Promiseland

[Fetian]

Oh dang it I typoed one of my answers

[Fetian]

Left a note on the submission just in case she'll go easy on me, but even if not that's only two points

[Fetian]

By 'a bunch of people' I mean, like, three

Five, now

 
She did not give me the points for the typoed answer (but did respond to my note with 'I understand. You did well.', so.) and she also dinged me for something else in the quiz -- I think that I put 'hot springs' instead of 'hot spring' for おんせん.

Finished and uploaded the homework. I have ideas for the skit premise, either tonight or tomorrow I'm going to start writing it to share with my partner on Friday.

Also tonight! More video games. My bag of coffee arrived, so I can start drinking that now that it's cooling off outside, and in fact I have been. I also need to eat more dinner.

[Fetian]

teketserif.png

 
This is what Teket Lau would look like with serifs

[Fetian]

So earlier tonight ash told me that people have been recommending Mouthwashing to him, including someone saying it has a 'hopeful found-family ending' or something like that and,

I.

I'm truly baffled. I've never heard an analysis of anything with less evidence than that. I just want to-

Let's look at the ultimate fates of the members of the "found family"

► Show Spoiler

Curly: This is the only character whose fate could be said to be "hopeful", because he's the only one who lives, except that he's trapped, alone, in space, with no skin, and no painkillers, and will probably never be found. Jimmy's last act is to "rescue" Curly by putting him in the cryo-pod, which is yet another attempt to play hero that, on a deeper-than-surface read can only be said to be extremely selfish. He spends the majority of the game in a condition that would almost certainly leave him begging for death if he were in any position to communicate. Most of your (Jimmy's) interactions with him are forcing pills down his throat because he's incapable of taking or swallowing them on his own, but it would be too cruel to leave him in the excruciating pain that is -- spoilers -- Jimmy's fault. Even after the painkillers run out, Jimmy is too much of a coward to take responsibility for his actions and put Curly out of his misery. Hopeful! Sure!!

Daisuke: The intern you (Jimmy) send into a death-trap because you can't take responsibility for your actions and have refused to do so so consistently that the entire ship is nothing but trolly problem after trolly problem. He of course gets fatally injured, but you used the last of the disinfectant on a stupid prank so you have to use MOUTHWASH to try to clean his wounds, which you know won't work because the MOUTHWASH is mostly sugar, so his wounds get infected and he dies. Before that he spends the majority of the game having his youthful optimism slowly crushed by the fact that no one cares all of you are going to die. Because of you, Jimmy! At every step of the way Daisuke trusts you and believes everything will work out, right up until you fucking kill him!

Swansea: Swansea knows you're (Jimmy's) a fuckup and spends his last moments trying to kill you for getting everyone else killed. He also spends the majority of the game drunk on MOUTHWASH because if he's going to die he may as well be completely numb for it! So you shoot him, and it's heavily implied that you do it while he's tied up, like an execution. It's arguable whether he was spending the game trying to save himself or trying to save Daisuke, but either way at least he was doing something, Jimmy.

Anya: Oh boy Anya. I have opinions about the implications in Anya's character and about how the fandom at large has been interpreting them, but it's almost certain that Jimmy has been sexually assaulting Anya and that Anya is pregnant with his child. It's almost certain that she does not want to be. She spends a lot of the game quiet and sad and flinching in Jimmy's presence, as he berates her and condescends to her in ways that he thinks are justified because she's bad at her job. She isn't though, when she actually has the opportunity to do something she's confident and when she's talking to Curly in flashbacks she's funny and easy going. She just hates giving Curly the pills for what should be obvious reasons, including that Curly was her friend and she hates seeing what's happened to him. She kills herself, in the end.

And Jimmy. Spoilers -- it's Jimmy who wrecks the ship and kicks off the events of the game. Jimmy who is so petty and bitter about losing his job, so petty and bitter about Curly not, that he tries to kill himself and everyone on board. And then he lets Curly take the blame for it, and spends the rest of the game telling himself that he's stepping up and taking responsibility while he runs away from every opportunity to take responsibility that is presented to him. Jimmy who is so wildly incompetent and ill-suited for leadership that he fucks everything up so badly that there is no turning back even from the first moment of the game. This is a tragedy! They are all doomed from the start! And it is your fault. There is no action you can take to fix anything, and every action you do take just makes things worse.

There is no hope in MOUTHWASHING. The found family is abusive and dysfunctional. You -- the player -- spend the game seeing things through the eyes of a man who has told himself that his actions are justified, but if you step back you see a coward who lashes out at everyone around him. Step back again and you can see that no one else on the ship could have done any better -- there's a reason they all let Jimmy take charge and it's not just that he gets to be Captain now that Curly's out of commission.

I don't want people to force this game into a box it doesn't belong in, and I don't want people to play it based on that box, thinking they're going to get an experience that the game cannot and will not offer. MOUTHWASHING is what it is, and for a certain kind of freak (me) it is exactly what we want. For everyone else, it's not for you and that's okay! It is not an experience I want anyone to have if they don't actually want it! Games like this can hurt people, and it's really just not cool to be pushing those people toward it anyway.

[Fetian]

Like everything else aside the fact that every single person in the game experiences a gruesome death should be enough to discount that interpretation immediately and thoroughly

[Fetian]

I guess it's possible to have a 'hopeful found-family ending' with a bunch of dead people but like. Let's not be smartasses about this one, eh.

[Fetian]

This sort of thing is exactly why I stopped my analysis project of the game and stopped reading fandom interpretations of things, because I could see the game was breaking out of its original space into the wider internet and I knew people would Be Wrong about it.

[Fetian]

(I'm not mad, just opinionated)

[erikavonkaiser]

if working on BSFF has taught me anything it's that terminally online people will call literally any piece of media "found family" and expect that their words are a) accurate and b) descriptive, when they are often neither