Isomorphic is David McNeill's column about adaptations and the infectious influence of memory.

John Marston has killed a thousand men. Ten thousand. Ten million, perhaps, in the digital aggregate, by the time we find him in Red Dead Redemption. He occupies a half-light of the closing west, a sort of facsimile of a country that was, and a country that will be. The sparse art design and airy score deliver John across empty planes riding a vacant tone/astride a nameless horse. The influence of "government" on New Austin ricochets against the sense that John's life is already over. The lushness of John’s time in Dutch’s gang is entirely emptied from the west. Possibilities close.

A question outstanding from Grand Theft Auto V is whether Rockstar are capable of satire anymore, and in retrospect Red Dead Redemption provides a resounding "catch us in the right light". Where Red Dead Redemption II is a tragedy to its core, the first story is a portrait of a world already ended. John owns nothing. Not really. Every dollar to his name is accounted for on a mortgage balance sheet with the bank. Every piece of his heart is owned by his son and wife. Every ounce of his soul resides within a government ledger with esoteric and unpredictable inflation.

We open with John and Bonnie musing over the meaning of life on horseback in between mundane tasks, and even Bonnie accuses John of being deliberately bleak and obtuse. John can’t believe in any sort of god, nor does belief serve him, he tells Bonnie. He is an empty arm of the state, waiting to return home to resume himself. He has the soul of a poet, a man out of time (in both meanings), frustrated by law enforcement even as he is warped into equally insufficient law enforcement. He allies with the every-men he used to rob for a living. But as Bonnie points out "you don't talk about your wife" - his motivation is not something he can easily speak about because John cannot resolve himself, because he too has become a vacancy. A tool deployed the state, only valuable because of a past that has been erased and is being erased by him.

Part of what makes John challenging to think through as a protagonist now is the sheer gravity of Arthur Morgan. Arthur is, perhaps, the most expansively rendered video game protagonist ever portrayed. The sheer volume of casual interactions and micro moments available to to the player with Arthur are staggering, and the quality of all are, largely, even. And John is a replication of this man in so many ways. Loyal, and tortured by his loyalty. Violent, and conflicted by his enjoyment of bloodshed. But John is every father’s son, cursed to grapple with seeing what his forebearer was, and realising that did not get the job done. Arthur dies with maybe five friends in total, all counted. If Arthur is the modern man then, John is the postmodern man. His relationships, beyond his son and wife, are virtual, all in service of some other. Bonnie is a debt he owes. Bill is a target to please the government. Even the Mexican revolutionary he allies with is an avenue to find Javier. This is where the after shadow of Red Dead Redemption II sinks the shot so well in recontextualising the story: John has to do this, is physically driven to do this, because he carries the weight of Arthur's sacrifice. "Where's my hat" is the first thing he asks after waking in Bonnie's shack, the question now pregnant with specific meaning. The second game’s existence only adds pressure to the artificial reality of John’s new existence. The only truth resides back at his farm, all else is simulation. Clear a bandit camp during a mission? Tough shit, those bad guys respawned when you next come upon it. Killed all the rabbits in an area? They’re back, pal. Won everyone’s money in poker (okay this never happens to me I’m bad at poker), there’s five new strangers there once you turn your back.

Throughout the initial phase of the game, John passes through a world of weirdos and grifters, and he just shrugs and gets on with it because the world has already ended for John, hasn’t it? This question of what he will sacrifice isn't a question: he's lost everything except his wife and child. John’s west has already died, consumed by government and corporate interest, only the west has not realised things are already over. This is presented by the systems of capital that govern the west: the best way to make a buck is to take on a bounty or slay an animal with weapons that sling deadly ammunition. Bonnie’s farm lives on a knife’s edge by comparison, a single bad storm threatens their entire survival and would doom all twenty or so farmers if not for John’s help. Most remarkable about the ageing of this writing is that the detached irony of Grand Theft Auto V is almost nowhere to be seen save the game’s later contention with the Pinkerton agents. Looking back at this text across a decade where all of the little jokes and avatars on the computer emerged through the screen into reality as actual forces, I can’t be anything but impressed by the restraint present throughout most of the game’s writing. The resistance to portray John’s cynicism as a correct understanding of reality is sustained more or less until his temporary victory at the end of the game. The meanest writing is leveled toward the institutions of the state, and, naturally, the peons of the church. Gently (for Rockstar) in the latter instance.

The game is inexorably about “itself” - John is constantly irritated that people who promised to help need yet another favour. He’s forever threatening violence to get what he wants, and performing tremendous acts of murder to help the people around him. He is “in” a video game about, well, Rockstar video games. He switches sides to help the Mexican revolution for a young woman he feels some accountability over, but also because it serves his ends. This selfish barbarism within John is tempered by the endless philosophical discussions John has on horseback. He is us, sitting on the couch, turning to our buddy and saying, “hey, that was kind of fucked up, someone should say something about that” - John is an avatar, after a fashion, animated by his past exclusively in search of a maybe future that mostly involves clicking on heads and riding from here to there, jamming the A button in a rhythm.

He is disposable to the government, yes, but in a way this frees him to be the man he always was: the Arthur that lives in his mind for moments a piece. And he cannot stand that he enjoys this resumption as he hunts down holograms from his past. This sensation is only amplified by playing the game at a buttery smooth sixty frames a second while the graphics and physics engine remain identical to the original deployment of the game. The guns still sound snappy and explosive. The joy of shooting someone’s hat off or blasting a gun away during a duel is there, but feels even more inorganic than before. The delusional quality of the world is brought into sharp relief in the absence of the sequel’s lushness and the presence of this renewed frame rate. New Austin feels cold and infertile, rendered in stunning, empty 4K resolution, a land filled with corpses ready to be birthed by John’s arsenal of firearms. John has already killed a thousand men, his own soul the very first and the very last victim, and he lives among their artificial phantoms.

E.S. Anderson: David, I have an ongoing conversation with a friend about the most recent Superman film. I saw it on one of my rare date nights with my wife and it was a *moment* for us. We left the theater smiling. There was a rainbow. Birds sang. Was this honest fallout from a kid-free evening, or recognition of a film designed to actually improve the happiness of the viewer?

I am fascinated by the response to this film. There were a lot of eyes on it from the beginning, as it is the first big-screen Superman actor change since Henry Cavill's run (he was under-utilized. See The Man from U.N.C.L.E., for reference). James Gunn’s ability to somehow turn Guardians of the Galaxy into a blockbuster had many of us very excited about what was to come. Then he said in an interview that Superman was an immigrant, and that all Superman films were essentially about the politics of the day and “basic human kindness.” That Superman was originally written by two Jewish men living in America during the reign of Nazi Germany, and their experience was indelibly tied to the character. This set off a backlash from every conservative pundit in the country, labelled the film as “woke” months before it was released, and predisposed a decent amount of people to consider it a failure. Ink was spilled; guest speakers were greeted; mayhem reigned.

(Dalton: "He used to run this place?...Why do they want to kill him?"
Tilghman: "He told them they should be nice."
Road House, 1989)

Of course, the outcry had little basis in reality and most every claim was easily refuted by even a half-hearted viewing. But even after the false outrage died away, many still walked away from the theater with a very different reaction than my wife and I. My friend’s qualms were, in order 1) stylistic differences–the Snyder darkness and stoic strength of Cavill’s vs Gunn’s playful and bright approach 2) Luthor wasn’t menacing enough–compared to some really well-realized villains like the current Penguin or Heath Ledger’s Joker and 3) that the film incorporated current events into its storyline that mimic, or at least echo, Ukraine and Russia/Gaza and Israel.

I shrug my shoulders to Problem 1. We each have our own preferences in media and mine are much more inclined towards the campy and joyous than the dark and gritty, especially after the twenty year run of grit introduced by Christopher Nolan. What was once novel is now tired; but I can write that off as personal preference and not a failing of the film.

Problem 2 is similar. The effectiveness of a villain is specific to the individual. What one finds menacing, another finds amusing. For some, a clown is a clown. For some, a clown is IT.

But Problem 3.

I took a class on The Inklings in college and we studied the creative works of Tolkien, Lewis, and Charles Williams. A significant part of our conversation in comparing The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia (both being fantastic works written for children) was that Lewis wrote his with purpose. As my professor said, Lewis wrote, “with his thumb on the scale.” Tolkien wrote, by his own admission, out of a desperate need to escape the realities of his life, and a similarly desperate need to apply his linguistic hobbies. Lewis wished to teach, to develop the morals of his young readers towards Christian virtue. Now which man was the better author?

Yes, the political events of Gunn’s Superman remind us of current world events. Yes, the actions of the villains feel very familiar. Yes, we often wish we had heroes who could drop dictators from the sky. Does that make the film worse than one devoid of any real-world corollaries? And if so, how do we, as writers, choose between instruction and delight?

D.C. McNeill: Tolkien was the superior author, discussion over, verdict rendered. But if we assume I have not solved reality, we must contend with the fact that all work is inherently political, and therefore instructive in some way, intentional or otherwise. Tolkien’s Rings corpus is a Restoration Fantasy, replete with a holy (godly) bloodline and a martyr--the ways and methods Tolkien and Lewis explore these same ideas in their respective works is one I think about often. Not a bit: I was raised by an atheist who read us Lewis, and so I was cautious of any instructive text for a long time.

(side bar: I once blew a trivia night where we stood to win $100 each by confusing Lewis Carrol and C.S. Lewis, a relatable mistake I hope)

I saw Superman with my brother on a freezing evening in the middle of winter, which turned out to be the perfect conditions to experience such a delightful, hopeful film. During the scene in which Superman confronts Luthor, and essentially demands Luthor act like a god damn human being and show some decency, I teared up. I would have cried if alone, instead I misted over a bit and went very quiet on the walk back to the apartment. The film is, yes, a direct exploration of the ongoing genocide in Gaza City, and concludes, rather obviously, that genocide is bad. Period. Superman learns he is from a caste of Kryptonians who wish him to enslave Earth, and he says no, immediately. His moral conviction is refreshing, if not instructive, as you suggest.

Luthor, I suspect, is uncomfortable for conservative pundits because he is a fairly accurate representation of the banal, lame-as-hell tech oligarchs they are in bed with. Lex’s plan to conquer the world and establish a new reality is the thesis of “Patchwork”, the playbook for Silicon Valley. I imagine they dislike the Israel comparison because they know they are presently endorsing the cold-blooded eradication of human beings. I will spare you, and the reader, my elemental disgust and rage: there is a time and a place, and we are discussing stories here but fuck those people.

Earlier in my writing career I would have suggested that all writing ought to be instructive in order to be useful and productive (read here productive to mean producing an excess of its inputs, not strictly productive under capitalism). I find myself these days becoming a theory guy more and more, and valuing representation more and more. Having read one of your manuscripts, I would guess you are inclined toward instruction with a lining of bombastic optimism. My answer though, is that as authors we are charged with approaching each project with care and at times the work chooses as we make it. Some works develop into instructive critiques or warnings, while others exist in some amorphous category of “delightful ennui” - I am thinking of Emily St John Mandel’s novels or indeed everything Alfonso Cuarón writes. Perhaps what I am circling is a question of representation. Do we attempt to represent something that is, something that should be, or something that cannot be.

For me the answer is we ought to represent something we feel is emotionally true. If in a given moment we feel that instruction is that, then go with your chosen god(s). If we think that in fact delight is that, then sure, why not. But we need not make these as mutually exclusive. The rare work that does both are, to me, the nadir of our craft. The Batman (2022), while being dark and moody, is a masterwork about hope in the face of a cynical world while being a tremendous thriller.

Where I come unstuck in my argument is when we contend with works that are… something else entirely. Allow me a digression: at age seventeen, while working full-time in a kitchen, my brother and I visited my Dad’s house in the Sunshine Coast. This, you must understand, is a two hour drive or so. A long drive for us on a normal weekend in Queensland, and for some reason we drove separately. A stupid thing to do given our penchant for beer. I arrive, settle in, crack a few beers, and I facetime my then girlfriend for an hour before dinner.

Dinner is great, and then after more beers, the group agrees to watch Van Diemen's Land (2009). At this point in my life I had watched Alien and plenty of gory horror, but let me tell you Eric, nothing prepared me for this film. There is the idea of cannibalism, and then there is the representation of cannibalism. Halfway through I had to excuse myself and go to bed, and I did not sleep for a very long time. I have vivid memories of the sound of metal meeting flesh to this very day. Van Diemen’s Land is a brilliant and ugly, traumatising text that exists alongside other challenging works like Pathologic and Targets. They are instructive, delightful, and horrifying. And so I leave you with this: what text holds in your mind as both instructive and delightful, and if at all, do these challenging texts occupy your palette?

