You Were Hallucinating the Whole Time →

soundlogic2236:

theaudientvoid:

drethelin:

trickytalks:

wirehead-wannabe:

nostalgebraist:

Westworld: I’ve been gruesomely killed again and again in endless replays of the same scenarios, just for the sake of satisfying these murderers’ personal quirks, and now I’m going to fight back!  What the hell is neutral about that

Undertale: I keep telling you, it’s the Neutral Route, that’s just what it’s called

Hey, remember when everyone on the left was praising a game for telling you to play as a doormat, instead of weighing the idea of violent revolution and getting mad at Steven Universe for being opposed to killing the enemy?

guuuuys these are unrealistic moral scenarios, the fact that bubbling is easier to perform than killing in Steven Universe is blatantly unrealistic, in the real world combatants need far more training in order to subdue rather than kill

in Undertale you can literally time travel! That is also strictly impossible. I would totally assign more moral responsibility to someone who can fucking time travel, self defense is not a meaningful concept if there are no actual consequences, ie. dying.

with great power comes great responsibility. 

Also: you can just, settle for the neutral ending. It’s not the best possible, but it’s not awful. It’s just what you get when you try but don’t go above and beyond the call of duty.

I think it’s actually a pretty decent lesson that sometimes, in order for the best possible things to happen, someone somewhere has to decide to make them happen, and then try inhumanly toward that end. Shut up and do the impossible!

The time travel thing isn’t even the biggest departure from reality in the game. The biggest departure from reality is that in the universe of Undertale, all conflicts can be resolved non-violently. Just talking it out is literally guaranteed to work if you can find the right combinations of things to say (which you can because time travel). It’s this, and not the time travel, that breaks verisimilitude, and makes all of the game’s moralizing fall flat the second you try to apply it to the universe that wasn’t designed specifically to make its moral system be objectively correct.

Like, it wouldn’t be a list of four choices-I’m willing to chalk that up to gameplay simplification, but honestly, the prospect that if you give me full fledged groundhog day time loop abilities that are strictly under my control and propose that I ever have to resort to violence? The part that seems most unrealistic is finally having to hit goatdad at all. 

Give me unlimited retries so that not only can I retract any ineffective words, but can also dodge every attack and I have genuine trouble imagining a human so violent that I can’t get through to them-they would not only have to have an EXTREME philosophical viewpoint but would also need incredible (in the literal sense of not credible) intellectual and physical stamina.

I’m not sure I got the joke across here?  I was just riffing on the fact that in Westworld, experiencing the same violent conflict over and over in a Groundhog day loop is depicted as inherently horrific, to the point that it’s the source of trauma driving an uprising.  The same thing is framed as “this is why your life is unusually traumatic” in Westworld and “this is why your life is unusually non-traumatic” in Undertale.

Admittedly, there are many other differences between the two stories.  I’m not interested in pressing the argument very far, I just made it for the sake of a joke.

(via soundlogic2236)

Westworld: I’ve been gruesomely killed again and again in endless replays of the same scenarios, just for the sake of satisfying these murderers’ personal quirks, and now I’m going to fight back!  What the hell is neutral about that

Undertale: I keep telling you, it’s the Neutral Route, that’s just what it’s called

In other news, someone sent the Pope a copy of Undertale (technically, a Steam code).  All according to keikaku.

(I should be working today and will start after this post.  Undertale fans may not want to look at the little writing experiment below the cut)

Keep reading

It may be possible to take the analogy even further, since the morality of some of Hamlet’s behavior has disturbed or confused various moderns – as in the prayer scene, where he decides not to kill Claudius while he’s praying, since he specifically wants Claudius to go to hell.  If we are disturbed by this, does this simply reflect a difference between our morality and that of the Elizabethans?  Or was this just a genre convention of revenge tragedies, which the audience wasn’t meant to think too hard about?

Not necessarily!  Eleanor Prosser started by asking these questions and ended up writing a book, titled Hamlet and Revenge, which claims that the Elizabethan audience abhorred revenge, and that even it was generally condemned in other revenge tragedies:

Of the twenty-one plays analyzed in the present chapter, only four are even slightly ambiguous in their condemnation of revenge. The evidence is even more striking when we consider the judgment on specific characters. We have encountered almost forty who are faced with the decision of whether or not to take revenge: of those who take action, only six are vindicated (whether by civil authorities, as in Antonio’s Revenge, or by supernatural sanction, as in The Spanish Tragedy). These six would hardly represent the dominant theatrical tradition even if they were acting as the ministers of God. But they are not….The dominant theatrical tradition seems unmistakable when we consider the witness of six virtuous characters who explicitly reject revenge, five originally virtuous characters who turn villain when they embark on a course of vengeance, seventeen out-and-out villain-revengers, and many others whose threats or advice to pursue revenge are clearly judged as evil.

