Examples

For anyone wary of delving into a large primer on a metal adjacent genre, below are a two examples of both classic and modern dungeon synth. While albums are a more complete example, I have narrowed it down to two songs.

Depressive Silence - "Forest of Etenity" (1996)
Hedge Wizard - "More True Than Time Thought" (2014)

Dungeon synth is fascinating if not a little cryptic in its history and existence. If any of the above two examples are interesting or the concept of grim musicians making fantasy synth, then I urge you to travel further.

Introduction

Dungeon Synth is a style of at-home made fantasy synth. Despite it being a modern incarnation, its history is rooted in the 1990’s black metal scene, when its members created ambient synth projects and circulated those releases through tapes. These black metal side projects laid the groundwork for dungeon synth’s atmosphere and ethos regarding aesthetics, production, and distribution. Dungeon synth is primarily a solo endeavor with one person writing, playing, producing, and distributing the music. Today, it has become a diverse genre and cottage industry with tape labels, forums, festivals, and an international fanbase devoted to its history and development. Branching out from its beginnings to include a spectrum of sound, dungeon synth has transitioned beyond its dark ambient beginnings to a sound that includes neoclassical, new age, medieval, and even chiptune music. The space between fans and creators, since its beginning, has been small, leading to an intimate scene that exists today almost entirely on the internet.
This aspect of a virtual community and scene has shown itself unintentionally resilient within current events. The process of creating music in isolation and sharing it with an international fanbase through virtual albums and mailed media is something that has been unaffected since the wake of a global pandemic. Livelihoods of the creators and parcel service interruptions aside, dungeon synth, along with other virtual genres, has the potential to be a blueprint for future musical scenes that exist without in person contact. This divorce from the physical aligns with dungeon synth’s escapist aesthetics, as its thematic storytelling offers an at home journey that is safe and socially distant. Dungeon synth offers a window into a potential future where music exists between people through small portals separated by distance and realities.
I have been writing, reviewing, and cataloging the history of dungeon synth since stumbling upon its existence in 2014. Initially perplexed by its discovery, I began sharing the strange records I found with everyone I knew, marveling at this small scene of people making fantasy synth. What may have started as fanciful irony, has since evolved into a deep love for a genre of music I found almost by accident. Since that time, I have become an advocate of the genre, writing primers for its history, retrospectives for its albums, and organizing compilations for its creators. It is my hope to codify a roadmap for people who may not know of its existence but would love it if they did. Dungeon synth has a unique history among its creators, fans, and the space in which it exists, as it defies conventional classification -- continuing to make music in far away places, for far away people.

Part I: Forest of Eternity (1990-2000)

The use of the words "modern" and "classic" is easier to refer to with dungeon synth’s history two largest waves of interest with "modern" in referring to dungeon synth’s revival since the 2010’s and "classic" to refer to dungeon synth as it existed in the 1990’s. It is at this point, I am supposed to tell you the easy and linear history of dungeon synth forming from black metal side projects. Artists like Mortiis and Burzum would combine synth with fantasy aesthetics and sell it to black metal fans. That can be the answer and you can move on to the music, but I would be untrue to myself if I made it that simple. Genres and subgenres have a strange way of forming and even stranger ways of being written about. With enough time and hindsight, writing about music becomes easier since enough distance is created to make connections. Not only is dungeon synth still being created and its modern history has yet to get to a place where reflection can occur, its creation and foundations are still being connected. While bands like Old Tower are revered for their worship of classic dungeon synth and the term “Old School Dungeon Synth” signifies a proximity to black metal and perhaps a relevance to a core philosophy, dungeon synth’s roots are tenuous.
Classic dungeon synth never had a connected scene of influence outside of cassette trading circles. It has no documented motivation nor easy narratives to tell a tale of creation. Classic dungeon synth just existed collectively and independently in the mind of its musicians with their releases, which were then resurrected by fans and archivists decades after their original releases. Before 2011, dungeon synth as a concept and even name did not exist; rather it was a nebula of likeminded music under the name “dark dungeon music,” “neoclassical,” and/or “medieval” that was sorted with other dark ambient, darkwave, and experimental electronics. Dungeon synth did not begin as a named genre until one of its fans, Andrew Werdna, started "The Dungeon Synth Blog" in 2011 to promote the type of music made by Mortiis, Wongraven, and related artists. The creator of that blog coined the name and collected the material he found interesting and fit his view on what the genre should be. This arcane way of genre creation lays at the foundation of dungeon synth and its existence would not be if not for fans like Werdna archiving and connecting the dots.
Dungeon synth, in its classic sense, exists due to the will of its fans who are uncovering more and more releases, which in turn, reshapes its history over and over. One of the releases that will be discussed, The Sleeping Green by Lunar Womb, is a construction of a late 90’s release that was shelved and lay dormant on a harddrive for almost 20 years. This release, which is popular today, would not exist if not for the then current interest in modern dungeon synth. On a personal note, I even have a working theory that classic dungeon synth was a DIY adoption of the fantasy ambient that was created in the 1970’s with Kosmische Musik, and continued in the 1980’s with new age electronic music. As more releases are discovered, Dungeon synth’s history is becoming dotted with records that fit more into the history of electronic music than the birth of black metal.
One of the more popular early dungeon synth releases (one that is even tagged as dungeon synth) is 1991’s Master of Dragons by electronic composer Jim Kirkwood. Kirkwood was a UK musician who made a series of fantasy ambient records in the early 90’s. Master of Dragons would be an interesting starting point for dungeon synth as it has the aesthetics and sound for an origin story. As far as I know, Jim Kirkwood had no connection to the 90's black metal scene, rather his self released fantasy ambient records were just an extension of Berlin School electronics. It is my belief that dungeon synth in 10 or 20 years will have a more formalized history and for now exists as a genre that is being written as we speak. Its history is being constructed almost simultaneously, which makes writing about it strange if not incredibly exciting.
As of now, we have a roadmap of black metal musicians who made synth albums that were a long form version of the interludes that would prelude or act as an epilogue to many black metal demos. Additionally, we have dark ambient musicians who would release synth based records in the same trading circles as black, death, and thrash metal records. These are all well known parts of classic dungeon synth and is the sound tagged as “Old School Dungeon Synth.” It is a world of gloom where there are instances of wonder and magic but it is all cast in a haze of morose shades.

Classic Dungeon Synth Recommendations

Compared to the scope of modern dungeon synth, the boundaries for classic dungeon synth are smaller and more homogenized. There is a spectrum of dark and light and produced and raw, as we will see with modern dungeon synth, but the variety between these early releases is going to be more similar than different. This is due to the prevalence of home recordings and the proximity to black metal and dark ambient. Additionally, even in the most light releases there exists a sense of loneliness and solemnity. There is never (at least to my knowledge) levity within these releases, as the journey into synthscapes from black metal and metal minded musicians was a serious affair akin to meditation rather than something for a gaff. This is the bleak world of dungeon synth before it even had a name and its creators were the grey lords of escapism. For brevity, I included the highlights, If this type of sound is the thing you have been looking for, enjoy your journey through the lower worlds.
Mortiis - Født til å herske (1994)

Håvard Ellefsen, better known as Mortiis, is a project which is almost synonymous with classic dungeon synth, or at least the history of dark medieval synth. Mortiis to few was the bassist for the black metal band Emperor from 1993 to 1994. Mortiis to many more was a milestone in the development of what was then called dark dungeon music and a waypoint for future composers to model their sound. While Mortiis would make a variety of music, it is his “Era I” records or the releases that span from 1993 to 1999 that would become the center of reverence. Født til å herske (Born To Rule) is a 53 minute song split into two parts ,which brings the listener into a world of cold and uncaring passages that snake around the undercroft of a long abandoned castle. Between shadows and sunlight, Født til å herske is dramatic in its approach to cast emotion and atmosphere in a macabre play. The interplay with the keyboards and mixing is something that is both commanding and immersive. Mortiis' instance on the repetitive melodies that make up this song is a cornerstone of classic dungeon synth, as the music becomes a meditative chant used to transpose oneself to distant places. Mortiis would go on to explore different styles in the 2000’s before returning to his legacy as an alumni in the wake of the dungeon synth revival. The 2020 record Spirit of Rebellion is a reworking and recording of the 1994 record Ånden som Gjorde Opprør, which was inspired by his 2017 performance at the Cold Meat Industry 25th anniversary event (explain this a bit). This music means a lot to its creator and, though a lot of Mortiis' image is the punchline to internet jokes, Født til å herske and the majority of Era I is a testament to the power of this sound.

Depressive Silence - Depressive Silence II (1996)

Depressive Silence is perhaps one of the most popular if not most celebrated early dungeon synth projects. This is perhaps due to the fact the band started as a parallel project to the melodic black metal band Mightiest. Members Andreas Kreiler (Ral) and B. Schmidt (B.S) were both guitarists / keyboardists who created a synth entity for the 1995 split with Mightiest. While Depressive Silence’s second release Depressive Silence II is perhaps the more iconic release, with its cover almost being symbolic of dungeon synth. In the haze of mist and fallen ruins exists the whispers of entities that offer no guidance or reassurance. Depressive Silence II is a solitary adventure with an opening that could be one of the banners for classic dungeon synth. Both Ral and B.S. would go on to make one-off projects with a final release in 1997. These releases all happen to be some of the best music made in this time period. Solanum ‎– Spheres Of Time (B.S) and Gothmog - Medival Journeys (Ral) are essential and worth exploring for anyone interested in this time period.

Wongraven - Fjelltronen (1995)

Wongraven is the work of a Satyr well known as Sigurd Wongraven from the Nowegian black metal band Satyricon. Fjelltronen stands as the only release from the project outside of a 6 band split with Darkthrone, Neptune Towers, Storm, Isengard, and Satyricon: Fjelltronen’s history is rooted in Norweigan black and folk metal and its sound reflects this atmosphere with a 32 minute escape into fog ridden lands stalked by choral chants, soft acoustic guitar, and piano melodies. The success of Fjelltronen, and Wongraven in general, is the nebulous nature of the sound as it does not rest on a sole genre but rather gather a cadre of similar styles under a banner of grim atmosphere. The cover for Fjelltronen is a cropped image of "Til den grønne ridder'' by 19th century Norwegian fantasy painter Theodor Kittelsen. Not only was the same image used by black metal act Carpathian Forest for their EP Through Chasm, Caves and Titan Woods but Kittelsen’s works were also used by Burzum, Satyricon, and a host of modern dungeon synth artists. Fjelltronen remains a staple in classic dungeon synth as its bridge to black metal both in style and spirit.

Jääportit - Kauan Koskematon (1999)

Kauan Koskematon is the debut full-length from Tuomas M. Mäkel also known as Jääportit. While Jääportit lacks a black metal connection, it makes up for it with a strong foundation in the substyle of winter synth as well as a consistent output during the dark period of the 2000’s. On the project's website, Mäkel writes the inspiration for the project centered around the work of Mortiis as well as darkwave and neoclassical works from Arcana and Dead Can Dance. This nebulous origin produces itself in one of the most modern sounding records. Jääportit could exist in 2020 and be lauded for the approach to frozen landscapes, which are iridescent in the moonlight. Kauan Koskematon’s embrace of drone and regal melodies exist in icy embankments and would only be underscored by the artwork from Aslak Tolonen (From the Finnish neofolk band Nest). Winter synth would go on to become one of dungeon synth’s most popular substyles which, even though it borders on the edge of existence, is still a style that draws in listeners with an invitation to a glacial court.

Burzum - Hliðskjálf (1999)

For better or worse, Burzum is entwined in the history of dungeon synth. Burzum, also known as Varg Vikerness, was a Norwegian black metal project that not only produced milestone records for the scene but also found his way into some of the more horrific acts that would cast a veil of murder, racism, and antisocial behavior over this entire black metal genre period. While in prison for the murder of Øystein Aarseth, Varg Vikerness, with limited synthesizer and recording privileges, composed two dark ambient and medieval records based around Norse mythology. Dauði Baldrs, along with the follow up Hliðskjálf, would become some of the most famous records not only in the dungeon synth scene but also the greater black metal world as a lament from an infamous and imprisoned villain. Hliðskjálf would be the more complete record with melodic passages as well as retaining its icy sense of being. Hliðskjálf also saw some prototypes for modern dungeon synth, with songs like “Die Liebe Nerþus.” Hliðskjálf, and its predecessor, makes for easy talking points within the history of dungeon synth, yet the actions of its creator both before incarceration and during asks a lot from the listener when listening to the music. For some it is too much and to be honest, the history of dungeon synth can be experienced with or without the two records of Burzum.

Secret Stairways - Enchantment of the Ring (1997)

Secret Stairways was the solo project of US black metal musician Matthew Davis. Davis would lend his talents to the 90’s black metal project Blackened Chapel as well as the gothic darkwave project Twelfth of Never. Secret Stairways was his somber synth project that saw releases in 1997 and 1999. Both album's music was backed by the same sense of melancholy that would haunt most of Davis’ music, but a sense of twilight wonder with 1999’s Turning Point reached the zenith of production for these self released projects. Enchantment of the Ring has become iconic for its production and sense of wonder which creeps across the ground like fog. For most, Secret Stairways would reach a wider audience decades after its initial release and years after the suicide of Davis in 2011. Both Secret Stairway releases now stand as a shrine to its creator, who seemed to be a mage capable of marrying melody with a lingering sense of loss and grief.

