Returning to the Gorkhon, Space Transbians, & Nostalgia - Update 10/25/24

Hey y’all, Ruby here, hope it’s going well!

With the arrival of the Death of a Wish/Born of a Dream video looming, I just wanted to touch base with a quick update and lay out what I’ve got planned in the coming months.

So, first and foremost: The DoaW/BoaD video will be premiering at 1PM PST on the 28th. Premiere will hopefully be getting set proper on YouTube tomorrow, provided Premiere co-operates. I’ll be using the next couple days to get the closed captions in order. I’m happy to say that this project is well and truly in the can. Really proud of how it came out all things considered, though there are definitely some lessons I’ll be taking away from it going forward. If nothing else, I do feel like getting to spend so much time with Chris and his friends was ultimately a positive experience for me personally. A really nice cast of characters to hang out with for a change of pace, the relentless nightmare of it all be damned.

Additionally, after the premiere, I’ll be streaming my first playthrough of the Silent Hill 2 Remake over on Twitch and running through that over the following days to celebrate Halloween. A friend gifted me a copy of the game, so since I’ve already got it in hand, I am keen to find out firsthand if the Remake lives up to the hype. If you find yourself with some free time this week, feel free to come by and hang out, keep an eye on my increasingly active Bluesky for updates~

This means that Haruspex is now my highest priority. 

The rough draft for the first several days is already done and, more importantly, I’ve been making fantastic headway on the research into the history of the Moscow Arts Theater and the Stanislavski Method over the past couple months. I’ll be spending the next month or so getting a lot of irl stuff in order while wrapping up research and beginning to reach out to collaborators en masse. 

As I've mentioned before, it's my plan to put the entirety of the Haruspex's Route into one giant video, which is still very much the plan. However, both for the sake of pacing and for making some nuanced points I wanna make, there will be at least two 'intermissions' which, in combination with the intro, will tell the history of the Moscow Arts Theater and how it's legacy still impacts basically all narrative art to this day.

My goal is to start rolling out previews of the individual days here on Patreon in the coming months, hopefully starting fairly soon. I’d really love to be able to have some version of Day 1 to y’all by the end of the year, and will be doing my best to make that happen. That in mind, I am also doing my best to approach this as a marathon and not a sprint, so things might take the time they need. My long term aim is to try and make updates and previews more consistent, and I’m hoping this approach will be healthier for me and the project as a whole. As ever though, these things will take the time that they will take to make sure it’s everything I want it to be.

On the bright side, I am quite optimistic about it coming together smoothly. I know exactly what I want it to be and what I want to say with it, so once we get the first day together, I expect the rest will come together fairly quickly. If all goes well, it will mean that I’ll have a bit of spare time and energy to handle spinning a couple other plates on the side while Haruspex continues to come together.

Which brings us to the 2 other projects I’m going to be working on in the background alongside Haruspex:

The other big passion project is a video for Heaven Will Be Mine. For those of you who don’t know, Heaven Will Be Mine is a queer mecha visual novel made by Worst Girl Games about a collective of people exiled to space for not being human enough as the threat of war between them and the rest of Earth hangs over them. Then the mecha pilots make out with eachother while talking in lightly allegorical language about queer philosophy.

This is a game which is very important to me, as well as to SulMatul, as well as to several queer writers and youtubers close to me. So I wanted to try to do something a little special, a little experimental, a little in keeping with the spirit of HWBM. The current plan is to do something kind of akin to a more extreme version of how the Signalis video is formated: An in-depth voice acted summary, followed by multiple essays giving differing takes on the subjects in question, except in this case there would be minimal added narration on my part to let the game speak for itself, and then move into a second half which will feature 3-5 essays about the story from 3-5 different writers, all bundled together.

If you’ve played Heaven Will Be Mine, you might already appreciate why I think it’s important to do it this way. HWBM is, ultimately, a game about how radically and reasonably queer perspectives can diverge, but also how we need to reconcile and grant grace to each other. It’s a story of finding love within queer solidarity as we remember that we all, at heart, want the same things. A beautiful and important message, which I feel would be very undercut by me hogging the mic all to myself and refusing to make space for views differing from mine.

It will still be a deeply collaborative endeavor and one that I’ll still be overseeing and directing, rest assured. It will ultimately be My Baby, as it were, and the most involved of those essays is likely to be my own. However, part of having even the relatively small platform I have means that I feel some obligation to get more viewpoints other than mine out there when it comes to subjects like these. We’ve already finished replaying the game and most of the essays in question are already being drafted. I don’t know when this will be out, as getting Haruspex is my top priority, but this will be slow cooking in the background.

The other is a project I had no plans on doing until about two weeks ago, but then tripped and fell into writing 10k words about, so I guess it’s now in the cards. Which is my way of telling you that I replayed the Devil May Cry games and, well. I still have thoughts. 

About the whole series. 

And I really, really wanna get them out there. 

And the DMC Netflix series is going to be dropping soon.

I’m sorry.

However, I recognize giving my usual level of detail to something like this would be A Lot of effort and time. As such, I want to try something slightly. Different.

So, I recognize that my high production value and tight editing is one of the unique strengths of my style, and I have no plans to change that. Haruspex will be very tightly edited for it’s entire run, the Heaven Will Be Mine video will be simpler in a way that’s easier for me to produce, but still very stylized and polished in the end product. 

That is not what I want for this DMC video.

Thing is, I’ve S Ranked ever DMC game except 2 in some form, so I’m pretty confident I’d be able to create some decently compelling footage without aggressively editing it, particularly since a big part of what I’d want to talk about is what S Ranking these games looks like, means, and entails. 

I’d want this to be somewhat closer to a commentary, or simply more inline with the approach of most other ultra longform essayists. There might be 2 minutes of unedited gameplay from time to time. There might be time I just let a cutscene play in the background rather than sync it up 1:1 with what I’m talking about. I have no plans to be lazy about it ofc, but I’d rather save that energy for bursts rather than the sustained song and dance I often default to.

Which is my way of saying that this will be my attempt at making a ‘normal’ longform video essay. No theatrical influence or storytelling, no gimmicks or major experimentation, nothing except a long script about a video game franchise I mostly enjoy. I may even turn it into a chance to practice working with an assistant editor more in-depth.

This is a backburner project, something I’m effectively doing in my freetime as I continue to revisit DMC games and inevitably find myself incapable of NOT writing about them. I’m hesitant to even talk about this because it is such a backburner thing, but with how I just keep pouring more and more thoughts into the script for it, I’m increasingly confident it will make an appearance at some point.

And I believe that covers everything for the immediate future of the channel. As mentioned above, I’ve become much more active on Bluesky, so if you’re one of the many people who have recently fled to there, be sure to give me a follow @codexentry.bsky.social. Really should get a custom handle, @codex.entry is just right there, staring me in the face. Eventually.

Anyways, hope you all have a Happy Halloween and hoping to see you all later this week for the premiere and the hang out stream afterwards

See y’all real soon,
Peace~

Ruby <33