Be Gay, Do Witchcraft

This is a bit silly, but this summer I’ve gotten into tarot reading. Every morning I do a simple two-card spread in which the first card indicates my current situation and the second indicates the best approach to this situation. For example…

There’s an explosion of activity… but don’t get swept up in the details and focus on the end results.

There’s an issue with communication… and it’s good to go ahead and say what you need to say.

You’re focused on a goal… but it’s important to remember that plans take time to come to fruition.

You’re involved in needless trouble… so it’s time to get your priorities straight.

These tarot readings are useful to me in a “you knew the answer all along” sort of way, and I think the exercise is a nice way to pick apart complicated issues that might otherwise be too difficult to process.

The deck I’m using is the Cosmos set published by Light Grey Art Lab. It has gorgeous art, and the symbolism of its multicultural mythology-based astrology speaks to me in a much clearer way than the “five of pentacles, nine of wands” imagery of traditional tarot.

Like I said, I know it’s silly, but these days I need all the help I can get.

Night in the Woods, Part Two

I started playing Night in the Woods again recently, and I have a lot of feelings about the game. When I get interested in something, my first instinct is to read what other people have written about it. Although I knew it was a mistake, I made a bad decision and clicked on the Polygon review.

This specific line jumped out at me:

Mae also does some platforming in her sleep, and these dream sequences in particular are dull, especially late in the game when the story starts to pick up momentum.
 

First of all, this game is not a platformer, and evaluating a story-driven exploration game as a platformer because the main character can jump is not useful or interesting.

Second, the dream sequences are amazing. One of my favorite conceits in gaming is a piece of music that has more instruments added as the player makes progress (like the Hateno Village theme in Breath of the Wild), and every single one of the dream sequences handles this conceit perfectly. The songs themselves are weird and fun and creepy – my favorite is Astral Alley.

The fact that a professional game reviewer could look at Night in the Woods and criticize its "platforming" as "dull" boggles my mind to such an extent that I feel like a Lovecraft narrator who can’t describe what he's seeing and resorts to frenzied and nonsensical muttering. I want to return to this review, but this is the limit of what I can deal with today.

Night in the Woods, Part Three

Here’s another bit of the Polygon review of Night in the Woods that caused me physical pain:

[Mae] is often selfish, cruel, self-absorbed and destructive in ways that may be believable and relatable but rarely ever pleasant. Mae is somewhat redeemed by a childlike joy in simple pleasures, a streak of loyalty to her friends and some late-game realizations about her own failings, but only somewhat.
 

Mae is a good protagonist because she’s flawed, and she’s a good person because she’s genuinely trying to be sensitive and understanding for the sake of her friends and family. She’s not perfect, but she’s doing her best, and the same can be said of the way most of the other characters in the game treat her. Some people lose their tempers with Mae when she accidentally says something stupid, and some people are mean to her for no reason, but she’s good-natured about it and doesn’t get into fights or try to hurt people to get back at them. She goes out of her way to speak to everyone without prejudice, and she’s extremely generous with her time. She’s good-natured and, yes, she’s loyal and cares about other people, even when she’s hurt. This is why people want to be friends with her.

The fact that an adult man would look at this twenty-year-old female character and say that he doesn’t like her because she’s not performing enough emotional labor is really scary to me, to be honest.

It’s also troubling that Polygon wanted someone to review a story game about a twenty-year-old queer woman and couldn’t find anyone except an older man with children. They didn't know any women? Any queer people? Not even any younger people? This writer openly admits that he didn’t want to review this game. Could the editors at Polygon really not find anyone in even a slightly different demographic?

And listen, I wasn’t going to include the actual name of the reviewer, but it’s Justin McElroy. I know people love The Adventure Zone a whole lot, but I have to admit that I’ve never found the McElroy brothers as charming and funny as most people seem to think they are.