Guest Post: Home, Heartbreak And Undertale

This post contains story spoilers for Undertale.

I spent most of my playtime with Undertale scared and depressed. This is probably not a normal or even, perhaps, sensible reaction. The game is pretty hilarious. It’s full of fantastically written characters. It’s an overall enjoyable, fantastic experience that I’d recommend to anyone. But it really upset me, and that’s still hanging around whenever I think about it. And it’s all Toriel’s fault.

Well, maybe that’s a bit harsh. But it certainly feels that way.

Toriel is the kind of character I wish there was more of in fiction. I’ve been experimenting with a character like her (though quite, quite different) for awhile now in my own writing. She’s caring and incredibly genuine. She’s feminine, and given many “grandma” sort of qualities. But at the same time she’s strong, she’s powerful, and she makes things happen. She has agency. She calls back to this ideal person I dreamed of being when I was little: mom-like, but without the dependence that was connected in my head. Who I am has changed a lot since then, of course, but there’s still a real strong connection there. I could do a lot worse to look back at my life and realize I resemble Toriel. I loved her, from when she first takes your hand in the game. It was something so ridiculously intimate-feeling, a gesture you just don’t see in games like this. How could I not?

And not long after, the game forced me into a situation where I had to essentially hurt her. Now, yes, of course, there’s a pacifist solution, and I used it, but I really hurt her emotionally by leaving. I knew she’d be upset. But she gave me a phone, and her phone number, so she’d always know I was safe. So I called her, and she didn’t pick up. I called Toriel approximately every 10 minutes of game time for the entire game, and she never picked up.

Now, from a narrative standpoint, this makes perfect sense. To her, me leaving was another death, of many. Another mistake of her ex-husband she couldn’t stop. To Toriel, she was grieving for me. (Even more true once it’s revealed she was really grieving for the me of long ago, the character you control in the game not being you.) Why would she increase her pain by talking to me? I wasn’t going to make it, just like the rest. I was already gone. I understand why it’d be hard to pick up the phone.

But to me, personally, it was devastating. I’ve been working really hard on my brain problems recently, and I’ve discovered something about myself. I have an anxiety disorder, and it all comes from this fear that people I care about are going to leave me, or abandon me. That I can’t be the thing they want. Someday they’ll realize it, and off they’ll go. Toriel wanted me to stay with her, enjoy a simple life with her, and I tried. I tried so hard to do that. I wasted almost an hour trying to figure out a way to not tell Toriel I wanted to leave the RUINs. I liked her. I wanted to be that for her, if that’s what she wanted. I couldn’t. It was a game of adventure. So I had to press on, because that’s the game. And she left me for it.

The moment I called her after walking out of the RUINs, and she didn’t pick up, I nervously told myself it was too quick for another event with her, and she’d pick up soon. I played a tiny bit more, and nothing. And I realized she would never pick up. And I vowed to stop playing the game right then and there. I couldn’t take her leaving me. It reminded me of my recurring nightmare I have. I used to have it every night. These days, I’m doing better, and it’s a couple times a month. But I’m always somewhere I want to be, and I realize, at some point, someone I care about has disappeared because of something I did. Maybe it’s my parents, maybe it’s my fiance, maybe it’s someone else, but they’re gone. I run and search and cry and can never find them. I knew I wouldn’t find Toriel either, a character who said she’d love it if I called her “mom,” since I brought it up. I couldn’t take it. I had that nightmare that night, just to seal the deal.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the game, and Toriel, though. Everyone else was enjoying it. I was going to miss something important, wasn’t I? So I asked around, talking to people who had beaten it, trying to find a reason to play more. “Will Toriel pick up the phone? Will it be okay? Will she talk to me?” They told me it would be alright. But the whole way through the game, I called, over and over again. And she never picked up. I held on to the pie she had given me. I couldn’t bring myself to use it, because I knew it would probably say something in the use text that would upset me, because it’d be about her. I laughed at the jokes, I got to know other great characters, I enjoyed the game, sure, but most of it I was on edge. I was worried. I was scared. What if it didn’t work out? What if she doesn’t pick up the phone?

