#defuse00

Please tell us about the cursed board game, I want to know

Ok. I have told this story before but I’m sure I’ve got some new people.

Some board games are bad because they’re overly complicated and confusing. This game was not like that. There was a board with a start point and an end point connected by a bunch of colored squares. There were two dice. There was a stack of cards.

There was no competitive aspect. There was no strategy. I’m not sure there was any way to win, per se. The sole action in the game was to roll the dice and move forward that many spaces, and no matter what square you landed on, you drew a card. The square and the number were irrelevant beyond that it got you a little closer to ending the game while enduring as little public humiliation as possible.

I went first. The card I drew announced that for the rest of the game, every player not currently taking their turn had to communicate in sign language. I was the only one who knew any sign language. Everyone else was stuck with charades until they eventually forgot/gave up, because oh boy was this just the beginning.

One of my coworkers drew a card, mutely started flailing his arms, and ran out of the room. When he returned he showed us his card, which read ‘act like a tornado is about to hit’. Someone else got “talk like a gnome who just burned a batch of cookies until another card tells you not to”. They were all like this. Again, there was no scoring. There were no ‘good’ squares to land on. You simply moved your game piece and took your punishment. And it was a long board. There were a lot of cards.

Eventually my fellow GA (and also the grad student association president) who’d drunk the entire bottle of gas station wine got desperate and every time someone rolled their dice she went “WOW! TWO SIXES! SO GREAT! WE’RE CLOSER TO THE END NOW” until someone finally made it to the last square. Theoretically we could have stopped at any time prior to that but I think we knew in our hearts that if we tried, the game would not let us.

Wildbow is starting the next series, which is in Pact-verse, on Tuesday. (No break! The madman)

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HOW DID I MISS THIS?

I hope this answers your question.

I feel like Vriska might be a manifestation of separation or detachment. In a later seen, she separates John and Dad. And the conversation with Karkat that you are reading now, Karkat has exposed divides between him and Terezi, but is, of course, denying it.

One thing: I don’t think the trolls are absolutely locked in to being a manifestation of X. It’s a useful starting point, and sometimes it even relates to classpect! Gamzee served as manifestation of Tavros’s suppressed rage, which isn’t far from the ‘passive destruction of Rage’ of a Bard. But Gamzee’s first conversation seemed to serve as an indicator that Karkat doesn’t actually hate his friends. So, like. Keep an open mind, they can be multiple things.

But yeah, there’s definitely a weird tension going on -- Vriska stops John from reaching his Dad but also paints herself as a hyper-aggressive life coach. So she’s simultaneously embodying an urge to grow up and the inability to do so? Both separation and the desire to bridge the gap. Which certainly sounds like Vriska... who knows, maybe Thief of Light is supposed to indicate that she’s a force that prevents the kids from learning, like an obstacle to personal enlightenment. That’s kind of how the retcon went. Anyway.

BYB once pointed out that Vriska has some loose associations with the moon. “The moon’s an arrant thief, and her pale fire she snatches from the sun,” essentially refers to the moon as a Thief of Light. There’s even a reflection of the moon, gently torn by the rippling tide, on the night Tavros gets thrown off a cliff. Both of these are relevant to a snippet of John’s soliloquy, which is supposed to highlight some of John’s central problems.

His coarse schemes are those less of a prankster than a common pickpocket. His riddle is Absence itself. It is a mystery dispersing altogether, like the moon's faint reflection, with even one pebble of inquiry dropped in its black well. (bolding mine)

John’s planet LOWAS is revealed near the end of the story to be an edited picture of the moon, which asserts... something. The centrality in John’s pervasive sense of inauthenticity? A sense that he is a Shadow that will never live up the Form of his true potential?  A sense he will never grow up? I’m at a loss, honestly. I don’t have a firm solution to John’s riddle, an answer for what the abscence is.

I mean, each has an association with beginnings – biting the apple in Genesis, breaking a bottle on a ship’s maiden voyage, hatching an egg,  breaking a piñata on birthday. I don’t know how one might connect an egg to temptation, but the piñata wiki says that some Mexican Catholic traditions hold that destroying the piñata can represent the struggle against temptation (with the blindfold representing faith). So that’s an angle.

I actually had a post going for a while where I was trying link the entry trials of the kids to the problems they reflect on when they go outside of the houses and look at the world. It’s incomplete, but I’ll include those:

For John, I focused on his concept of reality that’s explored in Act 1. When John finds his mailbox empty, he broods on a sense of emptiness, a lack of inspiration. He sees himself as an imperfect iteration of an ideal John, whose flame he has borrowed (1950). This pervasive sense of being inauthentic and unreal dampens any hope that his problems are solvable. John compares examining his own depths to throwing pebbles at a reflection of the moon – what does he stand to learn by exploring an illusion?

Within the lens of forms, I see the act of biting into the fake blue apple as having two possible readings: 

One is John choosing to explore an illusion/abstraction despite his skepticism on the merits of doing so. Playing the game is an implicit acceptance that he will learn something, if not everything, from the shadows in the cave. 

Two is that Sburb is allowing John entrance into the land of ideals and archetypes, so that he can give his real problems the same level of acceptance he grants to the heightened reality of movies (reality where you interact directly with symbolic meanings). I’m more inclined towards two.

As she walks in the rain, Rose broods on her procrastination, feeling intimidated by the scale of her own aspirations. She paints herself as a “zealous god”, and her image of threading the clouds and the earth is later echoed in the very name of Skaia (sky + gaia), the “dormant crucible of unlimited creative potential” (2322). Rose sees her own despair mirrored in the endless rain that fails to put out fire; a corner of her heart believes firmly that her endeavors will fail and burn.

From this angle, the most important thing is that Rose was forced to leap into the abyss of the waterfall after the fiery tempest carrying Zazzerpan’s orb knocked the bottle into the river. Leaping into the depths seemingly inevitable failure was her only path forward. She had no guarantee that Jaspersprite would carry her back up, but if she waited too long – if she procrastinated, as she is inclined to do – she would have failed for certain.

Here we go:

In no particular order:

1) Taylor Hebert (Worm) 2) Yang Xiao Long (RWBY) 3) GLaDOS (Portal) 4) Ser Jaime Lannister (ASOIAF) 5) DEATH (Discworld) 6) Kakashi Hatake (Naruto) 7) Saber (Fate Zero / Fate Stay Night) 8) Homura Akemi (PMMM)

9) Agent Texas (Red vs Blue)