Mantis Bones

im sick of this shit.

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Poetry, then, as that which is left unsaid.

“My, what a cool and lovely autumn.”

Putting Tenna side by side to sans, and people are doing the exact same thing. “Spamtenna” feels like its own fandom. People are drawing Tenna shipped with himself. People are drawing yuri of him for crying out loud (something to be said about fandom caring more about yuri versions of men over canon female characters but that is a discussion for another time). People like The Character so much they are doing literally anything with him! Even with Tenna thankfully the times are changing, his most popular human interpretations aren’t even white.

It's in my top 5 favourite films ever; the other two being Kairo, Paprika, The Prince Of Egypt and The Descent, in no particular order. So, I want to talk about it. There will be spoilers. If you haven't seen it, go fucking see it, it's a brilliant beautiful clever film that has become a cult classic for a reason.

To be up front, Ravenous is a film about the W*ndigo. (From here out, I'm just going to call it a W, rather than using the full word). Unlike, honestly, most other depictions, I think it does a pretty respectable job of depicting it. The filmmakers consulted with various native experts on the myth, and I think it shows.

The W is a ~ spooky ~ forest monster with antlers or something, it's a curse. You eat human flesh, and the curse slowly takes hold. It's invigorating, but also addictive, and your hunger for more drives you ever further into the curse.

It's a fucking thematically dense film. The central plot concerns America's expansion west into California in the 1840s, and follows Captain Boyde, a trauma-riddled soldier reassigned to Fort Spenser in the Sierra Nevada. Here, he encounters the W among other settlers.

And here's the thing, the film is very up front in drawing a parallel between the greed of the Ws and the behaviour of the American expansion. One of the villains outright states it towards the end of the film. The W is always hungry, never satisfied, has no regard for the lives of those it brutalises and devours. Its a cunning but inhumane force of endless bottomless consumption. And so, the film argues, is capitalism, is America. The W, it implies, isn't just manifesting in these individual cannibals on the frontier, but also in the vast impersonal forces of American society that will soon come to California to displace its native people, and rip up the land in search of gold.

I think it's telling that our protagonist, Boyde, is by his own admittance a coward. He finds himself resorting to cannibalism three times throughout the film; once unwittingly in the events that incite the plot and see him sent to Fort Spenser, once in a state of desperation at the mid-point of the film, and once when coerced to do so towards the films end. He doesn't kill, he seems to have little stomach for violence, but when presented with carrion and desperation, he succumbs. But he spends a lot of the film revolted by what he's done, resisting the urges its unlocked in him. Boyde is (albeit handsome), depicted as kinda unmasculine, kinda unamerican. His struggles to do the right thing and not give in to his hunger aren't seen by those around him as noble, but as a personal weakness.

I think it's telling that the order we see characters die in largely mirrors class privilege. The first person we hear of dying is an enslaved Black man. The first one we see die on screen is a native american guide. Then working class rank-and-file soldiers die, and only then do the officers and upper classes die. We think we see an upper class man - Colonel Hart - die pretty early, but it turns out that, no, he didn't. The upper class Hart gets mercy where the men under his command don't; rather than allowing him to die, the W nurses him back to health by converting him, too, to cannibalism. The W treats racialised and poor people as disposable but the privileged get either a clean, late death, or get to join it.

Though the central protagonist and antagonist are both white settlers, I find the film incredibly sympathetic to native americans and their situation. It's the films native americans who successfully identify what's going on, although they are not taken entirely seriously by anybody except Boyde until it's too late. What tenderness and kindness we see in the film is between the two natives - George and Martha - and their obvious friend and ally Private Cleaves. The only character who gets out of the whole thing untainted and unscathed is Martha, who has a certain moral clarity to her character.

I think Martha's words kind of form one half of the central thesis of the film: "You don't (stop it)! You ever give, yourself? Wendigo eats. Must eat more, more; never enough. He... he takes. Never, never gives! You stop Wendigo, you give yourself." And then the other half is summed up by Ives: "Manifest Destiny. Westward expansion. ... This country is seeking to be whole. Stretching out its arms, and consuming all it can. And we merely follow."

I love Martha as a character. I think she's the most sympathetically portrayed character in the whole film. In what could be a very bleak message, I find myself very glad that she gets to walk away from the whole thing at the end.

The film is unashamedly about colonialism, about the way colonisation degrades and destroys and devours whatever falls within its grasp.

