mystic confluence

Dear young folks, 

Hi young folks! I’m going to say some stuff that sounds condescending that I really don’t mean to be condescending, but I trust you’ll read into it properly. 

I’m genuinely glad y’all have TADC. “Mr. Rogers for highschoolers” is not an easy plane to land, and I think TADC does a solid enough job at it. I appreciate that we have queer adults in the scene creating fun, fandomable shows telling you true things like “please talk to your friends”, “it’s never too late to ask for help”, “things will be bumpy but get better”, and “seriously, for the love of god, please please talk to your friends they will be more understanding than you can imagine”. There’s a sincerity in this show that I didn’t fully clock until the last episode when all the jokes got out of the way (I think the jokes are genuinely bad - sorry kids), and it made me come away with a more positive feeling towards the show than I expected!

The stuff I had like this growing up online in the ancient past of 2011 was certainly not as empathetic (I was lucky and specced into Life is Strange instead of Homestuck, but then again I thought FNAF was really really good..), so I’m glad y’all get to partake in this. Enjoy the fandom - including the discourse! One day you will be unbelievably exhausted by it so take as much amusement in it now as you can. Keep living life to the fullest - you’re never alone. 

Sincerely, 

A 27-Year Old

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Dear adults,

Hi adults! I’m going to say some stuff that sounds condescending that I absolutely mean to be condescending, so I’m hoping you’ll do some introspection. 

What are you doing here? What are you doing here?? I’m here because I’m always interested in what the online youth are resonating with - I’m prepping to be a resourceful and not toooooooo out of touch queer elder. If that’s your goal, hell yeah! It’s always cool to see how the culture has shifted from when we were growing up. 

If you’re emotionally connecting with this show? If you’re out here thinking this is a new favorite? If you’re excitedly thinking about reading or writing fanfiction? I’m gonna be honest - I’m embarrassed for you. If you’ve made it past the ripe old age of 24, you’ve probably experienced grief and loneliness in more profound and curious ways than the characters of the circus. That’s normal and beautiful - it’s a sign of a life well lived! It also means you should be looking for art that allows you to put that into words, to make sense of it, to connect with it, to tussle with it. You should also be looking for art that’s different from how you’ve experienced it, to see your missed connections, to see how others might’ve reacted differently. The kids are learning despair and excitement for the first time - you have experienced these feelings for a decade. Again - what are you doing here? 

I’m reminded of when Steve from Blue’s Clues would make those mortifying TikToks where he would just put his ear to the screen while you vented for two minutes - you have so little faith in your personhood that TADC is where you can find meaning? These characters don’t experience sad emotions beyond “they’re sad” - are you saying that’s you??? You’re the millennial in the YA section and you aren’t going to “let me enjoy things” your way out of this one. You should’ve outgrown 95% of fandom by this point in your life. Jesus Christ. 

Sincerely, 

A 27-Year Old

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P.S. If you liked TADC, you should absolutely check out the following films for things that tackle similar subject matter in more mature and thoughtful ways, regardless of which of those letters was for you! 

Night is Short, Walk on Girl (2017) - Masaaki Yuasa

Desert Hearts (1985) - Donna Deitch

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) - Sidney Lumet

Carol (2015) - Todd Haynes

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) & I Saw the TV Glow (2024) - Jane Schoenbrun  

it is absolutely true that kate being black in the life is strange television adaptation being produced by amazon racializes the dynamic between her and nathan, her and victoria, her and jefferson, her and max, her and blackwell, her and arcadia bay. to pretend it does not influence these things is willfully ignorant. the influence, i hope, is the point.

