#macroblogging

i have been. on a journey recently. i've read up to the timeskip and i'm pausing here to talk about it before i dive further in.

I did promise I'd use this account for long form analysis of Batman characters' psychological problems. Something I was talking about on twitter the other day was that to me, one of Tim's primary drivers is his sense of duty -- his need to figure out the correct action and take it. This comes out either in family/social obligations ("I have to quit Robin because my dad said so and he's my dad") or in broader obligations he takes on ("I have to become Robin because Batman needs someone, and nobody else is doing it").

This trait of his is super compelling to me because it's both a strength and something that backfires on Tim constantly -- it's a big source of crunch. On twitter I called him the world's worst utilitarian: he will identify a need and then do pretty much anything short of murder to fill it, even if it tramples over things like his happiness or other people's boundaries.

my first impression of this game was "ohh it's snake!! 🥺 but it's not.... MY snake..... 🥺" and it feels like the whole game is set up to make you experience this emotion fdhjsfkjh. it's sneaking but it's not my sneaking... it's radar but it's not my radar....... it's infuriating camera angles and that's still the same,

mgs3 is like if john le carre loved both physical comedy and mech anime. everyone is committing themselves to choices that make themselves miserable and the world worse. eighteen layers of manipulation and double dealing. the absolute worthlessness of politics.

this game is so good at putting you or npcs in a situation. two sequences of events i'm still laughing at:

1) oh there's a guard on one of those hover seats. i would prefer not to kill him so let me use my tranq -> he has fallen asleep at the controls and crashed his hover chair, killing himself and alerting every guard in the area

2) i gotta hide in tall grass for these guards to pass -> oh fuck a rattlesnake, gotta kill that before it bites me -> no room in my pockets for another meal so i guess this ration item is just going to block my view for a while -> oh fuck guard dog incoming -> guard dog doesn't alert on me. it eats my rattlesnake, wanders off, and falls asleep instead.

when you eat a snake for the first time and you get a little picture-in-picture video of john ripping at it with his teeth. this is moe.

the fury: very fun fight. the end: took me half an hour. unbelievably frustrating. i am not here to be "good" at "sniping." but thankfully the funniest option, knockout cigarettes, was here for me.

i used the knockout cigs on volgin as well. this is the power of secondhand smoke. this is the nicotine tolerance of a man trained by the boss himself.

i can see why ocelot has bewitched the hearts and dicks of a generation of gamers. his failure to pull off any cool move he attempts is so good, it made me cheer every time he showed up because i knew some bullshit was about to happen. his backup dance squad. his meows. his inexplicable belief that juggling is an inherently threatening action.

he's also the standout for knowing what comes next. girl i know how you grow up. i know what your hairline ends up as and what lessons you take from your time with volgin. sorry about it!

i know from fandom that he's the kid the boss talks about having. and he's ADAM. but i can't really put together how he became a triple agent if he was also raised around volgin [ie in the ussr military]. i need to stare at the character timelines on the fanwiki again.

big boss is a fun character on his own as well. i know "big boss doesn't know about sex" is an old fandom joke but i still laughed at every single interaction where eva is trying to femme fatale him and john goes hrngh. this revolver is good stuff. make sure to keep your fingers away from the vent when you're using a two-handled grip. okarun dandadan voice i will now tell you about the tsuchinoko monster

it's sad to think of him coming away from this experience and starting outer heaven, but the boss is so much sadder, because she's fully aware of what she's doing and keeps committing herself to it over again anyway. her scenes are some of the best in the game. the field of white flowers turning red and her scar turning into a real snake that slithers away.... this is abstraction that works.

and the sorrow... the boss still haunted by the partner she killed but he wants to comfort her/help her son/bop around in the afterlife having a good time........................ augh.

in a way if the cobras (minus the sorrow) are boss's sons and big boss is her youngest disciple. big boss is a baby brother and/or has a bunch of uncles. it would have been fun to dig into that a little more.

