Shippy fic and text-based games
Dec. 5th, 2019 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enemyofperfectREAD
Dragon Age Inquisition: Say I Do, Say I Don't by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Sorted, which is 8k of Adoribull marriage of convenience (for "convenience", read "infuriating Dorian's asshat father") deliberately eschewing the usual sorts of tropes that go with that. Honestly, I feel like the only thing I didn't love about it was the author's note at the end, and maybe I was just misunderstanding. (It's fine if omegaverse isn't everyone's thing! I think maybe I've just gotten a little more sensitive to potential kink-shaming in fandom since antis took off.)
Smallville: Locked Room Mystery byrivkat is futurefic for a show I've never watched, but it's also brilliant. IDK, there seems to be amnesia involved? I know Clark Kent is Superman, and Lex Luthor seems to be a moderately amoral genius who's also president of the United States, and the two of them have chemistry like nobody's business. Delicious.
Supernatural: World-Historic Facts and Personages, also by byrivkat, is Wincest, which is not usually my cup of tea, but I'll try a lot of things if the author's good, and apparently it also helps if one of the brothers is currently soulless and just has virtually no fucks to give about anything. From his perspective, why not, I guess? Content notes for like... um, hell, and references to torture, and violence, and lots of Dean being terrifying, and... some disturbing one liners in Dean's internal monologue, and... well, incest, of course. Content notes for a lot of things, basically. But damn, the writing's good.
Hockey RPF: To Be Seen Aright byDeastar, which is 110k of glorious Sid/Geno BDSM AU dealing with a ton of internalized and original flavor domism -- including about a million microaggressions against subs as well as some really bad scenes -- on its way to happily ever after for its endgame OTP. I almost wasn't sure I could rec this in a public post, because it's locked to the AO3 and what if mentioning it was violating privacy somehow? But the author has linked to it on an unlocked tumblr, so I think mentioning it is okay. Which is good to know! I really love it!
In a more nonfiction vein, I found this post about tumblr undermining communities really intriguing. The lack of moderation for common spaces is definitely a big problem there, and I was also really struck by the point about it being impossible to make effective retractions. I feel like even on twitter, which I have never felt comfortable using, you have a marginally better chance of making an apology or correction seen than you do on tumblr, which is a pretty sad state of affairs. Content note: the post is discussing these things in the context of asexual and aromantic communities, and contains links to other posts discussing some pretty heavy stuff relating to anti-ace prejudice.
Thanks tostunt_muppet, I've also enjoyed this three-part review of Pathologic, a truly fascinating game I am glad I will probably never play!
PLAYED
Alter-Ego, a weird life simulator from the 1980s I played once or twice as a kid (not in the 80s) and whose existence I was reminded of by this satisfyingly uncomplimentary review, so then of course I had to play it again.
It's such a creepy game, or at least I've found it so each time I played. With respect to my first playthrough years back, that probably had something to do with the deeply unnerving experience of skimming through an entire lifetime -- with all the losses that includes -- over the course of an hour or so while in the middle of a deep depressive episode: it felt like a dramatization of the sense of pointlessness and terror that I struggled with on a daily basis.
But this time, I wonder if a lot of it was also just the truckload of sexism the author brings with him. I'm pretty sure I played as a cis woman before, whereas this time I played as a cis man, and I was honestly surprised by how great most of my life was this time around. I mean, not only was I well-liked and well-behaved as a kid, I ended up with a steady career, a great marriage, good health well into old age, and basically everything I could have asked for. Which is not how I remembered it from before!
Every once in a while, though, even in this playthrough, there were weird moments. Like the time my then-girlfriend was trying to float the idea of getting married, and not only was there absolutely no option for me to say that seemed like a great idea, the game ended up chiding me for getting her hopes up by not telling her I wasn't interested, as if that were a given. (I responded by proposing in my next move, because she was fantastic. I knew she was the one when she admitted that her ex was super hot while still letting me know he was no competition.) Another time, I opted not to grope a woman just because she happened to be within reach, and then the game not only gave me a whole extra screen just to ask if I was really sure, but seemed honestly kind of disappointed in me when I said I really was. What?
So yeah -- this game is interesting as an artifact of its time, and I'm sure a lot of work when into its creation, but that's about as far as I can go in recommending it unless you have a pretty thick skin. On top of the various oppressions blithely embedded in it, there's an arbitrariness to it that's somewhere between hilarious and chilling. Or maybe I'm just miffed about how upsetting it was to be told that my choice to stay calm while calling for help led to a young boy drowning. That's the kind of game it is!
