal in the game: "To go to Grandmother's house". But if you do that, you're not actually playing the game. As was once noted in an article by Justin McElroy, "You get one instruction in the game and you have to disregard it."

The point of The Path, is to get off it. You explore as one of these six sisters, taking your basket and interacting with the world. Each sister has a different experience. Each sister encounters the Wolf, but it's not THE Wolf, it's A wolf. Each sister has their own. And at the end of the path, each girl finds their grandmother's house different than the time before. When you finish the path with one sister, you start over and get to choose another sister to take the path. And when you've been through the sisters, the cycle seamlessly starts back over.

The game itself is about exploration and adolescence, about trauma and acceptance. It's scary and disturbing and beautiful. It's not a long game, though I think it bears repeating The Path for each of the sisters multiple times, as there is always something to find on subsequent playthroughs. Even if what you're finding is just a different interpretation of a sister's particular story.

There is another character in the game, a seventh girl available for interactions who is neither a sister nor a wolf. There's been some theories about her too, and the tie-in to another ToT game, 8.

The Path is more than a decade old at this point and the simple design and graphics reflect that now. But the story is still engaging and I often go back to it. One of the most beautiful things about this game is the music and sound design. The characters aren't voiced in this game, so there's nothing to break the sound of a heartbeat and footfalls in the forest and the sounds of the wolf as it closes in, laid over the music. It's really, really good.

If you've never heard of The Path, or played it, the trailer is below. It's available at the Tale of Tales site and a variety of other places like Steam or itch.io.

Watch on YouTube

I've been putting off this post since I only ever seem to think to post it at the weirdest times. I don't want all my recent posts to be music related, but yet here we are. So, let's make it good.

I mentioned in my previous electric_challenge post about Kentucky Route Zero that the music in that game is SO VERY GOOD, because it is. If that sort of indie folk, chiller even than Mumford & Sons kind of music is for you? Check out the albums for Kentucky Route Zero from Ben Babbitt in that post, because he's great.

HOWEVER. While the music for that game is a pretty close runner-up, it's definitely not my favorite. There's a bunch I could mention here -- music plays a big part in games for me. Too repetitive or annoying, I'll turn it off or listen to something else entirely instead. (I used to listen to the radio when I played Super Mario Bros. as a kid and all games with similar music.) Depending on the game, I might even watch videos on another monitor (if it's on the PC) instead of listening to music at all.

A few games though have the sort of entrancing music that just sucks you in at all the right times and isn't just a background for music stings to cue you in and out of battle or puzzles. And while I can appreciate the grand sweeping orchestral type music they do for Final Fantasy games or even the Zelda games, it's not what serves me.



For me, it's the music composed by Gustavo Santaolalla for The Last of Us that feels just perfect. The soft guitars, the sweeping melodies and the music producers and supervisors at Naughty Dog knew just how to cut it or fade it for the action and cut scenes when appropriate. Few games have made me really take notice of the beautiful musical composition like The Last of Us has.

If beautiful guitar melodies are your thing with a bit of a western twinge, check it out. But if they're not, maybe the other one I want to mention will be it instead.

[The Last of Us album on Spotify]

I would never have expected a horror game to provide me with music experience that made me pause, go look up artists and download whatever I could find and provide me with a favorite band I STILL listen to regularly. If you have not played Alan Wake -- one of the first games to bring the episodic game play style to the console and in a bingeable way. Man this game is great for a lot of reasons, but let's talk about the music. This isn't orchestral, it's not background, it's right up in your face! Over the opening title screen of each episode is a song, a big song, a popular song like Nick Cave's "Red Right Hand" kind of song.

And as if that wasn't enough, there's a metal band incorporated into the backstory of the game that Alan can hear playing often in the radios he passes by and later their music is used in the concert scene near the end. This band in the game is called "Children of an Elder God" but in real life it's a prog metal band called Poets of the Fall (I love them so much). It's an amazing integration of story and song.

[Alan Wake soundtrack on Spotify]

Honorable music mentions for the following games: Transistor, Bastion, Cuphead and The Path (I could write a whole post on The Path alone).

Also worth mentioning this single song from Red Dead Redemption, which is best seen with it's accompanying travel scene for which context is not needed. If you've ever liked cowboy movie music like Ennio Morricone, this is for you. This is a song by Jose Gonzales (who is worth checking out if you like Spanish music (ballads) at all) called "Far Away". The scenery change during this scene is one of my favorite non-action/story based scenes in any video game...ever maybe. RDR might often come off as a gunslinger, horse-riding sim (and it is) but this is just a perfect moment that I've always enjoyed.

