#reallygreatposts

Can you imagine being the Wizards of the Coast marketing team right now? I would legit be buying everyone in my department a bottle of champagne. Pizza party with a petting zoo.

The essay itself contains a wealth of information for someone who was born yesterday; there's a reason that the only real discussion is about the way it uses language, not what that language conveys. There are several cans of worms pertaining to disability that the author is too stupid to really grapple with (and with which people much wiser than me have successfully grappled with in the wake of the article), so it ultimately is one of those things that's utterly worthless on its own merits but pretty fun to talk about.

Oopsies, sorry this took a month instead of a day. To begin, I actually don't know much about Markiplier. I want to say this out of the gate to cover my ass; this was my first time engaging with anything Markiplier has ever done...And, I have to say, what a first impression!

It doesn't hurt that I'm a huge fan of New Blood and an absolute glazer of Andrew Hulshult...but even so, this project emanates an amazing amount of passion from absolutely everyone involved. I'm already thrilled to see what Mr. Plier's next project is going to be. There are some questionable moments in this movie -- the acting, editing, and pacing occasionally trip over each other -- but it's also filled with a million tiny details and nuances indicative of multiple people caring a whole lot about this movie. It has the spark, and you can't buy that.

With all this being said, the movie as a movie is relatively uninteresting to me (compared to the movie within its medium). Mr. Plier is a very unique case of celebrity -- he achieved it by broadcasting his energetic terror across a medium of entertainment that (despite sharing many superficial similarities) is monumentally different from what we saw in the movie theater. To clearly illustrate the problem: we know what a Movie is, and we know (broadly) what makes a movie good...however, the definitional and appealing qualities of a Let's Play are harder to pin down.

Are you watching because of the game? The person playing the game? The way that both of these variables bounce across each other? At a certain level, you have to like both of them, and (crucially) you have to understand both of them. A good Let's Play game can't just be entertaining, it also has to be (for lack of a better term) readable. Five Nights at Freddy's is a great example of this: at any given moment, the combination of what the UI shows and does not show builds up a clear and focused tension -- for both the player, and any perspective viewers.

As you've probably realized, this is exactly what the first half of Iron Lung does. Tension, stakes, and drama are primarily conveyed through the UI elements of the sub -- almost identical to the ones in the game. Despite following its source material closer than any other "video game movie" I've yet seen, I don't feel comfortable saying that Iron Lung is an adaptation of its eponymous game (not completely, anyway). While it focuses on translating the experience of playing the game as closely as possible within the constraints of film as a medium, the flashpoint of the movie's experience isn't you. It's the person trapped in the sub that has to figure everything out, and you are powerless to help him.

Admittedly, the second half of the movie eases into a more traditional adaptation (arguably an elaboration) of its parent text...but the movie slowly blooming from a Let's Play into what we more traditionally recognize as a movie only adds to its symbolic weight. I'm not sure we'll ever get anything else like Iron Lung. Beyond all the other thousands of stars that aligned, I'm sure Mr. Plier and co. have much larger ambitions for their follow-up projects; and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's not very often that we get something this strange and novel, and even rarer do I get to see it in a movie theater!