#violaeade

of course!

if you like horror, please play the crooked man! If you’re someone who was familiar with the surge of jrpg horror games in the early 2010s, then you might have heard of this one. I decided to play it earlier this month because I completely forgot the plot and it’s totally worth it! It’s very clearly inspired by silent hill but i still think it has a style of it’s own and I really enjoyed the story. also I 🫶 David Hoover

it’s also a part of a tetralogy called the strange man series that is about… strange men. I won’t say it’s the best but it’s quite cheap if you get interested after tcm and it’s one of those series where the creator decided every past character needs to be in the next game somehow in increasingly ridiculous ways.

I’ve also been playing Eastshade which is kind of Skyrim but without the fighting and where you are a painter. It’s a very beautiful game and it’s always fun to explore to see if there’s any secret quests you can find.

not so recently I finished we happy few which is not good but not bad! It definitely did not turn out the way I remember it looked in demos years ago but I still had fun with it.

also finished old city: leviathan a few months back which was pretty neat. I definitely liked it more in the beginning than towards the end but some of the writing absolutely slaps. You’re playing as a city dweller in an abandoned sewer system learning about a war between the three ideological groups that had formed. if you’re okay with some dense reading it can actually get quite interesting.

I played the inheritance of crimson manor which was a fun spooky time. It’s basically just exploring a Victorian mansion and solving puzzles but I thought it was neat!

the painscreek killings is somewhat the same but you explore an entire abandoned town to solve a murder! it has some annoying backtracking but it was really fun for me since there was such a diversity of places to explore.

I almost forgot this but this has probably been one of if not my favorite game to play this year but mundaun!!!! It’s this beautifully created horror game where all the textures were hand sketched by the creator. It takes place in Switzerland and it’s about the protagonist visiting their old village after their grandfather passes away. It involves a lot of Swiss folklore and the character is fully voiced in Romansh which is not something I’ve encountered in games before.

If you would be interested, I also just added a lot whole bunch of game to my wishlist including - subway midnight, hylics, umurangi generation, you must be 18 or older to enter, how fish is made, how to say goodbye, scorn, scanner sombre, hypnospace outlaw, yomawari: lost in the dark, Spookware, rain world, everything, one dreamer, a little to the left, norco, glitchriders the spaces between, lone survivor, unheard, the enigma machine, world of horror, not for broadcast, anodyne, cats and the other lives, gruund, slay the princess + more i am too lazy to list

it just...it felt like TKONLG but without EVERY GOOD PART, you know?

scene-wise, the closest individual scene we had to anything in the book was maybe the scene where Viola read Todd’s mother’s book to him? (even that wasn’t the same bc that was also the scene where we find out he’s illiterate, and he lets her read it right away, so there was no deep-rooted embarrassment about not being able to read). also it happened in Farbranch. BUT, like it captured the emotion of the OG scene a little, where Viola is reading to Todd and he’s hearing his ma’s words and getting emotional about it.

but all the stand-out scenes from the book, i.e. saying goodbye to Ben and Cillian, meeting the girl and getting hit in the head with a branch and bandaging her anyway, ALL of the Aaron fights, the bridge, the massacre of Farbranch, the song of Here, the Spackle, Todd’s illness, the waterfall scene, Haven, NONE of that was in the movie. so imagine all the really important and powerful moments gone

also all the overarching themes? those are gone too. todd becoming a man is  HUGE deal in the books. even in his horrible awful town he just wants to feel like he BELONGS and he’s the one person in the entire town being ostracized. two of the biggest secrets in Todd’s whole world are kept from him for the majority of the book because he’s “not yet a man”. it’s important to him. and once todd realizes the connection between Prentisstown maturity and murder, he spends the rest of that book WISHING he could be a killer. wishing he could have that kind of strength and seeing himself weak for not being able to kill. 

all of that?? gone. movie!Todd often chants the familiar “I am Todd Hewitt” (and sometimes “be a man”) when he’s nervous or trying to cover something in his Noise, and has a little tiff with Ben and Cillian at the beginning of the movie bc the Mayor sees Todd as a man while Ben and Cillian do not. (that’s a weird little bit though bc the movie never really explains why the Mayor had such an interest in Todd). but that’s about it in terms of coming-of-age material in the movie. and about murder. seeing as he doesn’t. kill. the. Spackle. let that sink in.

also like. the Noise is shown as a CONCEPT but not as a theme. the THEME of Noise is that, and I quote

“In this world of information overload, the ability to feel, my boy, is a rare gift indeed.”

or perhaps

“Knowing a man’s thoughts ain’t knowing a man.”

or even

“Knowledge is dangerous and men lie and the world changes, whether I want it to or not.”

