Always, I want to build something that says something

A lot of my work is about expressing my pain, my frustration and anger. And almost always, my fear - this is why I write science fiction and horror. I'm constantly occupied with the potential for something horrible to happen, to figure out how to strip my feelings of the surface details and let the deeper stuff wear a new coat that invites other people to share it without feeling like their digging into my own guts. (Except when I show off my guts - I guess these are for different audiences, but I exist as someone who craves both from my media so there must be others.)

This project is not from my fear though, it comes from my joy! I am trying to say something about the things I love. This really specific philosophy about how fiction moves us, and how that movement can be made literal in fiction, dragging use from one world into another, and changing us while we're there. Fiction lets us be vulerable because it makes this alien space where we are free to dig into the world around us without the same responsibility to it, or the faces attached we would feel bad admitting to hating or loving. But those names are attached in our lizard brain, and fiction can show us things about those perspectives we would not be open to learning otherwise.

I have learned through this project that I do have a lot of friends and strangers open to me guilelessly info dumping about this nerdy, indulgent topic! But as fun as that is, it's not nearly as fun as forcing it into a poem or a set of mechanics that someone else can play with. A certain audience has the patience for a clinical and passionate lecture, and is totally receptive to feeling in that format. But a game is an illustration that shows how I feel about it in a way I can't express with words.

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day - we both love torturing ourselves by learning about the shitty ways humans carve up and claim the earth to exploit. I'd learned that a famously terrible movie touches on this in a direction I hadn't approached before, and now I want to watch it. He asked why I'd want to learn about it through a shitty fiction, and I told him it's just my preferred way of playing with a dark world, and the order in which I like the experience things - watch the mediated and maybe mutilated media depicting it first, without the context of how it's incorrect so I can just enjoy it for what it is, and how it relates to myself. Then I like to go out and learn more about the topic from a more informed perspective - I can judge the author of the fiction about who they are and what they value while I'm investigating the source they're drawing from, and it really propels my investigation. My dad also taught me from a young age that even non-fiction is distorted by an author, and the responsible way to form your own opinion about something is to seek out reports from a variety of perspectives and see where they overlap and where they differ. Frontloading fiction is just the fun way to do this for me. (It is a trick I learned from watching film adaptations of novels - I stopped reading the book before the movie comes out for this reason. A movie only has two hours to stand on its own, a novel has a lot more space to dip in and out of comparison and narrative immersion, and you can reflect and compare during breaks rather while you're actively reading. This is a narrative mechanic afforded by the format. My thesis was originally about narrative mechanics afforded by formats. I will talk about it more someday. Teleporting through realities is maybe more fun for other people, and I'm still talking about narrative affordances of one specific format. )

So! He said something along the lines of "You just perfectly explained why my life is so joyless lately." Dark, dude! But flattering? He said maybe there is not enough fiction in his life right now, he's just doomscrolling all the misery in the world. I hope that if he injects a little fiction into his life, and sees imaginary people doing their best to process similar misery, he will see their hope, or at the very least feel less alone in it.

I don't think fiction needs to be educational or even cathartic to be valueable, even if it can be both those things. I do think it can cultivate a curiousity about the world as viewed by others in a person. Sitting in that story for a bit, and feeling it with a bit of care shows us a bit of ourselves and the world we live in, without the mud calculating our reaction -