Trabia Garden

I played a couple of hours of Oxenfree last night! It's very pretty and colourful, which is an interesting design choice for a horror game. All the landscapes sort of look like they've been made out of coloured paper.

You have to make decisions within a few seconds in Oxenfree, which I find very stressful, even when most of the decisions are just 'what do you want to say now?' (I feel a bit spoiled by Life Is Strange, which not only gives you as much time as you like to choose your response but allows you to rewind and redo things if you change your mind.)

At the very beginning of the game, just after you get off the boat, I refused to speak alone with Jonas because my mind was working by Until Dawn rules: DON'T SEPARATE, BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. th_esaurus pointed out that this was very early in the game, nothing bad had happened yet, and a brief conversation with my stepbrother was unlikely to get anyone killed. I felt so bad for turning Jonas down that I restarted.

At this point I set the first and most important of several goals that would help me make decisions in the future: I want to get along with my stepbrother.

Later, after panicking during the 'who do you meet up with first?' decision at the radio tower, I came up with my second goal: I want to improve my relationship with Clarissa.

My third goal, after telling Ren there were other fish in the sea and TOO LATE realising that the game might think I want to be his fish: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can I end up in a romantic relationship with Ren.

('The game won't let you romance your stepbrother,' th_esaurus said, with deeply felt sadness. I laughed at her.)

I feel a lot more comfortable making quick decisions now that I know what I'm aiming for. Even if I still miss Life Is Strange. (The soft colours and loading-screen Polaroids really remind me of Life Is Strange, actually. Although I'm puzzled by the fact that Jonas took a picture on his phone and it appeared on the loading screen as a Polaroid.)

I'm playing this game at th_esaurus's flat, so I don't know exactly when I'll be able to pick it up again, but I hope it'll be soon! There's a lot of intriguing mystery. And I like Alex, which is unusual; I usually have trouble warming to characters who communicate entirely through dialogue choices, because they can end up feeling like an empty vessel for the player rather than a character in their own right, but a lot of personality comes through in everything she says.


Here are a handful of things I experienced in 2016 but didn't post full entries on:

- I watched the anime ERASED (it's available legally on Crunchyroll here), which is about a man who goes back to his childhood and tries to prevent the abduction and murder of a classmate. It was very good and very gripping, but I don't know whether I'll ever watch it again; it might be a bit too bleak and serious without the 'but what happens next??' drive to keep going. Still, I loved that it told a very compact, intense story in just twelve episodes. It also has one of the coolest opening sequences I've ever seen. The shots of the empty school give me chills.

- I saw Your Name in the cinema and loved it. The basic concept (two strangers keep swapping bodies across a great distance and can only communicate with each other by leaving notes) is exactly the sort of idea I find irresistible: people being drawn together by weird experiences, unable to talk about them with anyone but each other! Inevitably, I'm now wondering whether it could be employed in fanfiction for other works.

- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a much, much better show than you'd think from the title. A couple of my favourite songs:

I've kind of got a girl crush on you, by which I mean I wanna kill you and wear your skin like a dress.
FACE YOUR FEARS. RUN WITH SCISSORS.

- The second series of How to Get Away with Murder is, I'm delighted to report, just as stupid as the first. The scene in 'Meet Bonnie' where the students were going 'pfft, we've screwed up our lives, might as well have an orgy' inevitably delighted me. Has anyone written the fic where they follow through? I'm going to be so disappointed in fandom if nobody's written that fic.


Inevitably, the combination of fandoms in this entry is making me ponder a How to Get Away with Murder scenario in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, in which Rebecca somehow ends up killing someone and has to try not to get caught. It's actually a worryingly plausible scenario.

I've been waiting for the start of a fresh month to share this story! On the first of August, I was contacted by one of my clients.

'I've got a new book coming in for you to edit,' he said. 'It'll need to be ready by the end of the month.'

'Okay! How long is it?'

'About thirty days.'


Unfortunately, I also have to share a story where I'm the one who ends up looking silly.

'I don't know why I finished Life Is Strange and immediately started writing horrible fanfiction about [unpleasant character],' I said to reipan yesterday.

'Don't take this the wrong way,' Rei said, 'but I'm really not surprised.'

'I don't know. I've always thought of my writing as reasonably wholesome.'

Rei laughed in my face.

Here's the thing: I was serious. And then I started scrolling through my Archive of Our Own account, trying to find the most recent wholesome thing I'd written. And scrolling. And scrolling. And scrolling.

