corpsebrigadier | Snowflake Challenge #9: Canon Promo

Promotional banner depicting a snow-covered green bench in a snowy park. Text: Snowflake Challenge: 1-31 January.

In your own space, promote at least one canon that you adore (old, new, forever fandom).

Okay! Time to play catch up!

It would be very easy for me to just gush about my inordinate love of the 1990s sepia-toned misery generator that is Final Fantasy Tactics, but I recognize that my addiction to this canon is a very personal one and that it's honestly a sort of hard sell at points. Immensely fun as it is, it requires the time sink any video game requires for one to get into it; it has two translations that have pronounced downsides in two incredibly different ways; and as much as I adore its plot, it's not actually that original or earth-shattering. If you read the Cliff Notes to Shakespeare's first Henriad, browse a Wikipedia article or three on gnostic gospels, and set on Ladyhawke as background noise while you do the dishes, you probably have most of the major plot beats.

I'm going to use this prompt, then, to gush about some canons I love that have absolutely zero fanworks on Ao3, as I want more people to know they exist, I want to remind myself why I love them, and this will prove good practice for describing them should I decide to eventually put in some long shot exchange requests.

A Movie: Survive Style 5+

This, in addition to Hausu and The Fall, is a compelling piece of evidence as to why we need to allow advertising directors to make more films. This 2004 film by Gen Sekiguchi is visually fantastic in the most overwhelming, hyper-detailed way possible, and it is utterly magical. The narrative follows five different interconnected groups of characters engaging in various escapades involving an odd mixture of hypnotism, assassination, robbery, and conditional immortality, and it's a bit hard to describe the plot in any cohesive manner. The primary narrative arc, however, is a compelling story of a nameless man repeatedly murdering his wife only for her to resurrect herself again and again to attack him in increasingly fabulous outfits in their complete art installation of a house. If you like pretty people navigating their relationship through repeated acts of violence (and I do), this is already a great time. If you like films where Tadanobu Asano gets beaten up (and God... I do), I strongly encourage you to pick up this fine piece of cinema immediately.

It's just intensely surreal and goofy in all the best of ways. It has a showy, animal themed stage mesmerist hypnotizing a salaryman into believing he's a bird. It has passive aggressive torture in the form of an unending feast of foods straight out of some 1950s hell cookbook. It has a woman snickering over her idea for an obstacle course in which participants must successfully bed a woman until they achieve orgasm, such that the contest is won by a man with premature ejaculation issues. The main thing I want to emphasize about this film, however, is that despite being about spousal murder and hiring Vinnie Jones to assassinate your douchey boyfriend (another major plot point!), it's actually really heartwarming. It's set during the Christmas season--which makes its garish visuals all the more appropriate--and most of the characters you come to care about get some measure of closure by the end of the film in a way that feels satisfying. The end of the movie is also just completely perfect in a way that I am not inclined to spoil.

Also the soundtrack is completely killer.

A Book: "The White People" by Arthur Machen

Ao3 has 8 whole works for Arthur Machen's better known horror story "The Great God Pan," which is a fantastic, proto-Lovecraftian novella from 1890 about the dangers of performing invasive brain surgery on orphans to bring back the elder Gods. It's excellent, and you can read it here, but it's not the work I'm talking about.

I'm talking about "The White People," which in addition to having a name for that lends itself to all sorts of jokes about apt horror story titles, is phenomenally chilling in its portray of childhood corruption and the innocence of evil. It opens with a philosophical discussion of the sublimity of sin, and then delves into a young girl's diary that opens with an accounting of all manner of rituals and terms that are never described or defined. Like, seriously, you just straight up get a dose of this:

I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great beautiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the chief songs. I may write something about all these things but not the way to do them, for peculiar reasons. And I must not say who the Nymphs are, or the Dôls, or Jeelo, or what voolas mean.

And Machen will never tell you what any of that means and will keep on adding layers of secret ritual and creepy allusions to things not spoken of. The end result is a gorgeous, chilling look at all the ritualistic, folk horror type tropes we know and love (or at least I know and love) from an unknowing and serene insider perspective.

A Game: Beneath a Steel Sky

I love me a 90s click and point adventure game, and I'm often saddened that the ones that are not by Sierra On-Line or Lucas Arts don't get so much love. Revolution Software's 1994 Beneath a Steel Sky is a futuristic dystopia story brimming with black humor, and while it's end obviously suffers from being a bit rushed, it is generally just brimming with cool stuff that I admire.

You play as Robert Foster, a guy living in the post-apocalyptic Australian wastelands who gets picked up along with his sarcastic robot buddy Joey and dumped into a totalitarian cyberpunkish city for plot reasons. The game is standard adventure game fare (combining lots of nonsensical items for nonsensical reasons), but its inclusion of a cutely insufferable robot buddy adds a different dimension to the game play than the often solitary practices of titles where you play as some solo dude trying to fix the world's problems to custard pies and masking tape.

One of the things I love most about it is that it has a great vibe of suburban horror to it, featuring strip-mall-esque joints where you can get one hour plastic surgery and surprisingly chipper music for a game about navigating your way out of a horrific fascist-flavored metropolis. It also has a complete off the hook sequence where you get one of those electrical port body mods and go into cyberspace only it's cyberspace circa 1994. This is something that could only have been appreciated by audiences well after the decade in which the game was released; there's something impossibly nifty, though, about being a glowing body of light moving about to open Windows 3.1 file folders on a glowing synthwave grid.

Also in it's favor, I have to say that I am 99.9% certain that it was a major influence on Wormwood Studios completely excellent game Primordia and that it is also completely FREE on GOG these days.