my reaction to the boss's last speech was GIRL DO ANYTHING ELSE but unfortunately this generation of characters is not capable of seeing beyond the choices given to them. and big boss is going to make a new choice that's even worse. it's your grandson who's going to figure out something new. sorry, the boss. :(

so there's this one 9 sols fan who draws comics for a good ending au and one of their posts is captioned like "i promise i understand the themes of the work i'm just having fun." and this is how i feel about mgs X Character Lives AU.

does snake know literally any of this?? does otacon know literally anything about his dad/strangelove/the boss from peace walker??? god it would be fun to write about them finding out.

granin and sokolov are both fun. this series is very much about the horror of war from the perspective of two groups of people who contribute to it-- the people who make the weapons and the people who use them. everyone is doomed by the actions of prior generations and by the actions circumstances drive them towards themselves.

games also about what we pass on. genes and memes. parents and students. the curse of one generation's war inherited and amplified by the next.

para-medic voice: have you ever heard of the criterion closet, snake?

i did not like the shagohod design until i saw it walk around. it's so cute walking it's like a spider with only two legs dragging its abdomen after it [<-here we are imagining that the spider is perfectly healthy. it just came like that.]

on the one hand john really does not rate the dignity of a bond theme song. but on the other hand a bond theme song about eating frogs in the jungle is very funny. so maybe it does work.

i have previously talked about how MGS is both sexist and homoerotic, but that the homoeroticism does not derive from sexism. with raikov here and looking back at raiden in mgs2 i feel like i have to add a little nuance here. the games are homoerotic independent of misogyny but they are homophobic as a consequence of it. it's totally cool for snake and otacon to have a deep arguably textual romantic bond [that the game creators knew they were writing, it's not unintentional], because they're bros and masculine and even if otacon is a little weenie nerd it's not in a feminine way. we aren't going to mock volgin for having a male lover because he's a big scary tank of a guy. but raikov is totally fair game both to the camera and to other characters because he's a little too swishy.

when the boss sees snake dressed as raikov, she says: "What is this fairy disguise? It's gonna rub off on you. And then you'll lose sight of who you really are." and we can argue about how much she's playing it up for the audience but oh my god lol. final statement: oh my god lol.

for that same scene-- the boss almost cutting out john's eye and ocelot shooting it out is i think the one time i yelped out loud at what was happening. that whole sequence is so brutal. you don't even get the opportunity to try to resist, like snake in mgs1 does. you just watch everything happen.

if nothing else it is impressive that metal gear has a canonical secret cabal pulling the strings of politics and finance and it doesn't come across antisemitic at all.

adam and eve and the snake is such a funny throughline. no further statement

there's a big caloriemate logo in the credits. thank you caloriemate.

really really enjoyed this one. i want to keep playing metal gear but the next handful are only available via consoles i don't own or pc emulation, and i really don't want to deal with emulation. the third choice is to wait for the second HD rerelease bundle, but konami hasn't announced when it's coming. rip. can someone lend me their ps3 for like a month it's important

however i do also worry that after this we're going to reach the tipping point of AAA Game Too Big, I Get Scared. and mgs4 might make me too sad lol [<- guy who is not good at sitting with mortality]. but i still want to give them a shot.

finally. after i finished this game i looked at the playstation triumphs and there's one for spotting ocelot in the final cutscene with a hidden R1 look trigger.

okay i have not been meaning to speed through these games in like three sittings each but they're so focused and propulsive you just barrel through them. also, i started what i thought was the final cutscene sequence at 11:30pm and stumbled out of the game 1:30am.

this game crystallized for me why i'm so allergic to modern AAA games. i want the directed experience, to be given exactly the mechanics/map/scale needed to bring me through it, i don't want to direct myself towards nuggets of story scattered across a wide map. telling me the story is your job!!

i love the codec system, i love bugging snake about what i'm doing, i love that it is separate from the sneaking gameplay so i'm never splitting my attention going HUH WHAT while i'm trying to not let the clap of my asscheeks alert the guards. also really fun the way the game chains cutscenes and codecs. codec into prerendered cutscene with FMV elements into realtime rendered scene back to codec.