I find it interesting how each of the soldiers at Fort Spenser represent a sort of urge in American culture. Colonel Hart is a pseudointillectual, using the thinkers of the past to justify his current crimes. Toffler clings helplessly to Christian piety, and a bit boggle-eyed. Reich is a hypermasculine action-hero wannabe who can't stop taking his shirt off. Major Knox is a sort of alcoholic southern dandy, all easy charm and lies over a core of vindictiveness. And Cleaves, a common man who likes weed and slacking off, and is the only one to show any sympathy to the racialised members of the cast. The fort is a little microcosm of white american society that is, tellingly, built on the back of the labour of the racialised, indigenous George and Martha.

There are a lot of little allusions to Christianity. We see it in Toffler, who is well meaning, sensitive, naieve, and proves an easy victim to the W, being the first to be eaten on-screen. And then Ives himself displays the other, more prominent side of Christianity. It's pointed out that Christians eat the flesh of Christ every Sunday, and Ives presents himself as a man of god, marks himself with a bloody crucifix, talks about how cannibalism has let himself be reborn. We see Christianity as a vector for the W, as the meekness of Toffler in the laity contrasts against Ives's weaponising Christianity to gain power and consume.

There is a whole, understated, metaphor going on around the meat industry in there. It's less explored, but we see the way that the Ws dehumanise their victims, and then here and there we see the film draw parallels to the way a meat-eating society treats animals.

But the thing is, all these different themes get pulled together. You're left to conclude that it's all the same pattern. The W isn't just these individual men, it's a pattern. Enslave, destroy, consume. Individual men do, and society does it. It does it to the animals we eat, to colonised people, to the poor, to the vulnerable, to everybody it can. Because it will never be satisfied. It's all the same moral rot.

Now, I'm saying this as a white british person, so take it with a grain of salt, but I find this refreshing. The pop-culture image of the W - the spooky tall thing in the woods with a deer skull - bears little resemblance to the actual Algonquian myth, or the seriousness of what it represents. But Ravenous, I think, does it properly.

I think the use of a native american myth to tell a story about the colonisation of America and it's indigenous people here isn't thoughtless or accidental, it's very deliberate. I think the fact the film consulted with Algonquian cultural experts on how to depict the W comes across. It conveys not just the surface level of the myth, but what it represents underneath.

The W is used to represent the crimes committed against indigenous americans, through an indigenous lens, in a film where our final image is of an indigenous woman walking away from the carnage wreaked by white men.

The allegory is not fucking subtle, but it is complex. I don't think it could get made today, and if it was I think it would make a lot of people very angry.

Because like, a dungeon crawl is a story. So is a complex political negotiation. So is a heist. So is playing out a battle tactically. All of these things are stories, and insofar as each player contributes the actions of their characters and (in a good group) an equal stake in the enjoyment of everyone in the group, it is collaborative.

I don’t see how it isn’t for “collaborative storytelling”, and I don’t even play D&D5e. The relationship between the GM and the players isn’t adversarial. All of them are players trying to have fun, and crucially in a healthy group that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s fun.

The thing is you’re pretty much right, but I think it would be more accurate to say all of those things are collaborative, and they produce stories, which I’ll explain in a minute. This is a case of the two of us agreeing about 90% but defining terms differently and in different context. What you’re saying is true, but isn’t what most people mean when they say “TTRPGs are collaborative storytelling.”

The issue is that when people begin to define all TTRPGs as the buzzword “collaborate storytelling,” particularly coming into the hobby from watching big budget “actual play” podcasts that are more invested in producing an entertaining story for an audience than playing the game by its rules, they begin to consider the purpose of TTRPGs to be the telling of a conventionally satisfying narrative story by the standards of a book or movie, rather than the playing of a game which produces (as a byproduct) a series of actions and events which can be strung together and told as a story ad-hoc. Such a story may or may not fit marks of “good storytelling” by the standards of other mediums such as books or movies by having things like “a good plot” or “character arcs.”

