YOU'RE AT THE PARTY

does anyone remember back during the big cancel culture scare where comedians would be criticized for including racist or otherwise bigoted material in their works and then go on this big "CANCELLED" tour and try to be as problematic and edgy as possible while talking about how no one would let them speak and we all agreed that was loser behavior? just thinking about that today for no particular reason

i feel like the kneejerk reaction everyone had to undertale, of being scared of any degree of permanence to their actions in a video game, is like. some kind of sociological tell, but i couldn't tell you exactly what it means.

the idea that a video game could materially hold you accountable for the choices you make in it, and how that might feel like a breaking of the unsaid contract between developer and player, wherein the developer is only ever expected and furthermore obligated to provide you with an uncomplicated experience where your choices have no true bearing on yourself; the sort of weird guilt that emerged post-undertale where everyone got the wrong takeaways from what the game was saying about the conventions of RPGs as a genre, and how it highlights the ways that fictional worlds are brutally colonized and harvested for their meaning, even in ways it hadn't meant to that just emerged organically from player response; the demonization of the protagonist of the game for the sole crime of holding you morally accountable for the path you chose to lead it down, that it would dare ever express any true agency rather than let itself be overwritten by your will, as though that is ever how video games as stories have worked. it pushed against player expectation in a lot more ways than people gave it credit for and i think the world wasn't ready for it in 2015, and they're still not in 2026.

the fact that you can just go delete a file and make the game forget everything you did in it just highlights the point further. it can't hold you accountable, not really, but the fact that you would have that response at all proves that the art had a strong impact on you, no matter how much you would try to refuse that to yourself.

huge coming from the site who is so against black art that 'tumblr users are afraid of rap' has been a meme for the best part of a decade. You know that yall are 4channers with pronouns right?