The Patreon Letters - August 12, 2017

Hey, everyone! This is going to be a short letter today, I’m currently working on university deadlines, so I’m a little out of action this week and next, but I’m sitting down to write the letter! Can’t leave you high and dry and content free, can I?

Please shoot me if I ever say that again.

There’s a moment in this week’s Amory Score where Molly and I talk about the fact that in the comic, a Jackhammer is a weapon used by Wilhelm Ryan’s Red Army (these are the bad guys). We’re grumpy because in the song, the line “MAN YOUR OWN. JACKHAMMER!!” is the first line of the chorus, yelled more than it is sung. It’s a fantastic moment, capturing this feeling of a big sci-fi style call to arms, repeated throughout the song as the other sections begin to wander and slow down. This is the first moment where you suddenly see why people latch onto the idea of these albums as telling this epic and emotional story. Because you’ve seen films, watched shows or read books where this exact moment has happened, and now you get to take part in it through song. And then you read the comic, and it turns out that’s actually the fucking bad guys. 

The comics we’ve been reading so far for The Amory Score have been universally terrible. The protagonist murders two of his children and another is sexually assaulted by the end of the first issue. They’re indefensibly bad. So bad that the more I start to understand the actual story being told, the less I like the songs. They take what was once evocative and in filling in the details make you realise just how rote and boring it all is. What was once the tone of the music conveying suggestions of a story is just a Star Wars rip off with some added misogyny.

Completely unrelatedly, No Man’s Sky just got an update which promises double the lore! Twice the lore. Where once stood one lore, now stands two. Look upon my lore, ye mighty, and despair. 

I fully understand why No Man’s Sky pushed people away at launch. It was a small game about flying from planet to planet with little to guide you, and what was there sucked. The story was empty, the cultures were meaningless, the space stations were identical. But it had tone for days, and it used that tone to create sublime moments. No Man’s Sky is a game about the music swelling as you leave a planet’s atmosphere and are greeted with space majesty, or the release of breath as you make it to shade before you die of heat exhaustion on some barren world. Its vagueness is its strength, just non-specific enough to be constantly familiar, for you to fill that void with your own ideas of an adventure among the stars. 

This isn’t saying the new NMS update is bad - I’m very excited to play more - but instead to say that I treat that game in the same way that I do an album. It’s a game of vague feelings that I can recapture and close down; the infinity comes not from the amount of Stuff but the lack of Stuff. Once I’m done with this podcast I’m never gonna read these comics again, but I’m going to keep the albums in my library forever. 

There is a desire in games, and anywhere else where nerd dudes rule, to quantify. To fill in every blank, to re-read every terrible line of Claudio’s lyrics in order to correctly fill in the wiki. It’s a shame because not only is it tiresome and dull, it can also prevent you from engaging with the very thing that is cool about whatever it is you’re into.

Anyway! That’s it, that’s it, I’ve got other work to do. I hope you all enjoy The Amory Score and get a sense through listening of how I can find the actual story and much of the fanbase shitty and repulsive, while still being able to love the music a lot and have those two things not even contradict slightly. It’s been a cool thing to explore in that show and I think it comes across through the goofs. I’m very proud of it, and I’m excited for the things coming up.

Okay that really is it now I have to work. Goodbye, see you out there, man the battlestations.

Jackson <3