uck

[psocoptera]

Stayed up way too late playing text adventure with DVS. We were ready to be done with it, but failed to finish. First we were stuck for awhile, and then it just stopped being fun. Too grim. I mean, I've *read* Lovecraft, and, yes, there are some gruesome deaths in Lovecraft, but generally he's trying to *creep* you out, not *gross* you out, and it's not so much viewpoint character death (at least that I've read) and you don't have to read it *over and over and over* while you try to figure out what you're doing wrong. And now we have reached a part of the plot where the *correct* path of events involves being a helpless witness to an incredibly brutal murder, and committing murder ourselves, against a character the game totally led us to humanize. And, like, I'm sorry, that is just not nifty, you know? Nifty is when despite the scary appearance of something you connect with it, all close-encountersy, not when you take advantage of its moment of humanity to sneak-attack. So it is really not so much with the fun at this point, but it's hard to not finish something like that (we only have 60 of the 100 points!) leading to us keeping working at it far past our bedtimes, just trying to get through it. But still not succeeding. Bah.

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

Chthulhu is like that...

I thought the end was very cool, though and not at all ucky in this way, so I think it's worth finishing.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

But Cthulhu *isn't* like that, or at least Lovecraft's Cthulhu isn't. Yes, cults may sacrifice people in unpleasant ways to dark idols and half the party will perish almost instantly when they stumble in to a place they shouldn't have been, but Lovecraft's narrators are the sort of academic gentlemen who spend more time apologizing that they must relate these awful events than sharing the grisly details with you. Lovecraft may mention "oddly marred" or "dissected" bodies, but we're almost never actually there for the marring, and there aren't a lot of sickening details about the texture of the remains or the disposition of various organs. (And the people who die are more typically redshirts than fleshed-out characters.) I feel like Anchorhead needs a little more "You look away, unable to bear to witness any longer the savage spectacle before you. The degeneracy of the Stygian townsfolk has found full efflorescence in their unspeakable brutality, and you speak a silent prayer for the wretched soul engulfed in that tide of mad hate" and less "They are beating the old man to death with iron rods. His bones are shattered and his organs turned to pulp." Invite the reader to enter in and fill in details with their own imagination, instead of encouraging the reader to disengage and block out those too-realistic descriptions. I mean, I get enough stomach-turning brutality in the news, now that we've entered the pro-torture era. I don't want that kind of reality in my fiction.

But we probably are going to play one more time and try to wrap it, just to see it through.