E.S. Anderson: David, when I consider a challenging film, I immediately think of Straw Dogs (2011). A remake of a 1971 Duston Hoffman film, this movie bothers me in ways that I am still trying to unwrap (none of which relate to production. The actors were fantastic, the pacing was perfect, and the payoff was satisfying). If you aren’t familiar: David, a screenwriter and Amy, an actor, move back to Amy’s hometown in the deep south so that David can write his magnum opus. They hire Amy’s ex-boyfriend and his buddies to fix their roof and this brings forth the conflict that eventually results in an assault on Amy and David having to defend the house by killing everyone.

David’s discomfort with the town and its people reminded me of my own move as a 7-year-old to Alabama, where I understood nothing, knew nobody, and was confronted with completely foreign ideas of masculinity and violence. I was bullied and confused for years, until I found a sense of humor and some passing confidence. The four former-football stars still living in their hometown, working odd-jobs and feeling that life had passed them by, sounded like a few people I still know from home. The casual ease with which these men can enter the home and assault Amy is terrifying, as is David’s helplessness within the social constructs before life-or-death takes over. This movie is on my list of ones I’ll probably never watch again, but it was very well done.

For Christmas this year, I talked my family into watching The Green Knight (2021), written, directed, and edited by David Lowery. I am very familiar with the source text and was hopeful that the movie wouldn’t erase the fact that it takes place during Christmas. Adaptations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight tend to be difficult because the story beats aren’t very familiar or comfortable to us, but I had heard good things and looked forward to it. And the first half of the movie was spectacular. I can’t remember the last time I was so struck by visuals. The cinematography was incredible and they worked very hard to create an artistic rendering that reminded me of Julie Taymor’s work.

Then I really began to question the “why” of this movie. Gawain’s strange adventures on his way to the Green Chapel are fun and weird, but seem very disconnected from the story. Why are there giants and a semi-magic fox? Why did Gawain’s mother, Morgan Le Fay, orchestrate all of this? The character arc we expect–that the young and brash Gawain needs to learn some humility and grow into the successor to Arthur’s throne–never happens. In fact, Gawain states many times over that he is not a knight, and so isn’t held to the chivalric code necessary for many of the plot points. The original tension in the story comes from Gawain trying to be a good knight and failing, not only because he lies to his host to try to prevent his own death, but because he was attempting to maintain the honor of his host’s wife. In the film, Gawain has an orgasm, leaves early, lies to the host, and only removes the garter when a vision shows him how awful his life will be if he runs away again.

I’m left with much of the same frustration I’ve felt with other adaptations. It chooses to be bleak. This story is untouched by popular media. It could have been anything, gone in any direction. Lowery did such an incredible job in creating a mystery and setting up the character of Gawain to go out and quest, to become a better man. But the movie ends with a sigh, that Gawain has flaws that can not be overcome, that he is no knight and never will be. Arthur is old, magic yields no results, the round table is broken, and chivalry is dead. Lowery made a beautiful movie that forced a lack of morality into an inherently moral story, and I think it suffered for it, though most critics seem to disagree with me about this.

D.C. McNeill: I have seen that particular Green Knight adaptation, and I’m reminded of my own feelings toward postmodernism and the kind of implosion of the literary crit movement by way of short form video (truly the most cursed format of any media). That feeling is that we can sometimes inadvertently engage with texts on our terms, not on the terms of the text itself. There is text, and then there is how a text teaches you to read and engage with it, which here we will call conveyance. I think my issue with The Green Night is that the story does a bumpy job of conveying how it should be read. This sounds like it resulted in your expectations being failed because they were incorrectly set.

That said, I think The Green Knight does a tremendous job of holding up the Arthur mythology and spearing it through in a postmodern view. The quest is not noble but a duty. The King is not magical, rather his authority casts a long shadow, indeed. I did enjoy this deconstruction, along with the jaw dropping art direction, but perhaps where I agree with you is that the deflationary tactic of making auto-critical stories can strain my tolerance. I think here in contrast of Community, for example, a TV show that uses its rather silly and comedic pretence to write very thoughtfully about the human experience, almost starting at a deflationary position and attempting to push air back into the narrative.

On this topic, I finished Emily St John Mandel’s bashful novel The Lola Quartet last night, and far from genre fiction, the story makes itself about four musicians and the way their lives bisect and weave through the decade from age seventeen to age twenty-seven. Like all of Mandel’s work the prose is sharp and gorgeous, and I’m left thinking of the book constantly. I have a number of outstanding questions and unsolved plot cul-de-sacs, but mostly I miss living with these characters. Mandel’s tendency to flicker between memory and reality and interiority means that by the end of a novel, you’re not on any one character’s side, but instead beset by the circumstances of their lives. This is true of all Mandel’s novels, except for Sea of Tranquillity which actively undermines this structuring principle by being a novel about time travel. Suddenly the flowing prose and confluence of memory are inseparable from the high sci fi concept. Similar to The Green Knight, this could be a deflationary move, but Mandel manages to hold onto the throttle and keep the ship upright (this evolves into a luxurious and brief meta commentary on the nature of the novel as a produced artefact itself). The critical difference between the two pieces is that Mandel does not begin her story with the protagonist already burdened by their own lack of purity as we see in The Green Knight. Events and time conspire to break the spirit of these characters and challenges them to do good despite the risks and despite a lack of clear moral punctuation.

So in response I would say this: the postmodern movement posits there is among us not a single innocent, not a one, down to the man (ostensibly under the influence of mass capital as Jameson argues). I’m tempted to ask you a question in the opposite direction: do you ever find overtly moral films to be unrealistic or trite at times?

E.S. Anderson: The first example of an “overtly moral” film I can think of is American Sniper. This one is hard, because the film is honestly trying to show the moral toll on troops following orders into battle, who then have to return home to live ordinary lives while the horrors of war haunt and deprive them of the peace they deserve. But in doing so, it only brings forward the tenuous nature of the Iraq War itself, the depiction of the Iraqis, and the nature of trauma.

I'm not saying that a “modern” War movie is easy. Marvel took WW2 with Captain America; DC limped in with Wonder Woman in WW1, not because they wanted to, but because Marvel had already gotten WW2. These are the easy wars, the ones with clear aggressors and easy moral high ground. Can you imagine Captain America in Korea? Or Superman flying at the front of an American invasion of Ho Chi Minh? Comic books won't touch these other wars, because imaginary conflicts are prefatory to the horrific. I sometimes wonder if this complication of social conflict results in the downfall of the social Hero. If the situation is complicated enough, there can't be enough support behind the martyr or war hero that ends the conflict.

I've never been a “flag” guy. I was never a part of a household that flew a flag, so the entire concept is foreign to me, but I've taken enough walks around the neighborhood to know that people enjoy supporting their “thing.” Sometimes it's a university. I can get behind this, as a guy who got a scholarship and an assistantship which made my higher education almost free, my current house, kids, wife, dog, cat, cars, and lifestyle are directly tied to the support they gave me. So fly free, University flags. Let the whole neighborhood know who paid for your inclusion on our cul-de-sac.

We have a neighbor who we're friendly with. Been out to drinks, wave on the way to work, let them know if their house is ablaze–that kind of neighbor. About 2 days after the event, they put up a “We are All Charlie Kirk” flag on their house. And I am so torn, now. Because a relatively forgettable Christian pseudo-politician's name now waves to me every day when I go to work. And nothing in any of our conversations ever hinted at them caring at all about the Christian faith, or values toward this or that, or even *gasp* gun control, the only policy which might have prevented the murder at hand. So now I have a very normal neighbor, with a flag on their house that confuses me.

So my question is–can I still enjoy The Green Knight? The art direction is beautiful and the chutzpah to adapt such an ancient and difficult story, while bringing on Dev Patel, warrants several rounds of applause. But there's this big waving flag out there, and it says that innocence has been lost, that we are now trying to claw our way upward from the muck. And I thought the story deserved more.

I'm standing in the same place, as the world turns about, watching people build an ark to save themselves from the drizzle estimated to last till 4pm, with a chance of fog.

D.C. McNeill: Jarhead is the only acceptable war film in my household. The story of how the jingoism and inhumane rhetoric of the American war machine literally breaks these young men. Most poignant to your note about American Sniper is the scene where the unit we follow are preparing to be deployed. The tension is barbed wire through your gums: they all want to be deployed, because they’re all brainwashed with the dogma that they ought to seek glory in combat, but they’re equally horrified for their lives, and perhaps what this might make them into. When they learn they won’t see combat, one of the squad implodes, yelling and foaming at the mouth, cosmically disjointed by the collapse of this tension. I’ll also note that Iraq “war” is a uniquely American term, that is an invasion and always has been if you hear it from any other piece of soil.

This flag business is almost incomprehensible to me. This is not a thing here. I repeat: not even a little bit of a thing. There are three flags that are flown here with corresponding meanings. The Australian flag denotes a proud racist. The indigenous flag indicates a broad range of “well things are fucked, aren’t they” political view on the imperialistic founding of Australia. And finally the pride flag (and variations there upon), which indicate exactly what you’d imagine. But those are rare. I see maybe one flag a month, tops.

The Kirk flag is perplexing, I grant you that. But we can never know the true heart of people, nor how gullible they are to propaganda (we all think we’re immune, that’s how they get you). The way I explained the flags there has an agenda, all speech is political, after all. In this case I was hoping to convey the alien landscape that is the “United” States of America where a regular person might think it normal to hang a flag that implies we are all infamous gigantic loser, racist and misogynist Charlie Kirk because… he believed in guns? And we all should protect the right we have to be shot? Or perhaps it is simply a dog whistle should the secret police show up: look, I’m one of you. Who can say these days?

I had a Christian friend (don’t laugh, they are real) and we sustained a normal-ish friendship for about eighteen months. I lamented a lack of progressive politics in my country, they lamented the opposite. A real “will they won’t they” situation. I’m no debater. I roundly despise the exercise. But we endured many detailed discussions about morality, and though she’s nowhere near as dangerous in her thinking as a Kirk or Peterson, occasionally the enjoyment of the friendship butted up against the obvious incompatibility of our worldview. Could I still enjoy this relationship, despite this? Only until a comment about “well I don’t mind migrants but I sometimes think the country should be more traditional” caused me to terminate our friendship quietly.

I’ve reread The Hobbit recently, and while the book is superior to anything Carol has done, I cannot stand the English “he’s a lil scamp!” vibe that carries that book. Tolkien's failed rewrite to fit in with The Rings Cycle is the power-clashing of the writing world. Cosmically important objects and locations stult the comedy and whimsy, and vice versa. Is it still funny when Bilbo can’t climb into a tree and the dwarves bicker about who forgot him? Yeah dude. So the question really is: would you still get a beer with The Green Knight, knowing what you know now?

E.S. Anderson: I love how Tolkien built his world–Elves from before the dawn of time, Dwarves who delve deep and craft treasures, men of broken kingly lineage. And then Hobbits are basically just English country gentlemen. Except short, and with fuzzy feet. I like to imagine that the Inklings gave him hell for that.

We're way off topic here, but I think something modern readers miss, and Jackson's trilogy avoided altogether, is the class issue inherent in Sam and Frodo's relationship. Especially for those of us who live outside overt class systems, “the help” doesn't hold much meaning for us. But Frodo and Pippin are the equivalent of landed gentry, and going to Mordor with his gardener is like a duke going to war with his butler. Sam only ever refers to him as Mr. Frodo, and is never corrected, even after Sam bodily carried him up the slopes of Mt. Doom.

The disconnect between the vibe of The Hobbit and the seriousness of The Rings really encapsulates my musings. We have two separate stories, written for different audiences, that are being forced to align. Not to tread on my brother's territory, but Star Wars suffers from this same tension. George Lucas wrote a space epic, then a sequel. Then he started having kids and his audience changed. Now, Disney doesn't know who their target audience is, so they create separate stories for children, teens, and jaded adults, and expect us all to figure out where we belong.

The 1980's saw the first rise of the dark-superhero genre with Frank Miller. His influence was such that darkness became the default worldview. Brightness and hope were relegated to the stuff of childhood. I think that for some, this dichotomy comes at the expense of joy and the appreciation of works that span tones and moods.