Of course, in the True Pacifist ending, you are reunited. Toriel comes back as part of the dramatic finale, and you can give her the family she wants. But what you can’t do is apologize for hurting her, making her worry. And what she doesn’t do is apologize for not answering the phone. You tell her you want to live with her, and she remarks that you should have said so from the beginning. But I couldn’t do that. I tried, but I couldn’t, just like so many things I wanted to be for my parents, because they wanted it so badly, but I couldn’t. And just like my parents, Toriel abandoned me, for a time.

I saw those ending scenes, and I went, “Oh, good, that’s what I wanted.” But even now I can’t completely get into the fantasy of it. I’m still worried about it. She left me once, for doing something I had to do. Can I really be sure she won’t leave again? She made a joke out of me wanting to call her “mom,” after all. Is this as serious as I want it to be? I don’t know. There’s no more game to tell me.

A friend of mine commented (or maybe retweeted, I can’t remember) that it’s wonderful that Toriel has already basically become a mom for furries who don’t have that sort of thing. And that’s something I really understand, and that idea makes me happy. I kind of feel that way too, not because I don’t have a wonderful mother (mine’s pretty great, all things considered) but because can you ever really have too many moms? Too many people that show concern for you? And I’m glad she had an arc, of sorts, in the story, as a writer. It all worked well. I know she, in particular, is going to stick with me for a long time, and that’s the sign of a good character.

But I’ll never get to tell her I missed her. And she’ll never get to tell me she’s sorry for leaving me alone for so long.

Maybe that’s silly or ridiculous to be so hung up on. But I am. Such is the power of an interactive medium.

This post originally appeared at On The Stick and is reprinted with permission. Alexis Long writes cool stories you should read at poetfox.com.

Why Do Teen Dramas Keep Sidelining Black Characters?

Bianca Lawson as Kendra Young
from the second season of Buffy
The Vampire Slayer

Writing for Vulture, Angelica Jade Bastién, talks about hear love of teen dramas, starting as a teen watching The Craft and shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer when she was a teenager herself. She's remained a fan up to the present day, but she's found that a problem she had with shows in her teens persists in shows today: it's really hard to find characters of color that get as much development in ensemble dramas as their white counterparts. djdjdjdj, :

[B]lack characters are often solely given an arc in relation to the white characters around them... In many films and TV shows, this is also used as a way to discuss racial politics...This may seem radical for the predominantly white filmmakers who work in this genre, but it’s important to remember that black girls’ lives aren’t solely defined by racism. We deal with romantic foibles, desires, and fears just as richly complex as the white leads this genre focuses on to the detriment of the black girls coloring the margins.

Bastién mentions the latest teen drama to start with a promising introduction, only to fall to some of the same problems: CW's Riverdale and the show's introduction of Josie and her bandmates The Pussycats:

K. J. Apa, who plays the remarkably befuddled (and ripped) Archie, is half Samoan. Veronica is Latina. Reggie is played by an Asian-American actor. And most notably, not one, but all of the members of Josie and the Pussycats are black, a change that eschews the tokenization previous iterations of the group have displayed. But as Riverdale approaches the end of its first season, it has reaffirmed some of the age-old problems within the genre... At the least, Riverdale’s Josie, Valerie, and Melody aren’t stereotypes, but they rest in the same troubling space that the black girls in films like Save the Last Dance occupy. They’re not characters so much as they are a vehicle for a Message. Josie and her fellow pussycats are positioned to communicate the message that Riverdale is more modern and inclusive than teen dramas of the past, even though it has yet to prove it beyond its casting.

Heck, in the comics and cartoons, Josie and The Pussycats were mystery solvers. Riverdale ended its season with a murder plotline that's been weaving in and out of the story all season, but Josie and company have been seemingly shunted aside. Bastién name drops The Craft, Buffy and Bring It On-- what ensemble shows do you think dropped the ball with characters of color? Did the writers fix it? What would you like to see, dear readers?

Guest Post: Undertale, Emotion, Pain & Love

Nicole Johnson, my sister from another mister, was also a contributor to an Undertale fanzine I solicited for last year. Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond my control, the project folded, but the comic and personal essay to be included were too good to miss out on. So I've been granted permission to reprint them here and share them with you all, gentle readers.