'Let's see... psychological trauma, psychological trauma, two teenagers discuss the horrible murders of their classmates, someone is afflicted with a hallucinogen and nearly kills her brother, someone isn't afflicted with a hallucinogen and nearly kills her friend... does "someone ropes a friend into having sex with her purely so she can use her pregnancy to evade execution" count?'

'No.'

'A guy has the memories of fourteen other people loaded into his head and has a mental breakdown, a photographer deliberately cuts off her fingers so she can't hold a camera... hey, my fic where the Final Fantasy VIII cast become l'Cie is all right!'

'Doesn't that mean they're doomed to become either monsters or crystals?' Housemate C asked.

'IT'S A LOVELY WHOLESOME STORY ABOUT MORTALITY.'

So, yes, it turns out that everything I write is horrible and somehow I never even realised it. So much murder! So much guilt! So many psychological breakdowns!

This is a genuine revelation and I don't understand how I never noticed it before.

I really wasn't expecting to write Life Is Strange fanfiction, and then somehow this happened. Please be aware that it contains imprisonment, sexual threat and general creepiness.


Title: Split
Fandom: Life Is Strange
Rating: R
Pairing: Max/Chloe
Wordcount: 1,200
Summary: Max feels like she's living three different lives simultaneously. Maybe she really did break time.


( Split )

The first episode of Life Is Strange is now free on PS3 and PS4! I thought I'd check it out, as timydamonkey recommended it to me a while ago. And then I bought the rest of the episodes. Whoops. It's fundamentally a 'looking at things and having awkward conversations' simulator, but it's strangely compelling.

Here's a miserable fact for you: the developers brought this game to several publishers before eventually settling on Square Enix. They chose Square Enix because all the other publishers said 'nope, can't have a female protagonist, you're going to have to change her into a boy.' Fortunately, Life Is Strange sold well and received good reviews despite being about one of those non-male things nobody cares about.

I'm currently two episodes in. I have some specific things to say about actual plot events, but I'll save those for a spoilery post once I've finished the entire game. For now, I'm going to keep things as spoiler-free as possible.

There's something about Life Is Strange that resonates oddly strongly with me. I think it's the depiction of a particular type of friendship between kids that I know from my own childhood. You're pretty quiet and insulated, and she's much cooler than you, and she can get you into trouble or be manipulative sometimes, but you endure all that because you're just so awed that this cool person is willing to spend time with you. (It's a type of relationship that sometimes appears in Jacqueline Wilson novels, actually.) I didn't realise until I suddenly thought 'hang on, I'm making a lot of groundless assumptions about Chloe's character' and then realised it was because I felt like I'd known her when I was a child. She's a very interesting character, even if in some respects she's difficult to like.

It's perhaps no surprise that this game gives me a very strong feeling of nostalgia. I really like the strange, quiet atmosphere of it, too, and Max's internal observations are often endearing.

There are, of course, a few things that don't entirely match up with my own experiences. For example, I went to school in a different country, and I've never been any good at photography, and I can't reverse time. I also don't have the speech patterns of EZboard fandom circa 2002. There's some very odd dialogue in this game. It feels very much like a game about teenagers written by adults, although of course I'm an adult, so it's possible that in fact it's an entirely accurate representation of modern teenage speech patterns and I'm the one who's out of touch.

Sorry, did I say 'in fact'? I meant 'for realsies'.

I clocked almost immediately, from his LOADS OF TEXT MESSAGES, that Warren had a huge crush on Max. This means that every conversation with him is a bit of a minefield, as I don't feel Max thinks of him that way at all. I'm constantly caught in a state of 'I want to be nice to you, because you're my friend, but I definitely don't want to give you the impression that I'm romantically interested in you.' I felt a bit bad about turning down his invitation to see a film. Sorry, Warren! I didn't want you to think of it as a date!

I find the occasional 'THIS ACTION WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES' butterfly very stressful. I don't need consequences in my videogames! I get quite enough of those in real life! (Now, in real life, whenever something minor happens as a result of something I unthinkingly did a while ago, I think back to that moment and I see 'THIS ACTION WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES' in the corner of it. You put a glass in the dishwasher! That glass was still in use and later your housemate will be trying to find it. This action will have consequences.)

The statistics at the end of each episode are sometimes a bit distressing. 'You didn't help Alyssa,' I was informed at the end of the second episode. I'm sorry, Alyssa! I didn't realise you needed help! 'You didn't water your plant.' I DIDN'T KNOW MY PLANT EXISTED.