I'm sure a further investigation into world events would yield a correlation between hard times and campy, fun content vs periods of economic prosperity that make artists want to delve into the macabre. CNN did a wonderful series on the 1970's, and taught us that so much iconic music and art came in the fallout of terrorist attacks, war, and economic recession. When people are stressed out and hungry, they want an escape, not a reminder of how hard it is to live.

So right now, I feel that I would buy the Green Knight a beer and try to convince him that the world is not so bad off, after all. If he can just keep his head, the next cycle will start, the darkness will bleed away, and we can have new stories again.

D.C. McNeill: I always think of the initial interactions with Sam, Frodo and Gandalf in the novels, where to Frodo, Sam is merely a tool to be deployed in this conspiracy. What I find delightful about the way Tolkien apprehends the Hobbits is that Frodo, Pippin and Merry are effectively landed university pals. They are Frodo’s “special friends” after all. Not until much later when Sam meets the elves for the first time does Frodo actually realise Sam is a person with interiority. And only then after Frodo is no longer landed. Bilbo goes “there and back again” but by the time Frodo leaves the Shire, he has sold Hobbiton, and some real estate sleight of hand makes it appear that he still holds a new home, but in truth he does not. He shutters his entire life before leaving on this quest. In a real sense he joins the petty bourgeoisie in service of defeating the ultimate evil because his uncle’s weird friend asked him to. The most British thing, ever, in my opinion.

Reflecting on the last few months since we started writing to each other in much the way that Christopher and John Ronald Reuel did, I find myself moved by your position, even if I remain perpetually finger-wavey at the insistence that delight remains a key motivator for fiction. We recently finished The Road on our podcast, and your brother repeatedly asked what the point of a novel is if it only exists to convey misery and the most unpleasant parts of the human experience. Setting aside that the book contains many of the most cosmically perfect and evocative prose ever committed to page. In response to which I have been forced to clarify my position: these works allow contrast. Felix Guattari, famously a cohort of Deleuze, wrote that one of capital’s most insidious mechanisms is to distract us from addressing the wounds at the heart of society. We mediate our experience with consumerism and economy rather than contending with the horrors we inflict on each other. And I think that fiction, in being a form of estrangement, can help us colocate the contours of that darkness, and in doing so, perhaps resolve some small aspect of it within ourselves.

Not that fiction can replace all of the many proven tools, but rather that fiction ought to serve to instruct, through grief, and through delight, and that when we follow the turtles all the way down, they might be the same thing after all. Similar expressions of the electrochemical rails that stutter and swoop within our minds. We are, all of us, delightful contrivances convinced we are more. And as Guattari tells us: once we set aside our pretensions and aesthetics, it’s all a question of machines, isn’t it?

E.S. Anderson is the co-host of Diamonds in the Rough Draft podcast and author of Science-Fiction/Fantasy titles for children and young adults.

Having played two hours and change of ZERO PARADES For Dead Spies demo I'm left with a few elemental questions about the story's pursuit of communism as a central topic, especially given the studio's carnal history of obliterating the original creative team. The excellent reportage of People Make Games outlines a series of unethical, fanged board room sleight of hand that becomes somewhat inseparable to any consideration of Disco Elysium’s follow up, ZERO PARADES For Dead Spies, especially being a game that slings the word communist and techno fascist within minutes.

The story concerns CASCADE, an operative for the Opera, a secret communist agency engaged in a phantom war with the techno fascists who run the country. This is revealed within minutes of the game commencing, gesturing to a slippery aspect of Disco Elysium that many of us spent pages and pages trying to convey: the experience of playing Disco Elysium is one of slow, constant realisation. No one ever sits you down to explain The Pale (unless you literally badger Joyce into telling you about the world) but when you find a bottle of Pale Aged wine, something in your brain clicks. The game’s writing is an experiment in tasking you to read not between the lines but below the lines and before the lines.

ZERO PARADES contains flashes of this writing. A man selling music records belies the taste of his customers, the art of the cassette gone to hell thanks to the destruction of taste at the hands of capitalists. He is truly insufferable, and, as my friend put it, “reminds me of you talking about booktok when we’re out drinking” which is… unfortunately accurate. The world building of the banal, flavourless slop peddled by the new ruling class infecting this man’s special interest is well realised, and perfectly aligned to how this happens in the real world. The supposed fantastical turned mundane is transposed from Disco as well. A leering creep watching the bizarre is just a logistics employee, in perpetual corporate punishment by his employer, unable to quit but unable to do the unethical thing. A young woman’s father and friend are missing after investigating a phone tapped by the fascists, and she rightly feels a little silly admitting this is what she suspects occurred.

Being concerned with a kind of cyberpunk grunge rather than a decaying soviet docklands, ZERO PARADES’ setting allows for more open discourse about the state of the world. This produces an odd doubling where characters voice displeasure with the state openly but double-speak on the specifics. This is a promising combination that one expects to perform the magic trick of Disco once again. I am, however, not convinced the idea wasn't meant for Kim as the protagonist. The notion of communist spy craft to counter techno-fascist spies feels coconstituent with the ending of Disco and Kim's realisation that traditional policing is insufficient to all scenarios. You could imagine a story set ten years after Disco picking up in the same way ZERO PARADES does with Kim undercover performing spycraft in a new city.

I'm reminded here of Gilory describing the need to focus Bourne's identity into action and rely on Damon's micro-performances when writing a spy, but the difference here is the words have to do that heavy lifting and that leaves much to be done across the length of this game. Visually, the UX of ZERO PARADES feels as fresh and electric as in Disco, each click and interface a glitchy, neo noir collection of secretive documents and smuggled evidence. The decaying town built around a stale canal is interrupted by green and purple graffiti, occasioning after Gibson’s entropic future Singapore. The writing reflects this cyberpunk tilt that hums alongside the spycraft. “Is he zeroed out” your handler asks through an encrypted telephone. A one-time trip code begins the mystery of your assignment. CASCADE’s rain slick straight out of Blade Runner 2049. Cyberpunk is here, the game announces loudly.

But as much as the individual components feel like Disco, the difficulty of engaging with the project is a familiar one. The executives of ZA/UM obliterated the original creative team in a messy bid for control of the software firm and for profit, only to write a sequel concerned with spies attempting to fight back against techno fascists. The irony is… visceral and didactic. The closest colocation for these problems is the time weathered question “can you truly make an anti-war film without making a war film” - to which 2005’s Jarhead answered a resounding “yes, but you have to really want it.” And so ZERO PARADES is charged with a similar quest, whether the new writers want to take on this task or not.

Art about communism feels especially a heavy burden in our moment when we see democracy failing around the world, even in the once goliath moral authority of the US where secret police murder citizens, the government threatens war with Iran for a genocidal dictator and pedophiles run the country. Just one example of the knife’s edge, where other countries are actively experiencing their own genocides and existential violence at the hands of capitalists. These moments of interval - between what was and what will be as the ruling class decimate reality - are often retrospectively applied to pressure art of the moment. This is useful, certainly. Looking back at the sequel to Starship Troopers or the dreadful Jarhead follow ups, the history of franchises capitalising on established works of political significance is not a well decorated one. To state the obvious: when money men acquire an anti-capital intellectual property they are motivated to write backwards from a piece that, generously, represents a threat to said money men. This, combined with the Neo-liberal insistence on producing “balance” because “there are good people on both sides” is how you arrive at a pro-war Jarhead sequel, for example. So while I don’t think ZERO PARADES is going to be pro-fascist, one has to wonder how the writers will earnestly pen critiques of fascists in bed with technocratic mega corporations when the studio itself is so deeply compromised.

The fortunate position of the critic allows me to perform this cautious finger wagging without committing one way or the other to a perspective on the available content of the game. Since beginning this piece I’ve since finished the available demo, and my guess is that the game will be perfectly fine, and feeling enough like Disco to serve the casual consumer. In so far as there is a casual consumer of CRPG’s concerned with the finer workings of Marx and the tides of mass capital in a dystopic cyberpunk city. Which feels an odd place to find the follow up work for ZA/UM who many of us once thought of as the ultimate resolution of a desire for modern, well written Planescape and Fallout. Replaced by Larian, then as swiftly left wanting as the CEO told some fairly dreadful lies about the studio’s “love” of generative LLMs.

ZERO PARADES is still a little rough (audio occasionally fails to play or is a take that isn’t matched with the prose) but the bones of the Disco engine are here, and we know the format is absolutely killer. In the category of game design, all aspects are closer to art and sound rather than graphics and audio respectively, but I struggle to get under and in front of the studio’s history. The trouble, I suspect, is what that art will be in service of. It’s all just art, at the end of the day, but I wonder if ZERO PARADES will crumble under the phantom of its own history. How can the game write jokes about being pro-cop when the owners of the studio are likely believers in the thin blue line? Only time, and a great deal of words, will tell.

Fall literature spoils on the bloated wooden boards. You recognise the shape of names--fiction you once knew and loved--now reduced to damp, cloggy promises that threaten your balance. The world has emptied out, yet these recollections stick to the sky, unbidden.

This week the gang cracks into Cormac McCarthy's seminal classic, The Road (2006) and try to unpick the behemoth that is the novel.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

J.M. Anderson: it really hit me hard. Especially run-on sentences and incomplete sentences and stuff. I'd have to go back, I don't what this is this talking about, you know? So that really took me out of it at the at the beginning. Just the the way that it's written.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. Well, that that's kind of my point about like um McCarthy, you know, in that introduction, the first thing they say is like McCarthy writes like no one and no one else writes like McCarthy. And that's for a really good reason. Like these are hard books. You know, it's like when you sit down to read a Gene Wolf novel and you have to promise yourself that you won't stop and look up words and instead sort of dig around for context clues or what a particular section might mean or like might imply.

it's why I thought this would be really good for this show because there are some scenes in this book. Well, I don't know what happened, y'all. Like, just truly, there's some scenes in this where I'm like, I don't know... I know chronologically what is being told to me, but I don't know what it means.

I think there's this this passage from Vereen M. Bell that nails exactly what J.M. is talking about with like the pros being being difficult and don't worry this we will read a lot of this book because I think it's really illustrative to do that. But this this is a really good summation. This is Vereen M. Bell writing about the the kind of um the exact thing J.M. is pointing out:

"There is a powerful pressure of meaning in McCarthy's novels, but the experience of significance does not translate into communicable abstractions of significance. In McCarthy's world, existence seems both to precede and preclude essence, and it paradoxically derives its importance from this fact alone. The vivid faciticity of his novels consumes conventional formulae as a black hole consumes light. He is Walker Percy turned inside out--intuitive, unideological, oblivious to teological fashions, indifferent if not hostile to the social order, wholly absorbed in the strange heterocosm of his own making."

D.C. McNeill: There's one thing I want to highlight and then we can really get stuck in. What I've just tried to illustrate there is how much people have written and talked about this book and McCarthy as an author um for this exact reason, right? People like me are saying "This might be the best book ever written." And then you pick it up and read it and you're like, "This is really hard to read and I'm not sure if I'm enjoying the art of reading this thing that's in front of me." And both are true.

J.M. Anderson: "The one caveat that I did not let myself form a solid opinion yet is that I do not know if this book is supposed to be written by the kid who doesn't know English and doesn't know how to write aside from the little tiny bits that he was taught before dad probably dies. So the broken grammar is part of the diegesis maybe. So I was giving it a grain of salt, part of me was like just stick with it. Maybe this was done on purpose and then the other part of me was like nah.

D.C. McNeill: So I mean it's done on purpose but it's not like a it's not going to cash out in a-- "and here is the purpose", right?

Patrick Lovern: For me actually – because I some similar experiences at some points, you know had to read a paragraph went what the fuck did I just read and then I had to go back and read it twice more but strangely enough like the lack of grammar and syntax actually made it quicker to read for me, you know it's truly a conversion of a stream of consciousness from author to reader. I feel like I was able to blaze through it because the lack of grammar. But also I have been pretty intensely reading like the last year like very difficult things.

Yeah it was... I felt like it was way more effective that way because I feel like I know in a normal book like you're forced to cohhere to the structure of proper grammar and stuff like that, and you're always stopping and starting. Whereas this one it just flowed through me kind of thing, and it was yeah all the more better for it I think.

You iron the shirt one more time, just in case. Your partner watches you from the corner of their eye, pretending to be distracted by the news. You've had it on for a week straight now, muted with the subtitles on. Barely able to leave the couch save for the essentials. You keep waiting for the moment it turns out to be a mistake. Of course it's a mistake. And then very suddenly it's the the night, and not until you sit in the car with the cardboard containing your pill in the breast pocket of your jacket that it becomes real.

