A Crow Looked At Me, and grief in media.

I listened to an album called “A Crow Looked At Me” by Mount Eerie last year, and it's arguably one of the most important things that I've listened to in the sense of how formative it's been for me as a writer. In a year full of good albums, this one stood out the most, but I hesitate grouping it with those albums and I hesitate calling it good. It's hard to recommend because of how untraditional it is in an album sense, since it's at best described as reading a diary over minimalistic guitar strums that even Phil Elverum himself describes as “barely music.” It's also hard to recommend since it's one of the most soul-crushing pieces of media I've ever partaken in, being an intimate and extremely uncomfortable glimpse into the aftermath of Phil's wife passing away from pancreatic cancer only 35 years into her life, not even a year after their daughter was born. There's a particular ideology about the album that reinforced a concept that I've grown to believe in as my writing's progressed and I've been forced to confront more of my personal demons, frequently losing to them in the process.

Apathy has become prevalent in my writing as the years have gone on and the reason I've stopped writing as much is that, while talking about depression and emptiness can seem cathartic and profound, it always felt insufficient. Like I couldn't adequately discuss it. I think talking about those things doesn't necessarily equate to describing them. Apathy and emptiness are nebulous concepts that always feel hard to articulate in prose because they're by nature an absence of something. It is not a feeling, because there is nothing to feel. It's not the same as “feeling bad” or “feeling indifferent” or “not caring”. Being indifferent and disregarding towards things is different than emptiness and apathy. It's something that can only occur when you've been hurt irreparably, when you've lost something important about yourself. When your feelings have no choice but to retreat, to cease functioning in a situation or time period entirely.

For some of the most traumatic occurrences in my life, I do not remember most of them, at least in explicit detail. I was not there when they happened. I could not have been there when they happened. Something about yourself is now gone and your body just has to reconstitute itself to function again properly without it. Trying to do that and failing is what depression from tragedy is, where you have to acknowledge your inability to function without something in your life anymore. The clawing feeling of a familiar presence slowly being replaced with the vague memory of it instead, where the emulation in your head is what the new normal is. Memories become a weird sort of uncanny valley with a surreal disconnect to them while you slowly adjust to what's become reality.

Writing about personal tragedy and depression is not necessarily meant to accurately portray that feeling to the reader, moreso that it's meant to act as a surrogate or a shitty emulation of the part of themselves that has gone missing or was taken from them. Cheap melodrama and sentimentality is a punch to the face, a sting meant to evoke immediate emotion or sympathy. There's an audible gasp from the audience and then some sobbing and powerful erratic emotions because we as human beings relate to strong displays of emotion. While there's nothing inherently wrong with this, media has grown to trivialize, even glorify how tragedy and loss actually affects the human soul. There's always something that's a bit less genuine about it

Real emptiness, actual depression is cold, numb, and flaccid. It's a slog, a slow burn, an agonizing wither that nobody wants anything to do with. Sadness, tragedy and depression is frequently not a gunshot, it's being stuck in quicksand and slowly dying of exposure. And when it's presented in a form of media meant to be consumed, it should repulse the person absorbing it. It's not meant to be enjoyed, it's not meant to be taken as an art or a story where you feel like you're a better person for partaking in it. It should make you feel like shit, like you didn't learn anything from it. It should fill you with dread, it should make you want to distance yourself from it because it confronts you with an ugliness that you either can't adequately comprehend and cope with, or if you're far too familiar with it, are aware of how devastating it is. And if you have any shred of empathy, you shouldn't want it to exist because since it does, that meant that it was somebody's reality.

“A Crow Looked At Me” was an album that has altered my perception of why I write about my struggles with depression, loss, and coping. It's made me rethink what it means to use tools of self-expression to cope with tragedy going forward. I think in order to grow as a person, not every piece of media that makes you a better person is supposed to leave you feeling “good”. Music, shows, videogames, how shallow of us would it be to reduce these things down to mere escapism, or that every sad thing that happens in them plays on junk food sentimentality rather than actual palpable grief or sadness, in a world where sometimes life is just shitty or unfair.