Corvus Neblus - Chapter I - Strahd's Possession (1999)

Fans of the Greek black metal band Macabre Omen might recognize the name Alexandros Antoniou. In fact, on this subreddit we had an AMA with the artist who casually mentioned the Corvus Neblus project in conversation. Though Alexandros Antoniou sort of dismisses the project as a fanciful side project, Corvus Neblus and its two demos are high quality in terms of melodic dungeon synth. With heavy ties to the RPG universe, specifically the Dungeons and Dragons Ravenloft campaign, Chapter I - Strahd's Possession not only showcases the musician's immersion in the synthscapes but also the embrace of high fantasy for a vehicle of escapism. Though this record is, perhaps, most popular due to its connection with the artist and wouldnt have been found otherwise, Corvus Neblus is a high watermark despite the casual attitude of its creator.

Lunar Womb - The Sleeping Green (1999/2015)

Lunar Womb was a project started by Henri "Trollhorn" Sorvali known in other circles as the guitarist and keyboardist of the pagan metal band Moonsorrow and keyboardist for Blackened folk metal project Finntroll. The Sleeping Green was intended to be the third demo for the composer, following two other dark ambient releases (released on Meat Hook Productions who also released Moonsorrow records as well as Sorvali’s other project Woods of Belial). For various reasons, the third demo was shelved until 2015 when Sorvali found the tracks and intended artwork for the record. Additionally, 2015 was also the time when dungeon synth was experiencing it’s modern revival, which led Sorvali to remaster the tracks and release the long awaited demo. The Sleeping Green is caught between two worlds, as it was originally intended to be from the late 90’s but has now had the benefit of cleaner, more modern production. It is now we can hear Sorvali's vision, which combines the folk melodies heard on Finntroll and Moonsorrow releases with the atmosphere of what would later be called dungeon synth. The result is a sound that is both enchanting and immersive, and is the best soundscape Lunar Womb produced, as it saved an unintentional blueprint for modern dungeon synth.

Neptune Towers - Caravans to Empire Algol (1994)

I initially did not have Neptune Towers on this list but later added it for reasons I will mention. Neptune Towers has the obvious connection to black metal with it being the solo side project of Fenriz of black metal act Darkthrone. While Neptune Towers, much like Wongraven, was featured on splits with other black metal bands and was released on labels with other black metal acts, its sound is perhaps the least dungeon synth of this list. Owing more to drone, kosmische Musik, and berlin school electronics, Caravans to Empire Algol worships the work of Klaus Schulze and perhaps makes the tenuous connection from the dungeon synth of the 1990s with the far out Berlin school electronic of the 1970s. Whatever the case, it is a good place to begin allowing the transmission of other worlds to wash over you with a sound that is unnerving yet hypnotic and showcasing a sound that is just sci-fi that just wanted to wear black.

Part II: The Age of Wonder (2011-Present)

Dungeon Synth, in the modern sense, began with the advent of a stable internet. Not only were blogs, social media, and a reliable streaming service and marketplace the tools composers needed to reach a global audience, but they were also the same tools used to unearth, digitize, and disseminate the obscure and forgotten releases from the 1990s. While the nascent idea and aesthetic of dark keyboard music carried on in various dark ambient, neoclassical, and medieval records in the 2000’s, dungeon synth as a focused style did not exist until the appearance of internet blogs that not only collected older releases but codified the aesthetics and proper name for the genre. The work of blogs like Asmodian Coven and eventually the Dungeon Synth Blog allowed a new generation to not only discover older releases but also be inspired to make new records.
The mid 2010’s saw a boom in dungeon synth as interest grew across social media and online forums. This boom was a revival of the classic sounds of the 1990’s as well as an inclusion of melodic ambience. While high fantasy and nature were always a part of dungeon synth’s aesthetics, the modern era is when artists embraced the escapist themes for their records, taking on theatrical personas and dedicating full releases to fictional narratives. This shift in style would provide an avenue for new creators and fans to travel and deviate from its classic roots.
Dungeon synth composers differ from other musicians in that the barrier for making the music in the style was low and its reach was only anchored by an internet connection. Composers had no need for touring or even working with other people. These composers only needed a computer, internet, and imagination to be a musician. If one wanted to take a release from the writing, composing, recording, and even manufacturing of the marketing media, they could do it all without leaving their room. This cottage industry spread among creators, who all varied in their levels of professionalism, but were connected by social hubs such as Facebook, Bandcamp, and online forums. All in all, Dungeon synth is similar to other internet centric microgenres whose scene and community exist entirely in a digital space. Dungeon synth, much like other microgenres, has a pitch to newcomers based on sound and aesthetics. It is alluring but also poses a unique question: 'Do you want to listen to Dungeon and Dragons music made by people in cloaks playing synth in their bedroom?' The answer was a resounding 'Yes' by many and the dedication to the tabletop hobbies by fans embraced the style into their folds. Dungeon synth had an aesthetic and the boom of home releases would only strengthen its legacy.
Dungeon synth is a style of music that has grown quickly throughout its modern era, showcasing the evolution of a music genre in an expedited timeline. Its precursors, foundation, watersheds, and experiments, which usually take years and decades to be established by a genre, have been collapsed into only a few years. This rapid progression can be attributed to the ease of virtual engagement of the community, as well as at home production of its albums. Albums could be made within months, causing a flourishing of new ideas, which would cause reactions to the evolution at an exacerbated pace. Criticisms, tensions between stylistic tastes, and feuds between the scene could be waged easier, leading to an accelerated collapse or synthesis of ideas. This drama of a small scene that went through a surge of popularity and cracked under the influx of new fans is not unique among genres, yet dungeon synth went through it in a matter of a few years as opposed to the decades it normally takes. This exceleration has matured dungeon synth to leap forward in its evolution, and has led to one of the best periods in perhaps its entire existence.
Dungeon synth continues to be fascinating for many reasons. One is boring while the other is fanciful. The boring reason is that the musicians live in an age of reliable internet and with a low entry for making music, this leads to a consistent output of new material. Combine this with a continual fanbase that is just discovering the sound and you have a continual wave of consumers. The more fanciful reason is that dungeon synth offers a sense of magic to its listeners. Dungeon synth offers a style of music and scene whose intimacy between artist and listener feels like a relationship, and the subsequent journey is more like an adventure both of you are undertaking. This relationship between art and artist is something I find particularly powerful, as each release is like a chapter in an ongoing story that both us as the listeners and them as the creators are unaware where it will take us. We are all players in this story and we will go to far away places.

Modern Dungeon Synth Recommendations

For this primer, and for the purposes of introductions, I revised a nine point alignment chart that was created on a Dungeon synth forum. Musician RævJäger made an alignment chart modeled after the Dungeons and Dragons character alignment, which is set between two spectrums of dark/light and produced/raw. Since the sounds of modern dungeon synth are much more varied than the 1990's, directing people towards a type of sound is more viable and potentially useful. Modern dungeon synth, while almost entirely removed from its black metal roots, has a sound for almost anyone ranging from fanciful tavern music to nihilistic noise.
These nine albums are what I feel were important at the time of modern dungeon synth's boom, as well as ones that fit neatly into an alignment chart. This chart is not perfect, and there may be better choices or questionable placement depending on interpretation, however it is not meant to be definitive rather a playful introduction to a style and might help people find the right sound that would interest them. Those who are versed in these nine albums might find Part III of this primer more helpful.
Lord Lovidicus - Book of Lore Volume I (2015) [Produced/Light]

Book of Lore follows a line of better known releases from Lord Lovidicus. 2010’s Trolldom and Quenta Silmarillion are perhaps this artist's most well known releases due to their placement in the early history of modern dungeon synth. Book of Lore sees the same focus on medieval fantasy but begins the artist's ascent to the production the music deserves. Lord Lovidicus always wanted to sail in the cloud of production and, combined with the artist's love for Tolkien lore, Book of Lore is fantasy ambient minus the rough edges. While the bedroom aspect is present, the music blurs between worlds with a sound that is approaching bliss. I could think of few other releases that quest for the same level of production that tries to transcend the bedroom setup.

Fief - - I (2016) [Neutral Light]

Fief is a wonderful artist to start with in dungeon synth as it is a very popular sound among fans. In fact, Fief may be one of the most popular dungeon synth artists, which is no surprise given the string of amazing releases. Rather than a direct narrative, Feif's five albums are vignettes into a medieval world that might or might not have any sort of fantasy elements. This is a long campaign in a low magic world that is filled with just as much danger and excitement as other more dragon-filled narratives. I feel Fief is popular due to both accessibility with the production as well as a charm in its minimalism. This is tavern music for the weary traveler and while there are few patrons, the hearth is warm and roaring.

Chaucerian Myth - The Canterbury Tales (2016) [Raw/ Light]

I have written a lot about Chaucerian Myth and the artist's debut The Canterbury Tales. I wrote an introduction to the album for the CD reissue, which is on the inside flap. To put it simply, The Canterbury Tales was a watershed moment for dungeon synth as it took the growing modern scene and its bedroom recording, married it with English literature, and cast a drama into a 3.5 hour epic. An unofficial soundtrack to Chaucer’s collection of stories published in 1483, each of the tales is scored by the sounds of fantasy synth. The Canterbury Tales was a fantastic release from an active member of the Dungeon synth community, which set a new benchmark for intensity and devotion to the craft. In terms of atmosphere, there is little space between Fief and Chaucerian Myth. The difference lies in the length and scope of The Canterbury Tales, as these songs are cast in near 20 minute epics that wander sometimes lost in the tomes of history books. This is passion amid piles of books and its charm is undeniable.

Sequestered Keep - Wandering Far (2017) [Produced Neutral]

There is a joke among dungeon synth fans about the prolific, bordering on oppressive, release schedules some artists use. The years between 2015 and 2016 saw 14 releases from US based Sequestered Keep, which would have fit into this trope if not for the fact that all of it was outstanding. Wandering Far was the only release of 2017 and, for me at least, it was a grand declaration of magic and somber distance. Sequestered Keep aims in the same direction as Lord Lovidicus but collects the shadows as much as the highlights. Much like the album covers, Sequestered Keep offers rolling landscapes that are filled with as much joy as they are with sorrow. Sadly, 2018 would see the last release from this artist, so Wandering Far as well as the finale, The Vale of Ruined Towers are now monuments to the legacy of this artist.

Erang - Another World Another Time (2013) [Neutral]

For many, Erang was their first exposure to dungeon synth. This came through a compilation video put out by this French artist simply titled “2 hours 30 minutes of Dungeon Synth, Medieval Fantasy Music by Erang.” It was a simple video that provided 2 hours and 30 minutes of background music for reading, playing games, or whatever the user wanted. I feel there is something omnipresent about Erang as the music seems to touch every aspect of the sound. Another World Another Time catches the artist as they climb out of the classic dark ambient sounds of Tome I-IV to to craft a world of imagination and wonder. If I could offer any one record which I feel captures the variety in dungeon synth, it would be this. Additionally, 2013-2015 would see some truly fantastic works from Erang and this release is indispensable in one's journey into dungeon synth.

Til Det Bergens Skyggene - Til Det Bergens Skyggene (2011) [Raw Neutral]

Til Det Bergens Skyggene is a German artist who is also the operator of Voldsom Musikk -- a label specializing in black metal and dark ambient. Til Det Bergens Skyggene is a project that was responsible for 5 releases in a few short years before ceasing. The third and self titled release has grown in legacy in the dungeon synth scene for its reverence to the classic sound of the 1990s. With a focus on texture and ambience, Til Det Bergens Skyggene, the album, moves at a glacial pace across a landscape of fog with only shadowy outlines of trees and ruined structures. If limbo or the desolate landscapes of the afterlife had a soundtrack it would most likely sound like the track “Skog, Natt Og Stjerner.” This is a record that does not approach pleasantly and, in fact, it does not approach at all. Rather, Til Det Bergens Skyggene walks ever forward through the growing opaque wall of fog uninterested in anything but the crawl of time. It is aloof, magical, and completely uninterested in being accessible.

Murgrind - Inheritor Of The Forest Throne (2015) [Produced / Dark]

Inheritor Of The Forest Throne was the second record for Murgrind and a step forward in terms of production from the dark and classic sounds of 2013’s Journey Through The Mountain. Clear and grand sounds dominate the production, combined with a constant reminder of scorn and sadness. This marriage between the dark and production clarity was mirrored on the cover as it depicted a vast forest devoid of foliage and oppressive in its presence. Murgrind would set a new standard for production, and send a reminder to people that, despite the DIY nature of the music, professionalism and craft could still be revered.

Thangorodrim - Taur-nu-Fuin (2016) [Neutral Dark]

Taur-nu-Fuin was a monumental record on its release. I remember when it came out there was something that changed about the scene as its release pointed to a new benchmark for direction. With it’s cover, which worships the aesthetics of second wave black metal, to the sweeping labyrinthian sounds, to the obscure Tolkine lore, Taur-nu-Fuin was a champion of the classic sound that lay in the graves of Mortiis and Wongraven. With four songs and a running time of 50 minutes, Thangorodrim is intense in its need for commitment. This is not background music rather a passage into corridors that lay far out of the reach of sunlight. I would urge people to listen to this release for nothing else than to experience classic dungeon synth in a modern incarnation.

Old Tower - The Rise Of The Specter (2017) [Raw / Dark]

In terms of optics, The Rise of the Specter was perhaps one of the most famous modern dungeon synth records in the 2010’s. The Rise of the Specter’s cover was briefly used as the header for the 2017 Bandcamp article “A Guide Through the Darkened Passages of Dungeon Synth.” This was eventually changed to a more generic stone arch but, for a while, the hooded figure was a guide for newcomers into the world of dungeon synth. The Rise of the Specter and its ruminating sounds made sense for people as it worshipped the classic style of dungeon synth. This was Mortiis in 2017. This made sense as dungeon synth, for many, was the sound of dark passages and people in cloaks. It was mysterious and arcane and, above all else, dark. Old Tower was one of dungeon synth’s largest success stories as The Rise of the Specter led the artist to a deal with Profound Lore and a 2018 concert at the Roadburn Festival. Old Tower, for all intents and purposes, is the largest spokesperson for dungeon synth outside of its small community and to many, including myself, is the perfect spokesperson to the world beyond the small scene.