The gang see out the year with the only Christmas Apocalypse film David could find, Silent Night, a blistering black comedy.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: So, I picked this film because I can't tell if it's good or not. And I think it's really funny. And I kind of have predictions for what everyone thought.

Like I think that Darth and Eric probably loved it and had a bunch of stuff to wax lyrical about. I think Patrick thought it was mid. I think Alex still has not fully decided whether it's good or not.

I think Daniel probably hated it, was my guess. Those are my, that's the gifts I've brought in my Christmas sack, as it were. But let's go to, let's go to Darth first.

Yeah, what did you think?

Darth: Overall, I adored it. I almost immediately rewatched it, especially because like right when I finished watching, Eric was beginning to watch it.

And so I was like, oh, let's get on the phone and we can watch it together because I really want to watch it again. There's a lot that I would, I think that the film would have been a lot stronger had they made different decisions.

Some of the backstory stuff, if they had moved that to on screen, it would have heightened all of the drama way more. Like all of the parents go into the film already having made the decision.

If all of that had taken place on camera, I think it would have been an overall stronger thing. But aside from that, I absolutely adored it.

D.C. McNeill: Okay. Interesting. Sort of what I thought you would say. Yeah. It's... okay. Interesting. Patrick, vibe, vibe check.

Patrick: I loved it, actually. I thought it was hilariously unhinged. I thought a lot of the events and scenarios that take place were very relatable and raw.

Like, last day on earth, confessions and stuff like that. I thought that was all really inspired. Yeah.

In terms of apocalypse stuff, it was quite... The whole thing with the pills and the government, that was an interesting premise. I don't think I've really seen that before.

Overall, I was pretty warm in this movie. I thought the script was really sharp. I thought all the characters, or rather all the lines of dialogue were just funny or interesting or kept to the story moving in some capacity.

Yeah, I thought it was a pretty good film.

D.C. McNeill: Okay. Glowing, almost. The second most positive path has been all year about anything, I think.

It's been that kind of year. Danielle, you were kind of, I assume, the one that was going to be the biggest hater of this film. What did you think?

Danielle: Yes, so for full transparency, I have not seen the full movie.

I only watched till, I don't even know where I ended up stopping, probably forty some minutes in, I want to say.

D.C. McNeill: So you got the hook, at least, the twist on the...

Danielle: Yeah, and it's funny because I did know the twist, I just forgot what it was, and I was like, because I saw when this movie came out, like what, in 2021, I remember watching the trailer and being like, hmm, I don't know how I feel about this, but

okay. But you know, so far, I wasn't a huge fan of it. I thought it was a little on the nose. And just, I don't know, everybody like talks so fast.

Like it reminds me of like Gilmore Girls, like of just like constantly going, like there's no time to process anything. But you know, it's just hard for me to give a definitive rating since I haven't seen it all the way through.

But so far, like I ended up being like, okay, well, maybe I'm glad I don't have to watch the whole thing.

But you know, I feel like that's a lukewarm take considering like I quite literally like watched like an hour before this, because time has just unfortunately been crazy.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, it's this time of year. Look, I mean, you can see where the film is going, I assume.

Danielle: Yes. Yeah, it does

D.C. McNeill: If I think it's the my general reading on this is like, if you're a genre person, you basically get to like about where you're up to and you go, okay, I know how this is going to go. I know what the moves are.

I think to Pat's point, it's twisted enough that it does continue to make jokes about stuff. And you're like, I don't know if you should be joking about that. And I do think that's quite an admirable trait. Like it's willing to push some lines right up to the end.

Danielle: I mean, if I could say one thing real quick, like I did think the acting was very good. Like I thought everybody was doing an excellent job. And hats off, I generally think the kids.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, it's a film with like annoying kids, but like the characters acknowledge they're annoying.

So it doesn't like, you know, like a normal film where like they get like a kid actor and the kid actor is really annoying. And then everyone pretends the kid's like delightful. I like in this film that everyone's like, Kitty, shut the fuck up.

Like that's really fun. That everyone hates this fucking kid. That to me is, that's storytelling.

Patrick: You're harshing the end of the world vibe.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, be chill.

The steady trickle of the river reminds you of home, but as you blink, you find yourself not on the abandoned streets of Night City, rather, the glittering white pillars and spires of Colony One surround you. There can be such oppression in order, can't there?

This week the cast analyses Emily St John Mandel's conclusion to a trilogy of novels to try and figure out what exactly is going on.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: I want to preface this discussion with, I've read a lot of critical pieces on the book since last week, and I've done a lot of thinking about where this book sits for me, having read it a couple of times, or I guess three or four times now, having

Thought a lot more about Mandel's work throughout the discussion with you guys. And where I think it has value is maybe different than what I was thinking when we went into this unit.

So yeah, I'm curious if you guys feel like this was a sufficient payoff for us having our little Mandel mini-unit divergence, and yeah, where you guys land.

I want to get a Pat first because I realized that you've had a couple of days to chew on it now. So yeah, what do you think about this whole thing and how it sits within the larger corpus of Mandel's trilogy as in?

Patrick: Well, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. It is so different from the first two books.

It's a confronting thing thinking about, does a high concept ruin a thematic cohesion, i.e. does time travel distill this trilogy of stories that are deeply human and relatable and, you know, like, you know, rooted in reality and the human experience?

And then it's like, does time travel obscure that or, I don't know, like unfocus it or some way? I last night, I was I was literally in the shower and I had a thought and I was like, I need to write this down.

But I've actually I've wrote something down. I know.

And a literal shower of thought too.

D.C. McNeill: Now, folks, this is this is what this this job is all about, is going away and doing something else and then being like, oh, my God, I have to write that down and then writing it down and forgetting where you've written it down.

That's half of my experience with this job. Yeah, what do you got?

Patrick: And because I've written because I've written this down, it's much more poetic than I normally am.

So just, yeah.

Emily St John Mandel's trilogy ends by focusing the series' thematic lens in an unexpected way. She wonders what makes human interaction so special.

To get ontological, it's where drama is created, that clash of binaries that generates infinite nuance in between. It makes me think of that Niels Bohr quote, in the great drama of existence, we are ourselves both actors and spectators.

He's talking about quantum physics there, but equally it's a good expression for how human drama is an equal and opposite partner to time.

Time is documenting supernovas, yes, but it's also hosting the most intricate interplay of complex variables you'll see anywhere in space, i.e. human drama. You need time in order to have human drama.

She even choosing to jump on stage to help Arthur Leander. Miranda falling and dropping the both keys into the ocean. Morella choosing to ignore Vinson at that bar.

These are moments, both decisions and acts of random fate, that only take form in time, and which in turn changes the course of the universe. And only us humans really understand what that means.

Mandel then asks, but what if decisions and fate were reversible? Would drama still mean the same thing, produce the same feelings?

Would we put any less value on the past because of the sobering fact that the past is malleable and not, in fact, irreversible? And to that question, Mandel says, the time police are on their way.

D.C. McNeill: Round of applause to Patrick Lovern. Well done. Yeah, nihilism, right, is the thing that she puts square in her lens and doesn't spend any time discussing that.

The book just kind of ends. And there's some of the criticism I read. This is by Lily Zhao, and this is her article, provocatively titled, Emily St John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility is an Overly Simplistic Exploration of Nihilism.

I roundly disagree with her thesis and would have to do a lot of work to kind of recompose her argument to make it sort of feel like something I agree with. But this is what she, this is the bit that I think relates to what you were talking about.

Through these intersecting timelines, Mandel raises interesting conundrums about time travel and the value of human life. Zoe warns Gasperry not to attempt to save the lives of the people of the past, in fear that it will compromise the future.

She proclaims that the job requires an almost inhuman level of detachment. Additionally, multiple characters throughout the novel grapple with the possibility they are living in a simulation.

Gasperry refers to the anomaly as a corrupted file, and he ponders the possibility that the world as he knows it is not truly real. This worry is compounded by the fact that, in the book's futuristic timelines, very little of the characters' lives as they see them are truly real.

The humans who inhabit moon colonies live under an artificial sky that is meant to resemble that of Earth. To communicate across space, characters utilize holograms that give only the appearance of a face-to-face meeting.
On a more abstract level, the characters are unfounded in their worry. They are, after all, living in a simulation called a novel.

And, you know, I think that's the most salient and provocative part of Lily's piece there, because I think this is also a book that is using these ideas to think about what a novel is. It's a book about books, and it's a book about...

It's a book about Mandel's books, and it's a book about her reflecting on what it has meant to be an author that has done this thing of writing a bunch of books that have the same characters in them that are nominally not really sequels or prequels

to each other. I have so many big and complicated and unwieldy thoughts about what you said as well, which I'm sure we'll sort of really dig into as we talk through this book.

Many moments preceded my enjoyment of Dustpunk, but I knew I would need to write about the game when a factory of workers raised their hands to support an unborn child, and I finally broke. I paused the game and cried for a moment, just to hold myself in the moment of such profound grief. Which is, ultimately, the heart of the story. The crumbling city of Dredgeport is bent on churning people into profit and oil while the Emperor and his kin thrive in the Palace District.

The game is structured around a series of competing clocks (ala Blades In The Dark). Each clock has a number of segments that count up as you invest money or time to progress to a positive outcome, or clocks count-down toward a given outcome based on the number of in-game days. You play a soldier returned from the Empire’s bloody war, a husk of a person. A zealot preacher keeps you alive, but almost immediately the vibes are wrong and it’s clear this is a temporary reprieve. Each morning you wake with a limited number of actions per day and a limited number of actions per night, and almost all actions that progress time require a dice-roll. Your character is traumatised and weakened from the conflict, and so most mornings you wake not renewed and rested, but tortured and stressed. You can spend double the time on a task to prepare, increasing your odds of success, but not guaranteeing a better outcome. This is where Dustpunk swerves from contemporary siblings: stress is a punishing, distressing mechanic that shows no signs of abatement until very, very late in the game. When your stress ticks too high, you start to break dice until you finally break inside, and injure a skill. The only way to heal stress is to take solace, an addictive heroin allegory that grows weaker with each use.

The core tension is competing priorities, clocks ticking as time runs forward, but really who you align yourself to and why, and whose interests you advance. And which of those interests align with your own, and which are just the right thing to do. Placed in opposition to ensuring you have enough money for food, shelter, medicine and sanity.

Early on I fell in with a clutch of beggars, using my sneak to five-finger discount enough money for food. And then one night my stress peaked and my sneak skill broke. The problem with this, dear reader, is that I dump stated into sneak, and was suddenly faced with the alternative of working in an incredibly dangerous factory, where at least once a day I injured myself on the assembly line. Which meant I wasn’t making enough money to visit the doctor, and even when I did, with my stress high I often failed to be healed, losing more coin and growing more stressed. This spiralled toward a progression-hole which plagues the genre, until I clicked on a random event on the map. I drifted along the streets and paused beneath the curve of a church. Voices rose in song within, and for a moment I felt a glimmer of hope, and peace. And my stress decreased by a few ticks. Enough to recover a dice. I went back to the factory, sailed through three shifts without incident, and then with the wheel ticked up, I met the other factory workers, a delightful thruple being crushed by the factory conditions. And so, after a few more shifts, we start planning a unionisation effort, and things seem less bleak.

Meanwhile the no-nonsense bartender Zai who poured me drinks a few nights a week to fight off stress asks me to recover scrap for her latest build, a furnace to teach other mechanists the ropes. So, even as I plan to unionise, I sneak back into the factory after dark to swipe scrap components and tools. The game never punished me for this strange dual position, but I felt an itching guilt and compromise. Fuck the factory bosses, obviously, but if my theft came to light, would that undercut our union effort? And both are on a timeline so I’m doing little else, my wanted level increasing with each evening I toss in fitful nightmares, sleeping in the sewers with the other veterans.

I illustrate this spiral of compromise and conflicting priority to communicate the feeling of Dustpunk at its best. A series of best of bad choices, and irreconcilable goods crashing over the shores of war, and the violence of the plasm factory.

The games sharpest political writing arrives with Markov, a straight forward rearrangement of Marx. With a curious twist: Markov has been forcibly addicted to solace, a dreadful secret that could crumble his entire Collaborist movement. This turned out to be incredibly fitting for my character who refused to touch Solace, even once, on principle. After chastising Markov for risking our revolution, I set about printing pamphlets and performing speeches about politics. The Emperor’s war is just an excuse to solidify his power while producing an endless supply of bodies to churn into plasm. His rule is not divine but greedy and ugly, and so on.

