it's yeehaw time

1. Robin Williams making off-the-cuff jokes that are definitely not Sesame Street appropriate.

2. The slow zoom in on Elmo’s face at the end.

“You're too delicate! You're too precious! You can't go!”

Well first of all, I love that she’s fat, in part because you can bet your ass that if she wasn’t, she’d be overeroticized and made the object of those shallow copy-pasted “awoooooooga step on me mommy” screeds that fandom regurgitates to avoid having to put coherent thought into female characters. Much like queerness and the role it plays in Coyle’s storyline, fat characters that are conceptualized to act as fonts of horror have traditionally reinforced fatphobic social norms. And because of the gory, grotesque conventions of horror as a genre, these cases are often distinctly more damaging and offensive than, say, a fatphobic character in a sitcom. (You can read more about this topic here and here.)

The voice acting carries all of her appearances, too. Her now infamous cocaine song is the first example to come to mind; that overwrought, wavering tone she adopts makes it sound like she’s always on the brink of breaking down entirely. The sustained anxiety created a harsh juxtaposition between her tone and the lewd lines share’s parroting (“fucking and fighting.”) The quote that I highlighted at the top of the post also shines. Gooseberry’s great vocal performance is cool not least of all because the last major fat antagonist in the series, Chris Walker, didn’t get a lot of lines. I’m midway through replaying the first Outlast, and I think the game treats Chris Walker with a lot more pathos and significance than many games treat fat characters of his kind, although that assessment falls apart once you get to The Murkoff Account.

Chris is the main villain of Outlast. He’s portrayed as brutal but also competent and deliberately ruthless, which implies that he’s capable of complex thought in spite of the dehumanization he endured as a variant. The contradiction there underscores the game’s main theme & the overarching tragedy and atrocity of Mount Massive. In the end, Chris is brutally murdered on screen, and you could argue that the imagery incorporated in his death scene - that of expanding and blowing up - has fatphobic undertones. But unlike Rick Traeger and Eddie Gluskin, who meet similarly grizzly fates, the audience surrogate Miles directly suggests that the viewer should sympathize with Chris after his death. Somehow, Chris emerges as the least monstrous of the three, no matter how much abuse was piled onto his body and mind, and no matter what crimes he committed under that duress. Overall, Outlast presents him as a relevant, memorable, and fully autonomous character. Not bad, for a game that came out while The Biggest Loser was still airing on NBC.

But the comics have a lot less time to develop Chris than the game did. In The Murkoff Account, his main purpose is to act as a human example of broader institutional cruelty, much like Billy Hope did in Outlast. That position naturally invites the audience to view Chris as victimized and, to an extent, sympathetic, but his only notable characteristic outside of that victimization is a childish inability to control his aggression or prevent himself from being bullied. Those two details seem to form a paradox, right? Chris is a former military police officer, he brags about knowing judo, he should be able to get his coworkers to shut up and stop making fun of him. But he lacks the drive, conviction and strength of will necessary to do that. He’s basically a big baby, characterization which is reinforced by the comics’ art style.

Compared to the thin characters, Chris isn’t allowed to act with nearly as much autonomy as he did in the game. What happens to him in the comics could happen to anyone, and the only distinctions relevant to him as a person are crass stereotypes revolving around his body. The cost of expanding on the game’s lore was that the main villain got whittled down to the latent antifat tropes which had always lingered just below the surface - Chris doesn’t get to be a mad doctor like Trager or an abhorrent admirer like Gluskin. Instead, he’s the stout strength trope, he’s the fat idiot trope, and he expands on the pig imagery. Not great times.

And Gooseberry was probably influenced by Chris. Dhe’s fat, she’s strong, she’s associated with an animal, and to an extent, she’s infantile! Although I think that her characterization as hysterical and not fully in control of herself is less a manifestation of fatphobia, as it was with Chris, and more a direct allusion to antiquated perceptions of mentally ill women. “Goose” is itself old-world slang for a silly or witless person. If one thing has emerged from my thoughts on Coyle, it would be that the writers of Trials are a lot more conscientious of social perceptions and stereotyping than the writers of Outlast were. It’s natural for a series that’s been going on for this long to begin to develop redundancy, but Trials’ 1950s setting and new game mechanics help gloss over that. Phyllis’ asserted sexual relationships with in-game characters struck me as unnecessary, but fat women (like dark skin women) are often depicted as masculine and drained of eroticism, so. You win some, you lose some.