before i started this game, i opened the pre-ps1 metal gear games just to look around at them a little. even a short look made it obvious how much this series is so far iterating on the same ideas, expanding and scaling up a little each time. preddy cool

playing this after mgs1 made me go "wow.... there are so many polygons in this game.........", and yet i think i prefer the art direction of mgs1? i love its crunchy pixel textures, and the smooth expanses of metal in this one don't speak to me as much.

i love the addition of the tranq darts, it's so much fun sneaking around popping guys in the head and watching them fall asleep.

mgs1 had this "last time on..." function where when you load a save, a text box pops up telling you what's happened so far. i knew i'd miss it as soon as it was gone and i do. i do miss it.

the context-dependent jump/flip over railing/put your back to a wall button feels bad. it never does what i want it to do.

the frustration of the "clamber over all these broken railings" traversal section and its clumsy controls that resets you to the beginning at every failure is completely made up for by how funny it is to see raiden slip off a ledge and plunge into the hudson.

okay. story

the first fact we learn about the first woman we see in this game (olga) is that she's pregnant. the last fact we learn about the last woman we see in this game is that she's pregnant (rose).

one funny thing about mgs is that it's both misogynist and homoerotic, but the one doesn't cause the other [see prior scholarship on shounen that comes out gay because it hates women so much]. they're two independent qualities of the work.

mgs women can be sex objects or they can be self-sacrificial mothers. these games are about reproduction (genetic, cultural) and how people are driven towards it/kept from it/try to manipulate how the world does it. makes sense to have a lot of family relationships in the game from that perspective. HOWEVER ,

i can tell i'm going to be possessed by otacon and emma. they're this perfect storm of (1) story bullshit driven by sexism [hard not to dwell on] (2) genuinely compelling conflict that never gets a chance for a resolution [ditto] (3) siblings.........

like. idk. otacon's last speech to her.

"you didn't get a chance to learn how to love for real in a healthy way, like i did (with snake) (my family) (btw)" is so good. "i ran off and we've had this wound festering for twelve years" is so good. "we never had any real model of how to love and for a time as kids we landed on 'playing house' and you moved on and grew but i'm still there" is compelling, even. but the way it's laid out in game is rough. sorry e.e. you don't get your own story we need a bisexual vampire to leap out of the water at you like a killer whale. and then fall back in immediately.

raiden flirts with her and there's a missable joke about snake wondering if he needs to ask otacon if it's okay to ask emma out. this is where i begin loading the gun. game incapable of seeing a woman and not making her story about romantic relationships with men

emma and otacon paralleled by snake and his sibling(s). and fortune and her queerplatonic life partner, her father-in-law. these games are so good at drawing these lines between characters.

the playstation collection i got has some extra documents in it, including a canon timeline. it says otacon was born in 1980, so he's 25 at the time of mgs1. and he has a phD. he had eight years to go from "running away from home" to "lead engineer on metal gear rex." a lot of how he behaves in mgs1 and how much he's grown by mgs2 is instantly explained by him being a naive 25yo who has to hit the ground running on emotional growth after shadow moses. [<-the fanwiki says in some mgs1 bio he's in his thirties and the younger age is a later retcon. maybe i've been poisoned by prior online context but the new ages feel stronger to me.]

okay perhaps enough otacon yapping.

wait one more otacon note. mgs1 made it feel (to someone who didn't play the pre-ps1 metal gears) that otacon invented metal gear himself from whole cloth. but people have been making metal gears since mgs3 times. guy who builds the fourth car ever invented in the world: i'm a monster i've cursed this land to environmental pollution and vehicular violence for all time

solid snake is now starring in red white & royal blue (he's the president's brother)

raiden is red white & royal blue's nephew,

photos of snake were released to the public after the tanker incident? bro it's crazy how that environmental terrorist looks exactly like the president that just stepped down

i love how snake and otacon are doing their whole own big shell chapter just off screen. snake keeps coming back around like "yeah i had this boss fight of my own where i learned this groundbreaking fact about big shell half an hour before you did. no i didn't tell you." he's having sooo much fun being a free agent who doesn't have to be polite to other members of the military.