Markov is a useful stand-in for Marx, and his ideology is reduced into simple beats that are arranged in unobtrusive ways. Markov never explains use-value and exchange-value, but we’re provided the broad outline of the philosophy. Though the practiced reader will understand the game’s structuring principals also communicate Marxism.

Perhaps the weakness of Dustpunk is a structural issue a lot of RPG’s run into, the “I want to play more but don’t quite fancy it” hump. This occurs in Disco Elysium, for example, when Kim leaves to take a body back to the morgue or the day before the bridge opens. The timing is often unique but similar for most players. I remember Josh Sawyer calling this the “about to bite down” moment of a meal. One must simply bull through and take that next large bite, and then everything falls into place.

For me this occurred the night before a strange, wealthy socialite summoned me to her club. She asked me to do a small job at first: gather some gossip. Then blackmail, and then very suddenly she’s asking me to murder one of my co-revolutionaries. The city is on the precipice, and The Ossuary sees only an opportunity for power.

The game hangs all of these ideas on an evolving revolution that goes from idea to reality so much faster than I was prepared for. I won’t spoil where this goes, or the late game “currency” twist which manages an impressive zag to undercut the typical RPG late-game economy curve. When I realised what this twist meant my panic over certain clocks reached fever pitch and I sacrificed my body and mind for the cause, pushing myself day after day, night after night, desperate to keep the machine of revolution turning. This never errs into full-blown main character syndrome: the writing keeps a close handle on the fact this takes an army, and diverse leaders with diverse interests and priorities doing huge amounts of work. The cascading pressure feels fitting, as does the necessary violence of revolution, and neither end up reproducing the aesthetics of what they critique.

I’m reminded here of the argument of moralism which we hear endlessly in our modern context. “It’s inevitable, keep up or get left behind” they tell you, compromising before a cheque has even been written. Meanwhile profiteers like Dresden sell their soul to the highest bidder and soldiers serve the Empire, knowing it is wrong. On this note, my resolution with Dresden involved a distant church, a preacher and the sweatiest five minutes of gameplay so far. I managed to finesse the situation but it was a close thing indeed. Proof that even after the dust settled, the game still had knives to twist.

I knew Dustpunk worked for me as a whole when, with my revolution resolved, each closing conversation with core characters left me in tears and punching the air in equal measure. The game is a radical argument for hope in the face of oppression, and understands that this is an adversarial position. Choices have a cost, and Dredgeport always collects. You must fight, comrade, together we can take back our city.

Caiette sleeps beyond the treeline. Here in the forest you are truly alone. Your loafers perch on the lip where the sand meets the sucking mud. Here, so far from the world, there may as well not be a world at all. The horizon and the trees are the only real thing.

This week the team try to peel back the layers of Emily St John Mandel's perplexing time travel novel Sea of Tranquility.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

Patrick: So suddenly a lot of things made sense about you foregrounding supernatural more sci-fi stuff in the last two works. I was really sure that there was going to be nothing like this.

I thought yet again, it was going to be the possible feelings of what might happen in the future were always going to be fantastical and sci-fi-ish. I never thought we'd actually get to the point where it would go straight into sci-fi.

But yeah, it's interesting. It's as if you just read, it's as if the author just translated what they had been doing, which is completely grounded non-sci-fi thing into sci-fi all of a sudden.

It just has all the same structures and hallmarks and themes and stuff. And you know, the feelings of human experience in that book.

But you know, it's also quite interesting how like, she has to speculate a lot about what the future is going to be and how people will live in experience in settings in the future and how they possibly are similar to the feelings we have today.

But yeah, it's a bold swing to take, especially the time jumps she does. Yeah, and I really admire it. I think it's kind of...

So far, I like the previous one better, but I feel like this one is about to go into some crazy, insane, interesting direction.

And I'm here for it.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, this is a real... You built your career off writing these really meditative, literary fiction type stories, and then you wake up on a Thursday and you're like, fuck it.

What if it was all actually part of a big sci-fi trapping? And there's some... You know, it's...

I read The Singer's Gone last week, and then I read The Lola Quartet this week, two of Mandel's other works, and they're just literary fiction. Like this is a complete... This is a real post, Station Eleven.

You know, Mandel has escaped containment from Canada, is getting published everywhere. And the audacity to be like, yeah, my third big book. This is pretty incredible, I think.

Whether you like it or not, I think like, yeah, as you say, it's a swing, and a lot of authors will go their entire careers without swings that look like this. So, yeah, it's interesting.

So, I'll explain why we stopped where we stopped toward the end, but yeah, it shit's about to happen is what I would say. Darth, what about you?

Because this, I think is, I can't tell, I think that at this point, the stopping point, I'm making a prediction. This stopping point is Darth's worst nightmare of the book.

I think when you finish the book, you're gonna think it's like the best thing ever. But I'm curious where I find you right now, sort of, at the two-thirds mark.

Darth: Okay, so Station Eleven had me thinking it was sci-fi, and then rug pulling, so it wasn't. Glass Hotel had me thinking it wasn't sci-fi, and then rug pulling me so that it might be, but it might not be, we couldn't really tell.

So, I have not let myself assign any meaning to anything in this book until we finish it.

So, in my mind, there is no time travel yet, it could be a dream, it could be real, we don't know what's happening, and I will not dedicate my mind to anything until we get to the end, because I don't trust Mandel.

The collapse is an apocalypse first in your mind, then when you learn that it's all over, a sheer, cosmic relief. At least now the lies can stop, and this ugly thing can end at last.

David, Pat and ‪@DarthdYT‬ close out their discussion of Emily St John Mandel's sleep hit and try to figure out what the book is doing.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D. C. McNeill: Now, I finished this book. There's two things I want to say before we get started.

The first is that I did a disservice on the last episode, Pat, where you asked a little bit about Emily St John Mandel's relationship with sex, and I was like, gosh, she's just not that interested in writing about it. I was wrong.

Someone on the Patreon DM'd me and went, look, and they asked to remain anonymous. Fair enough.

They were like, listen, it was a really eloquent point, but you need to read The Singer's Gun, because that is Emily St John Mandel's book, functionally about sex. I did that this week.

The Singer's Gun is a novel that basically follows a, I guess they're second-generation immigrant cousins, Anton and Arya. Their parents run a clothing store. It's like a tchotchke furniture thrift store, antique store blend in Manhattan.

And all of the furniture they sell is stolen. And the book kind of follows Anton's life. And growing up, he immediately falls in love with his cousin.

And that's kind of like the beginning of his sexual awakening. And then marries a woman that he definitely shouldn't marry, who they have a terrible relationship, and is having an affair with this woman, Eleanor, the whole time.

The book is sort of about, it's still written quite keenly from the female perspective in that it's about the connection and the absence of that connection as it relates to sex that like actually matters.

So like Eleanor, the character, while she's having this affair, she's in a relationship with his boyfriend, Gabriel, and he's been on these like depression pills that mean he has no sex drive.

That's kind of why she starts the affair in the first place. But the book really centers like, it's not lurid and it's not torrid, it's like really dealing with these things as like elemental facts of reality.

And so I think that to more thoroughly answer your question from last time, Pat, I think that Mandela is not necessarily interested in sex itself as like an act, but the things that it produces in us as people and the things that it produces in us in

its absence as well. And the way that some connection can be sustained without it and some connection can't be sustained without it.

But reading that book, it really felt like she'd sat down and went, let me think about this once, so I don't have to worry about it ever again. That type of exercise.

Patrick: Yeah. I mean, that makes sense to me. She's very interested in the complicated, messy relationships that come from such intimate acts, like in the before and after of that kind of thing.

But yeah, it sounds like from that description as well, that she also still doesn't go into the very, as you said, carnal aspects of sex and stuff.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. Yeah. I think like a male author, and certainly I've noticed like the way that I write about sex insofar as I have, because obviously the Maynard Trigg series is like Young Adults, so it's not really in that series.

But I'm working on like a side novel set in the same universe just to figure out like what is sex in this universe like mean and look like.

It's like, yeah, I guess I'm interested in Sea of Tranquility because that ends up being a book about a lot of things.

But seminally, it becomes a book about like every, I think everything Mandel has written, which is like how do you not live the wrong life and then die, right? That line from Station Eleven.

And a big part of that to her seems to be, who do you choose to be vulnerable to over like large periods of time? I think that's like a like a foundational piece of her corpus.

Darth: I think it's worth pointing out that that the both Station Eleven and this ended up being much more about like relationships than about whatever the the quote-unquote mystery was, right?

And I think the same thing can be said about all of the sex scenes that we've not seen in this book, because each one is just indicative of a relationship either shifting or, you know, something like that, where the point of it is what is being

indicated. Does that make sense?

D.C. McNeill: Eric, we live in precarious times: I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. This is for myriad reasons: the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the rise of fascism in America, and most keenly the fact that I am not dealing with my thirties… particularly well. I released my first shitty novel at nineteen and my first real novel was published at twenty-three. That was… a while ago now. This has me thinking about time and those big, scary choices that feel like things other people do: adult stuff. I bought my apartment in 2022 and I’m already looking at upgrading to a townhouse / a nicer apartment in no small part because the Olympics are coming to Brisbane and we’re all desperately trying to outpace the subsequent economic collapse.

More procedurally, something I really struggle with is some simple executive tasks because of my depression. My shower grout is worn down: I need to go to the hardware store and buy silicon. I drove over a nail and need to take my tire in for repair. The balcony needs a power clean. It all goes on the backburner. Not because I lack the time (I don’t have 3 kids, a job, and a wife studying like you) it’s just not something I can do without a companion. One of my closest friends Lucy is a therapist and she calls this paired behaviour. The avoidance is mostly harmless, but occasionally gets me in avoidable trouble. Last night I accidentally fudged a password reset on my recording PC because I’d been putting it off for weeks, and I had to stay up til one in the morning fixing it. I do not recommend this.

As I get older, I’m struck by how much my thinking about time and death has changed and how small these annoyances I seem unable to resolve really are. I find myself instead focused on writing and reading as much as possible, while seeking out activities in the real world: they’ve made public transport 50 cents where I live so the barrier to slinging a laptop in my bag and hopping on the bus is lower than it’s ever been. To say nothing of the convenience of being able to have ice cold beers and enjoy the last few weeks of perfect weather in Brisbane before it gets hot again… I sometimes think about my last beer.

I love beer. I think about the (if we don’t burn our planet into a ruinous hellscape in the next decade) conversation in a doctor’s office where they tell me that I have to give up drinking to extend my life. I wonder if I’ll even want to do that. Either way, there will be a last beer. A last book I publish. A last podcast I record. A last… well, you get the idea. It is within this reflection that I think very often about the ecology of my life. I wonder if I’ll remember my incredibly annoying neighbours across the road who are incapable of shutting up for five minutes. I wonder if the irritation I feel at how long it’s taken me to donate a few bags of clothes to goodwill will be resonant all those years later. I suspect not. I suspect I will recall my favourite restaurants. My favourite work colleagues. My favourite books. My favourite experiences. And, probably, my favourite beers: shout out Range Brewing, Aether and Happy Valley. The corollary, too: what will I be remembered for? By readers. By audience. By colleagues.

I’m curious if legacy and memory is something you think about often. And if it is, how your relationship has changed as you’ve grown older (and, in theory, wiser).

E.S. Anderson: David, bold to begin this letter series with a simple, “But what about death, then?” But, death, or legacy, has definitely been close to mind these last few months, for the global reasons you described, and some very personal to me. I lost my mother, age 67, in 2024, and my aunt, age 80, this year. I have seen my father navigate the passing of his brother-in-law, his father-in-law, his father, his mother, his wife, and his sister, in a span of 25 years. Our family has gotten “good” at death.

Artists probably consider their legacy more than average. It comes with the work, which we hope will outlast us. To some, this comes packaged with the burden of considering what future generations will think. I believe that there are only a few ways to react to death: fear and reclusion, carpe diem, or a Hamlet-esque revenge plot. Thankfully, unless I decide to spend the rest of my life in a war against cancer, I have only to choose between the first two. This leads to the binary struggle inherent in all human decisions: safety/excitement, security/growth, comfort/adventure, fear/wonder. The Garden or the Field. Tatooine or Space. The Hobbit-hole or the Misty Mountain. Having children meant that I had to begin making these decisions with regard not only for myself, but those under my care. I am now responsible for the development of tiny humans that need a balance of comfort and discomfort to become happy and capable adults. We may make decisions soon that will make us all very uncomfortable for quite a while, in exchange for greater fulfillment and joy.