By only valuing the stories produced, and by grading those stories by the storytelling standards of a different medium, you get to a mindset where a dungeon crawl is not “a good story,” nor is playing out a fight tactically, because those things, by the rules of most TTRPGs that involve them, do not produce conventionally satisfying narratives and character arcs, and often actively resist them. If you think that the only point of a TTRPG is to “collaboratively tell a good story,” then TTRPGs where characters can just make a mistake and die randomly and unceremoniously to a trap or goblin before they finish the plot or their character arc are therefore fundamentally broken and bad TTRPGs. This leads to the player base writing off like 80% of TTRPGs as complete failures, and either never touching them, or trying to “fix” them by making the GM responsible for overriding the rules every time something is about to happen that wouldn’t fit the mold of a good story by the standard of a novel or movie. I won’t get too into it here because I’ve made a million posts about it but putting this responsibility on a GM burns them out. At best, assuming the GM doesn’t burn out from this misplaced responsibility, it results in a group completely missing out on the kind of fun experiences they could be having by going with the game instead of against it. They never experience a TTRPG, they experience an improv storytelling session while the TTRPG itself constantly gets in the way like a housecat trying to climb on the table at supper time. They experience “the rules getting in the way of the story,” because the story they came for is not one the rules were ever meant to produce.

The kind of events/situations-that-become-stories produced by TTRPGs that have any D&D DNA in them(which is the majority of TTRPGs, even if the designers don’t realize it) is kinda similar to the kind of events/situations-that-become-stories in a match of Team Fortress 2, even if they do not necessarily involve violence (though of course most D&D DNA games do involve violence).

Here’s a short TF2 clip where I sneak behind a Sniper as Spy and kill him, then get scared by a ghost which renders me helpless to another Sniper who comes around the corner to kill me, but he also gets scared by the same ghost just in time for me to come out of the scared stun and kill him.

Here’s a TF2 clip where I’m playing Medic and me and a bunch of other Medics are healing one Heavy, but then he and one of the Medics get killed by a Spy right when we run into the enemy. Through a little luck and seizing the initiative in the fight though, I, as Medic with only a crappy melee weapon, overcome the odds to kill all three enemies.

Here’s a short TF2 clip why I’m playing as Spy and sneak behind a Sniper to backstab him, but he keeps moving even though he doesn’t know I’m there so I keep comedicly missing.

Here’s a short TF2 clip where I join a match to play Spy and turn invisible to sneak behind the enemy team only to get immediately killed in one hit by an enemy rocket that hit me completely by accident.

All of these are fun little stories, but they don’t have a plot or character arcs or anything like that, and all the other events of the matches they took place in, while very fun in the moment, aren’t really anything worth telling a story about after the fact, so I didn’t save the footage.

This is the kind of story that most TTRPGs produce. Here’s a similar one that’s actually from a TTRPG, where the party had to somehow get a dog down a sheer cliff at the top of a mountain.

(And TF2 players are collaborating, even if they’re on different teams. Cooperating or competing, they’ve all agreed to participate in a game where the rules of TF2 apply.)

The reason "most adventures are built up the same way a story would" is because of the rise of the treating TTRPGs as "collaborative storytelling" foremost instead of being games which may produce a story has increasingly encouraged a playerbase who does what I described above, and that playerbase is making the adventures that are plots rather than situations, and having the "linear story with a plot" style of adventure marketed to them by WotC, whose marketing pervades every inch of the space even outside of D&D itself. When you play the kind of adventure that a particular game's rules are in sync with, it will click and you will have a fun time going with the flow of the rules. In D&D's case, its -and all descendants of it - rules are most geared towards "sandbox" adventure modules* with preset environments and situations not plots.

"The PCs will defeat the evil wizard by going to the six temples and having specific interactions with NPCs at certain times and places in a certain order and develop particular planned relationships with them" is a plot. "The PCs are in the town of Bumbleshire. There are two abandoned castles to the north and south, and some NPCs who can give XYZ information are located here, here, and here. The layout of each castle is this and this and the traps and monsters can be found in these rooms" is a situation.

*and I always have to clarify, an "adventure module" does not necessarily mean "linear scripted plot," WotC has just been putting out linear scripted plot adventure modules for 20 years because they want to keep tricking the "collaborative storytelling" people into playing their game even though it does nothing that they desire, which has unfortunately tanked the reputation of "adventure modules" because these kind of adventure modules just do not work with D&D.

I have a couple of posts where I explain these concepts further.

and just as a disclaimer, in the second post, because I didn't expect it to go anywhere, I made the mistake of saying "TTRPGs" when I should have said specifically "traditional challenge-based TTRPGs which share any DNA* with D&D."

the pictures are just examples, synapsids for example is ANY mammal/synapsid extinct or alive not just pigs and juramaias