the original game exists. it has existed for over a decade. if you are watching the show with the hope that it is similar to the original game then you need to go outside and roll around in the mud until you emerge someone different and hopefully more intelligent. the last of us tv show is profoundly forgettable if you’ve played the game, and yet i adore the episode with the older men falling in love as they try to survive the apocalypse. a reimagining should chafe, should challenge. you /should/ feel uncomfortable as to what it says about victoria when she directs her cruelty towards kate. you /should/ feel uncomfortable when max tells kate that she needs to contact the police about her assault. there is real, honest-to-god potential here with this show, to reckon with the fact that our so-called “everyday heroes” are messy and ignorant – they are teenagers believing themselves woke while simultaneously not able to actualize tangible compassion towards the black teenager crying right in front of them.

to be clear, i think the show will be watchably mediocre just as most "reimaginings" of existing ip are watchably mediocre. i do not have hope that the show will be good because it is being produced by amazon, and the existence of said show is merely to capitalize upon nostalgia towards a perceived cultural phenomenon. kate’s blackness will certainly layer victoria’s actions with more abhorrence, but I do not have hope that the show will explicitly draw attention to this dynamic. that exercise will be left to the fans, the watchers, the discourse lovers, many of whom are starting their homework early.  

I just finished Reunion. Rolled the credits. Whole nine yards. 

Reunion wants you to know, above anything, that Max has ended up truly scrambled in the mind. While everyone who surrounds Max in Reunion is composed, focused, determined, Max stands out as perennially young. She still instinctively tries to save everyone in the exact manner as the first game, forgets that she’s an honest-to-god professor, and makes profoundly reckless decisions. I like this, for what it’s worth; I adore how Max seems to be forever trapped in her trauma, and I appreciate the moments where Reunion seems to be saying “how could anyone learn anything from this horrible moment in Max’s youth? How was Max ever supposed to reenter society as a normal person?” It’s why I thought the idea of the Max/Chloe breakup in Double Exposure was so clever. 

But rather than indicating to us, as readers of the text, that there is something to be learned from Max’s trials and Tribulations, DeckNine seems to imply that there is a responsibility for us as collaborative authors, as both audience and writer, to give Max an out. It’s our duty to create a game she can play in. I got an ending in which basically everybody lived (RIP to one of my students who wanted to go to grad school) and there was no real ominous fear looming of the horrors returning. I realized that the game might be going down this route of least resistance and so I began resisting as much as possible near the end, desperately looking for opportunities to have Max truly bork reality and feel some type of way about it. When I elected for Chloe to give the instigating photo to Max at the very end, hoping that Max would enter a spiral of trying to put everything just right, Max was instead like “don’t worry! I’m okay and not traumatized now!” and the two of them skipped happily into the sunset. We got all our wishes. It turns out rewinding was badass, actually, as long as we feel sufficiently concerned about it. Throughout the entire experience, I felt like the authors were telling me that if I didn’t learn anything from the first game, that that’s okay! We have something else for you here. Don’t worry! I think that’s disappointing. I think Max deserved worse. 

DeckNine said that this game was for the fans in some interviews leading up to its release. I don’t know how much that’s true (this game is not nearly as much of ‘the Max and Chloe show’ as I was expecting). But it does feel like fearful art, like they wanted to wrap all this nonsense up in a way that wouldn’t be too sour. It’s not a bad game. It’s actually pretty funny. But bad and good, better or worse, canon or not canon, all of these are nonsense lines in the sand. The only question I have here is if theres any meaningful reason the game exists at all. I wish they’d made this with the knowledge that it might piss someone off, that maybe people getting upset would be a good thing. 

In the penultimate scene of Reunion, Max walks around a bar talking to everyone she’d saved, and they give her a few lines of dialogue that aren’t very emotionally affecting, and she nods and says goodbye and walks away every time. The work is done. Everyone is alive. Everyone is content. The future is unknown, but also it doesn’t matter. I kept hoping for someone to yell at Max, for a real absence to be felt, for her to express a meaningful moment of regret. Maybe I was hoping someone would scream at DeckNine instead, or even me.