I offer a reframe to your frustrations with “adulting.” Societally, people are expected to care for their stuff, and stuff falls apart. A home needs repairs, a car needs new tires (I write this from the waiting room of my local shop). And when those things break, it shows what our priorities are. I have coworkers that see their cars and homes as extensions of themselves. A dirty car infers a negligent driver; cracked grout infers a cracked resident. But for some, these moments bring clarity for what we personally prioritize, societal norms be damned. I drove for years with missing hubcaps, because for me, the time/money cost was greater than the benefit. Some have a much lower threshold, some a much higher.

When I was in grad school, I attended a talk by Jorge Cham, author and artist of Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) Webcomic. Caged in humor and a relevance to grad-student life was one basic life lesson: the enemy of joy is not hard work, long hours, or strict academic advisors. The enemy of joy is Guilt. We feel guilty when we take extra time for work, and can’t go out with friends. We feel guilty taking a long phone call with family because it puts us behind on our to-do list. Those who live joyful lives do so because they are able to appreciate every moment achieved without regretting the moments lost. It is important to recognize that these priorities can change, quickly and drastically, or slowly, with time and age. The garden I kept for years is filled with weeds, but I have a new baby and a finished novel in rewrites. I wouldn’t trade those for tomatoes any sooner than Bilbo would trade his adventures for those lost spoons.

I was just informed that it will take two more hours to fix my vehicle. I could dwell on the “work” I’m unable to do from the waiting room. Instead, I’m writing to you and thinking about death. And instead of feeling guilty, I am thankful for this opportunity to pause and work on something I enjoy.

D.C. McNeill: Guilt is an emotion I have spent the past five years trying to grow away from (not out of). Through the writing of Palerunner, a book of video game essays shot through with a catastrophic break-up, I arrived on the other side with a cautious lack of guilt. I love spending hours and hours studying genre fiction, talking about that into a microphone, and hours editing that into a podcast I am proud of. Yet I am no perfectionist. I am a just-good-enough-ist, I am just fortunate that my good enough is honed by years of practice and training, and I let my mistakes go without prejudice. A hard won skill that occasionally falters.

The guilt you describe is, in my opinion, a through-put of a capitalist economical concept that any econ-101 student is familiar with: opportunity cost. The notion that if you are doing A, you are missing out on any hundred/thousand other things you could be doing. Which is, of course, nonsense. Each of us exist within a web of context that push and pull us in, as you say, drastic and small ways. We are not free moving Newtonian objects that could just do something else.

On your note of these priorities changing with time, an anecdote: I recently visited my family in the UK. We are not close. These are strangers for the most part. With the exception of grandmother, Maureen, and my cousin, Charlie. My grandmother is 92. I am certain that this year is the last time I will speak with her. The last time my behaviour irritates and confuses her. The last time I cook for her. The last time my Aunties complain about her fussiness. I have never had a good relationship with my grandmother: my Mum, my brother and I are the black sheeps of the family. I feel no regret or guilt over this relationship, yet, having spent a night in London drinking with my cousin Charlie, I find myself flooded with guilt and nostalgia. A guilt that I have lived this great big rich life and she has not been a part of it. That, I think, is where my regrets tend to nest and multiply. Not in carving out time for edits or writing sessions or personal space, but in realising I have accidentally gone without someone I love for no particular reason other than time and space and life. We are all parallel lines on a graph, and I regret that I allowed my line to stop intersecting with this person’s line. When we hugged at the train station we pulled our bodies together as if we might impart some permanent imprint on each other, some small piece of the other to carry forever. I like to think we did.

The guilt, I think, also resides in the lies about productivity people use to sell self-help books about maximising your time so, you guessed it, you can do more labour to produce more excess capital: this being the only true metric that many measure their time with. I recall a third year writing seminar where the formidable Dr Kari Gislason asked a class of four hundred students who would consider self-publishing. A silence enveloped the lecture theatre. I raised my hand very slowly indeed, trying to catch the eyes of my fellow writers, looking for support. The beacons are lit, David calls for aid! Two students answered the call and raised their hands. Dr Gislason asked the other students why they had not raised their hands. Would it be so bad? Dr Gislason asked.

But how would we get paid, one student replied, and I swear Dr Gislason never looked at that student the same way ever again.

E.S. Anderson: David, I had a similar experience in my first year at university. I was in a Western Civilization class and the professor, knowing that most of us were in our first semester in higher education, asked us “why are you here? Is it for money? To earn a high-paying job?” Several raised their hands. “Is it because your friends and family told you to and you had no better options?” A few raised their hands. “Maybe you know that this is the best place to find a spouse and you don’t plan on using this degree at all?” Two very honest girls raised their hands. By the end of it, I was the only person in the class without my hand up, and he asked me, “why are you here?” Having never put much thought into it, I said “I’m looking for a job I enjoy so much I would do it for free.” He grinned, called me an idealist, and moved on. He should have added “naive.”

Now twenty years later, I am not working a job I love so much I would do it for free. I enjoy the work and the freedoms it provides, but would give it up immediately if a better option came along. The interesting thing is, I could have chosen otherwise. We used to joke that I’d be living in my friends’ basements after graduation because they were all going to get real jobs. But at some point along the way, the idea of being a starving artist became unappealing. Some may consider it a weakness, but when I saw an easier path to self-sufficiency, I took it.

I have had major internal and external debates about “art for the sake of art” or what work I put myself through if I’m not going to “get something out of it.” My side-hustles, my hobbies, are all done without the promise of immediate compensation, but in the back of my mind I can justify the work as a part of building my audience, my portfolio, my connections, and my skillset. I have not been able to embrace the idea that I am creating for my own enjoyment. I must have an audience in mind to feel legitimate, a path to publication to justify the words on the page. I sometimes wonder if this is healthy, or if it is just the way I am wired.

Several years ago, we had some family members move to the other side of the country. It came suddenly and without proper farewells or explanations. Bitterness festered. Ties were cut. Suddenly, we had to balance how close we actually felt to these people with how much work it would be to visit them, or to sustain awkward phone conversations, letter writing, etc.  The funny thing about it is, we have other friends and family that live just as far away, if not further. We hold no bitterness towards them and consider it a special treat when we are able to meet in person. This realization rearranged our entire approach to those we pursue for relationship and the guilt we feel when we let some of those relationships go. We had to rethink our definition of relationship.

I’m currently at a writer’s conference in Atlanta and attended a talk on “Writing with a Full Time Job.” The room was filled with marketing managers and teachers and cardiologists who are struggling to write on weekends, in free minutes between patients, or during their long commute. The crux of the talk was that we needed to reevaluate our definition of success. Some want to win awards. Some only want to see their books in print. Some only want to finish a project. If I can push out a novel every 3-4 years, along with random articles, poems, podcasts, and other projects, that is far better than not writing at all. And if the writing I am able to do finds success that leads to publication, fame, and fortune–so be it. I will write, no matter what, just as I will visit those important to me, no matter what. And I must leave myself open to reframing what, and who, are current priorities in my life.

D.C. McNeill: Funny, I was the friend in my writing degree who had the real job, and frequently the person who paid for beers, dinner, and often attracted couch surfers for various periods of time.

You raise a problem at the nadir of every creative unlucky enough or untalented enough to not be an Alan Moore or a Sarah J. Mass or a Stephen King: we artists who fell through the cracks and now live beneath the surface of the culture. On this note, a confession: I originally started the Art For Artists podcast to promote my writing. That podcast expanded into Digital & Creative Media Works, and it took the cracking of that company to free me of that motivation. I find myself so grateful for ZeroIndent, and the absolute willingness of my colleagues to do big, large creative work just for the sake of doing it, and because it is fun. I vividly recall the ending of our Daredevil unit where it occurred to me and Pat just how much doing the work had changed us. While we make work, our work makes us, too. This is why I will always write novels. Articles. This is why I will always find new and emergent reasons to speak into a microphone about something I have thought about very deeply. My life is better for doing this work with people I love working with. The audience is a nice side benefit, isn’t it?

I’m reminded here of a conversation I had with my old Engineering Manager some four years ago. We were sitting in the office--which at that time overlooked the Storey Bridge and the curve of the Brisbane river--sipping beers and watching the sunset. We’d just been through a gruelling client go-live, and all I could think about was going home for a cold shower and a whisky. He’s a huge science fiction fan, so we got to talking about Maynard Trigg, and he asked, in his very direct way, how the hell I find the time to write, alongside work, podcasting, socialising and so on. I’d never actually been asked that before, and I tried to figure it out. The answer, I explained, is that I just sort of do. But the real answer is that creative work is like any work: you simply have to sit in front of the computer and do the damn thing. Even if you do the thing for ten minutes. That’s ten minutes more than nothing.

As you say, if we could wave a magic wand and become fiscally successful authors tomorrow, we would both do it. Yet there is a delicious freedom in running my own independent publisher. UnderInk lets me do things the big three never would, like sell secret Novellas to frequent customers or publish Palerunner, a completely non-commercially viable book of essays. The few times videos or projects escape containment of my core audience, I am always disappointed by the comments from the masses. I can only imagine how that must go for a famous author, so I find myself torn between wanting that success, and getting that success on my own terms. Getting it isn’t getting it if you don’t get it how you want, I think. But then who am I to judge? Chris Nolan made Batman to unlock unlimited money for his films for the rest of his career. Brandon Sanderson wrote Wheel of Time to catapult his Final Empire series into the stratosphere.

I posit then, it is a brave thing indeed to change how you define success. When we draw a line and say “for me, this matters” we wage war against cynicism. To believe in the work is no neutral position: each word puts the devil back in his hole, just a little more each time.

E.S. Anderson: David, since your first message, I had a moment of transcendence that I think captures these thoughts perfectly. I also had a large bag to donate to Goodwill. It was filled with toys my kids either never played with or ones I couldn't stand to hear any longer. It was in my car for a long time. Every day, I felt guilt when I saw it. A bit of a failure. How couldn't I find the 2 minutes it would take to do this simple task? Then my office participated in a volunteer project for a boy's foster care camp. They needed landscaping, furniture moving, cleaning, organizing, etc. It was very fulfilling work. And after it was over, I realized I had a bag of toys in my car. When I showed it to the staff, they were immediately able to name the boys that would appreciate every single toy. Often, these kids come with nothing, fleeing horrible circumstances, and the camp is only able to supply so much. We were all in tears by the end.

Not every recurring guilt will end so well, but I took these thoughts away: I could have just thrown those toys away. Added them to a landfill. My basic desire to do good resulted in me accidentally doing more good than I ever expected. Call it divine intervention, serendipity, kismet. I call it planting seeds we may never see grow. If I leave my door open at work so my team can come talk to me, I'll get a lot of distractions and annoyances. But I'll also get opportunities for human connection, better workplace morale, and a team I can count on when I'm the one who needs help. I take meetings with people that will have no affect on my sales goals, merely because they are lonely or need help, or because I don't want them to bother my employees. And maybe 1 of 4 times, my actions reap benefits.

Once, while I was on a ridiculous side-quest,  I needed a stranger's help to park my professor's truck in a parking garage in Atlanta. Then my good Samaritan disappeared. She didn't even wait for me to open my door so I could thank her. My thanks were completely unnecessary and her good deed needed no justification. Her legacy is that I now try to stop to help strangers back into tricky spots.

I believe that, at best, my legacy is the trail of deeds left in the wake of my life. If I have lived well, it will be impossible to trace the ripples. At worst, my legacy is my last good deed. If nothing else, I can still see those closest lines, and concentrate on dropping one more good thing into the world.

D.C. McNeill: This is a tricky thing to articulate, but I think that so often we are willing to attribute those moments of kismet to fate, or some divine coincidence. The truth that we all have to adjust to eventually is that we are fleshy objects with mass that move through and interface with a material reality. This is one of those bone rattling truths that I think of when I consider legacy. Sometimes, I think that my life will be the objects I leave behind to my family, or perhaps if I somehow outlive my brother, a marathon runner, the objects I burden Patrick with. To this end, I am obsessed with owning the least amount of stuff, and instead concerned, like you, with the amount of ripples I can produce in the universe.