And while that's a transformative thing to go through, I still wish that this album didn't exist because that means these things happened to Phil. I wish that I could've reevaluated something like this by not having to listen to this album. I don't want to learn anything from feeling hurt like this from a piece of media. There is a good chance that after only about three complete listens to this album, I will probably never listen to it again. I think the album accomplishes what it set out to do because much like what Phil's gone through to make this album, I don't want it to be real either. Despite my lack of familiarity with his other works like other Mount Eerie albums or the Microphones, I just want Phil to be okay after something like this. This is an album that I would not wish upon anybody to have to write.

And if all this makes it sound like this album is something you don't want to listen to, then I don't blame you. But it's also an album that nobody wanted to exist, especially not Phil. You won't feel like a better person for having listened to it, nor will you find it easy to judge based on traditional parameters of how you think you should approach a music album. But it will leave an impact on you, perhaps one you wouldn't want. But that's sort of what the whole album is about, and it's the closest I've at least gotten to empathizing with real grief and depression from a small piece of music.

A postmortem on Super Mario Odyssey.

Man, 2017 was sure a dumpster fire of a year for the world. But on the bright side, it was a fantastic year for videogames, arguably one of the best we've seen in a very long time. If the amount of tragedy and terrible garbage of 2017 is indicative of juxtaposing the great games we got, the only way 2018 would be better was if Trump actually succeeded in starting a nuclear war while we found out the entirety of Hollywood were cannibals instead of sexual predators.

I'll be upfront, I didn't play as many games I would've liked this year. I'm ridiculously poor and the aging relic from a lost era that is my computer generally functions as nothing more than a salt generator powered by MOBAs and five-year old F2P compost. It felt more like a catch-up year for me, enjoying some older games I wanted to sink more time into while the blur of fantastic videogames I wish I could play moved on by. So I don't know how qualified I am to discuss my favorite games of 2017, but I can tell you that one of them wasn't Super Mario Odyssey. Ooh that's a hot take, aren't I contrarian for not liking the critically acclaimed love child of Nintendo's flagship franchise. Well joke's on you, I loved it. ...just not as much as I expected.

I'm going to spoil this game to an extent, but being upset at Mario spoilers would be like getting upset at finding out Ganon was somehow shoehorned into a Zelda game and there's elemental dungeons involved.

Let's be clear, Super Mario Odyssey is a fantastic game. It's a stupendous whimsical romp through a bunch of fascinating worlds and it's one of those few games filled with so much child-like glee that you just feel happy playing it. Any other year that wasn't crowded with your Horizons and Personas and Niers and Cupheads, it would be the best game to come out that year. But it's not my favorite game to come out this year. It's not even my favorite game to come out last year with the word “Odyssey” in the title. 2017 was a really fucking good year for videogames, videogames that took risks and were doing innovative or new things with massive payoffs.

Super Mario Odyssey doesn't really do any of those things. It wasn't a brand new or innovative experience, not in the least. And there's nothing wrong with that; it's a well-polished and (mostly) beautifully designed game that is among the best in its class... but it didn't do anything new. Odyssey was very intentionally designed as a revival of sorts, a return to the open-world design the 3D games in the series had with its start in Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine. And unlike Yooka-Laylie—another N64-styled platforming adventure game that banked a lot on nostalgia for its success—Odyssey does a fantastic job of modernizing a tired old genre of game without giving into some of the faults that plague those games.

...mostly.

Can I be on the nose here for a moment? I like Super Mario Odyssey, but am I the only one who thinks this game harkens back more to the N64 era of Rare platformers a la Banjo-Tooie and DK64 moreso than Mario's own 3D shenanigans? Where there's an alarming emphasis on _GIMMICKY_ transformations and minigames scattered throughout massive and in some cases vacant worlds? Super Mario 64 and and Super Mario Sunshine were very pure experiences in sense that traversing and navigation were the primary focus of the games. That seems marketedly less so in Super Mario Odyssey, and it's kind of apparent when some of the game's best levels play on that strength while intermingling the crazy hat soul-stealing mechanic with it smoothly. The Metro Kingdom was a level that made traversing it the main point of attraction and made exploring it compelling. On the other side of that coin, the Sand Kingdom felt like a momentum killer so early on in the game, and I had little desire to come back to that level because it honestly felt like a level straight out of DK64. It was a massive vacant slog with a few neat little gimmicks here and there, but felt more suited to be a part of an adventure game than a free-wheeling romp in a Mario game.