Yes, it’s a proper soft lock. I am currently ten hours into the 2000 JRPG epic Final Fantasy 9, stuck in a field in the middle of nowhere. Three of my party members are dead, dead from a bevy of random encounters too harrowing to recount. The one soul remaining is a little wizard guy with forty-four HP. My backpack contains no potions for him, so my only option is to try and limp to a nearby township while somehow avoiding the deluge of creatures that inconspicuously populate the nowhere surrounding me. The ability to flee from battle is unfortunately tied to the main character of the story, Zidane, who got KO’d by a lethal bubble. My backpack contains no Pheonix Downs, the resuscitation item of the game. Nuts.

In a modern-day game, there would be several outs here: I could fast travel to a nearby town, or a Game Over would send me to the last hospital-adjacent landmark I visited. No such luck at the dawn of the millennium, however: fast travel isn’t unlocked until much later in the game, and Game Over just puts me right back in the middle of that insipid field (after sending me to the title screen first, of course). It’s here where I must admit a bit of my own incompetence – I got myself into this mess by erroneously saving at this precipitous point, thinking that I was close enough to a healing salve that I could waddle the rest of the way. Even if I hadn’t saved here the game would have placed me outside of a dungeon, a dungeon I was not strong enough to complete, a dungeon I fled so that I could trek back to town to properly stock up on items, a dungeon whose exodus I have found myself hogtied in the middle of right now. With that context I still feel mostly absolved of responsibility, but if you still feel that this nightmare is of my own making, I’ll begrudgingly allow it.

I am playing FF9 on the Steam port, and as such there is an option on the game menu to enable cheats. The only one pertinent to my interests right now is that which sets my entire party to level 99, but as I mouse over it the game cautions me that this divinity is permanent, and to bless my entire party this way would be to doom the rest of my game to godhood. I balk at this – I famously (to my friends, at least) despise mods, and philosophically this is far too close for my liking. I’ve only played two games with mods in my life: Dragon Age Inquisition (one of the worst games ever made) and Project M (one of the best games ever made) and I’m hoping to make it through life without ever increasing that number. Mods are like going to a Rebecca Black concert and having Taylor Swift show up to perform halfway through her set: I didn’t buy a ticket for this, and I don’t care how talented you are or aren’t. I want the authentic FF9 experience, goddamnit, and it appears that I’ve received it.

I’ve played a truly absurd number of games this year (counting only the completed games I recently hit fifty), and if there’s anything I’ve learned from such gluttony it’s how generous modern games are. Soft locks functionally do not exist, difficulty sliders are everywhere. The whole enterprise is designed to make you always feel like you can be productive, can always finish the game. While I certainly appreciate it as someone who wants to play a lot of games, I worry that it can take away from the feeling of success within those games. I expect to beat bosses first try, to never have to do any sidequests if I don’t want to, to never have to worry about getting lost. I don’t need to talk to random NPCs. I don’t need to see what’s in that cave over there. Is it possible we’ve sanded away too many edges? I finished Kingdom Hearts this year, and while I believe that game is genuinely putrid, I cannot deny the feeling of elation when I beat Ursula or Maleficent. Perhaps that’s something we’ve lost with the streamlining of games: the ecstasy of overcoming a genuine obstacle. Perhaps we can’t be trusted to place our own hurdles. Maybe I’ve been so arrogant as to think that I can complete any game that I want and now is where I reckon with my own hubris. Maybe I’m not supposed to beat Final Fantasy 9, and I have to be okay with that. I have to move on.

After about an hour of hemming and hawing, I roll my eyes and enable the maximum level cheat. None of my party members revive; my wizard doesn’t even regain HP. But Merlin with a gash in his side is still Merlin, and so I trudge on. The world spins, and two birds appear. They screech at me, and I grimace back. I select my fire spell. The birds are fast. They’re strong. They’re too fast. They’re too strong. Merlin falls.

I’m back at the title screen.

I’m back in the middle of nowhere.

Three of my party members are dead.

My backpack is empty.

Everyone is level 99.