She claims that the audience would have recognized the ghost as an evil spirit, and seen the trajectory of the play as Hamlet’s descent into evil.  (I haven’t read the book, and am piecing this together from the Google Books preview, reviews on JSTOR, and this cool summary which you should check out.)  Here’s one reviewer describing Prosser’s account of Hamlet as bad guy:

From this point to his departure for England Hamlet descends further and further into evil. First he spares Claudius at prayer in order to damn him. This is a depth to which no other Elizabethan sinks (except those who were villains to begin with). Next Hamlet attacks his mother, and in his effort to get her to repent prevents her repenting, by his “mad” encounter with the Ghost. Finally Hamlet loses control altogether and kills Polonius. The Fortinbras soliloquy which follows is a loose end; it does not belong in the play at all. By the end of Act III Miss Prosser’s Hamlet is a thoroughly Black Prince, a cruel, vindictive, bloodthirsty rebel “against established order,” whose excesses we see mirrored in the next act in the madness of Ophelia and the violence of Laertes.

But Hamlet is … Hamlet, right?  He’s this fascinating relatable tortured character who delivers unforgettable speeches and all that.  We love the guy.

Under this interpretation, Shakespeare took a stock villain and made him into such an awesome, fascinating character that we don’t really think about how he still does the stuff the stock villain would do.  Except sometimes someone like Eleanor Prosser looks at this guy and does a double take: “Suddenly, for the first time, I was appalled at Hamlet’s reasoning for refusing to kill Claudius at prayer.”

But the discrepancy is this: in Hamlet, the characters’ actions all remain the same as they would be in the dark and serious story of Hamlet Prime. They play the same role in the plot, they are still Villains. The only things that change are their personalities, and the manner in which they are presented to the audience.

The result is that Hamlet Prime makes moral sense, but Hamlet does not.

the ur-hamlet, or “hamlet prime”

OK given the reblog chain this is getting here I think I need to explain this joke, I apologize if this seems condescending and/or you know all this already

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a sort of “remake” (see here for a good short summary).  We have records of a play called “Hamlet” being performed in 1594, too early to have been Shakespeare’s, and all we know of it comes from a few people snarking about how bad it was.  (Or, to be precise, snarking about something that is presumably it)

This bad play is generally referred to as “the Ur-Hamlet.”  Why did people snark at it?  In part, it seems like they thought it was an especially silly, cliched example of a pretty silly, cliched genre, the revenge tragedy.  This genre started (ignoring some ancient precursors) with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which was very popular and inspired lots of derivatives, parodies, etc.

The Spanish Tragedy actually uses a lot of the same tropes as Hamlet, like the play-within-a-play and the vengeful ghost.  Because it gave rise to a derivative genre, these tropes were used repeatedly and started to become stale.  Thomas Lodge’s derisive remark about the Ur-Hamlet is basically “lol, vengeful ghosts”:

[…] walks for the most part in black under cover of gravity, and looks as pale as the vizard [mask] of the ghost who cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge!

Another contemporary groan about the trope, from the introduction to the play A Warning for Fair Women:

Then of a filthy, whining ghost
Lapped in some foul sheet, or a leather pelch,
Comes screaming like a pig half sticked,
And cries Vindicta, revenge, revenge:
With that a little rosin flasheth forth,
Like smoke out of a Tobacco pipe, or a boy’s squib:

So apparently Shakespeare was like “people are sick of these revenge tragedy tropes, so I’ll write my own fresh, knowing twist on them.  I’ll make vengeful ghosts cool again!  In fact I’m going to do it as, like, an AU fix-fic of that shitty revenge tragedy ‘Hamlet,’ where I make all of the cliches more interesting and the writing better, etc.”

So understanding all of this would presumably help up understand the choices Shakespeare made in his Hamlet, right?  Like we’d want to know which things he was deliberately changing because their original versions were “too cliched,” say.

We can kind of do this, because we have the text of The Spanish Tragedy, which is a lot like Hamlet already.  But what we don’t have is the Ur-Hamlet, the bad play Hamlet was a remake of.

So all we can do is sort of … speculate … about what the genre-typical, cliched alternative version might have been … read Shakespeare’s choices in light the more trope-y versions they might be twists on … maybe even make sense of things that puzzle us about Shakespeare’s text by proposing that they make sense as responses to specific aspects of the now-lost original … hmmmmmmmm

the ur-hamlet, or “hamlet prime”

genderfluid-ranma:

nostalgebraist:

genderfluid-ranma:

nostalgebraist:

hot new homestuck theory reveals that in addition to inventing anime, andrew hussie also invented metafiction

At least it’s not as awful as that theory about undertale being fanfiction of some generic incredibly boring fantasy with skeletor in it

Are you deliberately trolling me here or do you not know the context?

No, a sarcastic dismissal by comparison to a theory that is actually more terrible and ridiculous than the goode ole “it was all a character’s hallucination”, that you strongly endorsed.

Not only is just the theory itself terrible, but also the fact that it filled my entire dashboard with “see, this is why (reads smudged word on hand) qarners are all terrible and [words that mean low status]” for the time it was popular, plus maybe some pretentious words about Incorrect Reaction to Reasonable Critique.

I have no bloody clue as to why people who generally don’t into videogames are all so incredibly bad and banal at their critique and so incredibly dunning-krueger about it but apparently our universe is just shitty that way.

But calling people who disagree with you trolls works pretty well i have found

OK, I am now aware that you think a particular opinion I have is wrong.  Is there a particular response you’re expecting from me here?  (I am not going to get into that debate again, if that’s what you’re looking for.)

(via ranma-official)