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Night in the Woods, Part Four
Here’s another bit of the Polygon review of Night in the Woods that I find genuinely frightening:
For an adult man who identifies as a parent to choose the dialogue option that belittles Mae’s parents and then blame his own choice on the personality of a twenty-something female character in a video game is hypocritical and unfair. (This is a good analogy for a lot of the communication problems I’ve had with adult men, to be honest.)
It’s also important to provide the specific context. What has happened is that Mae’s mom, who is stressed out about money but doesn’t want to talk about it, tries to be “helpful” about her daughter’s illness in an unhelpful way. Mae interprets her mother’s genuine but off-the-mark concern as condescending, and she makes a shitty comment about how she doesn’t want advice from someone who stayed in town and never went to college. Mae’s mom snaps and says she worked hard so that Mae could go to the college that Mae has dropped out for reasons that, depending on the player’s dialogue choices, she’s either not willing or not yet ready to explain.
Mae knows this, of course, and Mae’s mother knows she knows this. They both realize they’ve gone too far. Again, depending on the player’s dialogue choices, Mae can either apologize or be a brat and walk away. Regardless, Mae and her mother offer each other more meaningful apologies later, and Mae’s father provides a different perspective on the situation when Mae mentions that she wants to start looking for a job. Essentially, he tells her that it’s the responsibility of parents to care for their child and to provide for their future; and that, as parents, he and Mae’s mother take that responsibility seriously.
What the player learns toward the end of the game is that Mae was suffering from severe depression, which was comorbid with executive function disorder (which refers to the state of knowing what you need to do and wanting to do it but being unable to get started) and extreme dissociative episodes. This specific diagnosis is never provided, but I’ve seen it often enough to know what it is. The way college is structured is not healthy for people who are prone to mental illness, which the game has established is true of Mae. It’s not that there’s anything “wrong” with Mae as a person, but being forced to live in a dorm while taking large general education classes that she wasn’t interested in triggered a crisis with a condition that she had previously been able to manage.
Mae was failing all of her classes, sleeping for most of the day, and thinking about death while feeling that she was slipping in and out of reality. No one helped her – which is normal in American universities – so she came home. Mae’s parents are sympathetic, and Mae is, for the most part, grateful.
Mae is in a difficult situation, but she made the right choice.
What exactly did Justin McElroy expect Mae to do? Stay at school until she successfully killed herself? So that she wouldn’t cause trouble for her parents?
A major theme of Night in the Woods is its critique of this specific attitude, namely, that it is the individual who is to blame for the failings of an impersonal system. It's terrifying to me that Justin McElroy could play this game from start to finish and write about it as a staff reviewer for a major gaming news outlet and completely miss this theme, saying instead that it's “a bold choice to center a game on an unlikable character." What I'm afraid of is the fact that this is the sort of person who’s driving the culture – an older straight man who doesn’t see any problem with condemning a young queer woman for making difficult but healthy choices about her own life.
After a scene where Mae belittles her parents for working for years so they could afford to send her to the college that she had just bailed on, I found it pretty difficult to re-engage with her. But I’m also a parent and feel a lot further from Mae’s side of the kitchen table than I used to. It’s a bold choice to center a game on an unlikable character, and it’s an effective way of highlighting the virtues of the supporting cast.
Before anything, it’s important to point out that Night in the Woods is a dialogue-driven game. Except for a handful of very specific instances, the player is always given a choice of what Mae can say and how she can respond to the direction the conversation is taking. For an adult man who identifies as a parent to choose the dialogue option that belittles Mae’s parents and then blame his own choice on the personality of a twenty-something female character in a video game is hypocritical and unfair. (This is a good analogy for a lot of the communication problems I’ve had with adult men, to be honest.)
It’s also important to provide the specific context. What has happened is that Mae’s mom, who is stressed out about money but doesn’t want to talk about it, tries to be “helpful” about her daughter’s illness in an unhelpful way. Mae interprets her mother’s genuine but off-the-mark concern as condescending, and she makes a shitty comment about how she doesn’t want advice from someone who stayed in town and never went to college. Mae’s mom snaps and says she worked hard so that Mae could go to the college that Mae has dropped out for reasons that, depending on the player’s dialogue choices, she’s either not willing or not yet ready to explain.
Mae knows this, of course, and Mae’s mother knows she knows this. They both realize they’ve gone too far. Again, depending on the player’s dialogue choices, Mae can either apologize or be a brat and walk away. Regardless, Mae and her mother offer each other more meaningful apologies later, and Mae’s father provides a different perspective on the situation when Mae mentions that she wants to start looking for a job. Essentially, he tells her that it’s the responsibility of parents to care for their child and to provide for their future; and that, as parents, he and Mae’s mother take that responsibility seriously.
What the player learns toward the end of the game is that Mae was suffering from severe depression, which was comorbid with executive function disorder (which refers to the state of knowing what you need to do and wanting to do it but being unable to get started) and extreme dissociative episodes. This specific diagnosis is never provided, but I’ve seen it often enough to know what it is. The way college is structured is not healthy for people who are prone to mental illness, which the game has established is true of Mae. It’s not that there’s anything “wrong” with Mae as a person, but being forced to live in a dorm while taking large general education classes that she wasn’t interested in triggered a crisis with a condition that she had previously been able to manage.
Mae was failing all of her classes, sleeping for most of the day, and thinking about death while feeling that she was slipping in and out of reality. No one helped her – which is normal in American universities – so she came home. Mae’s parents are sympathetic, and Mae is, for the most part, grateful.
Mae is in a difficult situation, but she made the right choice.
What exactly did Justin McElroy expect Mae to do? Stay at school until she successfully killed herself? So that she wouldn’t cause trouble for her parents?
A major theme of Night in the Woods is its critique of this specific attitude, namely, that it is the individual who is to blame for the failings of an impersonal system. It's terrifying to me that Justin McElroy could play this game from start to finish and write about it as a staff reviewer for a major gaming news outlet and completely miss this theme, saying instead that it's “a bold choice to center a game on an unlikable character." What I'm afraid of is the fact that this is the sort of person who’s driving the culture – an older straight man who doesn’t see any problem with condemning a young queer woman for making difficult but healthy choices about her own life.
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Anecdote time! I knew, from the time I was five, that College Was A Requirement. My mother started working right out of high school and she was, by the time I came around, aware that she'd gotten damn lucky with her job (at a big tech company) without a college degree and I would not be able to pull the same trick. (I'm the first person in my mother's family to go to college; most went for union jobs, or the military, or military then union.) Dad, on the other hand, comes from 100% a college-educated white-collar family.
When I was seventeen and doing my college apps, I got into Northwestern early decision, and also got accepted University of Denver (with substantial scholarship offerings). I specifically told my parents that the smart financial choice was for me to go to U Denver (we were somewhat well off.) My mom said "but that isn't where you want to go." This is true; I wanted NU. She said, "when we made it clear that college was as required as high school, we also committed to paying for that. You held up your part of the bargain, which was doing well enough in school to get in where you chose. Now we do ours." Now, obviously, this was only possible because we were, as said, reasonably well off, and I was an only child.
Now, as it happens, my particular combo of mental illnesses and the specific structure of my brain works brilliantly in an academic setting, at least as far as I went (had I tried for grad school I"d likely have had much more difficulty, at least until I got the mental illness treated.) But, had I hit some kind of massive issue as Mae does, and had to come home? I would have had a very similar conversation with my parents.
I think I'm both super terrified by his perspective, and also sad that he can't see that his choices aren't for everyone.