Conclusion

The above primer represents the start of material I am putting together for a dungeon synth book / series of articles regarding the collected history of the genre. These profiles are being collected on my blog as "The Book of DS." My blog will also be the continuation of some subjects related to dungeon synth including its connection with the Berlin School electronic scene as well as the dark period of 2000-2011 where this sound existed in the shadows.
Part of my fascination with dungeon synth is its emerging history combined with the proximity of its creators to community. Most if not all of these creators are people passionate about music who are more than ecstatic they found a community that shares their love for fantasy ambient. If you have read this far and know everything in the above primer then you can move onto a continuing primer that you will hopefully find more recommendations. If not, then we will discover them together.

I don't know what to think or do anymore, everything is so frustrating and confusing, and I'm just scared and feeling hopeless...

This is probably going to be a really long vent... I've just wanted to write a lot down and post it somewhere that it might be heard and just, understood, if that makes sense?... It's a lot so no pressure for anyone to read it. And I'm not asking for advice or help so I don't want anyone to feel pressured to help either, but any kind comments or advice is still welcome <3....
I'm tired. Tired of everything. I'm 19, turning 20 this year. I started taking my gender doubt seriously in Sept of 2018, dropped out of highschool Jan 2019, started HRT August of 2019, tried going back to school the following September and also got a job, but dropped out again and quit the following November when my ex outed me to my mum and I broke up with them...
Since then, for an entire year I've... I've been doing nothing. Nothing but sleeping, sitting around, browsing the web, chatting on discord, playing games or watching shows... I've spent so much time in bed and so much time sleeping but I'm still so, so tired all the time... Even though I've done nothing, I've still just been overwhelmed and put through so much that, idk feels it could have been avoidable but... Idk, the life of someone online is so strange and odd... People tend to joke and say "Lmao how is cyberbullying real, just log off" or "How can internet stuff affect you, it's not the real world?", but it's been my real world for the past year+.
To preface, I've had signs of dysphoria and issues with my assigned gender since I was young. Memories stand out, thoughts, wishes, confusion. I had a dream I was a girl and then taught myself how to lucid dream just so I could be a girl again. I've always been confused about who I'm supposed to be, or what I want to be, or what my sexuality is, or if I can even feel romantic love... I wrote a lot of it out in a letter to my mum a year ago, maybe I should go back and read that for comfort, it's kind of my "proof" that I'm trans, or at least that's how I see it. It's the observable thoughts and feelings I've had as long as I can remember that line up with what it means to be transgendetransexual/whatever. I don't know why I'm like this, I wish I wasn't, I wish I could have just been normal and happy...
To summarize the past 2 years or so, starting September 2019... It's the dumbest thing but, there was a meme in me_irl, back when I used to frequent reddit, and it was the one with the knights pointing their swords at the table, and each sword was a different "_irl" subreddit (I'm sure you can see where this is going). I saw the egg one and thought it was funny memes like the Long Egg or "Don't forget WOWEE! Waller, phOne, Wkeys, Egg, Egg (backup)" type stuff. And when it wasn't, and instead it was tons of relatable jokes and memes, all the thoughts I had when I was younger and the memories of lying awake at night making wishes all came back to me. It's not that I had forgotten them entirely, I just had decided to ignore them, or not believe in them. The usual, that it was a phase or, it was just a fetish, ect ect. But seeing all the egg_irl memes made me feel like that was the wrong decision. Made me feel like it would never go away, like I needed to do something about it sooner than later, or even that it was already too late (I was 17 at the time). So I made a new reddit account (this one), joined lots of trans related subs, started looking for answers, asking questions, trying to figure things out. It was fine at first, honestly. I wish it had stayed that way. I was learning things, feeling things out, I was optimistic about what HRT and transition could do for me, I was kind of happy that there seemed to be more trans people than I had thought. I was open-minded and willing to learn all the stuff I'd never thought down to think about before, different sexualities and genders and such (I wont deny I had that phase of transphobia early where I mocked transpeople alongside my peers because I felt I had to and it was "the norm", and I guess maybe cause I didn't want to be one?... idk). I absorbed a lot, always tried to be kind and understanding, after all this wasn't a community I felt I was a part of yet, just one I was maybe dipping my toes into to see if the water was cold or warm.
Time went on, I at least admitted to myself that I had depression, something I'd been struggling with in the background for several years at that point, told my mom about it too. And all this sudden "trans stuff" had definitely made my depression worse. I stopped paying attention in class because I was busy on my phone trying to learn and figure out what I was and what I was supposed to do about it. With my mum's help I saw a doctor, got diagnosed with major depressive and generalized anxiety, started trying meds to see what worked, got a therapist for a while, he was really cool and chill but only had like 3 sessions with him before he switched locations or smth... And I dropped out of highschool, second semester of my 12th year. I just couldn't do it anymore, I didn't care about school at all. I had other priorities, and got increasingly depressed and suicidal.
I still was closeted irl at that point, only out online on reddit and to some trans discords I had found. The main one I spent time in was pretty in the middle, which I'm happy for tbh. It was a small community, it wasn't political, people were mostly chill. It was the kind of server that you could jokingly say trap or tranny in without getting instabanned, but it also still had non-binary people and people were often supportive no matter one's situation. (I feel like now there's no servers like that, any support/trans servers are extreme one way or the other, it's either a hyperwoke heccin valid space where 90% of the people are xey/xem DID ADHD Autism Depression Anxiety OCD havers and if you have a "wrong opinion" you are banned and chainblocked by everyone, or it's 4chan-like servers where most of the people are racist and transphobic, repressing and coping with being trans in insane ways)
But anyways.. Things were still oddly okay back then? I met some good friends that are still close friends (and one is my gf now going on a year), I was still in the middle with a lot of things, but I didn't care so much about stuff, I was just focusing on myself and figuring it out yknow? I eventually got close with a classmate and we started dating pretty quickly, they were out as afab transmasc, and on our second date I basically came out to them. They were super comforting and supportive and understanding which was something I never thought I'd have IRL. I thought this terrible secret, that I was transgender, was something I'd have to hide or be hated for. They shared a lot of my opinions about "trans stuff" too which was nice... Despite all that I had mentioned, I still felt very conflicted about the whole "transgender community" stuff. On the outside I was smiling, kind, and always accepting and open minded. But on the inside I was confused, and not entirely sure if I agreed with the things I was nodding my head along to. So me and them would have conversations here and there, where I always was scared they'd suddenly turn on me and hate me, but surprisingly they were chill and either agreed or disagreed but made conversation out of it, not arguments. They did describe themselves as "transmedicalist" and struggled with a lot of dysphoria, upset with the non-binary community and how many people in it weren't "actually trans". As much as I could understand their anger at the time and I had thought similar thoughts, but I didn't like the idea of so much negativity towards strangers, energy wasted being upset. Again I was very closeted and had very little experience interacting with most of the online trans communities. What they were upset about didn't affect me (at the time..) because I was just focused on myself and figuring things out. I still didn't think of myself as LGBTQ.
Time went on, I contacted a non-profit in my city and slowly got some support, all while lying to my parents everytime I went out. I talked to some people irl, the gender therapists they had there. Then I got a letter of recommendation sent to a doctor and waited some more. Summer rolled around. My partner took me shopping to thrift stores, I started trying fem clothes and feeling nice (but also shitty at the same time cause my body wasnt right for these clothes...). Support and kindness and validation from my partner was really important at that time I think, and I'm grateful for it despite what eventually happened. Maybe that's why things feel like they were better back then in comparison... So my life was taking meds, going to school when I was feeling up for it (I was allowed to attend classes still but I was no longer like, in the books. The principal knew me well since I was an "exceptional student" and so she was very kind and wanting to help as much as possible. Being able to go to school and not have to stress but still be able to socialize was good I think...), going to visit my partner (who I hadn't really told my parents about but my mum kinda knew/suspected considering how often I went over to their place and even slept over), and just spending time at home either sleeping or being online.
It was a shitty summer cause when I got a call back from the doctor to finally get an appointment it was a Friday. We had a family trip planned on the Monday. It wasnt strict though, it was our annual cabin place, and everyone had been kinda been doubting if it was a good idea. I could have easily stayed home and just my mom and brother went, but being the person I am I felt guilty and sad and didn't want to hurt my mum's feelings by saying I didn't want to go, so I booked the appointment a week sooner and went.
When we got back home I went to the appointment but, I had kinda been a little sick for 3 weeks at that point. Mild sore throat on and off. I had gotten my bloodwork done before the vacation and when I saw the doctor he said I couldnt start Estrogen yet because he wanted to be "extra safe" cause he thought I had strep based on something in the bloodwork. So my HRT got delayed another week, and then two until I was better... When I was, and I went to book an appointment, the doctor was away on his own vacation for another week.... All those 4 weeks were hell. But eventually I started the usual 2mg E and 25mg Cypro (Canadian). One thing that scared me though was, when the doctor asked me "Why do you want to start HRT?". I knew my reason, it was to alleviate my dysphoria, I wanted my body to change and be more female so that I could eventually pass and live stealth. That's all I'd ever wanted, even back when I was little and wishing I was simply a girl. I hated the idea of "being trans"... But I was afraid to give my reason, because I worried that this doctor might react how some people online would... Something I had started to see within trans communities at this point was that attitude of "You dont need dysphoria to be trans!", or the extremes of "Wanting to pass is transphobic, passing is a cis concept and you're a cis bootlicker. If you're transitioning just to pass then you're doing it for the wrong reasons" (I'm not exaggerating, this is something I had seen a few people here and there say in some servers, on reddit, on twitter...). At the time, I personally saw the debate as more of a misunderstanding, that the phrase wasn't supposed to be interpreted literally and broken down semantically. It was simply broadcasted as a reminder to ease the minds of people early in transition who were doubting themselves. It didn't literally mean "You do not need gender dysphoria in order to be trans!", it just meant moreso "You don't need to be constantly dysphoric 24/7 to be trans, and your dysphoria doesn't have to be as extreme as wanting to cut things off yourself! Feeling affirmed and euphoric from presenting or being seen as your desired gender is also valid!" (Now I feel like that's.... Not usually the case, but I still cling to the cope that it is or else I'll overthink too much and get all frustrated and upset and sad yknow...). So I ended up awkwardly telling the doctor something like "Well, I want it to change my, physical appearance to be more feminine I guess... Ideally I want to just, eventually pass as a woman, b-but! I know that's, not important and I dont mean to suggest that like, all trans people want that or.." and he kinda just interrupted me and was like "Yeah that's fine". I still remember the tiny panic I had when I was asked that, because I was afraid of being "wrong" about what I wanted, or afraid to possibly invalidate people who weren't even in the room. I remember that experience still as an example of how those beliefs and attitudes, and those types of people within the community do affect people and the world (because I sometimes see people to tell me to stop caring or worrying because "those people dont affect you or the real world, or the perception of trans people")...
Now... To rewind a little bit. Earlier in the summer I was in VC in that main server I mentioned, when suddenly a friend who I hadnt heard from in a long time joined. When I had known them they had identified as a trans girl, but now they said they realized they had been "pinkpilled" and were actually a cis male femboy. They were still taking HRT with no plans to stop though. They ended up mentioning a server they ran that was more "edgy" and less restrictive. At the time I was still kinda at odds with myself, both with the usual "being a good/bad person" dilemma I had struggled with for years, and also at this point I was started to see more of the online trans community and, felt like I couldn't put forward thoughts or ideas that might be "wrong" without getting told off. So I asked to join the server. It was a 4chan based server called /femgen/. Right away I adjusted my personality to be all edgy and "cool" to fit in there, cause the owner invited me as like "This is my babytrans friend" type thing. At the time I felt like I wanted this type of space, to explore the side of me that I felt like pushed down. The "mean things" my brain would shout at me but I would never say. I always had a hard time figuring out what thoughts were mine and what thoughts were intrusive or anxiety or just based on my upraising/parents. I was consistently a social chameleon, and always adjusted my likes, opinions, and beliefs based on the group I was around, because I was afraid to be attacked by someone who maybe didn't agree. And this led me to really, not knowing what I actually believed. "For every thought, the opposite thought exists equally" is something that the therapist I had mentioned said when we were trying to put it into words. And it was true. I knew what opinions or beliefs would be seen as good or bad depending on the crowd, so I'd always just opt for the perceived "good" one. I didn't like discourse, it would always affect me too much and just engulf me. Maybe it's just who I am, maybe it stems from some sorta mental disorder like anxiety, but I had already gone through a phase of having pointless arguments with strangers back when I was 15, (tiny dumb things I still remember, like when someone told me I was stupid for thinking a tabletop microphone had better sound quality than the pinhole mic of a pair of Bose earbuds, or when someone started arguing with me because I made a joke about american obesity and they claimed that actually Canada had a bigger obesity problem). And it had only caused me stress and frustration.
So, that new server had become my second active server I used. Again I was dropped out and jobless and spent most of my time online, discord was the entirety of my social life. I did still have my irl friends from HS but I was distancing myself from them because I wasn't out to them. It was the thing where I felt like I was being my "true self" online in these spaces, but irl I was just putting on the visage I had been wearing for years. At the time it felt like I had finally found the right people. The server at the time was a mix of trans women and gnc guys (as well as non-binary people technically, but they called themselves cis femboys). It felt like I didn't really have to act a certain way or an overly feminine way in order to be valid (I hate that word but there's no good synonym so...). I also wasn't afraid to share thoughts I had, or the feelings I felt about being trans and whatnot. But more importantly, the people there were very knowledgeable about HRT. I had done my own research before in February when I was considering DIY, so I was aware of the whole WPATH being outdated and often ineffective. The server even had an HRT channel for all the trans people and the cis males taking estrogen. So I made some friends there and now I felt like I had my two spaces, one where I could be edgy and whatever, and the other where I was always kind and agreeable. I also liked it better because people seemed more honest and realistic. The other server was very hugboxy, and it bothered me a lot. It also affected how I saw myself. I'm sorry but, when a server has a selfie channel where a 30 year old transwoman with drag queen make-up, stubble, and a wig gets called "Cute!" and "Adorable omg!!!", and I post my own selfies where I'm asking how I'm doing in terms of passing and get the same responses... Not only is it not helpful, but it's actually harmful. It made me feel even uglier and devalue myself more because I knew "The people in this server lie in order to not step on toes or hurt feelings", and I wasn’t actually getting any helpful advice or criticism to look more feminine.
Back to irl, I had finally gotten HRT. I had been on SSRI's for several months. The school year was starting again and I felt like maybe I could go back and finish the two classes I needed in order to graduate, so I did. I also got a job at a dinner theatre as a waiteadcast. It was stressful but fun (I was a theatre kid so it felt less like work and more like theatre), and it was okay at first. School was fine as well, I still had my supportive partner to visit and I only had two classes to worry about. I knew HRT was happening in the background now which eased my mind, and as weeks went by I noticed the usual small first changes like sensitive chest and buds, libido and emotional changes, ect ect. I was still closeted irl for the most part, I had come out to my 4 HS friends but that was really it. I still spent a lot of time socializing on discord. I had some freakouts abt "What if my HRT is wrong??" and I worried about being "hondosed", and I was still struggling a lot with depression, so I'd vent in the vent channel there. Since I was in that server, I also started frequenting 4chan's /lgbt/, which I thought was good so long as you ignored the transphobic trolls. It was such a contrast to the trans communities I had been in and seen on reddit, and it felt like the realistic side of the trans community.