and you learn about prior adventures of theirs! love to imagine them weekend at bernie'sing liquid's corpse around.

the emma sniping section is also just perfect, imo [till vamp breaches the surface]. you can call snake to help out with the second half, and then you just have to look at stuff in your sights and he'll do the shooting. mechanically it's a huge help in a difficult section (that you can opt into. for fake gamers, like me), narratively it's the game going "raiden you think you're tough. but this guy is the real deal." and he is!! i played mgs1!! that's the guy from it!!

if you punch out a locker door and it falls on you while you're wearing your fake guard uniform, the uniform falls off to reveal his sneaking suit. snake knows what game he's in but raiden doesn't. the information would probably cause him distress. let's not tell him.

everyone is so mean to raiden and he does NOT take it well. and it's so funny. he's so resentful about everything he has to do.

hallucinogenic gunpowder in the meals of child soldiers is like. such a perfect metal gear narrative note. like of course they did that. what else could they have possibly done

the "fight multiple metal gears in a totally empty space" boss fight did not feel cool so i'm not surprised it got topped by a sword fighting 1v1 afterwards but also solidus, are you good, because i feel like we could really chill. come over to philanthropy hq i'll get out the ciders

i think i knew this was where "fission mailed" came from but i forgot/didn't know that the picture-in-picture game over screen was the playable area for those sections. these games, like deltarune, are so good at using every mechanical component they have to tell story in compelling and unexpected ways.

loved the live action video sections once again. there's a whole little archival look at turn-of-the-century nyc at the end there!!

shout out to ocelot who loves nothing better in this life than putting on a show for spies he knows are watching. i bet he's the one who taught solidus how to flip a gun around like that.

overall i had a really really good time. i burned through it way faster than i meant to fhdkjhkhfgkjd. excited to meet young catboy ocelot next time. and listen to snake eater

man this is going to be disjointed.

THOUGHT:

OTACON: I wanna ask you... Do you think love can bloom even on a battlefield? SNAKE: Yeah...I do. I think at any time, any place... people can fall in love with each other.

this is immediately followed by snake asking for a dangerous favour, and otacon replying:

OTACON: Don't worry. If I do this [turns on stealth camo], it doesn't matter. I just pretend like I'm not here. Then I'm not scared.

this got my ass so good, because the first exchange is otacon asking, can you be a whole human even in war? can life exist alongside death? is it worth trying to be a person? and snake goes yeah. yeah it is. and then otacon goes hey so love and life are the scariest things in the world. you know what isn't scary: not being a person. being invisible. not touching another person.

and then in otacon's ending he gives up the stealth camo. hey man i'm ready to be a whole person. can i be a human being with you?

I Understand. I See. I Know Now.

THOUGHT:

meryl and otacon are the same person. this whole game does a great job of using each member of the cast to reflect its questions back at snake/the player/itself. everyone has a complicated relationship with life/death/their genetic inheritance. and meryl and otacon are particularly close mirrors. painfully naive oversharers obsessing over their family legacies of violence, latching onto the nearest cool person to give them the time of day. hey snake want to talk about why you live alone in alaska and what it might have to do with killing your own father in metal gear (1987)? no? i'm gonna keep talking about it though :)

BULLETS:

game so much fun. game so frustrating in parts. i'm kind of bummed that i didn't play this twenty years ago but also it's been such a delight to finally get to it now how can i complain.

i watched this game as a let's play five years ago and it's wild how little i remembered. playing something yourself is always such a different experience.

the "last time on" text you get when loading a save is so useful. why don't games do that any more.

this game is gorgeous. i played the playstation mgs 1-3 collection port, which doesn't have the new twin snakes graphics, and i loved the ps1 crunchiness. it's so well done. you get exactly what you need to get.

i love the FMV insertions and the 2d illustrated codec portraits, and while i know these come from tech limitations i'm kind of mourning their loss in future games when the tech gets better. i love the patchwork quality of the art.