Sometimes it feels like we are ghost stories, waiting to happen. Idea for a ghost story: a great writer becomes a great writer while working as a Sales Director, only to die never achieving fame as an author. Idea for a ghost story: a mediocre writer spends their entire life talking about storytelling and running an independent publishing company, only to die never achieving fame as an author.

E.S. Anderson is the co-host of Diamonds in the Rough Draft podcast and author of Science-Fiction/Fantasy titles for children and young adults.

Cover photo by Wallace Chuck: https://www.pexels.com/photo/round-silver-colored-pocket-watch-and-eyeglasses-on-opened-book-3109167/

The novel prickles in your grasp. The sweat on your fingertips make turning the pages easier, but the sense of an axe about to fall remains. You glance up from the words: the gardener is attending the rhododendrons by the edge of the terrace, and once again you feel a flutter of anticipation.

David, Pat and ‪@DarthdYT‬ dip their toes into the heady, brilliant waters of Emily St John Mandel's brilliant novel.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: The structuring idea of this book is basically there's a hotel and the hotel is this big elaborate fancy glass hotel obviously in Caiette, which is a remote insula, like it's not even a spit, it's a tiny strip of little houses in the Canadian wilderness. We get our first glimpse of this through uh Vincent's perspective as a kid. Something I should say, we were talking about this in Station 11, and you guys looked at me like I was crazy. So, in the books, Caiette is where Miranda and Arthur are also from.

Patrick: Oh, okay... wait... Miranda and Arthur are from the same place...

D.C. McNeill: They're both from Caiette. So that's the big connective tissue with, at least nominally, that's the big connective piece of tissue with Station 11.

Patrick: Is Caeitte meant to be in and around like Ontario?

D.C. McNeill: It's not. It's based on qu--fuck, um, I don't how you say that... Quatsino? Quastono? North of Vancouver Island.

Patrick: Watching David try to pronounce words he doesn't know how to pronounce is one of my favourite things.

D.C. McNeill: I don't know, dude. But similar vibe like Great Lakes vibes.

Patrick: Yeah okay.

D.C. McNeill: So nominally the idea is that like the whole of this corpus sort of centers around this one geographical location in some way or another.

Patrick: Yeah. Exactly. Severn City.

D.C. McNeill: This is the lake that presumably Jeevan  crosses and so forth. Let me give you our first glimpse of Caiette because I think the description is probably relevant. So, this is Vincent and Paul catching the bus home from school just after Vincent has vandalized the school property with the words, "Sweet me up." Which she just thinks is really poetic. And it's really funny because Paul catches her doing it. And he's like, "Why did you do that?" She's like, "I don't know. I just like the phrase" - it's very um it's very kid brain stuff.

This is our first proper look at it. This is on page 30 of the e-pub:

They rode the bus in silence back to Grace Harbor where the mailboat waited to take them to Caiette. The boat careered around the peninsula and Paul stared at the massive construction site where the new hotel was going up, at the clouds at the back of Melissa's head, at the trees on the shore. Anything to avoid looking into the depths of the water. Nothing he wanted to think about down there. When he glanced at Vincent, he was relieved to see that she wasn't looking at the water the water either. She was looking at the darkening sky.

On the far side of the peninsula was Caiette, this place that made Port Hardy look like a metropolis in comparison. Twenty-one houses pinned between the water and the forest. The total local infrastructure consisting of a road with two dead ends, a small church from the 1850s, a one room post office, a shuttered one room elementary school. There hadn't been enough children to keep the school open since the 80s, and a single pier.

Isomorphic is David McNeill's column about adaptations and the infectious influence of memory.

I thought first of my own injuries from the video game on concluding The Last of Us season two: a bleak, ugly story devoted to replicating a flat conception of reality that makes little effort to say more than “there’s good people on both sides” about some morally imperative problems. I would be more easily swayed by certain adaptive changes if writers Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann attempted to address the underlying issue of this story, which, in no uncertain terms, is that the story does not have much to say about its themes of violence, and, by the end, essentialises all violence as individual rather than structural or socially located. Muddied further by the television adaptation insisting on protecting our protagonists from their worst choices.

I knew I was in trouble with season two when, after the events of the cabin on the hilltop, Dina looked at Ellie and said “I loved him too, you know” - and I said to myself “huh, that’s an odd choice.” Comporting Dina into a more classic highschool girlfriend archetype is sensible but love? Is she another adopted daughter, then? Nominally Dina and Joel having a relationship is a dimension in the game. In the game as Dina and Ellie patrol the snow, Dina announces she and Joel are planning a movie night, and invites Ellie. You can read this a few ways. Is Dina hanging out with Joel just as an excuse to get closer to Ellie? Is she trying to mend their relationship as a sort of gesture to help someone she really likes? Does she just actually like hanging out with Joel? Like a lot of the game’s writing, this idea is presented as flavour dialogue to engender you, the player, to like hanging out with this character. Because it’s super fun, actually: riding a horse through the post-apocalypse learning all about your new girlfriend is just a good idea for a gameplay sequence, so much so Naughty Dog dedicated a miniature open-world sequence in Seattle to this exact idea.

I’m not convinced the only thing that makes this work in the game is that you, the player, are doing other things. I’m not convinced that nudging the stick on my Playstation controller and sneaking around infected adequately occupies my brain so that Dina’s dialogue feels less like exposition and more like flirting. In fact, I actually made this argument about The Last of Us Part 1 on the release of that second remaster - just kicking around the empty world with Ellie, mediated by gameplay loops, does serve that narrative in some impressive ways. I found myself more actively engaged with those small “press square to chat to Ellie” moments and more actively listening to her ongoing chirps. Much more impacted by her change in demeanour toward the end of the story, especially in the lead up to the hospital. The moment where she does not provide you gameplay assistance by dropping a ladder, in particular, hits different in such detail.

The Last of Us Part 2 attempts a similar alchemy with its character switch halfway through the game to produce a truly predictable narrative that never quite lands any of its many punches, both literal and figurative. To be blunt: the game is far too simplistic in how it writes and approaches its themes, especially so the replication of the conflict in Gaza where it attempts a “both sides” argument when writing about a protracted decades long genocide. And look I get it: Druckmann is writing about his own personal experience growing up, but the story fails as a tragedy because these characters never sit down and try to contend with their grief and trauma in the context of this world. They never actually try to reason with their own motivations, their own actions. The brief glimpses of this reflection (Ellie falling silent after beating someone to death in anger, Abby using her oldest friend Owen in a dire romantic encounter) do not coalesce into saying anything other than violence is here, and violence is roundly bad.

Consider, by contrast, the best tragedies: Macbeth, Madame Bovary, Of Mice and Men. Each centres violence, domestic and otherwise, but their tragic figures have things to say about these events. Justifications. Deflections. Lamentations, regrets, convictions. And they want to talk about it. Because that’s the juice: how do our tragic protagonists deceive themselves and the world about how they feel? That’s just honest to goodness drama.

The act of switching characters to play as Abby, and filling her world with characters that she likes and that like her, and repeating the Joel/Ellie dynamic with Abby/Lev, is effectively a game of empathy that produces a much more complex thesis. Where the first game engendered you to Joel by having you play as him and do the work of protecting Ellie, the second game makes you play as Abby to empathise with her, and, ultimately, complicate your feelings about Ellie’s revenge quest. To the extent that by the end of the game your perspective should be shot-through with Abby’s grief as much as Ellie’s. But the complication is asked and answered by the ending: yes, violence is indeed bad. How quaint, you might say, as Ellie holds a knife to Lev’s throat. Druckmann’s corpus is filled with similar hollow suggestions - the cynical e-brake turn of the Uncharted series - explaining every inch of Nate’s life for a sterile “perhaps the family you choose is the real family” ending makes me want to yell to this day  comes to mind. Not to undercut the emotional impact of Ellie’s plight or the awful, sweaty panic I feel from Abby many times during her journey.

Without the mediation of the gameplay itself, The Last of Us season 2 has to do something to elicit the same empathy from a reader, and then, hopefully, have a perspective on that empathy and what it might mean for these characters.

One of these somethings, then, is to show us part of Joel and Dina’s relationship. Early on we have Dina sitting with Joel as he teaches her how to replace a capacitor. But then, as if realising they added this extra dimension to their relationship, it’s Dina who accompanies Ellie on the search for Joel. She’s captured by Abby’s crew and drugged unconscious, because Dina needed to be there, but the added dimension of Dina’s love for Joel should force the scene to change, right? Dina should react to Joel being killed in real time, and we would lose Ellie’s isolated reaction. And I have… no idea why they did not do that. Why put Dina there instead of Tommy, and then do nothing with it but reproduce the same logistics but without having to punch Dina in the face? Just to have Tommy back in town for the Game of Thrones sequence? Why not just have Ellie alone? This is a classic trap of adaptations: the relentless comparison to a previous homeostasis is why it is so difficult to think and write about adaptations. I’m not meeting the text, but rather, drafting a previous version of reality with a new brush and complaining the image resolves differently.

Because that truly is the lever that the TV show can pull that the game cannot: resolution. Without the need for gameplay the story can divert and indulge and express in ways that wouldn’t quite make sense for the game, even in the Playstation house style of narrative blockbusters: there is just a wider aperture of what you can put into the story. This is something the show takes advantage of with varying degrees of success. Joel’s dire therapy session is excellent character work, while the added characters to the Dina/Ellie patrol only serve to make our protagonists more immature by comparison.

I’m usually the last to excoriate additions like this unless they undercut an idea I’ve already staked rhetoric on or built an argument around. The net:new Bill anthology story in season one is a great example of a change that I like quite a bit despite what we lose in the translation. No longer is Bill a cautionary tale of what might become of Joel if he cannot open his heart, but instead an example of a life well-lived. The immediate resolution to the “will they, won’t they” of Ellie and Dina in the game is strung along in the show for added melodrama that, honestly, works. Isabela Merced puts forth a stand out performance as Dina. The revelation of Ellie’s immunity via a bite to save Dina is followed by a harrowing eight minute sequence of Dina holding Ellie at gunpoint, distraught, trying to come to terms with shooting her best friend. The moment relies on Merced flashing through a dozen emotions at once and she sells the visceral relief when Dina finally believes Ellie is immune, cascading into a kiss of pure, cosmic relief.

Yet the story seems content to ratchet up the tragedy at every opportunity, make the violence more real and even buy into the idea that these characters are fused with violence as an elemental quality. Violence is not socially located but inevitable. Dina delivers a speech about this very fact: there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for revenge. Despite this, Ellie’s violence in the aquarium is played up as an accident. Self-defence. Violence is at once bad, sure, inevitable, yes, but also accidental? Minor compromise to insulate Ellie from moral consequence. These things happen to her. They are inevitable. Nora was already going to die from the spores, why not torture her for information? It’s already too late. It’s already too late. It's always too late.

I resisted the performative credulity that follows identifying these changes, and then the show provides us a “reason” why Joel is the selfish hardcase. We flashback to Joel’s childhood in a freighted, bizarre addition. The scene is captivating: Tony Dalton turns in a brilliant frayed portrait of masculinity. A young Joel stands up for Tommy, says his father won’t hurt Tommy, and Dalton breaks down in tears, says he wants to do better than his own father. No surprise Joel’s father is a cop, I suppose, but this detail casts a long bow in an attempt to contextualise Joel’s whole deal as a complicated dad. And that really is the story of this show now. Ellie is bad for extracting revenge, but not that bad. No longer does she beat Nora’s face in with a pipe. Now she just beats Nora’s leg a bit and already after Nora is infected - gone is the blood rage. No longer is Joel bound to anxious attachment by the loss of his daughter’s death, now his father was kind of physically abusive but Joel took care of Tommy so it’s also a hangover of his childhood, you see, unresolved traumas, you see. Tommy doesn’t irresponsibily run off for revenge, instead he and Jesse are here to support Dina and Ellie. These micro-compromises shoot through the whole of season two in a perhaps necessary attempt to make our characters redeemable.

I struggle here because the show falls for the adaptation problem of adding extra material in occasionally unhelpful ways. Compare season one’s Bill episode with season two’s Joel episode. Rather than a unique anthology story in the world, season two ops for an extended portrayal of the birthday mission, but one that contorts itself to also be the same sequence Ellie burned over her bite mark. The same sequence Joel made her a guitar for her birthday. For all the cuteness of a high Ellie eating cake with her hands, these decisions engender a sense of completeness to the story, to the extent that Joel sings his ballad: If I ever were to lose you on the very same day.