Obviously, now having been on both extreme sides, I can say that neither are helpful for questioning trans people, or just… Trans people at any stage. They’re both too far to one side in terms of just, everything. A hugbox and a hurtbox. It’s sad that it’s hard to find an intermediary (I feel like this subreddit does a decent job? It’s good at being that place for people to come to and be honest and question the trans community without having to go to /lgbt/. Obviously sites themselves aren’t 100% one group and it just depends who/what you follow, but for the most part reddit and twitter are dominated by the egg_irl and traaaaaa types). It feels really hard to find people similar who are just, wanting to pass and just be the opposite sex. It’s either people who block me because I indirectly associated being trans with having dysphoria (this really happened…), people who think ALL nb people aren’t real trans people and are like hardcore medicalist, people who sincerely believe in Blanchardism, ect ect… Idk I still kind of float around, like the title says I’m just, I don’t know what to think or believe anymore. It’s just too overwhelming but… I’ll get to that I guess…
Slowly my job got tiring and I guess I got increasingly dysphoric for some reason. At the time, my character was a beatnick stereotype so I talked like a chill hippy and slapped on a fake goatee. I think maybe I just kept thinking about how I wanted to act and do theatre as a woman, not as a man. I had considered maybe coming out at work and doing a female character (I had some people urge me to…) but obviously I knew that was a terrible idea. I didn’t pass and I’d just be seen as a drag weirdo (The servers sometimes crossdressed for a character, but usually it was women dressing as male character which, cause of society n gender roles and such, people never cared or judged and it wasnt something to ridicule, it was just for fun. A woman wearing jeans, a dress shirt, a fake mustache, and a short haired wig and talking in that goofy low dude voice is fine. A man wearing a skirt or dress, makeup, fake tits, long hair, and talking in a stereotypical gay voice is hardly the same…). So that built up, suddenly school felt overwhelming and pointless again too, and then the breaking point was in November, when my ex outed my to my mom… I think the post I made when it happened is still up if anyone is for some reason interested in the details, but TL;DR: I sent my mom a text just saying that “There are things I’m going through that I cant tell you right now, I’m sorry” after being urged by my partner to just communicate something to her cause she was worried about me. I was not at all planning on coming out to my mom, however I did think it was possible she knew so if she wanted to talk and ask me questions I would answer and be truthful. Unfortunately my partner beat me to the punch and texted my mom, playing a sort of 20 questions with her until she inevitably figured it out with lots of hints from them. They lied to me about it and did it the morning after I had sent my mom the text the previous night. Eventually that night I did come out, moreso because my mom knew and wanted me to say it. Thankfully she’s been really good and supportive and was open to learning lots. She was never transphobic moreso just, a bit old fashioned and not quite understanding. But as for my partner… I had told them before that if they ever outed me to my parents I would leave them and never forgive them (because they frequently nagged me to come out), and so after thinking about things, talking to some friends, and making a post here on reddit, I realized they had been somewhat abusive and manipulative... I texted them a message breaking up and saying “I don’t know what this means in the long term, but for now just give me and my mom space”. They said “Ok” and I havent spoken with them since. They moved to Vancouver for school which was a plan they’d set in motion a few weeks earlier.
Now that my mom knew, I spent the time explaining things to her, telling her I was already on HRT, and all those times I went out to “hang with friends” was actually doctor’s appointments and such. I made a youtube playlist of videos I thought would help her understand, and they did. We watched them together on a laptop in bed. She also found Gigi Gorgeous on her own (I don’t know much about her..) and watched lots of her videos and cried and said it was really helpful to see an example of someone else's like, journey. I got her involved with the non-profit I did things through, she joined their parent facebook group and attended some of the in person meetups for parents which helped her a lot. I dropped out of school again and quit my job. I still wasnt out to my dad or my younger brother, and I didn’t want to come out to either of them anytime soon. I had explained to my mom that, I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t want people to know, I was ashamed and scared, I just wanted to transition and come out when I passed, and she respected that. So time went on, after a few weeks I ended up dating one of the friends I had known for several months through that original discord server. We had kind of been flirting with each other on and off for a month and a bit at that point, and she was really helpful and caring and understanding. I was now in a long distance relationship which was new and, much different than what I had just had (that partner was my first ever relationship). I knew that physical affection was my main love language so it was hard, but she only lived an hour plane ride away, so I planned to meet her irl eventually.
Christmas happened, my mom did a little separate small Christmas alone with me. I had told her I didn’t really care about gifts or anything and I didn’t want her to worry or stress about it, but she last minute ended up buying a bunch of little small stuff at the drugstore (makeup things, a little stuffed animal, basically what she thought of as “girl stuff”). It was a nice surprise and I love her a lot. New years happened too, that was kind of a depressing night for me. I had fallen back down and didn’t see myself getting up anytime soon… January came along and then something really shitty happened. I mentioned that 4chan server, and it had become my main server at that point. They ended up changing the server direction drastically and decided to ban all the trans women, making it a place exclusively for feminine cis men, especially those interested in HRT. There had been jokes about a “trans purge” frequently in the past, but my friend always said I would be an exception. Well, I wasn't. And without getting into it, it wasn’t at all about changing the space of the server. It was just the owner and mods wanting to get rid of people they didnt like, most of which were the trans women. They made several arbitrary exceptions for a few of the trans women there, like “Oh she’s dating one of the femboys here so she can stay” “She’s hot and she flirts with lots of the femboys, she’s based and can stay”. They’re all fairly transphobic 4chan femboy types so I don’t know why I was surprised. But gender shit aside, that was my main social group, and a place where I thought I belonged and fit in and had friends. Then suddenly those friends didn’t care about me. I guess I had just, gotten too comfortable there, used the venting channel one too many times, they stopped caring about me the person, and just thought of me as a sad tranner venting about dysphoria or whatever. So that month was so much mental turmoil. Fighting, trying to stay, even starting to question my identity so that I could stay (“No wait, I think I’m actually a cis HRT femboy too! I mean look at me, I’m not a girlmoder, I don’t present, and I don’t think I ever will..”), inevitably getting kicked, lots of crying, joining back on an alt later on and lurking to constantly search my name and see if I was being talked bad about (I was extremely vocal about not wanting to leave and being sad about it, which was an invitation to be mocked and made fun of).
It took a long time, several weeks of checking the server on my alt every morning and night, reading every single message. It wasnt healthy, it was terrible. Slowly after many many months I eventually left on the alt, I blocked 4chan on my router so I wouldnt “relapse”, and while all that happened still affects me a lot, I’m mostly moved on. And in hindsight, it was not a good place to be. I learned who my real friends were (I am still really good and close friends with one of the trans girls from that server, she was really helpful and kind and supportive during the whole ban stuff), and I got away from that whole toxic, transphobic, narcissistic server. There was this other discord thing that had happened in that timeframe as well, basically just this schizophrenic trans girl I had tried to help who had like, this whole drama surrounding her or smth, who ended up really fucking with my head when she threatened to kill herself because of me… but I was able to get over all that a lot easier and it doesnt cross my mind or affect me as much as the 4chan server thing. That was a look into this whole community and group of people… I still get stressed when I hear or see the word femboy, and also seeing lots of stuff on twitter or on subreddits about “femboys on HRT” and other stuff idk… Sadly I could write a lot about that whole topic, and it’ll come up later but, yeah… So, after losing a community I felt I belonged in and suffering through so much terrible fucking, emotional turmoil, I was in a really bad place. I think my depression got psychotic because I started having really terrible episodes. Panic, suicidal thoughts and fantasies, dissociation and depersonalization, I even had 4 paranoia episodes over the course of a few months where I just, I got so disconnected from reality and felt like hidden cameras were watching me, my family and friends were all actors, and I was in some torture experiment to push the limits of a person and see if they committed suicide… I wont get into it (I did but it was a lot and kind of off-topic), but basically in that vulnerable state I was in, I fell down the rabbit hole of “being plural” which is basically a bunch of people appropriating Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly Multiple Personality Disorder, a serious trauma disorder caused by childhood abuse and trauma that halts the brain’s development and prevents it from developing into a whole person properly.. But basically yes, I started thinking I had separate personalities, to the point that my brain perpetuated it and it was real for a while. Thinking back to it all, it feels so unreal. I want to mention that I have since been diagnosed with ADHD after a long wait, and I think that also contributed to me experiencing what I did, hyperfixating on this new thing and thinking I had it, to the point of sincerely imitating it. And with that experience it gave me a unique perspective now… Most people think all that stuff is just people pretending, lying, and larping. And sure, I think a small percent could be people who are consciously faking it. But I think most of it is just similar situations as mine. First of all, most of the people in “plural communities” are young (like 13-17), and it’s normal for kids to get confused and have that whole coming of age, figure out who I am thing. A lot of the people I think also have mental disorders like ADHD or Autism or Bi-Polar and such. During all that I had also learned about tulpas which is basically, when you intentionally, consciously pretend to have a second personality. You “create” it and eventually it does become real, as in subconscious. Brains are extremely malleable and this has been like, proven scientifically that tulpas are separate personalities (They did studies with people who made em and observing the brain at different times, when the different created personalities were the ones “in charge” so as to say, and saw differences in brain activity and other stuff). Obviously it’s not perfect confirmed science but I’m just trying to say that, thinking something is true, especially separate voices in your head, can eventually lead them to being real. That’s what had happened to me, and that’s what I think has happened to most of what you see in the “plural community”. I try not to think about it anymore because it disturbs me and frustrates me, but all I can really do is hope that, like me, most of them realize and stop perpetuating it. It is normal to have different emotions, contradicting thoughts, to sometimes think to yourself or think in third person. That community uses those as examples of proof you might be plural
So that went on, but what really helped me get out of it was finally visiting my girlfriend in person. Late March I travelled and lived with her for 3 weeks. I burst into tears the second I saw her at the baggage pickup, she came up and hugged me and I just couldn't stop crying. I was shaking and just overwhelmed with a lot of emotion. I was quiet the drive to her house and ended up crying again sitting on her bed when we got there. She was really good and just hugged me and held me, got me water and a snack, just reassured and sat next to me. Eventually I calmed down enough and we just played some Smash Bros Ultimate. I had originally only planned to say for 1 week, but that one week went by too fast and so I convinced my mum to reschedule the flight home, and I got 2 more weeks to stay. It was just, so good for my mental health. It got me out of my head and out of that isolation, away from all that online shit. I had told her about it before, that I felt confused and stuff, and she didn’t really get it but she said she didn’t care and loved me always. I did have one depressive episode while I was there, where I felt like I dissociated a lot and thought it was a separate personality… But after that visit, I kinda just, stopped. I simply stopped “being plural”. I realized what I said earlier, that it was just a result of the isolation and my bad mental state and falling down the rabbit hole of that community… And since I stopped perpetuating it, it went away. I found some instances of the same thing happening to others, specifically an ADHD instance, and that was comforting. Dissociation and depersonalization are somewhat common alongside different types of episodes (depression, anxiety, ect). Dissociating does not mean you become someone else… I walked away from all that, deleted my twitter cause I just couldn’t anymore, and yeah…
When I got back home though, my mom told me that my dad had found out I was trans somehow. He claimed he was told by someone, but refused to say who. He was okay about it though… He didn’t confront me about it and gave me space. I started avoiding him a lot though, to the point that I literally didn’t see him for months at a time despite living in the same house. My bedroom and office are both in the basement, and I became completely nocturnal, sleeping from 8am to 6pm to completely avoid him. But besides that stress, the next couple months were pretty alright. I got into DnD which was really great for socializing and also practicing voice training in order to pass in VCs with strangers. I know covid happening was big and stuff but if it wasn’t obvious, it didn’t really affect me. My life was already isolation. While at first I was upset about seeing people complain about having to isolate, like “Yeah that’s been my life for half a year because of depression”, I don't care as much anymore and see it more as a positive kinda. If it weren’t for covid restricting a lot of people who are usually functioning normally, my own dysfunction and bedwridden depression doesn't stand out as much so I'm not as chastised for it. People don’t really say “Just stop being depressed lol, just go outside, you need to do things to feel better” because it’s now socially acceptable not to do things. Before covid restrictions increased, I was able to visit my girlfriend two more times, once for a few weeks in July, and again in September. Since then though I’m back to just… Doing nothing...
I came out to my brother right before Christmas because my mom really wanted me to and I didn’t want gift opening to be awkward… I sent him a letter and he basically said like “Okay. Maybe we can talk about it sometime. For now is it okay if I just like, ignore it?” and that might sound bad but it’s both what I expected and kind of wanted, and had emphasised in the letter I sent. I didn’t want things to become weird, I didn’t want him to worry about pronouns and names, I didn’t want our relationship to change too much. We were already kinda distant because of my depression and isolating, but we would still sometimes run into each other in the evening and just talk about stuff, life, he’d update me on school and friends, and I also got him into anime this last year so he’d talk about shows he watched and recommend them to me. And yeah things are alright. Now my dad is trying to use name and pronouns, nothing’s changed with my brother which is okay for now, and now I don’t have to feel like I’m keeping secrets, or randomly lower my voice around him and stuff.
I’m reaching the character limit and I feel like I’m taking the longer road to get to the point that I was wanting to make… I’m over a year HRT but it feels like hardly anything has changed. I just have fat man-boobs, I cry a lot, and I have zero libido. I feel no closer to passing or presenting publicly. I got onto injections in December at least, and my levels are finally not just “slightly higher male” levels, and maybe I’ll look into prog soon… But I’m again living online and it’s just such a headache. I don’t know what to think anymore, about all this trans shit. I’m considering not transitioning maybe, or just not socially. I don't want to present until I pass and stealth but that will take several more years if it happens at all. I promised myself when I started HRT that I’d wait 5 years before killing myself. If after 5 years of HRT I still felt no better, then it would be okay to just give up. At times that promise became really hard to keep, and now it’s feeling that way again… I havent self harmed since August 4th of this year which is good but… I just feel hopeless again. Pointless. I’m starting to have bad depressive episodes again. I was doing okay for a while when I got diagnosed with ADHD and got on meds, it felt like it reset my brain and made me capable of doing things again. But now the meds feel no different, I’m struggling to keep my sleep normal even with the help of prescribed sleeping pills… I still hate my body so fucking much, I just want to be a normal woman. I don’t want to be visibly trans, I dont want to be trans at all. Sometimes I wish this was all a bad dream… I just want to wake up… I had a bad dissociative episode a week ago where I literally tried to wake up from reality the same way I know how to wake up from dreams… I just feel like such a failure and a disappointment, like my life has no meaning and I have no happy future. I love my mom so much and she’s trying her best but I’m just not salvageable it feels… Things with my girlfriend have also changed, she’s been declining mental health wise and things aren't the same anymore, she’s not emotionally supportive, she’s avoidant and sometimes it feels like she’s only attracted to me and not in love with me… I know it’s just because she’s struggling and I do not think she is bad or anything like that, but it’s just we’ve become less compatible, and long distance has become a lot harder since we’ve lived with each other for the equivalent of over 2 months. And now covid restrictions are tight and I wanted to visit soon but I dont think I’ll be able to… But that’s also just a band aid solution. And nowadays, seeing anything trans related makes me so upset and depressed and suicidal… Words have no meaning anymore, anyone can be trans, I want to think it’s all a big shitpost and people aren't serious, the same way I want to think that about Flat Earthers. People aren’t serious right? It’s just an elaborate joke, they’re all larping and laughing at people taking them seriously right? Xenogenders, neopronouns.. I feel like gnc people are also facing issues because handfuls of trans people cope as gnc to avoid transphobia and to be “based femboys!”. I don't know how to stop letting it all affect me. I can't just ignore it or pretend it’s not real because it happens and affects me. I feel like the world is going crazy and I don’t know what to think anymore. What if I’m not trans and I’m just a femboy? What if I’m non-binary? What if this was all just a result of a mix of mental disorders?