meryl's "they gave me psychotherapy to destroy my interest in men"... this game is obsessed with reproduction

otacon talks about his name and his paternal legacy like they're insupportable burdens he's been dragging behind him his whole life. [the silhouette of i-suggest-forcefem hoves into view--]

i don't really know what to do with it but the way this game plays with the fourth wall is so fascinating. people realize something has gone wrong when the non-diegetic music stops playing. people tell you it's okay, don't worry, it can't be that bad if you have time to play a game! psycho mantis vibrates your controller across the floor. i don't think this is something you could imitate at all in straight prose. you'd have to get house of leaves fucky with the formatting or do a comic or something.

it's funny that level ups (more health/ability to hold objects) correspond to getting better keycards and also that it isn't communicated at all. people with lvl 7 keycard access to this base are just healthier. and have bigger pockets. i would fully buy an otacon codec where he talks about having a hard time carrying stuff since he gave his keycard to snake.

you know how sf magazine runners realized something was up in the desert during ww2 when a bunch of subscribers all suddenly changed their address. some guy out there is really thinking hard about why his best customer for mech anime OVAs is suddenly getting his stuff sent to alaska.

i'm troubled by the way my meal and kill numbers lined up in the end.

megal gear... [wistful look into the distance]

So this is a show set post-Cybertronian civil war, on an Earth where every Autobot and Decepticon who fought in the war are marooned. A new group of young robots comes to life and goes through adolescence as the first of a new kind of Transformer in a context alien to any of their elders.

They're "born" in two batches, first the short red and grey ones in the bottom right, then the green, purple, and orange ones in the back.

Green teen robot is Nightshade, who is nonbinary. Orange teen robot is Jawbreaker. Not relevant to this post is Hashtag, the chronically online zoomer robot (purple).

Nightshade is established as nonbinary immediately in their first feature episode in a pronoun-forward way. Optimus goes through a teachable moment learning about this. Multiple times they introduce themself by giving out their pronouns; they are the only character in the show who does this. In a later appearance Nightshade meets someone with a pronoun pin on her bag and learns the word "nonbinary." Charmingly, their reaction is: "What a wonderful word for a wonderful experience!"

Nightshade's stories are not otherwise about identity. While I think it's a genuinely goodhearted impulse to put this in a y7 show, and without even having to dig I am 100% sure this is all that's left after the character was sanded down by Nickelodeon/Hasbro leadership, it does fundamentally convey that being nonbinary is largely about pronoun usage.

Other than the she/they queen Nightshade meets in Philly, nobody on this show talks or thinks about gender at all. Every robot comes out of the living earth knowing their gender identity and pronouns and never questions them. This is a world of absolutes, and Nightshade's just found the secret third absolute.

Jawbreaker's storyline, meanwhile, is about identity. His siblings all pick an alt mode to transform into; Jawbreaker can't choose. He goes around asking all the adults in his life how they knew what they wanted to be. After a lot of agonizing he lands on "when I know I'll know, and for now I'm happy as I am." He spends a couple episodes as the only robot without an alt, till he meets Grimlock, who turns into a T-rex. Somewhere, Fun Home Ring of Keys.mp3 starts playing. Jawbreaker follows Grimlock around in a delighted haze until he finds a dinosaur skeleton to base his alt mode on.

Jawbreaker scanning a dinosaur skeleton is treated as something unusual in comparison to everyone else picking vehicles. This new form, and JB's ability to use it, is something that stands out.

Completely unspoken here and elsewhere is that Nightshade scanned their alt mode from a marble statue of an owl.

To me, Jawbreaker's story is a really sweet one about identity, about being unsure about yourself and your body, coming to terms with that uncertainty, and then finding yourself in a paradigm you had no idea existed. Nightshade's story is about how you should use they/them pronouns to refer to some people.