Watch on YouTube

I've long been a sucker for villains, specifically female presenting villains with all their over the top baddassery. Maleficent, Ursula, the Evil Queen were my more favorite characters growing up than any of the princesses in those movies. I think there was a combination there between black, kind of goth style and the sheer willpower these women exuded that set this like standard in me for the kind of villains/antagonists I prefer.

Of course my favorite games to play these days are long RPGs like Dragon Age and Mass Effect so unless we're talking The Invisible Man (and we're not) pretty much all the "evil" characters in those games are very dangerous shades of grey.

In fact in the first Dragon Age novel, The Stolen Throne, we meet a version of the Witch of the Wilds that seemed like your pretty typical chill hag in the forest doing up spells for the lost lonely village people who wandered too deep into the forest. I liked her. Then when we meet Morrigan and her mother in the first game, I was super on board with this like badass witch woman who wanted to live forever by training up her replacements and then inhabiting them. Such a creative twist on like old witch/hag folklore to have her turn out to be this old school dragon that you can in no way actually kill. She's great.

But she's not my favorite. By far, my favorite comes in the second game when we meet the Templar Knight Commander of Kirkwall, Meredith Stannard. To explain, I have a deep and abiding interest in magic/templar dynamic in these games and I'm always willing to debate it at the drop of the hat. But suffice to say I side with the Templars pretty much 100% of the time (which I know is not the norm for most fans).



Meredith meets all my qualifications for angry, badass women in fancy outfits (armor in this case) with fuck off weapons (definitely). So many people playing through the game manage to avoid the entirety of Meredith's backstory. But before the game, her family becomes infamous for the disaster her sister brought to Kirkwall. Her younger sister, a mage, hidden by their parents so as not to have her taken away by the circle, never properly learns how to control her magic.

In her teens (I think), her sister gets quite overwhelmed by her magic, the neighbors grow suspicious and call the Templar. In an effort to escape them, Amelia gives into the demons and turns into an abomination. The abomination tears through their parents before setting into the city upon their neighbors and friends and if I remember my lore correctly, she kills and/or injures like seventy people before the Templars finally take her down. When the Knight Captain explains to young Meredith what happen, she asks to join the Order. The Knight Captain becomes a kind of surrogate father to her as she rises through the ranks of the Order and he leaves his sword to her when he dies.

When we meet her in the game it's like sixteen years later, Meredith is a stoic woman who believes so fervently in the Templar Order and the Circle it guards because she's seen first hand what can happen to people, families, children, when they're left without proper training. She's harsh because she feels she must be, to not allow for the weakness that created the abomination her sister became.

Of course later, with the addition of the red lyrium to her sword, it amplifies her faith and devotion and fear to her goddess and the Order. But the affect of the red lyrium has turned her from rationality to radicalism. Logic and reason have departed had left behind a zealot in her place.

I love her because she's trying so dang hard to do the right thing. She's a faithful servant to the Order, the Circle, the teachings of Andraste and the city of Kirkwall. It's her home and she's only serving it in the best way she understand how. She's a tough nut to crack, Meredith, but if you side with her you get bits of her personality. You see how she might once have been more relaxed, maybe funny, maybe more open with her templar and the mages of the Order. You see how she could've been a mother-like figure to many of them. You see the change in Cullen from Templar to Knight Captain and how she gave him a second chance after his failure at Kinloch. You see his respect in her and for her training.

And then the red lyrium, does what it does, weakening her mind. And we see the Meredith she's holding back. We see the bitterness and angry about what happened with her sister. Her ever-present worry that it can and will happen again. She's hyper-vigilant. And then she's full-blown zealot as the very worst things she's imagined happening within Kirkwall are happening again. There is no control and so she must try to enforce some.

Now there's a lot of speculation about the Circle in Kirkwall and it's corruption levels, in addition to the city itself and the massive amounts of absolute batshit it was sitting on with all the ACTUAL honest to the Maker evil sitting right underneath it. So who knows how different things might have been.

The fight against her in Act III is LONG but you see her so well then. What the zealot version of her is willing to sacrifice to keep her city safe, becoming essentially the opposite kind of abomination that her sister had once been. This mirrored evil to save what is already lost.

"What I have done is protected the people of this city, time and again. What I have done is protect you mages from your curse and your own stupidity! And I will not stop doing it! I will not lower our guard, I dare not!"

It's the best. I love her.


[graphic by geraltciri]