CMV: Used without malice, the n-word is not harmful to anyone and should be see as, at worst, impolite.

Battlesuit's names, augment and costumes analysis [Round 1: Kiana Kaslana]

Hello fellow captains,
My last small analysis post about the new Fu Hua costume Onyx Simurgh was received extremely well, and I thought I'd do one for every valk there is if I had time, and in those time, what do I have but time?
At first, I thought I'd do a battlesuit a week, but I saw that there were like at least 52 and I thought "No way I'm passing my whole year to it, I'll be bored before the end and I'd leave people hanging". So I thought that I'd do three battlesuits per week, with a two days interval for each. But when I, finished White Comet, there was absolutely not enough stuff to post a post every two days, so I said: "Fuck it, I'm doing a character a week, and I'll see if I can be regular enough to last".
A little bit of a disclaimer to start.
1) Mythologies are complicated. I'm taking surface information, and usually stuff that is pertinent to my point of view. If you're interested, do your own researches, I'm sure you'll find joy and happiness there.
2) Analysis and opinions are mostly subjective, if you interpret something in another manner entirely, feel free to share it in the comments.
3) All criticisms and input are welcome.
Without further ado, let's welcome Mihoyo's most beloved, Kiana Kaslana!
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Kiana Kaslana

White Comet:

The name “White Comet” is somewhat lacking in interpretation. The only thing I’ve come up with is a sort of lotus plant (not really relevant I assume) and the fact that apparently, Chinese astronomers actually knew a lot more about comets than us Westerners did at the time (first sighting is reported and catalogued in 613 BC).
What I think it comes from is that they didn’t have the name ready before the first cinematic of the game (the one where she drops from the Hyperion) and that when they saw the render, they came up with that, because let’s be honest, it does look like a shooting star, and if White Shooting Star doesn’t sound good, White Comet surely does.
Another point, being absolutely not a Chinese reader-speaker myself, I’ve been using Google Translate to get some names from the official Mihoyo Website, and while some are quite accurate and others are more inventive, White Comet would apparently translate as “Field Costume - White Training”. Any Chinese reader could confirm what it says in Chinese?
So basically… She’s falling and is fast as a comet, and she’s white. Soooo… yea. They can’t be all super inventive and full of foreshadowing.
About her skills: Everything is pretty much comet themed, or cat-themed, or valkyrie themed. Nothing special in that regard.
Now about her costumes :
The first one, Starless Rift, is still space-themed. The name is pretty much explanatory, nothing much to say: it’s a covert op version of the White Comet, so it’s darker, and in space, nothing is darker than a place without stars.
The second one, Prodigal Girl, is somewhat more interesting. Prodigal can mean “who makes sacrifices for other people’s sake”. Seeing what happens to Kiana post chapter 15, I’d say it is rather appropriate.

Valkyrie Ranger:

First battlesuit of the “Valkyries” series (every suit with “Valkyrie” in the name). In the original sense of the term, a ranger is an armed guard that patrols the land and forest of a king to prevent poachers, illegal hunters.
So, basically, she’s an armed guard that patrols the Earth, and the poacher is the Honkai. Simple.
Her skills, just like White Comet, are pretty much still space-themed, cat-themed, or Valkyrie themed. One exception though: her special, the Gungnir Fire.
In Norse Mythology, Gungnir would be the lance of Odin, one of the supreme deities of the Northern pantheon. It was created by dwarves, and used by Odin to kill Fafnir, a gigantic wolf. It is said to be able to strike any targets.
Now onto her costumes:
Ocean Ranger is just a palette swap from white to blue, hence the name. No need to look farther. Although I have to say she looks a lot like some Azur Lane character when she's dressed up like that…
Honkai World Diva was for an event probably (I wasn’t around at the time) where they were idols I guess? Nothing to say here, except that (that’s probably unrelated), Mei’s theme Houkai Utahime no Sekai also translates as Honkai World Diva. Coincidence? Probably.
Her augment, Void Drifter, gives her a look cool as dope. Void Drifter, not only because she’s a drifter with the power of the void, but also because her life is devoid of much hope after what happened, she has a void in her heart and she drifts away, little by little, eaten by Sirin’s power.
Her augment also has a palette swap version, Red Lictor. “Justice is now red.” says the text. A lictor in imperial Rome is the executor of the law: they coerce and punish. They most often than not accompany the representative of the Emperor’s authority. Read: Red Lictor was released for Chapter 13, where Kiana, the executor, teams up with Rita, representative of Schicksal, and by extension, Otto, the emperor. Good job Mihoyo.

Divine Prayer:

Not much to say here, it’s a divine prayer, it’s rather explicit, it’s a religious-themed outfit with a religious-themed name to refer to the Catholic church which Schicksal is the representation. It’s canonically Kiana’s first battlesuit, third-gen battlesuits like White Comet are only given to B rank valks, and Valkyrie Ranger is her school uniform.
Her skills are now space-themed, gun-themed and religiously-themed, with germans inclusions like “Weihwasser” (Holy Water) and old pompous words like “Song of Alacrity”, alacrity meaning “speed and eagerness” (it’s a passive that boosts speed during special, so name checks out)
Costumes :
Frostmoon Bunny comes straight out of Honkai Zero. Unfortunately, I didn’t play the event, so I can only guess (a bit of help here would be appreciated.)
I have absolutely no idea why the cat-themed Kiana was suddenly replaced by a bunny, but the most important symbol of Kiana, the moon, is still here.
The Frost Moon is the name of the Full Moon in November, named as such by natives American. It’s associated with the start of the chillier season at the time.
The Frost moon, being the full moon of a chilly month, is also totally a representation of Kiana, being born December 7th, a chill day. Speaking of that…
Winter Princess, or Kiana being cast into Frozen. Joke aside, that dress was handmade by Cecilia, before her death in 2000. She had damn good weaving skills, and a good measure of luck to have the measurement of her daughter right 16 years after her death. That dress is featured into the Second Eruption manga as well as the Cooking With Valkyries anime. Nothing much to say about the name, Winter because she was born in December and Princess because which mother wouldn’t want to see her daughter as a princess growing up but now Cecilia can’t because she’s dead and goddammit Mihoyo now I’m crying, moving on.
Lavender Love is a palette swap switching white for lavender purple. No surprise here, the description says everything we need to know.

Knight Moonbeam:

Now we’re entering some good stuff.
The Knight Moonbeam, a prototype of 4th generation Godsbane battlesuit. Each of them is moon-themed in their name because the moon seems to be very, very important in this game.
The Knight part is a reference to the Kaslana’s heritage, knights pledging their swords to Schicksal in order to save the world. This armor is tailored for a Kaslana, obviously shown by the presence of their sigil on the chest plate.
The Moonbeam is a reference to the weapon system of the armor which fires gamma rays on the target.
In Chinese, the armor is also called White Knight Moonlight, a White Knight being exactly what the Kaslana are as a whole.
The skills are pretty much all space-themed, except for Gungnir Execution which is Nordic-themed.
The costumes :
Dark Devourer is the evil palette swap of KMB. The whole immaculate armour turns black, a symbol of corruption, as does the Kaslana sigil. Not much to say about the name, it’s very explicit.
However, there might be a small reference to Egyptian mythology on that one: the dark devourer might refer to Apophis, the gigantic serpent that seeks to devour the Sun (yes, yet another Serpent that tries to kill everything, but we’re not to Jormungand yet.) And it is most interesting because it is sometimes said that Apophis was defeated by Ra (the Sun) taking the form of a cat, or by the cat goddess herself, Kiana’s symbol.
Talking about cats…
Bastet’s secret! Bigger Egyptian reference, Bastet is the goddess of maternity, joy in the household, and sunshine’s warmth. Her greek name would also give the greek name for the cat.
However, she can also turn into Sekhmet, goddess of war.
Hmm, a cat-themed individual always bright, which joy always brings warmth in the house, but can be deadly in battle, where have I heard that one I wonder…
Also, did I mention that sometimes, she’s represented with the lunar disc? Damn moon, always everywhere.
And lastly, Lemon Soda, a cat-themed summer outfit, nothing much to say there.