These two characters don't, as far as I've seen, talk to each other about this at all. (I'm nearly done S1 and have skimmed episode descriptions/character fanwiki pages for the other, and it doesn't seem to come up. Maybe I'll be proved wrong!)

may or may not have watched both seasons and the tv movie of rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles in a possessed state the last couple of weeks

i first heard of this game through waypoint/remap radio, who were really really high on it. then more recently a friend played it and went "the writing ain't that good they should not have hyped it this much." so i went in with expectations tempered for the writing, and had a great time.

the prose has the flavour of small dev team, person who did the writing is not a full-time writer and/or didn't have access to an editor. some clunky phrasing, lots of little SPAG errors particularly in the dlc endgame. didn't bother me because of the warning i had but would have been frustrating to have gone in with "this is the best indie game writing of the past X years" as the rec. so thank you fish for having a bad time so i would have a good time

looooved the art.

i loved the mechanics: managing hunger/stability/clocks. the beginning through the point where you get rid of your tracker is the most thrilling part of the game, because you have so much pressure on you and so few resources to play with. i felt at sea or stalled out a couple times once i hit the later game and didn't have any actively ticking clocks counting down on me.

how you interact with your resource needs adds so much texture to the story. you have a set of dice you roll to perform actions, and you lose dice one by one as your physical conditions decline. there's one point where you have to make a bunch of rolls within a short timeframe, so i used my stabilizer much earlier than i would have otherwise so that i'd have the dice to make it work.

i fucked up multiple drives first because i didn't realize what would happen and then because i had too many things happen at once. i realized too late that the guy who lets you stay in his container has a clock that keeps coming back; i ruined lem and mina's initial chance to get on board the ship because i needed the money from working on the ship and didn't max out mina's babysitting clock by the time i completed the ship.

i'm still not sure if there's a way to stop ankhita from shooting that guy.

i found it so compelling to treat my sleeper as just a guy -- someone doing their best who fucks up, who tries to make up for it, who may not succeed, who is making their best guess judgment for what to prioritize. when i got my ticket for the ship leaving the eye, i gave it to lem and mina. my sleeper fucked it the first time with them, but they tried to make it up to them when the opportunity arose.

i didn't leave with bliss, and didn't leave on the ship, and didn't choose to assimilate with the gardener, and kept committing to the eye right up till the end of the dlc, when i chose to leave with sol. that felt right for my sleeper.

when you finish a storyline, the character who it's related to disappears completely from the world-- the node is gone. this feels jarring (positive) when the story ends badly: that's it; you don't get closure. it feels jarring (negative) when the story ends well. i don't get to keep talking to my friend who i helped? they're still right there. come on. all i get to do with emphis is buy dinner? no more chats with my man??? this makes the world feel emptier and emptier the more storylines you close out, right when it should feel more and more full of life, as your sleeper builds a life on the eye.

castor was maybe my fav running thread through the main game and dlc. great buildup on that guy.

entropy real. the sleeper's body is going to keep decaying and eventually they'll run out of stabilizer to keep it going. the eye is going to fall apart someday. the political and social state of the eye is temporary as well. this too will pass, whether you want it to or not.

i said recently to some friends about a piece of art, "this is well made but fungus object heads are so ten years ago." cannot express how tumblr user cannibalism is passé i felt saying this but it is true. and it is true again here for the fungal network. loved all the creepy node stuff, loved my friend the vending machine, gardener was fun but gardener is--i am sorry--so ten years ago. we gotta pick something else. we're done with mushrooms for now. i'm sorry.

i saw credits like three times before my final credits roll. on the one hand it would have been so frustrating to have to replay the whole game to get to the other endings, on the other it feels a little weird to get tossed right back into the world after the credits wrap. with a couple of these i was at a point of, well, okay, none of my current storylines are urgent and i have no clocks ticking down, so what now? do i keep noodling around? do i stop here?

well, i kept noodling, and i'm glad i did, because i really liked the dlc storyline. i often feel the "nobody is entirely right" thing in games doesn't work, but here it felt good. the three ember ships all with their own takes, the different factions on the eye, it is a mess and it feels right that my sleeper can help in one direction or another, can in fact change things pretty dramatically, but ultimately can't decide the fate of any huge group--they can just choose what they do with their life.

which is to say i like that if you release the gardener it doesn't stop the flux and it doesn't stop corporations from coming in force.

so: overall: art gorgeous. prose mid. actual storylines good. resource/time pressure good. could have used a little more nudging from the game in the slow periods. loved how my sleeper's personal journey ended up going.