Eyes of Tree byursula, which is a beautifully written Twine game about someone trapped in service to the Lady under the Hill in a time when said Lady's court receives news of the Americas. Content note for allusions to historical slavery and genocide.
Spoilers follow:
I wasn't sure how to understand the description of the land as strangely empty; is the implication that the native folk have been driven out already, or that they have found ways to pass unseen? Maybe the answer to that is, yes. But it was unsettling in a different way from the brief treatment of slavery, which at the time struck me simply as well-judged, and strikes me now as more easily interpreted.
With that said, I really loved the first ending I found, with my character and the chough living together beside the sea. I think it made for an especially restful experience that the protagonist is never (that I noticed) unambiguously assigned a gender. And I really did come to care for my jailer-companion, as trapped in her own way as I.
Dragon Age Inquisition: Say I Do, Say I Don't by
Smallville: Locked Room Mystery by
Supernatural: World-Historic Facts and Personages, also by by
Hockey RPF: To Be Seen Aright by
In a more nonfiction vein, I found this post about tumblr undermining communities really intriguing. The lack of moderation for common spaces is definitely a big problem there, and I was also really struck by the point about it being impossible to make effective retractions. I feel like even on twitter, which I have never felt comfortable using, you have a marginally better chance of making an apology or correction seen than you do on tumblr, which is a pretty sad state of affairs. Content note: the post is discussing these things in the context of asexual and aromantic communities, and contains links to other posts discussing some pretty heavy stuff relating to anti-ace prejudice.
Thanks to
stunt_muppet, I've also enjoyed this three-part review of Pathologic, a truly fascinating game I am glad I will probably never play!PLAYED
Alter-Ego, a weird life simulator from the 1980s I played once or twice as a kid (not in the 80s) and whose existence I was reminded of by this satisfyingly uncomplimentary review, so then of course I had to play it again.
It's such a creepy game, or at least I've found it so each time I played. With respect to my first playthrough years back, that probably had something to do with the deeply unnerving experience of skimming through an entire lifetime -- with all the losses that includes -- over the course of an hour or so while in the middle of a deep depressive episode: it felt like a dramatization of the sense of pointlessness and terror that I struggled with on a daily basis.
But this time, I wonder if a lot of it was also just the truckload of sexism the author brings with him. I'm pretty sure I played as a cis woman before, whereas this time I played as a cis man, and I was honestly surprised by how great most of my life was this time around. I mean, not only was I well-liked and well-behaved as a kid, I ended up with a steady career, a great marriage, good health well into old age, and basically everything I could have asked for. Which is not how I remembered it from before!
Every once in a while, though, even in this playthrough, there were weird moments. Like the time my then-girlfriend was trying to float the idea of getting married, and not only was there absolutely no option for me to say that seemed like a great idea, the game ended up chiding me for getting her hopes up by not telling her I wasn't interested, as if that were a given. (I responded by proposing in my next move, because she was fantastic. I knew she was the one when she admitted that her ex was super hot while still letting me know he was no competition.) Another time, I opted not to grope a woman just because she happened to be within reach, and then the game not only gave me a whole extra screen just to ask if I was really sure, but seemed honestly kind of disappointed in me when I said I really was. What?
So yeah -- this game is interesting as an artifact of its time, and I'm sure a lot of work when into its creation, but that's about as far as I can go in recommending it unless you have a pretty thick skin. On top of the various oppressions blithely embedded in it, there's an arbitrariness to it that's somewhere between hilarious and chilling. Or maybe I'm just miffed about how upsetting it was to be told that my choice to stay calm while calling for help led to a young boy drowning. That's the kind of game it is!
Eyes of Tree by
ursula, which is a beautifully written Twine game about someone trapped in service to the Lady under the Hill in a time when said Lady's court receives news of the Americas. Content note for allusions to historical slavery and genocide.Spoilers follow:
I wasn't sure how to understand the description of the land as strangely empty; is the implication that the native folk have been driven out already, or that they have found ways to pass unseen? Maybe the answer to that is, yes. But it was unsettling in a different way from the brief treatment of slavery, which at the time struck me simply as well-judged, and strikes me now as more easily interpreted.
With that said, I really loved the first ending I found, with my character and the chough living together beside the sea. I think it made for an especially restful experience that the protagonist is never (that I noticed) unambiguously assigned a gender. And I really did come to care for my jailer-companion, as trapped in her own way as I.