Herrscher of the Void:

Here she is, Sirin herself graced us with her presence. Not much to say with the name, everyone knows everything, Herrscher is the german for "ruler", she can measure stuff with her name, moving on.
Her skills are space and void themed, with some German mixed in, like Gegenstrom (against the flow, or reverse the flow) or Weltraum Richter (judge of the space)
Her costumes are
Parasol Kaiserin, not much to say here, Kaiserin being the feminine version of Kaiser, a synonym of Herrscher and Parasol because it’s a summer version
and Frigid Empress, not much to say either.
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And that's it! Thanks for all those who stayed and read until the end.
Have I made a mistake or forgotten something? You tell me.
Stay tuned for next week, with "Battlesuit's names, augment and costumes analysis [Round 2 Electric Boogaloo: Mei Raiden]"

Deaf person on the Piccadilly line

No one is safe from the ruthless scrutiny of a deaf person without phone signal. No lie goes undetected, no microexpression ignored. No big secret that you’re keeping locked away won’t ultimately be revealed for all to see. Whether you like it or not, if you’re trapped in the presence of a bored person who through sheer necessity has spent years honing their non-verbal communication skills right down to the granular level, you WILL be unzipped and mercilessly rummaged through like a suspicious item of luggage. You WILL leave that person’s presence with your dignity in shreds.
I learnt this the hard way one rush hour evening in May 2019 when I was on a westbound Piccadilly line train that broke down inside a tunnel. I was squished up against a door in an outer corner of the carriage, directly below some oblivious skyscraper’s armpit and about eye level with a green-eyed mouth breather who clearly liked her garlic pure and unadulterated and in excessive amounts. The brew of unsavoury scents in the air, both stale and fresh, was amplified by the equatorial heat of that day, which was rising exponentially inside the carriage. The clacking of the train against the tracks was interspersed with rustles of the Metro, murmurs of sluggish conversation and tinny pop music leaking out of untraceable earphones. We were underground and this particular train was on its last legs so we were engulfed in near-darkness, save for the rare flicker of an overhead light.
I’d just completed my ten consecutive minutes of staring intently at a charming assortment of creative expletives carved into the nearest window with a knife or knife-adjacent utensil. I’d spent the first five minutes tallying up the number of serifs against the number of misplaced apostrophes and theorising whether there was any correlation. The latter half I’d spent trying to decipher meaning from the words themselves: I’d combed through the “Fuck”s for any historical or geopolitical undertones and optically paced back and forth over their suffixed counterparts for any corresponding sociological observations or criticisms. No luck. They weren’t all that enlightening tbh. There were several “Fuckwit”s and “Pissbag”s just floating there surrounded by empty space and everyone knows a lone noun doesn’t constitute a clause so just wtf were the writers getting at?? To this day, I still don’t know what they were aiming to impart.
I’ve always found train window graffiti inscrutably enigmatic – toilet cubicle graffiti too, for that matter. The two seem to be of a similar ilk (with toilet cubicle graffiti generally being slightly more cerebral and poetic, but I think that’s just down to more writing space). Neither are like spray paint graffiti where you’re like, ‘Ah yeah. Zing!’ as soon as you see it. One day I’ll have a breakthrough, but today wasn’t going to be that day, so I gave up. Now I needed something else to stare at to avoid eye contact with another human, as is customary on the London Underground. Proper etiquette here is to vehemently deny the existence of your fellow passengers at all costs, be they yelling, fighting, singing, dancing, urinating, Beyblading, setting off fireworks, punting one another over the heads with bags of Hovis or delivering spawn. It is the way.
My eyes settled on a map of the Piccadilly line and I started trying to memorise the stops in order from west to east. I used to do this back when I was commuting daily on the Central line and eventually, I could recite all 49 stops at the drop of a hat. 8 years later, I still bust out this party trick at any given opportunity and as you might expect, nobody cares.
The train slowly screeched to a halt. No one reacted because this happens all the time and it’s usually just a red signal. Several minutes passed. Then several more. Then the driver’s voice sounded on the tannoy apologising for the delay and explaining that the train was experiencing technical difficulties but that we’d be on the move shortly. Some tuts were heard. After about 20 stationary minutes, I decided to stop studying the map and start examining my cuticles. I’m always idly pushing them back but they seem hellbent on reclaiming my nailbed as soon as I look away. Why are we told to do this anyway? Push our cuticles back, I mean. Is there any point to it? I think I asked my friend Joe this back when we were like 15 and he was like, ‘Erm I dunno, but speaking of Skins, what’s your stance on Effy’s eyeliner in Series 3 Episode 4?’
A full half-hour passed, bringing us to a total of 50 minutes in limbo. People were starting to grumble and fidget. The driver’s voice sounded again on the tannoy. He apologised again and said that the train had broken down but that help was on the way and we wouldn’t have to wait too much longer.
‘Typical,’ said the skyscraper, who’d thankfully dropped his arm to his side a while ago and spared me further nasal assault. ‘Fucking typical.’ I looked up at him for a half-second and gave a nod of solidarity. Then it was back to the cuticles.
A full hour passed. We’d now been stuck here for almost two hours. It was getting really, REALLY hot. I looked up from my cuticles and took in my immediate surroundings. The green-eyed mouth breather (let’s call her Person A) and the skyscraper (hereafter Person B) had recently slid to the floor. He was drumming on his lap and gazing wistfully at the ceiling and she was tapping away on her phone at a torrential pace. I had to do a double take because her typing speed was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I mean, my friend Lyn can hit 135wpm, which is unreal and she’s quite decidedly a martian, but this girl’s mad skillz were like actual god tier or whatever. I was awestruck. She glanced up and our eyes met.
‘H-how do you… do that?!’ I asked her incredulously.
Caught slightly off-guard, she smiled and shook her head. ‘Oh, just practice,’ she said modestly. ‘There’s no signal anyway. Fuck’s sake.’
Person B chimed in. ‘Yeah wtf is going on? How long have we been here now?’
‘Two hours,’ she groaned.
I slid down to join them on the floor, accidentally elbowing who I’ll call Person C in the process. Person C was a schoolboy of no older than 12 sitting cross-legged on one of those funny outer door seats that aren’t really seats. ‘Oh sorry,’ I said to him. He gave me a fleeting frown before returning his attention to his phone. I inferred from his drooping eyelids, clenched jaw and whitened knuckles that he couldn’t get a signal either. I watched sympathetically as he irritably jabbed the screen a few more times before shaking his head in defeat and dropping it back into his blazer pocket.
Person B was watching him too. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ he said, covering his mouth with his hand to cough. ‘We’ll be out in no time.’ Person C looked back at him blankly.
‘What school do you go to?’ said Person A, covering her own mouth as she absent-mindedly picked at her lip. No response.
A group with their backs to us were animatedly devising conspiracy theories over the situation. Half seemed determined to believe that the driver was acting unilaterally and staging a spontaneous demo to follow on from the recent string of unsuccessful tube strikes, and that he’d also set up hidden cameras in every carriage to record us as a ‘Lord of the Flies’-inspired side project. Two birds, one stone and all that. The other half were keenly pushing a supernatural angle, wherein angels and demons from the centre of the earth were rising up and wreaking havoc on our infrastructure for shits and giggles. Person A and Person B laughed as the theories got more and more bizarre.
I looked back at Person C, who was spectating but not reacting. I felt really sorry for him because I’m sure the last bloody thing a 12 year old needs after a hard day’s schooling is to be sealed up for two hours in a hot, dark glorified sardine tin with hundreds of smelly, unrelatable adults – and no phone signal.
Suddenly, in my periphery, Person A jerked forwards and suppressed a sound trying to escape her mouth that didn’t quite sound human. I turned to face her in alarm and in a matter of seconds, she’d gone from sweaty but presentable to looking like she’d weathered a tornado: her bun had unravelled and left her hair in a state of anarchy. Her eyes and nose were watering. Her top button had come undone.
‘Wtf you alright? What was that?’ said Person B.
‘Oh nothing, I just—’ and she did it again, covering her face with both hands. She looked up at us sheepishly with a pained expression. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine. Just ignore me please.’
‘Are you holding back a sneeze?’ said Person B. ‘If it hurts, just let it out. Don’t go firing it at me though, obviously.’
‘No, no, it’s not a sneeze. It’s, er… Tourette’s. Yeah, I have Tourette’s.’
Back in 2019, Tourette’s was quite heavily glamourised nationwide. It wasn’t yet widely understood to be a potentially very debilitating condition and sufferers were constantly the butt of jokes with impunity. It was just a popular, quirky thing to have – or claim to have. So naturally, this piqued mine and Person B’s interest.
‘Oh wow, real-life Tourette’s in action!’ I gushed. ‘So that’s one of your ticks, is it?’
‘Er, yeah.’ And she started telling us about how she was one of the co-founders of the up-and-coming Tourettes Action charity and how as a result, she was well on her way to becoming a millionaire and that she’d already travelled across every continent curing people possessed by Tourette’s demons by yodelling and banging saucepans and flicking rubber bands at their foreheads. But it had come at a cost. The demons needed to be rehoused and the only place hospitable enough for them was the human body, so she’d volunteered her own. She was now a walking, talking repository of thousands of Tourette’s demons.
‘It’s all been worth it,’ she said. ‘I’m filthy rich and I feel like a god.’ Person B and I nodded reverently.
The sound of Person C sniggering made us all look up.
‘Hey, don’t laugh,’ said Person B. ‘She deserves a medal for what she’s done.’
At that moment, some lights came on and Person B was illuminated enough for us to notice that he had a black eye and some nasty cuts and bruises all over his body. Parts of his white tank top were stained with dried blood. There was this one deep gash on his upper left arm in particular that made Person A and me wince.
‘Christ, wtf happened to you?!’ she gasped, expelling more garlic breath when she breathed out again.
(As an aside, can I just quickly say something about garlic? Please, please, prettiest of pleases can anyone reading this try and limit themselves to 1-2 cloves where possible? I promise I’m not a garlic prohibitionist. Far from it. In fact, I’ve been known in my time to go wild and bung 5-6 cloves into a single dish, but it’s always come at the cost of my social life or lack thereof. I’m just speaking on behalf of someone I know who really seems to abhor the smell in a visceral way, although tbh maybe she doesn’t count ‘cos I reckon she has vampire somewhere in her lineage. She even has her curtains drawn 24/7 and seems to think lightbulbs are a myth so when you’re round hers you’re just stumbling around in the dark and tripping over things. Either she’s vampire-affiliated or she genuinely has sensory processing issues. But yeah, what I’m trying to say is, people like her exist so be nice and live the 1-2 clove life – unless you cook your garlic super thoroughly, I guess.)
Person B looked like a deer in headlights. He looked like he’d just escaped a warzone and he’d clearly been relying on the lights to remain off and hide that from us. His eyes darted about and he wringed his hands nervously. We could see the cogs doing full 360s.
‘Well er… I’m s’posed to keep this under wraps,’ he said, choosing his words carefully. ‘But fuck it. I have this black eye ‘cos I’m a professional MMA fighter, and I have all these cuts ‘cos I’m also a zookeeper at London Zoo and today I almost lost my life wrestling a rabid lion back into its cage.’
Person A and I gasped in awe. Person B visibly relaxed and began telling us about his televised knockout win in the ring the night before, which had generated him over £100k in earnings and secured his place at the forefront of the MMA world’s version of the premiership.
He then filled us in on his near-death experience at London Zoo just a few hours prior, wherein a rabid lion had escaped its enclosure and tried to attack some innocent bystanders. He’d rugby tackled the lion down a manmade mountain and wrestled it into submission. It had then turned multi-pronged as other lions rushed to the scene to defend their comrade, but he’d single-handedly booted them back across the field one by one with his powerful MMA legs. He’d saved dozens of lives.
‘You legend,’ whispered Person A.
Person C guffawed. We all looked up.
‘Oi!’ said Person A. ‘Show some respect, young man. This bloke’s a hero. He’ll go on to do great things, I’m sure of it.’ Person B feasted on her compliment. He puffed out his chest and shimmied his shoulders and fist-pumped the air. Then he turned to me. ‘Hey, nice shoes.’
Caught by surprise, I looked at my shoes. I’d got them for £6 at LIDL next to a pile of potatoes. They always do that at LIDL, don’t they? Everything’s just seemingly shelved at random. You’ll find t-shirts and posters of Beyonce draped over boxes of Weetabix, and yo-yos and kettles and toilet paper inside the freezers. It certainly makes for a spicy shopping experience. It’s essentially a lucky dip with some added hustle and bustle. Not that I’m complaining – it adds character to the place!
Thinking back, I should’ve just owned it. So what if I’d got my shoes for £6 at LIDL next to a pile of potatoes? I mean, luxury doesn’t always coincide with utility and this pair was proving just fine durability-wise. I wasn’t going running in them so they didn’t need to be sturdy AF. I think I’d bought the sack of potatoes as well.
But I wasn’t about to lose face in front of these two. ‘Oh er, th-thanks,’ I stammered. ‘I got them fr-from, er… Harrods? In the… tr-trillionaires’ V.I.P. lounge…?’
I breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear they’d bought it. Person A was swooning and Person B was panting and fanning his face, either out of admiration or because it was now… Really. Fucking. Hot. I’d surely produced enough sweat by now to replenish the oceans under my two thick layers of clothing. I was desperate to unbutton my corduroy jacket but I couldn’t because…
I was wearing a Christmas jumper underneath.
In May.
I’d had no choice that morning but to succumb to this devastating wardrobe malfunction because our washing machine was broken and I’d reached the end of my clean laundry. I’d initially made no attempt to conceal it at work because I hadn’t thought it to be that big of a deal, but the tsunami of banter that had come my way the second I’d unbuttoned had been enough to set me straight on that. I’d hastily rebuttoned and roasted through the rest of the day. I’d managed to survive this cosmic level of discomfort for over 12 hours and I wasn’t about to call it quits now.
‘You must be baking,’ remarked Person A. ‘Why don’t you take off your jacket?’
I was not going to commit social suicide again that day. No way. ‘I… can’t,’ I said ominously.
Person A and Person B leaned in. ‘Why not?’ they breathed.
And before I knew it, I was weaving an intricate web of lies about how I was wearing a special material under my jacket because I was a human test subject for an official NHS-funded medical study on the effects of prolonged suffocation of sweat glands and how that might relate to human-derived recyclable drinking water in the future, which would render ALL MANMADE SOURCES OF WATER OBSOLETE(!!!!!!!). If everything went to plan, I’d become incalculably rich (on top of the trillions I already had that gave me access to the fabled trillionaires’ V.I.P. lounge at Harrods) and would be formed into a human fountain with a bonus ability to grant people three wishes. It was absolutely bonkers but Person A and Person B seemed to have an infinite store of credulity and the approval on their faces was intoxicating and I was feeding off it like there was no tomorrow and I couldn’t stop myself and I was barrelling headfirst and full tilt into a pit of deceit and before I knew it, I’d constructed the most ludicrous tower of rubbish replete with flying pigs, Charizards and blast-ended skrewts. The voices around us were receding and people were turning to watch and idolise me. I had everyone’s attention. This was the crowning moment of my life! I yapped on and on and on and when I finally stopped to breathe, they were all waiting with bated breath, poised on the threshold of a thunderous applause—
The train gave a lurch. We were on the move at last. And just like that, I’d lost everyone’s attention. My once-in-a-lifetime moment in the spotlight had ended, but it was worth it and now I had an excuse not to remove my jacket.
As the train began moving in earnest, we all scrambled to our feet and released sighs of ‘About time!’ and ‘What a palaver!’ and variants thereof. We hoisted our bags back over our shoulders and assumed our previous positions. Person A’s green eyes, now fixed on her phone, and garlic breath were inches from my face again and Person B’s armpit was back to looming over me like a spectre. Despite the instant reimplementation of the no eye contact rule, I stole a glance at Person C still sitting cross-legged in his seat. He looked back at me, knowingly and unblinkingly. I swallowed. He’d sussed me out. I turned to face the window as a shard of self-awareness pierced through my thick skull. What had I done?
As the train pulled out of the tunnel, bright evening sunlight permeated the carriage. We travelled onwards in silence. Before too long, we were approaching Acton Town Station. I saw movement in my periphery: Person C was getting his things together and preparing to alight. I sensed a foreboding doom. Somehow I knew his departure wasn’t going to be a quiet one.
The train entered the station and the doors slid open, and my memory of what happened next is fragmented because it all happened so fast. I remember a cloud of dust materialising out of nowhere, followed by Person A sneezing so loudly that I thought the cartilage in my joints would shatter. Aside from the volume, it was the most undignified human sound you could ever hear. Next, there came the sound of something smacking into a pole, followed by an ‘Ow! Not again!’ from Person B. Then I felt a small pair of hands rip open my jacket and expose my Christmas jumper to everyone present. ‘Nooooo!’ I wailed.
The dust dissipated just in time for me to glimpse Person C fleeing out the door, never to be seen again.
The doors slid closed and the train left the station. I blinked and tried to make sense of what had just happened. Without any preamble, Person C had just launched into a multi-character assassination with effortless grace and precision. He’d been so attuned to our body language that he’d seen right through our lies, and by his reckoning, we’d needed to be taken down a peg or two.
Person A’s Tourette’s fabrication with all its demonic appendages was just a way of diverting attention from her embarrassing sneeze. But she had no reason to be ashamed. While ‘natural’ isn’t always synonymous with ‘good’, in the case of a (pre-pandemic) sneeze that’s not being deliberately aimed at other passengers, it’s fine. She didn’t have a say in the volume of sneeze that Mother Nature assigned her.
Person B didn’t acquire those injuries from professional MMA fighting or lion wrestling. He just walked into things and fell over a lot. He was just a bit clumsy and uncoordinated and there’s no shame in that either.
I shouldn’t have lied either, but I probably shouldn’t have worn a Christmas jumper in May in the first place. I mean, who does that? I should’ve just gone to work topless.
‘Merry Christmas!’ someone chortled as I alighted at Sudbury Hill.

