130 - necromancy
tonight is about writing just for the sake of writing.
sorry about my last post, by the way. i was going through it and felt like i had to get that out.
anyway.
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i am, somewhat perpetually, working on a game right now.
it doesnt have a name yet, but its about necromancy. you, the player, are a necromancer. we don't know why. you don't know why.
the premise is fairly simple. you have the ability to raise souls, although the exact nature of these souls and where they come from is so far unexplained.
having raised a soul, you are able to place it into a body, binding them together as a new creature under your command. so far, there is no explanation as to why they are under your command, and thus no reason why they shouldn't be.
you, the necromancer, cannot leave your house. your base of operations. your freakly little laboratory. this may or may not have something to do with the large welded-shut hunk of metal lodged in your lower abdomen, which you're pretty sure is your phylactery, and almost certainly some kind of reproductive metaphor now that i think about it. but we'll get back to that.
you cannot leave your house. so, you send your little creatures out into the world to do your bidding. thus our game truly begins.
you can, if you please, construct new bodies from individual parts that your creatures gather and bring back. sticks and stones, roadkill scraped off the highway, limbs robbed from cemeteries - there is no moral judgement passed on how you choose to acquire these parts; only that you may not kill for them. something won't let you. it does not seem to occur to you that you could command your underlings to harvest flesh from formerly-live donors. they would not carry out that command if you did.
anyway. as i was saying. you can construct new bodies, new habitats for the souls you have raised. they may be fairly normal, to blend in. humanoid, animal, or something more incomprehensible. can you really have too many limbs? is that a sensible number of mouths? you can, with time, assemble whatever sort of horrors you wish.
and so the game presents its core conundrum: do you construct the body most suitable for the task at hand... or do you create a home for each of these souls to live within?
(oh, thats quite good. i might keep that as a tagline for the trailer.)
the souls you raise will present preferences for and aversions to certain types of body, certain configurations of limb and skin and bone. you will have to throw them into any old body to begin with, provide a baseline from which they might express themselves. but the preferences of each soul can... change, as time goes on. a soul that formerly occupied the body of a human man, and seemed comfortable in such a form, may eventually discover they'd much rather be 8 meters tall, covered in prismatic scales and baring teeth that can rend iron. (wouldn't we all?)
in one way or another, each soul will communicate these preferences and aversions to you, and you have the choice as the necromancer whether you listen, or if you consider these creatures just pawns to your will.
they have no power over you, after all. there is very little consequence, for you, if you treat them as meaningless pawns. the choice is entirely one of conscience, the impact felt only by beings that exist entirely because you decided to make it so.
or maybe it is felt by you. if you let it matter.
this is an allegory for a lot of things, evidently. parenting and transness are the two that sit closest to my heart, but... also, its not really about that at all.
gender euphoria is not the sole domain of trans people, not should it ever have been. to nurture and care for something (or, to embody an absence of care) is not solely the domain of parents, but also of friends and other family.
this is what the game is actually about, i think. it asks you to think outside of your usual notions about the order of things. it asks you to be inefficient to get the dubiously good ending. it doesn't punish unkindness or brutality, nor reward them directly. it encourages you to decide for yourself the point of the story.
this is the game i want to create. the premise changes a little every time i retell it, so i suspect this will not end up being the game i create. that is also what the game is about.
additionally there will be a silly little deer, with teeth. but that's a whole other thing.
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the other day a friend of mine called me out when i was being... maliciously humble? im not sure if thats a real concept, but we'll go with it.
i haven't stopped thinking about the interaction since then.
i like to think that i'm the kind of person who has ideas, and that those ideas are worth something. i've always liked thinking, just for the sake of it. i approach every situation with a dozen supplimentary questions, which i know most people find unfathomably annoying - but i sometimes wonder how anyone gets by without being insufferably curious about everything.
i also like to think that i'm the kind of person who really ought to stop having so many ideas, because so few of them are worth anything and i should really just get on with it and let everyone else do the same.
obviously this is a massive contradiction, and i'm sure you can see which of them is more fun. but i tend to worry about which is more sensible, and less of a problem for everyone else.
this is what i was called out for.
i had had an idea that day, and it was a good one, and my friends who i work with were pleased with it. they were complimenting me for it.
it felt... intensely wrong, to accept the compliments. anyone could have had my idea, and on top of that it was the first real contribution i'd made in weeks. it didn't seem appropriate to be praised for such a small thing.
my friend pulled me aside, and more or less told me to shut up and accept that i'd done something worthwhile.
this is the thing about malicious humility, as i'm calling it. it doesnt just affect you.
if you negate your own achievements as not being 'enough', what does that suggest for someone alongside you who is achieving a similar amount? are they also not enough?
of course not. you'd never look down on someone else the way you berate yourself. but you don't have to. the unspoken message is there.
achievement is such a subjective measure. if you are constantly pressing yourself to do better because your best isn't enough, what sort of space is that creating for the people around you, who are also doing their best? should they be doing more?
of course not. someone's best is always good enough right now - except for yours. yours could be better.
the mental trickery you have to pull on yourself to survive that kind of dissonance is quite spectacular, to be honest. thats an achievement by itself.
anyway. all this to say, my friend called me out on it, and i've been thinking about it a lot since then.
i think i wanna be the sort of person who has ideas. maybe more importantly, i wanna be the sort of person who is proud of her ideas.
other people already seem to be. from time to time, my friends make a distinct point of trusting my opinions, asking my advice, reaching for my ideas.
i certainly don't think i stand above them. but perhaps, my insistence that i'm somehow less than equal with them is itself not showing very much trust in their judgement. and i'd like to think i trust my friends.
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as usual, i dont think i have any solid conclusion to end this on. it's just some stuff i've been thinking about.
i've been reading more recently - poetry, a couple novels, a couple things that exist dubiously in-between philosophy and political theory. (is the latter a subsect of the former? i dunno. there seems to be some disagreement on the matter.)
i've also been watching more; a couple tv shows, some really good films, some really bad films.
this is the first thing i've written on here in a while that has actually felt good to write, even though i didn't have a clear goal in mind and i don't think i have a clear outcome. i suspect all of these facts, the reading and the watching and the pleasant directionless writing, are all related.
i dearly miss being a frequent writer. perhaps its time to get back into it. we'll see.
💚💚💚