You can read Gooseberry as a sort of a combination between Chris and Eddie, with her body and maturity interconnected to present her as disturbingly naive and immature in contrast with the great violence she enacts. This is a concept also explored with Eddie Gluskin: his hand-wringing need to preserve his would-be victim’s “chastity” becomes bizarre and unsettling when pushed up against the graphic, vindictive misogyny. Similarly, one reason the chases with Chris are so unbearably scary is because the sound of his clinking chains gets louder and louder as he gains on you, but he also does this laborious breathing when he runs which emphasizes his weight. When Phyllis chases you, you hear Futterman’s drill and the sound of her mindless shrieking - it’s terrifying in a way that doesn’t incorporate her fatness into the fear factor. Love that. The same unfortunately can’t be said for her implied DID, a demonization which is unfortunately very common, very old and very damaging all at once. (You can read more about that here, and in tons of other places.)

Michel Foucault used a two-pronged framework to examine popular narratives about The Plague and pandemics in general. Within this framework, there is one “political” story model which is defined by a controlling environment and another “literary” dimension which is defined by a collectivized, frenzied environment was first conceived. Perhaps because Outlast: Trials was developed amidst a pandemic, I think Foucault’s framework translates nicely to examining Trials’ narrative about the cold war and the red scare. Some common themes include mass hysteria, xenophobia, heightened interpersonal suspicion and a seemingly unprecedented increase in government control.

On the surface, Coyle would represent the “political” dimension of Trials’ horror, acting as an exaggerated, kinda ridiculous extension of the extreme social control that white supremacy & patriarchy enforce. Within this dichotomy, Gooseberry would represent the “literary” dimension of the game’s horror, acting as a chaotic dissolver of all social barriers rather than an enforcer of them and creating a frenzied, carnival-like effect within anyone who comes under her spell. The children who watched her old show and took to violence and drug consumption come to mind; regardless of background, parenting or culture, Phyllis changed them. She didn’t even have to see them in person. She did it over the TV.

Gooseberry [hosted] a children's variety show known as 'The Mother Gooseberry Hour” [produced by Futterland Studios] which started airing in 1951. Following Dr. Futterman's death, the cause of which is still unknown, she had a hysterical episode and began experiencing dissociation. The tone of the Mother Gooseberry Hour shifted accordingly. Throughout her tenure on the show, she used her television platform and mail-order "dental drops" business to get children addicted to narcotics, violence, theft, and possibly murder. Over the years, the children watching her show became cult-like, engaging in immoral behavior, drug use, and other shenanigans, leading to larceny and assault. In 1955, Futterland Studios was raided by the police, after which she was charged with racketeering, kidnapping, and conspiracy to commit murder. The raid left two police officers dead and five others injured, as she escaped into the tunnels beneath the set to attack them with drills. It is unclear exactly what was inside Futterland Studios, but police captain Stanley Hoad described the contents of the studios as "The most grotesque architectural perversion since H.H. Holmes’ Chicago Murder Castle.”

Trials is the first Outlast game to allow us to have character customization, and unlike the previous protagonists (who both get stand out from the other characters by being in some way Special within the setting,) the Reagents are intended to act as an endless supply of nameless, faceless grunts, the vast majority of which will die gruesome deaths during the guinea pig stage. In this game, we play as the people who would’ve been those nameless, faceless heads we see on the shelves in Outlast, or hanging from a tree branch in Outlast 2. The game’s customization elements are justified in-universe by the notion that they’re so addled that they can’t even establish a stable perception of their own features: an example of the collectivizing, depersonalizing nature of the literary dimension if I’ve ever seen one. As the popularity of the customizable character feature ebbs and flows, other franchises pull it out just out of laziness in the creative department. With that in mind, I’m really glad Trials did something cool and innovative with the concept instead of just dumping in RPG elements for no reason.

-decides to draw Travis to relax

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