[Video Games] The reboot that got rebooted: The rise and fall of DmC: Devil May Cry

Let's cut through the pre-amble:

What is Devil May Cry?

Devil May Cry is an action series developed and published by Japanese company Capcom, beginning with Devil May Cry 1 in 2001 for the Playstation 2 (Here's an advert showing it as part of Sony's holiday lineup that included landmark gaming titles such as Final Fantasy X, Grand Theft Auto 3, Metal Gear Solid 2 and... Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance). The game series began as a prototype build for Resident Evil 4 that had more of an overt action focus than the acclaimed horror franchise was known for. Rather than scrap the build, Capcom saw potential in the idea of a stylish action game, and gave director Hideki Kamiya permission to make it a full title.
Kamiya would involuntarily leave the series after DMC 1 as Capcom didn't ask him to work on DMC 2. Instead, a still-to-this-day unknown phantom director was put in charge of the game and he ran it into the ground. With less than half a year before DMC 2's 2003 release, Capcom brought in a new director to course-correct and get the game out for release: Hideaki Itsuno. In less than six months, Itsuno would rally the team, basically make the entire game, and create several features that would go on to become series staples, and while DMC 2 sold well, it was critically panned for being a very boring game. Itsuno, not wanting his reputation to be sullied, came back in 2005 with Devil May Cry 3, generally considered one of the greatest action games of all time. From here several core traits are instilled: chief among which being style meters that track the player's skill with combos and Dante having a style system that lets him use different movesets.
And it's in 2008 with the release of Devil May Cry 4, marking the series going multiplatform for the first time as it came out on the PS3 and Xbox 360, that this story really begins:

The build up to 2010

With DMC 4's release in 2008, Capcom set the sales expectation that the game would sell 1.8 million units by the end of the fiscal year. DMC 4 would sell two million units in under a month, but Capcom were a bit unimpressed. They were hoping that now that DMC was on a wider range of platforms that the sales would correspondingly go up, but instead the game just saw a modest increase over DMC 3. The cost of game development had also shot up in the new console generation, making Capcom more concerned about DMC4's sales just being fine, especially coming off of huge sales juggarnauts from 2007 such as Halo 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare and Bioshock. (It doesn't help that DMC 4 had a very rushed development leading to the now infamous case of Dante's playable chapters just being Nero's but backwards)
Japan at the time was also in a weird place when it came to gaming. The mobile phone gaming market was about to take off, and the playerbase in Japan was already smaller than the worldwide market for obvious reasons. In the home regions, it was safer to look into handheld gaming, and while Capcom had dallied with the idea of a DMC game on the Playstation Portable (at one point considering a remake of the first game that reached in-game screenshots and box art that was quietly shelved for unknown reasons, alongside a prequel focusing on Dante's father Sparda), these ideas never left the ground. Seeing how Western markets were more traditionally concerned with console gaming at this time (and the success of the God of War franchise proved Action was a genre people wanted), Capcom's idea was simple:
Give their IPs to Western studios and let them take a crack at it, with the idea being their knowledge of what the West wants would let the games sell better. The results were mixed. The Bionic Commando reboot is nowadays more known for the twist of YOUR WIFE IS THE ROBOT ARM and only sold 27,000 units in a month, but Dead Rising did fairly well under a Capcom Vancouver branch until Dead Rising 4 happened and uh... kinda killed the series because it was awful.
Capcom eventually set their sights on giving the West a crack at DMC, leading to them eyeballing several studios. This worked out well for them in that Itsuno was also burnt out. After having spent five straight years on DMC and having redeemed its image after DMC 2, Itsuno was ready to take a break and make his dream game: Dragon's Dogma, a dark fantasy game that is very fun. It got a Netflix anime adaptation recently that is... not as fun. But while Itsuno was making Dragon's Dogma, Capcom had some time to spitball handing the series off. They eventually settled on Ninja Theory, an up and coming British team best known for Heavenly Sword (a very pretty game with mediocre action combat and a priority on storytelling), and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (a modernisation of Journey to the West that was very pretty but priotizied story over gameplay). Rumors began to circulate in early 2010 that Ninja Theory had acquired the license and would be making a prequel focusing on Dante's early days, but it would only become clear at Tokyo Games Show that year when DmC: Devil May Cry* was formally announced.
And the fanbase collectively hated it.
(* Yes that does technically mean this reboot's name is Devil may Cry: Devil May Cry. I'm going to call it DmC from here to differentiate it from the core series)

The TGS Trailer

For those unaware of DMC, I should stress that by 2010, it had a reputation for a certain flair and theatics. Dante was known to be a goofball in cutscenes, taunting enemy demons and making a mockery of them. He has an entire cutscene in DMC 4 where he acts like he's on the stage of a theatre with how grandious he is. People liked Dante for this reason, he was a breath of fresh air in a time when most protagonists were stotic, gritty jerks who only talked in curse words and gravelly shouts. And his flowing white hair was also certainly iconic.
So here comes the new take on Dante, the West giving him a go and oh... hoo boy. There's no charisma, there's no panache. The trailer has no gameplay. Dante doesn't look like a trash talker, he looks like a meth addict. He's smoking, something the DMC 1 design documents said Dante would never do as (per Kamiya) smoking is uncool. His hair isn't even white!
Now let me be clear: I am not opposed to a new take on Dante. Certainly, the idea presented in the reveal trailer that Dante is imaging the demons he fights as an acute case of psychosis is an interesting idea, as it raises the question of whether or not the demons are real or if he's senselessly killing random people. But the execution would have had to be perfect, and opening with just a fancy trailer that had no signs of gameplay for an action franchise was not the right foot to start on.
What doesn't help was that the entire Western Capcom initiative was one pushed by a very controversial figure in gaming called Keiji Inafune, who would leave Capcom right after DmC's announcement in 2010. Inafune was the one most strongly advocating for the western development approach (Something Capcom were quick to stress in 2010 after his departure), but with his departure the movement had less steam. Inafune would go on to make Mighty Number 9, a Kickstarter that went miserably wrong on every turn and is usually seen as one of the most disappointing games of the 2010s.
I should also point out here: Dante's radically different design from the norm of the series was a mandate imposed by Capcom. Ninja Theory's original concept art for Dante was much more closer to his traditional design- white hair, red coat and all. But Capcom, and Itsuno especially, were adament that if Ninja Theory were going to be doing something new with the franchise, that they needed to go off the cuff- in Capcom's own words, "Go crazy."

The development

So Dante got a new color palette, a darker jacket and black hair. But at the time (this news only came out two years after the redesign was revealed), people didn't know about Capcom explicitly telling NT to go off the rails, and what they saw... was Ninja Theory going off the rails in the wrong way.
So from the word go, fans aren't happy. Fans are usually never happy but I mean they were unhappy. Chief Creative director for Ninja Theory Tameen Antionades said after the reveal: “The vitriol was immediate, aggressive and relentless for the next two years. Without a second of gameplay being shown, it had been written off as a disaster in the making.” Tameen would become the ball and chain around DmC's marketing, which is quite apparent in how Ninja Theory would dial back on his appearances as we get closer to the game's release. The backlash to the launch clearly surprised Ninja Theory and caught them off guard, with Tameen publically lashing out at the original fanbase for writing the game off or being unhappy at Dante's visual redesign. This would go on to dominiate the discussions about DmC for its pre-release cycle, as it became less about the game and more about the community and whether or not the response was justified (alongside in typical internet fashion, a few death threats being tossed around which apparently included a full metal song). No matter which side of it you lean on though, Tameen had habit of putting his foot in his mouth in regards to PR:

When asked by Venturebeat how he felt about the fan reaction to the TGS trailer, Tameen (and I am quoting them word for word here) “took a drag of his cigarette and without blinking or pausing to exhale the smoke from his mouth, said: ‘I don’t care.’”
Tameen went on to insult Dante's original costume in a later interview when saying that what was and wasn’t cool had changed in the years since DMC1: “If Dante, dressed as he was, walked into any bar outside of Tokyo, he’d get laughed out.”
Finally, he disparaged the original series for its depiction of women, particularly the demon hunters Trish and Lady, saying: "I've nothing against big tits - I'd rather have my head resting on a pair right now - but if you're going to try and stimulate someone on different levels, there's better ways to do it... We did that in Enslaved with Trip. People loved her, not because she had big breasts and high heels, but because she felt like someone who could be your girlfriend. That to me is more attractive than a prostitute walking around with a big gun." The idea that Tameen was dismissing Lady and Trish (Lady especially has basically the largest character arc in DMC3 and it's as much her story as Dante's) irked the fanbase.

Capcom likely stepped in behind the scenes and encourged a few changes. Notably, Dante's design underwent a few shifts, including making him more muscular and rewriting portions of the game to give him a few more of Old!Dante's trademark quips. A few voice actor was also cast, named Tim Phillips... though NT wouldn't budge on the haircut as it was part of the story. The Dante psychosis/prisoner angle from the TGS trailer was also completely scrapped from the final product, having Dante instead be confirmed to be sane and fighting demons, not people. Even though Capcom had encouraged NT to go off the rails... money still reigns supreme and Capcom wanted to turn a profit. So closer to release, Capcom made a point of stressing that Itsuno and several other DMC veteran staff were supervising the combat system and offering guidance. Combat designer Rahni Tucker spoke positively of the exchanges she had with Itsuno:

While Capcom Japan kept a close eye on Ninja Theory’s work on DmC’s characters, story and world, its greatest focus was, naturally, on the game’s combat. Itsuno and other key personnel would visit the studio in Cambridge every few months to check in on its progress, Ninja Theory staff would often make the trip out to Japan, and in between those times there would be regular video conferences and daily email updates. All that communication helped to unify the two companies, despite a fundamental split between their approaches to game development: Ninja Theory liked to start with the visual design, and Capcom with the mechanics. Modestly, Itsuno admits he learned a lot from the collaboration; Tucker believes she picked up an awful lot more. “I learnt so much,” she says. “Itsuno would speak philosophically about how he approaches combat and enemy design. They build most of the player’s set of actions first, and then think about the things they can build to allow players to exploit particular elements of the system they’ve designed. They really put the emphasis of the baddie design back onto the player’s actions. It’s kind of obvious, but just the way that he spoke about it was inspiring, and it made a lot of sense to me.”

The damage however, was long done. Even with the post-TGS revisions, DmC was facing an uphill battle from the community, with a minority waiting to give it a try themselves before casting judgement, but the majority either being apathetic or downright hostile to the game, not helped by Tameen's attitude creating the idea that Ninja Theory inherently hated what made Devil May Cry good (again, keep in mind most players wouldn't learn that Capcom were pushing for the radical Dante changes until years post-release). Ultimately though, Capcom themselves are to blame for the choices that impacted DmC: Ninja Theory were only doing their jobs to the best of their abilities and for the most part many of the staff clearly loved getting to work on such a popular franchise and boosting their studio's name. It came down an unfortunate blend of Capcom misreading what people wanted from future projects, an attempt to appeal to a Western market that fell on its face, and a director unprepared for the mass backlash his product got.
Either way, the game finally came out in early 2013.