For all that: fuck me if the museum doesn’t hit like a ton of bricks. The warmth between Joel and Ellie allides with Joel’s murder in all the familiar ways. The Apollo 15 sequence still damages me in a personal “my Dad wasn’t really around when I was a kid” way. All to say: I want to like what is here, but I find myself just sort of… stuck in my ability to appraise the alterations to the story, in no small part, because the show almost commits to making Joel, well, Joel. His reaction to Ellie’s queerness and drug use is “this is my house” and Ellie countering with a classic marxist “you don’t own anything” argument rings true enough. This is the end of the world, Joel, property doesn’t exist (and maybe never did). But then Joel, after a beat, is fine with Ellie moving to the garage for her own space. This is what I mean: the show’s constant capitulation to “what if things were always kind of okay and reset to a status quo” when given space to expand the text. Gone is the notion that from about age fourteen Ellie and Joel are apocalyptically estranged. Now they just sometimes argue with each other in small ways.

The show does call overt attention to one idea that the game doesn’t: Ellie’s moth. This is the symbol on Joel’s guitar, and apparently(?) the design of Ellie’s tattoo that covers her bite. The moth, as the show posits, is a symbol of death. A symbol Joel gives to Ellie on the guitar. Yes, Joel does give Ellie death to keep her alive at the hospital, we know this, but I am unsatisfied with the solved jigsaw of the season this produces. We have to see Eugene’s death because it’s referenced earlier. We have to see the burn, because it’s referenced earlier. We have to see the tattoo, because it’s referenced earlier. This sense of completeness dispatches whatever small subtlety Part II had. To the extent that Joel does an Of Mice And Men on Eugene in a scene that the show seems to frame as beautifully tragic that is so over-explained by the cinematography and Joel’s dialogue: ten minutes of Joel, more or less, facing the camera and explaining that he is, in fact, a bad dude but a justified one.

Yet the show has the audacity to fix my biggest issue with the game: the porch scene. You spend twenty hours murdering people in the game because of Ellie’s unresolved Joel issues only to get an epilogue sequence that reveals they resolved their issues before he died! And the show just gives us that, plain and simple, in episode six. But then, unbelievably, the porch scene becomes the “you swore” scene from the game. The aperture shrinks further and our world grows that much smaller because of it. Not to take away the performances and directing: Joel weeping and nodding. The stutter in his voice as he speaks. The break in Ellie’s voice and the violence in her gaze as she calls Joel selfish, and he repeats his father’s words “I hope you do a little better than me.”

So if we set aside the changes themselves for a moment and step back, the story retains, and seems to be heading toward, the same bleak, compromised theme of violence is bad and there’s good people on either side. Joel kills Abby’s father. Ellie slays all of Abby’s friends, and so Abby slays Jessie and nearly blows Tommy to hell (okay that bit doesn’t happen in the show). And then Ellie goes to hunt down Abby and her surrogate son. This violence is inevitable! How can it possibly be stopped! We’re all just monsters waiting for a reason and gosh darn it we can’t help but put ourselves in positions to keep doing violence! To the monsters, we’re the monsters, right?

This radical moralism is the fundamental failure of The Last of Us season two. “See, the homophobe can be on Ellie’s side, these characters have dimension” my television shouts at me as it performs a sleight of hand to rob Tommy of any complexity because we need a likeable dad-type now that Joel is in a pinebox. The moral crisis of whether Ellie should complete vengeance on Abby is no crisis at all here: violence is inevitable after all, and instead we’re left to argue for a small genocide over a large genocide because in the world of The Last of Us this blood-sport between Ellie and Abby is, first, necessary, and two, after a fashion, productive. To borrow the language of Ian Dell Danskin: “the war crime that stablises a region is not, to them, a necessary evil; if it was necessary, it was no evil at all.”

I’ve made the argument before that Druckmann’s work capitulates to centrism as a default position, but the second season of the show really works hard to produce a moralist universe, fill that joyless country with violence, and shrug as it paints the walls with blood.

Rain patterns across the bitumen. Thunder peels over the horizon, white-blue flashes followed by calamity that vibrates the walls themselves. The smell of fresh rain on soil fills the empty city as the roads become spillways and the sewers overflow.

This week David and Darth are joined by Danielle from ‪@levelstoryplays‬ and Alex to close out their discussion of what has turned out to be a fairly bad season of television.

Follow Danielle on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/levelstory.b... Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: I think it feels quick because it's structured really poorly. If that makes sense.

Danielle: I also want to bring this up just because it's fresh on my mind and I don't necessarily want to assign it to the last assign it to the Last of Us season 2, but perhaps it could be a product of this, but I saw a video and I forget who the actor's name, but if I find it, I'll make sure to post it in our Discord chat with an actor talking about when screenwriters are writing their scripts, they have to have a second pass because they want to write it in such a way where people can understand it when they're looking at their phones.

Alexogeny: Oh, I remember seeing that one, too.

Danielle: I couldn't help but think of that as we were talking. And again, I don't want to assign it that to this, but part of it does feel like that, but that's like a larger conversation, but I wanted to at least throw it out there.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. I mean, I knew that we were all in trouble in 2019 when Netflix started talking about second screen viewing. Where they were developing TV shows that were like that you're supposed to just have on in the background. As an illustrative example, and this is the most like David's on his high horse bullshit, but I think this is like a valuable thing to say, so I'm going to do it anyway. Let me know in the comments how pretentious this sounds, but we were-- it was I think it was like the second or third viewing session um after I got back from the UK when when me and Lucy were watching the season. Um and it was a Friday night. We got to like 9:00 p.m. and she was like like, "Wow, like I'm like I'm really relaxed. Like I was super in the story and have completely decompressed." And I was like yeah it's because like you sat down and you actively watched the TV.

The way that people like Lucy, and I think it's like a pretty normal thing to do, she runs her own business, right? She's a busy person. She's got a kid all that stuff right is when she's watching TV's usually working or doing email or doing, you know, making dinner or whatever. And so I think for her it was the first time maybe ever that she'd sat down and just like like you know the lights in the apartment are off, the TV's on, you're actively watching the TV. I and it was so funny afterwards because, you know, she's had a rule for a long time which is no TV in this house, right? She doesn't want to have a TV in her house. It was the first time ever where she gone "oh I think I get it now." Like I think I understand the appeal of this as an actual active pastime. And I think we're seeing a growing divide--maybe divide is the wrong word–but a kind of factionalization within viewership production and artistry in the screenwriting TV industry: people who want to make television and people who want to make stuff that's on the TV.

And you know in the same way that we're seeing increasing factionalism within technology technology companies and technology communities where some people can tolerate the use of AI in minimal ways and some people absolutely you know refuse it and will detonate communities if they find out that has been injected into into certain practices without their consent or without their knowledge. I think increasingly what's going to happen over the next couple years is we're going to see that second screen viewing focus be increasingly affected by the proliferation of these generative tools because it's an easier way for these companies to lazily make you know more and more what we would call content as opposed to to art.

A steep wind blows across the golden field of swaying grass. Sunsets, painful in auburn beauty that only reminds you of what has gone from the wold. You think again of violence. That freedom born from the collapse: violence, and vengeance.

This week David, Alex and ‪@DarthdYT‬ are backed up by Danielle from ‪@levelstoryplays‬ to unpack the strangest adaptation choices so far.

Follow Danielle on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/levelstory.b... Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: This, by contrast... it feels like when we cut from a scene to another scene, it's either very literal, right? We get that at the start of the next episode where it's like, well, this is the same guy. Are you paying attention?

Or there's no relationship between scenes, whether that be logical, or emotional right? And occasionally there is sure, you know the Kuleshov effect is here but I think episode 3 in particular feels like they shot a ton of stuff, and they went "it's just way too long" and then they found it in the edit. That's kind of the vibe I get from episode 3.

Alex: I think is that because they like locked themselves into seven episodes.

Darth: I was going to say I think I think part of what we're seeing is is just the format that they're forcing themselves to stick to. Meaning there's dialogue that happens in the game and then there's this action sequence, and much like Danielle was saying there were scenes that didn't feel like they should be there and they were in the game. There were scenes that felt to me like they shouldn't have been in the show and I was like "this was in the game."

Like when they find the guys hanging from the ceiling and then they have to sneak out of the sneak out of the warehouse without getting seen and then they have to go and and sneak down into the subway to try to hide and then they have to run away from the zombies. And like all of that is like ultimately pointless except I'm I'm just imagining like crouching in the game and you're doing the sneak thing and then you got to go up behind and do an assassination move. And I'm like "I can literally see this is only here because this is what happened in the game and I don't think this should be here because the show doesn't necessarily need this.

And there were so many scenes that could have flowed, I think, better and transition from one spot to another. When they're in the forest and Dina gets shot by the arrow and then they split up. So then you could have the action scene, which I'm assuming is in the game where Ellie has to run away from, you know, from all of the people in the in the forest. They didn't need that either. They could have gone a different direction and stayed focused on the characters, which may have transitioned from one scene to another better, but because you keep having these action breaks that were in the game, the whole thing has that montage-y feel that y'all were describing.

Danielle: I think that's so interesting that you're saying that 'cause I feel like that's sort of where I'm getting hung up is that I love seeing stuff from the game, but I agree like it just feels like why is it there? And and it's weird because it is from the game, but it's not adapted like it is in the game. And it's just odd like the they they shrink everything down to like, okay, well, like I do recognize this scene from the game, but it's still like isn't really the same. And then they always feel the need to add hordes of enemies all the time.

When they're in the subway and there's this huge amount of infected and I guess they do it for the budget, but again, the spectacle of it. It's exciting, they're running from the zombies. There's action, adventure but yeah it just feels--

Darth: Just quickly to interject think that was because of the problem that they introduced before that was they had all of the the WLF members. You had the dozens of people chasing them into the sewers, so now you have to have dozens of opponents to defeat those dozens of people. So that horde didn't need to exist like you said if you get rid of all of the Wolves.

Bitter snow crashes against the window of your small room in Jackson. You shiver as you try not to think of the cordyceps that ravaged your patrol. Thank goodness you made it away in time before the creatures could pursue you.

This week David, Alex and ‪@DarthdYT‬ are joined by returning guest Danielle from ‪@levelstoryplays‬ to talk about The Last of Us Season 2's opening salvo. Massive spoilers for this one folks.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: if you haven't played the game, this  this season of television breaks roughly halfway through with some adaptational choices that that bleed a few different bits and pieces forward. The season ends roughly halfway um through the game where the big change, which we'll get to next next episode of this this discussion. High level, going around the horn we'll start with you Darth because you seem to be the most positive on this these two episodes. How do they find you um did are you really enjoying you know revisiting the show for this discussion - yeah what's your high level on these two two episodes?

Darth: First, I'll back up and and also answer that same question because two of the things that I heard before I watched this which I was just kind of flummoxed by was one that that many fans were hating Ellie in this season whereas they for the most part like loved her last season and before watching this I I just could not understand how they could so change a character that this many people would be talking about hating the character. Then, secondly, Dina, a lot of people were talking about how they hated either. They hated the casting or they hated the hair. It was something so stupid that I was like, I don't understand why you're you're making such a big deal about this that I've seen multiple posts about that. So I I remember I remember hearing that going into it.

D. C. McNeill: that's crazy. I feel like, and Danielle backing up, I feel like Dena is one of the highlights of this show. It's pitch perfect.

Danielle: She was fantastic.

Darth: there were literally people that were like her her ponytail was like the wrong length or the wrong color. There was there was some really stupid stuff. Granted, it was like Reddit and so like if you're in the right spot, then they're just there to complain, you know?

D.C. McNeill: okay...

Darth: But I wasn't sure, especially with y'all who are coming from the video game, like I don't know how for me, if I was looking at Halo or whatever, it's got to be really darn close accurate for me to say this show is a good depiction of the game. So, if they fundamentally changed even some minor physical characteristics, I'd be like, "Okay, you got to have a good reason for doing that." Grain of salt there. So, all that said, I was I kind of had a negative perception of the show going into it because I had been hearing some quote unquote "bad" things about it, even though the overall reception was: it was good, but it was nowhere near what the first season was. So my my expectations were tempered going into it, even though I was still I was vibing all the way through. I very much enjoyed it.  Aside from all the times I was probably crying because there was also a lot of sad stuff. A lot of deep emotional connection moments and I'm like how are how how is this happening, and you know this the zombie mushroom head show. And you've you've got this this deep connection happening at the same time.

Hosts

Patrick: https://amttm.com/

David: https://underink.press/

Darth: https://www.youtube.com/@DarthdYT