UNDERTALE SPOILERS FOLLOW AFTER THIS LINE

---

Long story short, I am glad I decided to do this. I am fairly certain that I would -not- have wanted to play out the rest of the game. For one thing, there are some really hard-looking battles. And there’s so much more of it than I expected. Seriously, we were there watching for like 5 hours.

My feelings on Undertale overall now… are that it’s a magnificent work of art. But an experience I can’t really enjoy because the depth of my investment… kind of makes being challenged by what is maybe the most meta, psychological (in an emotional rather than analytical sense) game I’ve ever seen into a harrowing event. I am certain that several spots in the game’s remainder would have elicited similar reactions in me as the fight with Undyne.

There are things I -adore- all throughout the game. There is so much I love. Characters, moments, dialog, sprites, backgrounds, music. Relationships. It is all rich and bountiful and brilliant.

But I still find it ultimately too sad to feel “good” about. It’s great art, but it leaves me in pain. Some great art does that. I don’t regret getting into this game. But it is very sad. It touches me deeply, I relate to so many elements of it so intimately, it cuts right to the bone. And it is rich in sadness.

I wish more people would have emphasized that to me. What people emphasized to me at first was the wonderment of “the game where you don’t have to hurt anyone”. That… sounded so healing, and wonderful. I was in a vulnerable place emotionally, and it sounded like the RPG I’d been waiting for my whole life. The Gentle RPG. Undertale is not gentle.

The other thing people emphasized to me was that the ending was magnificently redeeming and heartwarming. And they were partially right, and partially wrong, about how they thought I’d find it.

The Ending (the True Peaceful Ending, the Full Mega Deluxe Genuine Microsoft Advantage version) was …..it was very wonderful in some ways. 

I was given so much that I wanted. 

I got the ONE THING I wanted the most from the very beginning. I got to stay with Goat Mom. 

Sheesh, that is all I wanted. 

I seriously tried to see if I could, er, ‘end’ the game at the beginning. I never disobeyed Toriel. Which made the beginning….. kinda long. Well, I never disobeyed her without first trying to comply. As you all know, some of those times you have to do otherwise just to advance. My point is, I didn’t -want- to. The second she showed me my bedroom and touched my hair, I was SOLD. I wanted that life. I wanted the game to end right there. I wanted a mother who loved me.

Despite the wonderfulness of the ending… I am left aching by the tragic underpinnings of the story. The six dead souls. The suffering of the monsters and the war. Asriel. And Asriel once more, for good measure. I am left wounded by the emotional tumult one endures directing one’s fate through this world. So much emotional tumult. That’s practically one of the things the game’s “about”. The difficulty, ambiguity, and struggle that goes with trying to be a good person and fix things and help people/monsters. And care about things. How painful it is to care.

And I guess that…. circuit of mine is ‘hot’. Anything that touches my insecurities concerning those things shorts me out and I go haywire.

I think I am able to appreciate all the things I love about the game (Temmie), but I … do not have the relationship to it of an unambiguous fan. I mean, I am a fan in the sense that I generally promote it and think it’s a great game and should be played. But it was a rough experience. And it… left me with some freshly opened old wounds. And when I tell people about the game, I will tell them: It is magnificent, but if you get emotionally invested in character-driven stories, it is going to cut you. Maybe only a little bit, maybe a lot. But it is not Gentle. Shit, the pacifist route makes Mario RPG look like a playful romp with friends, a diversion by comparison.

It is a game rich with joyous playfulness, humor, redemption, and tender love. But it is also rich with tragedy, and struggle, and pain. I feel this needs to be said more than it was said to me beforehand.

As Dana put it, “Seeing you embark on this game with a full heart, opening yourself to it, and then just getting destroyed by it, was really hard to watch.”

So now I know how it all ends. (and ends. And ends. And then ends for Real. And then for REALLY real.) 

I am not the child who finishes the game out. I never finished the game. I dropped out, and watched the path of another hero for the benefit of knowledge. As an observer. My path was cut short. I know how it all goes down, but…. it feels like an adventure I set out on that ultimately bested me. A Game Over. I am not the child whose destiny unites the worlds, I’m someone who didn’t make it to the end. At least not in the shape I arrived there in.