Also let's talk about the collectables and why they're awful. Part of the fun in SM64 or SMS was that every Star or Shine was a mission, it felt like a legitimate accomplishment to collect one. And if you found hidden ones in the level, it felt like it mattered. If there's one thing Mario games always did well, it was that they emphasized the importance of collectibles without having to saturate the game with them, and used them to compel players into exploring. I felt Odyssey struggled on both of these fronts for a handful of reasons. Moons are everywhere, almost nonsensically so. There's 880 of them to be earned, and I use “earned” very generously in a lot of cases. You can find Moons by sitting on a bench with somebody while they ponder their existential futility being a human NPC in a Mario game. You can find one by just staring at a taxi flying through the sky and it magically poops a Moon out. Some of these are cute and clever, just obscure enough to reward the player for showing curiosity by interacting with the game world.

I also found a lot of Moons by doing mundane things that would normally earn me coins. I found a Moon kicking a rock. I found a lot of Moons by pounding the shiny spot on the ground in the open. I found a Moon by spinning my hat on the sparkly thing. These aren't interesting. And a few Moons that seem cute at first like stacking Goombas or catching rabbits or getting the music notes in a straight line are repeated ad-nauseum without ever really growing into anything else more interesting. I can get incentivizing players into exploring, but there are a lot of recycled and utterly tedious Moons to collect in this game. And the fact that you only need a small handful to advance the story to access new levels—the remaining Moons you collect only unlock cosmetic outfits AFTER YOU BEAT THE GAME—means you can go most of the game ignoring them because they serve almost no purpose, no reward for going out of your way to collect them. The purple coins in every level hold more value than them because what you can purchase with them are immediately available, and they're sprinkled throughout levels enough that they're always worth collecting and never feel undervalued. Whereas you can ignore well over half the Moons in a level the first time you play through it. Mario's world clearly isn't immune to the economic woes of inflation because there are a ton of these things and they border on feeling worthless. I'd even argue that so much of them are unnecessary that a non-insignificant portion of them could be removed from the game and it wouldn't be worse off for it.

The possession mechanic mostly serves as an extension for the game's mechanics, but unlike something persistent like the FLUDD or the movesets you develop in Rare's platformers, a handful of them feel too contextual or shallow to really flesh out the game as a centralized mechanic. Lightning rails are basic but uninteresting, but making Mario catapult off of sentient utensil men was common enough to be an interesting mechanic. A lot of them serve as one-off minigame gimmicks, but I never felt like there were enough of them to keep it varied. The dinosaur in the Cascade Kingdom surmised the hat possession idea in a nutshell for me; I thought it was ridiculous and clever at first, but then after rampaging and knocking things over with it for a bit I went “Huh, I guess that's really it.”

The game bleeds fanservice, and I can almost excuse all of the game's problems because I can dress up Mario as a clown and ride a moped before going to the Dark Souls Kingdom, but just shy of 400 moons and I have little desire to go back. In the end the game did feel like it stumbled around the same pitfall Yooka-Laylie did, albeit while still being a very good game. It banked a lot on nostalgia and fanservice to distract from the fact that this game's been made already, it does not do much of anything that hasn't been done before. It is Mario 64/Banjo-Tooie unchained, modernizing an open-world platforming adventure on a scale that hasn't been done before. And while that deserves kudos, I never felt that the game was capable of entirely shedding the problems its inspirations and predecessors had. It's exactly what I expected out of a good, competent Mario game. And honestly it's a little bit disappointing because I wasn't really surprised, I didn't really have a lot of genuine 'Eureka' moments, just the thought of “Yep, that's a damn good Mario game.”