in this movie, Noise would be described as like. a nuisance at worst and a superpower at best. you can hear most of every man’s thoughts in the movie, though not a constant, never ending stream. just just bits sporadically at either plot-convenient or comedic times. the Mayor (and at one point Ben, and at one point Todd) uses his Noise to construct illusions around people kind of similar to that Jake Gyllenhaal villain in Spiderman: Far From Home. 

but neither of these two main examples really SHOW the themes that Patrick Ness showed us in the books. that Noise is powerfully ANNOYING; that it can quickly break down relationships between groups of people; that it can be manipulated making large lies still possible.

like, remember when in the books, Todd and Viola get to Farbranch and poor Todd is absolutely GOBSMACKED that 1. the women are ALIVE and 2. the men and women are living together?? in harmony?? what the eff?? and you see Hildy in Tam’s Noise and just how much they genuinely love each other and Todd is like “damn we ain’t in Prentisstown anymore Manchee”. and you can just see based on the contrast that Prentisstown people are a whole different breed compared to the kindness of Farbranch?

in the movie Todd has a few moments of inner dialogue where he’s like “oh man that’s a woman. that’s nuts” and then we move on. his world should be turned upside down here and its not. and the difference between the two towns is that they kinda just made it seem like, yeah, Noise is annoying so we have the men sleep separately from the women so we all get a little peace, and it’s fine. that’s how Farbranch deals with it. it all just feels very blasé 

(i can’t remember specifically where this happens, probably either in Farbranch or cutting back to the Prentisstown men getting ready to march, but at some point a leader ends up saying something to a crowd of people and you can see how just one sentence spreads through an entire group of men and how they all start amplifying it and getting more and more panicked and i did think the mob mentality was cool. it reminded me of the beginning of The Ask and the Answer were the Mayor is addressing the citizens of Haven and you get that moment where the whole crowd flinches over the words of one man.)

and in all of this I’ve barely mentioned Viola. my wonderful girl. how they’ve massacred her story. god.

all of Viola’s development for the first half of the book is tanked from the start bc you SEE the crash, you see her stealing food from Ben and Cillian’s house (that’s the inciting incident of the movie), she talks to the Mayor in Prentisstown almost immediately after Todd finds her and his Noise helps everyone locate her, she talks to Todd a lot before getting to Farbranch after they escape Prentissown. the book does a LOT of work for Viola by having her mute and scared for the beginning and slowly showing how she comes to trust Todd. and how even after their incessent bickering in Farbranch they still choose to escape together because they know the army is after them specifically and they’re all the other has. that progression is really important in the book, as well as afterwards when we see how snarky Viola can actually be when speaking, how she thinks this entire planet is BACKWARDS and she can’t wait til her ship comes and shows them a thing or two about how to live.

movie Viola, well. she wants to find a way to communicate with her ship. she’s under the impression that since her scout ship crashed they’re gonna assume she’s dead and leave her behind. even though the Mayor brings up the settlers a lot after he learns about them, Viola curiously never really brings them up in any other context besides they need to come and get her. like it really made it sound like she planned on calling them, having them scoop her, and then they’d all just fucking leave, i guess. i don’t know what her end goal was besides CALLING HER PEOPLE which became the main point of the movie. the Mayor trying to find Todd and Viola so he could....use her to contact the ship?? that was also kind of unclear. and Viola trying to get to a communicator possibly so she could get the hell out of dodge. idk if that was her actual plan, but it was certainly what Todd was thinking, enough to where I was wondering if he was going to sabotage her mission in order to force her to stay (yeah. yeah. he had that energy about him and it was grosss)

and quickly, since all the animals couldn’t talk the way they do in the book, Manchee was more of a cute prop than anything. i could have gotten over it if he was useful in any way, but he never even like attacked a dude to save Todd or anything like that. so when he died it was sad on a dog-level but not a character level, since besides sitting next to Viola like twice while she cried he really added nothing to the story. also the shock of animal death was greatly reduced already since Todd’s horse that he used to escape Prentisstown from got a broken leg after he rode him off a cliff, so Todd used the knife (off-screen, thank god) to put him down. so Manchee getting killed was kind of lessened a little since my man Whiskey got nixed like 40 min earlier in the film.

and then as soon as 2021 rolls around we have to endure the chaos walking movie

Sabrina I would kiiillll for you thank you sm

15. Any old hobbies you took up again during lockdown? Hm I guess the brief period where I youtubed definitely counts. also reading a bit at first although that leveled off. rip i miss it

20. Have you been able to go on any holidays this year? .....no. did fly cross-country twice (aunt’s house to friend’s house and then back to college) but aside from that, no, i’m just with a friend for christmas, and i had chinese food with a friend on campus for thanksgiving. i love to have fun