So now I’m free. I can move on. Hopefully remain able to cherish the things about Undertale that I loved, hopefully, without… stewing and despairing over the things that hurt me emotionally. I feel freed from the responsibility I felt I had to myself, to know the full story. But the story doesn’t feel like ‘mine’. The other options were to try to grind through it myself and probably fuck myself up emotionally, or to not play OR watch and slowly find out all about it from the people around me. I thought this seemed preferable. And I’m really, really glad I got to do it with @cascadiarch right there, holding my hand.

---

Nicole Johnson is a cartoonist, musician, and costumer whose fondest wish is to publish stories that help weird little kids like she was once. She is definitely not a child masquerading as a voting-age citizen. She lives in California with her bossy big sister, a very helpful seabird, and two stupid cats.

Disclosure: I am a supporter of Johnson's Patreon.

Leigh Alexander: "All The Women In Games I Know Are Tired"

Photo courtesy of Shuterstock

Leigh Alexander is the former news editor of Gamasutra, as well as an author, creator of Lo-Fi Let's Play, and her writing on video games has appeared everywhere from Kotaku and Polygon to Variety and Time magazine. She hosted the "1 Reason To Be" panel focusing on how to encourage diversity in the tech industry in general and video games in particular. She has years of experience in writing about the nature of video games as a medium and as a creative force, and has worked with many other women in video games, from writing projects to memoirs to illustrated histories and more.

She's also noticed something she's had in common with her colleagues: they're all worn out and worn down, as she talks about in her personal essay "All The Women I Know In Video Games Are Tired":

"Every woman I know in games right now is really tired. Careful: That is 'every woman I know,' not 'every woman.' You must be very careful. It's the kind of fatigue that isn't so easily explained by our fist-shaking male colleagues who earnestly empathize across their social media platforms with how 'we get harassed a lot'. Some of us get harassed a lot and some of us don't... For the most part, I still have the same job that I have always had (not that I'm not proud of the growth I've had within it over the years). For my friends, the Twine revolutionaries and the vocal Tweeters and the other writers, a great act of deception has occurred: We've been in the New York Times and been invited to conferences and told that we are Important Voices, doing Important Work, we've been on the news at night and in magazines. We are awash in social capital. But none of it translates to real capital."

She talks also about her frustration with the impermanent nature of gaming's history, how so little is curated and so much writing about it disappears, and how so many interviews and panels want to focus on the issues she faces as being a Woman In Gaming to the detriment of her work in gaming:

[Another problem is] our ongoing memory crisis -- this field maintains little permanent record of either projects or conversations, reinvents the wheel every five years -- means we are all afraid to stop lest we be swept away and forgotten. If I were ever to stop, then five years from now, someone quite like me will not have known of me. Women, especially marginalized women, who had so much more to lose than I ever had and who risked it all to make their contributions, to do their important work, fear this too, probably far more. So we endure the interviews about The Harassment. But The Harassment is not our biggest problem at all...I have been here long enough to know that this article about Being A Woman will be more widely read than nearly any heartfelt work of pure games criticism I could do. That knowing is a low and constant ache.

The entire essay is a bracing and personal read. Please, read the whole thing.

Final Fantasy X Revisited

The HD remaster and re-release of Final Fantasy X in last for Playstation 3 and Vita has led to a new generation to rediscovering the game, as well as those who played it the first time to revisit it again, years later.

To this day, FFX remains one of my personal favorites in the Final Fantasy series, and I was wondering what other people my age going back and replaying it might have thought about it now. After all, while we have changed-- grown older, changed jobs, careers, moved, etc-- the game, has stayed largely the same, fresh coat of digital paint aside.

Leigh Alexander used the occasion to reflect on her love of Final Fantasy X, both from when she first played it as a teenager, and playing it again over a decade later in an engaging personal essay for Gamasutra, "Let's Revisit Final Fantasy X! Anyone?":

"Yuna is not the protagonist of FFX, but she's arguably the "main character," in that most things in the story are to do with her. She was maybe the first woman in video games that I cared for. Before that I had "liked" all kinds of others, sometimes dutifully borrowing lenses from the men's eyes through which most games were intended to be seen. I was usually attracted to women characters when I was supposed to be, and I was on board with "saving" them when the game told me to. Sometimes I liked them well enough as concepts, or thought I might want to "be" them. But Yuna, I cared for."

It's really interesting read, and you really should read the whole thing.