To juxtapose this conversation, let's bring up Breath of the Wild, my favorite game of 2017 and arguably one of my favorite games ever made. I can preface this and say that in spite of that claim, Breath of the Wild has a lot of problems. There are things about this game that can irritate the Hell out of me or disappoint me. The inventory system is obtuse and clunky, like cycling through weapons, cooking. The game has the traditional ARPG difficulty curve of being difficult early on but almost trivially easy once you're stronger than God. Horses feel pointless given Link's mobility. Stealth mechanics in any non-stealth game are universally garbage. The story is utterly shallow even by Zelda standards, a liability when you design it in a way that you can overlook and ignore it entirely in the confines of the game. And while it's created an interesting world, hardly any of the characters or plot threads are really explored well enough to make them memorable. And speaking for others, some lament the absence of “real dungeons” even though most of Zelda's real dungeons were switch and block puzzles with key-and-lock navigation masking the mundane linearity a lot of them had. But you people do you.

The beauty behind BotW is that a lot of its problems can be ignored. Barring the inventory system being kind of ass, virtually nothing in the game is necessary to completing it. If you hate combat and your weapons always breaking, almost every fight you can run away from or avoid. If you don't like using Stasis to stop time or don't remember to use Cryonis to create ice blocks, the game will almost always give you enough options that you don't have to. If you think horseback is trivial when Link can climb anything, you don't have to ride a horse. If you think the story is bad and the Divine Beast dungeons are uninteresting, you don't have to do any of them to fight the final boss. You don't have to get, let alone find the Master Sword. And if you hate the English dub, you can play through the entire game in Russian like I did, to prepare for Putin's America that Trump is setting us up with.

There is almost always something you can find to like in Breath of the Wild. It's an experience that grants such an unprecedented level of agency, even among other open-world games. Anywhere off in the distance you see, you can go there and there's probably at least something of mild interest waiting. You can choose to go through the story in whatever order you choose to. You can collect lore and information on almost every single enemy and collectible scattered throughout the world. You can help develop a town. You can even achieve the wildest fantasy of them all and become a homeowner. It's a game that provoked a level of curiosity out of me that no game has in years. Where I could just abandon what I was doing and get sidetracked for hours scouring mountains for resources. Where I can bring up the game at work or among friends and go “DID YOU DO THE THING?” and they'd go “YEAH I DID THE THING, DID YOU OPEN THE GIANT ASSHOLE DOOR ACROSS THE SHIT RIVER WITH ANAL BEAD BOMBS” and you'd response “NAW I USED MAGNESIS TO NAVIGATE THE HYLIAN DILDO OF TRUTH INTO IT INSTEAD” and both your minds would be blown because everybody's looking for secrets on their journey and the puzzles are open-ended enough to be solved in multiple ways.

A game like this shouldn't exist, not at this scale. In this era where corridor simulators cost 40 billion dollars and FFXV can be in development for years and still get only half finished, an open-world game this expansive is an anomaly. And coming from Nintendo of all companies on their first attempt is even more baffling. Breath of the Wild upended nearly three decades of tired and worn-out tradition, and it's obviously going to upset some people. But to undermine the success that the game has had, and how much of a risk it was burning everything down for the sake of reinvention is so admirably psychotic that it should be recognized. All for the sake of being able to freeze a rock in time and beat the hell out of it so much that I can ride it through the sky like a cannonball after it leaves stasis.

Hey.  Welcome to a new hole in the internet I'm digging for myself to hide in.  I'm Deo, Luca, or whatever the Hell pet name you have for me, I've gone by a lot over the last several years.  I used to be an alt-right edgelord and now I'm a militant leftist social studies warrior.  I'm a neurotic non-binary genderfuck with a lot of terrible opinions on things I am seldom qualified to talk about in depth, but I'm going to anyway.

I promised myself that this year I'm going to write more, but lately most of the things I wrote involved me complaining about shit nobody cares about.  So to expand on that premise, I'm going to do it more, except with shit people vaguely care about.  So that's what this is.  Get ready for needlessly petty critiques, inane ramblings, and lukewarm takes on whatever random media I manage to draw an awful opinion on.