what i'm reading:
TF2 Fanfiction
How do you write fanfiction about a 20-year-old video game whose major plot is "shoot shoot run die" and whose characters are assorted satirical cardboard cutouts?
I guess this is a stupid question to ask today, since we live in the asbestos-riddled ruins of the Overwatch fandom, but as similar as these games are conceptually, there is one critical difference: sex appeal. So comprehensive was the libidinal fog clouding OW's cultural niche, the apocryphal anecdote of SFM artists blazing new ground in 3D animation to make horny OW animations may well be true. The eros is especially blatant in the OW2 heroes, those polygonal succubae hell-bent on luring back those once-fans disinclined towards funding a den of sexual harassment.
TF2 doesn't have anything near that level of mass psychosis. Go on any booru-type board and compare the totals of entries tagged "Overwatch" and "TF2". You won't be surprised to find there's a difference, by order of magnitudes, in OW's favor.
So, absent the breasting-boobily (unisex) attraction of OW, what does TF2 actually have that inspires fanfic authors?
Character Everything about TF2 is fun. The "Meet The Merc" series remains the gold standard in video game character comedy, the webcomics rarely stray from hilarity, the designs are cartoonish but grounded, and the gameplay is exciting and unpredictable. Pissplay is literally a game element. For a certain type of person, this gets their gears turning.
Open-endedness Transformative works flourish in the lacunae of established plots. With TF2, there's literally nothing within the game itself. The web-comics offer more characterization, but their peripheral status and goofiness allows fanfic authors to cherry-pick the character and plot elements they want to underpin their comparatively more serious
"Anomaly Diversion" by ObliqueLane is a good example. The author takes the gameplay abstractions and runs with them into a slow-burning psychodrama with some classic TF2-appropriate silliness sprinkled in. It's kind of corny, but the rabbit-hole the author goes down is the kind emblematic of a property that feeds you only bread crumbs. And they name drop fucking Carl Jung.
All-male Ensemble Authors of transformative works cannot resist the siren song of two men standing next to each other. Now make that 3 or 4, and we start getting diverse entanglements of. There are 9 men in TF2, or if you count the RED and BLU teams as separate entities, 18. That's a lot of men. Just think of everything you could do with 18 semi-distinct dudes: enemies-to-lovers, forbidden love, self-cest, polyamory, orgies, vore. The possibilities are endless!
what i'm listening to:
overmono - paradise runner
Overmono is officially a failure.
The first I ever heard of Overmono was "16 Steps", which is a mind-bending rhythmic exorcism. They had an ominous, plunderphonic sound in those early EPs, very dubstep, very British. Then they dropped "If U Ever"-- a revelatory opener to the 'Good Lies' era, which had some real fucking heavy hitters. "Blow Out" is never leaving my gym rotation.
Five years of Doberman-clad singles later, "Paradise Runner" is just a travesty. After getting a taste of a Fred Again-level festival paycheck, they've death-spiraled into lowest common denominator, crowd-pleasing schlock. This is a tragicomic-level betrayal. RIP Overmono.
what i'm watching:
SISTER - a short film by Daniel Hentschel
Better known for being bald and loud in his car, Dan Hentschel has dropped what's essentially a digital Stan Brakhage. There's a masterfully executed story at the heart-- with the brevity and impact worthy of an urban legend-- but it serves as scaffolding a dizzying procession of textures: grainy jpegs, Google Streeview, public live-streams and desktop screen captures.
"SISTER" is about sensation, memory, and the struggle to exist now. So much of Dan's comedy is about personal friction with modern technology. His comedy parodies the click-bait genre of driver's-seat confessionals ("I'm a male feminist. It cost me my best friend", "Cringe things people say at therapy", "I saw my grandma pleasing herself"), meant to attest to the creator's authenticity as an individual but ultimately directed, however consciously, to be fodder for the algorithmic content-churn. Even his stupid-ass tiktoks are kind of a self-reflexive critique. Like, why the fuck does this silent video of him dripping with viscous fluid have 1 million views??? Because obviously it would, and he knew it would. And that's why he's a genius.
While set in the modern day, "SISTER" is pinned to the 2000s. The protagonist is trying-- impotently-- to return to those years via the internet, but not out of nostalgia. He tries through phone calls, Street-View, and travel websites, but in the end, all he has is a memory, and maybe not even that.
what i'm playing:
TF2 lobbies are such a fucking coin flip, because on one hand you can end up with cool people-- i complimented someones xiu xiu pfp and we had a nice conversation about our favorite albums-- or a bunch of hard-r-spewing gamers. I was literally in a game with Benito Mussolini and Emperor Hirohito, once.
what i'm working on:
i wrote a multi-threaded multiplexing socket server that makes the browser refresh when the files change. It's like Vite but it doesn't actually work and isn't cross-platform or user-friendly and none of the threads actually terminate so it just keeps swallowing memory. and it only took me 3 days of non-stop work.
something i liked:
I've been putting ice water in a mason jar with a little lemon juice. Makes me feel like a pickme girl but it's soooooo good. It's so fucking good.
something i hated:
epistemic relativism: how am i not right about everything???
u know how christians are like "I believe this because God said so" and then you're like haha,,, stupid idiot, that's not how facts work. I believe the right thing because society said so.
but then im like wait a second. I FUCKING HATE SOCIETY!!!! so how can I claim the grounds on which I base my beliefs are more factual than, like Christian Science or astrology or Q anon. If anything, I should feel supporting of knowledge-production that cuts against the mainstream. Knowledge is whatever everyone agrees on. I don't actually know if there's a President, if the earth is round, or if I have all the organs I'm told I have.
a picture:
Imagine this but TF2.
I don't even know where I fucking got this. I can't read German.