The game itself

Eh, it was OK.
DmC launched in March 2013 and got decent reviews on all platforms, getting a consistent 8/10 on all platforms on Metacritic. The PC port was especially praised for its sheer variety of features including an uncapped framerate. Critics quite liked it, praising the story and art direction, feeling it was a necessary step for the series to make the games somewhat easier to let newcomers in without facing as daunting a challenge as the games could be (I'm pretty sure learning how to fly a plane is easier than mastering Dante in Devil May Cry 4). Old Dante's most famous voice actor, Reuben Langdon, spoke on a podcast about the game and admitted that while he wasn't fond of the new Dante's characterisation, he applauded Ninja Theory's craftsmenship.
The fanbase were colder, even with the pre-release biases set aside (this wasn't helped by Platinum, helmed by several ex-DMC 1 developers including Kamiya, releasing Metal Gear Rising Revengeance also in 2013. Metal Gear Rising is a very good game that involves flipping giant robots and fighting a very actractive Brazillian man with a gun-sheath sword). The game's framerate on consoles was capped at 30FPS for technical reasons when all prior games ran at 60FPS. Dante had lost a lot of his mechanical complexity (including DMC 3 and 4's style system which offered Dante special abilities he could switch between such as more sword and gun combos, blocking and dodging) in favour of a more universal moveset. The Devil Trigger super mode was pretty lame and automatically knocked all enemies into the air, which people didn't like as it made most encounters too easy. Building up style was too easy and the game had no systems to stop you spamming the same combos over and over. The game's weapon system of angel/demon themed weapons included color-coded enemies that forced you to use the right gear or you'd be punished. There was no Turbo Mode, a feature in most games that automatically boosted the game's speed by 20% on average.
Ninja Theory still made a good action game, albeit one that needed a bit more refinement to reach its true potential. But the lack of several core features (or worse, poorly implemented iterations of said features) led to the fanbase adopting a term:

"It's a good game, but it's not a good Devil May Cry."

The fanbase were willing to concede to the good aspects of the game- especially in audiovisual aspects. Enemies now got a subtitle during their first appearance, weapons getting a slight glint when the player pauses to let them know they can launch a pause combo attack, the soundtrack was now dynamic and evolved up the higher your style rank got, alongside the killing blow at the end of a fight getting a cinematic camera angle. Ninja Theory's sense of style itself was something that impressed the Capcom team, as all of these aspects were modified and adopted into the mainline games come 2019. The game was also very beautiful in places, leaving the Gothic archetecture of the main games for a more European feel in Limbo City. Madrid in Spain and Genoa in Italy are clear influences on the archetecture, and the design team adapt them well in making Limbo a city that is itself a weapon trying to kill Dante through compressing alleyways, closing off paths or mocking him through writing on the walls, Splinter Cell Conviction style. Combichrist and Noisia's collaberations for the soundtrack were also praised between their licensed work and new music composed just for the game, especially the songs Never Surrender and Throat Full of Glass.
But for all the praise, reluctant or otherwise, that game got mechanically, the story that the critics had acclaimed as mature and a right step forward had few supporters among the playerbase. There's been a lot written and said about DmC's story so I'll cap off the highlights here:

Dante, even after the TGS revisions, was still far too crass and unlikeable. A scene early on in the game was also seen as a potshot at fans of the old games as a response to the TGS backlash where a mop falls on Dante's head, making him look like his older self, before he snarks "Not in a million years" and throws the mop aside. Fans quickly took to several creative nicknames to refer to this new iteration of the character, with the most popular being DINO (Dante In Name Only) or Donte. Fans hated Donte's personality so much that they began unironically championing the Spanish dub of the game due to his dub actor having more fun in the role, leading to people making mods to highlight the misadventures of Donté, el exterminador de demonios. Dante being changed from a half-human half-demon to half-angel half-demon also led to mocking jokes comparing Dante to the Adam Sandler film Little Nicky.
The game relied far too heavily on swearing, with the exchange between Dante and Succubus becoming infamous for the lines "Fuck you!" "Fuck you!" "FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUU." A scene with Dante and Vergil where the two engage in brotherly banter only for Vergil to end the argument with "And I've got a bigger dick" also went viral for all the wrong reasons.
Dante's brother Vergil in the core series is a man of MOTIVATION who would sooner cut his throat than admit to anything being stronger than him, alongside someone who hates firearms. Entire essays have been written about how amazing Vergil is in Devil May Cry 3 and in some communities, his name has become synonymous with the rival archetype. Here, he's presented as a thinly veiled analogue to the Anonymous movement (you can carbon date this game to early 2010s in general with the Anonymous analouges and WAKE UP SHEEPLE energy), openly admits to Dante that "I'm powerless to stop you" from just leaving his goal to stop the demons, and in the most infamous scene of the game, uses a sniper rifle to shoot a pregnant woman in the chest, blowing out her entire stomach, before headshotting her. To make things even worse for the reputation of this version of Vergil (who had been mockingly named Vergin), the launch version of DmC had him wearing a fedora. In 2013. I don't think I need to add anything to that if you remember what became of the fedora around 2013.
Despite Tameen's comments about women in video games and "prostitutes with guns," DmC was reviled for how deeply mysoginistic the game truly was. Kat (the one heroic female character in the game and the only female character to survive the game), had several far more revealing costumes planned in concept art (Alongside the idea that Kat fought with a violin weapon pre-Lindsay Sterling which was pretty cool). Here's one of the better pieces of art where Kat was planned to be a biker chick with platinum blonde hair. Kat is ultimately a vehicle for Dante's character development as he softens up around her, only for her to be kidnapped and brutalized by the police. Dante and Vergil then kidnap the mistress of Mundus (the main antagonist) who is pregnant with his child, and trade the two women off like Pokemon cards (the camera in the trade scene, linked above in the Vergin section includes several disturbing shots that linger on Kat trying to get up after being shoved to the ground), leading back to the Sniper Rifle Abortion. The fanbase got very creative with memes relating to that part of the game. Kat's main involvement in the final act of the game is just to give Dante a map of the building she was tortured in, then hide behind a dumpster when Dante and Vergil come to blows over whether or not they should rule humanity. And in the re-release of the game, the final cutscene is modfied so the last shot of the game is Dante copping a feel of Kat's ass.

The end was an OK game let down by a bad story. The tale of many a game. And unfortunately, partly thanks to the game just not being good enough for the DMC pedigree, DmC underperformed. Capcom initally hoped for 2 million units to be sold like DMC 4, but later quietly lowered their projections down to 1.2 million. Some rumors speculate that Capcom had to artifically boost the game's sale numbers by counting anyone who downloaded the game when it was for free as part of Playstation Plus in January 2014 (games that go on PS+ or Microsofft's Xbox Live Games with Gold service are usually games that are either selling so well they can take the hit, are past their lifespan and looking to reignite the playerbase, or did very badly and this is a last ditch effort to get interest into the game). While not speaking directly about DmC, Capcom spoke frankly in a financial report regarding their Western outsourcing, attributing the lack of success to a "delayed response to the expanding digital contents market," "insufficient coordination between the marketing and the game development divisions in overseas markets," and a "decline in quality due to excessive outsourcing". The long and the short of it was: DmC flopped commerically, failing to meet the sales of DMC 4 in the West (which remember was Capcom's entire reason for the reboot) when it was released on the exact same platforms, and the consoles had a larger install base due to five years having passed. For what it's worth, Itsuno himself support the game and approved of Ninja Theory's efforts, even saying he'd have been honored to work on a DmC Devil May Cry 2 had Capcom gone with that project.
Some post-launch support would follow, including DLC costumes based on concept art for Dante and several alt skins based on his DMC 1 and 3 appearances, Bloody Palace (basically a time trial gauntlet run) and a campaign focusing on Vergil that sets up a sequel hook which never gets followed up on.
Some Ninja Theory staffers didn't take the news well, especially as they knew that their reputation was going to take a large hit after DmC. Art director Alessandro Taini gave a GDC talk where he went on a weird rant involving editing DMC 4 Dante into stills from... Brokeback Mountain and Batman and Robin, while also saying reboot Dante was based on... Tyler Durden from Fight Club (for those who don't know Fight Club, you're not meant to agree with Tyler or find him a role model). Keep in mind that this is Taini basically shit-talking character designs he had no hand in making. In a hilaripus twist of irony, Dante would later in the series get a cowboy hat as a weapon. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Capcom up to this point had been going back and forth on what DmC even was- was it a prequel, a reboot, an alternate universe? They seemed to change the answer every month. But after the game's failure to meet expectations commercially, they quietly settled on it being based on an alternate universe, as was confirmed in of all things, Donte appearing as a DLC alt skin for Dante in Marvel vs Capcom Infinite.

(While I'm on the topic of weird fighting game trivia, Donte actually also got a full fighting game appearance in the "classic," Playstation All Stars Battle Royale as an attempt to market DmC ahead of its release. Yes, Donte technically didn't even debut in his own game. This story is so weird to me! In the trailer he even fights the protagonist of previous Ninja Theory game Heavenly Sword)

In 2015, Capcom re-released the game for the new consoles as DmC: Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition. This was largely helmed by the Capcom team in Japan who modified the game to make it more in line with DMC's series standards of gameplay. And you know what? It's really good! Genuinely, it actually makes the game and takes it from "A good attempt" to "one of the best Western attempts at action games period." 60FPS on consoles, all DLC included, Turbo Mode was back, a new mode called Must Style where you have to get an S Rank in combos before your attacks do damage, all alongside an insanely detailed changelog penned by Rahni Tucker. The one downside? It never got released on PC for unsaid reasons, presumably that most of the new gameplay additions... were based on mods made by the PC fanbase. Mods you can no longer find as the site storing them has gone down.
However even with this, DmC would get sand in its eye one more time. In the same year, Capcom released a similar re-release of DMC 4 called Special Edition. It was far more bare bones than DmC: DE, only adding three new playable characters in Lady, Trish and MOTIVATION Man himself, Vergil. Despite the game only getting a physical release in Japan and being digital only here in the West (whereas DmC: DE got a full release), Capcom eventually said that DMC 4 SE obliterated the DE in sales, with Capcom specifically saying that 4SE's digital sales led to a better quarter in 2015 than they were anticipating. As of 2020 (due to Capcom counting their re-releases of games separately than the original release when it comes to sales), we know that DMC4SE has sold 1.5 million units, while DmC: DE sold 1.1 million.
However, ultimately, I'm very joyful to admit that everyone got a happy ending! No, literally, everyone came out of this for the better. Ninja Theory in 2017 would release Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, a critical and commerical darling made on a self-styled "AA" budget that was praised for its handling of mental health through the lens of its MC Senua. It made its budget back easily, they're now owned by Microsoft and they're currently working on a sequel called Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2. Capcom would bounce back from their slump in the Early 2010s, beginning in 2017 with the releases of Resident Evil 7, Monster Hunter World and a certain title I'll mention in a minute. They've been releasing hit after hit for the last four years and they have more on the horizon. And Itsuno, now having made Dragon's Dogma, came back raring to go with more Devil May Cry. Though there are some rumors by Dante's voice actor that he had to threaten to leave Capcom to get it, at E3 2018 as part of the Microsoft panel, Itsuno took to the stage and announced:
"DMC IS BACK!!!"
(Watching people react to this trailer and freaking out when they see it's DMC gives me so much serotonin)
Thanks for reading this... long disaster of a post. Have a good one, and remember to keep this party crazy. Let's rock. :)

Additional reading if you'd like more words on this reboot:

So are we ready to admit that CD Projekt Red are mortals just like every other game developer?

I want to get off of Mad Ahab's Wild Ride. Continuing my commentary on Moby Dick with chapters 37-44. The image of the ungraspable phantom of life IS the key to it all, and that is the one thing Ahab can't grasp.

Original post, with commentaries on the first 9 chapters, chapters 10-24, chapters 25-36
———
CHAPTER 37
Now that Ahab has formed his death cult, he soliloquizes—and Ishmael is either eavesdropping or fabricating, but either way he means to convey the spirit of the man if not his letter. Ahab's voyage through life leaves "pale waters, paler cheeks" in his wake, sowing chaos wherever he goes yet where he goes he goes with unobstructed course and direction. His ripples are smoothed over by the billowing envy of men, but he cares not; he cares not for monuments and memorials, no, only for deeds done and the merit he acquires for himself in his own eyes. For when the sun sets, his "soul mounts up!"—his task as unceasing as the day-and-night cycle, but his soul reflecting not the light of the sun as the moon, but weighing on him with his task like the "Iron Crown of Lombardy", a small crown forged from the nail of Jesus' cross, the weight of sacrifice Ahab's to bear.
The clouds that set on his brow are no object; his Atlantean task is the crucifixion he bears, having been dismasted and reborn. He fancies himself not the son of God, but His equal in will and war, Satan made a man—set apart from the rest in charisma and intelligence, cloistering himself in his superlative ambitions whose reach leaves no room for human connection, and indeed actively forsake it through hard-hearted, eloquent guile that convinces pragmatic men to stake their lives on his goal.
Ahab must've had a perverse spiritual awakening while he lay dying, paved by his education, but instead of becoming a prophet and trying to speak God's truth, he's become the mad king whose words are iron spun like gold, who mistakes his enlightenment for alienation because he's unwilling to share it. Rather, he's content to dismiss those who disapprove of him and to brood about what he lacks: the simple pleasures of casual conversation, light-hearted humor, basking in sunlight,—"damned! most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!", his soul hibernating to incubate horrors.
Ahab reflects that leaguing his men was "not so hard a task", since he'd apparently convinced everyone—though Ishmael neglected to share how or if he was moved by the speech—to give their loyalty to him, even Starbuck who thought him mad, but Ahab, verging on self-awareness, declares:

I’m demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that’s only calm to comprehend itself!

Where Ahab goes, there turbulence will be in his wake, so long as his grandiose task remains his ultimate goal. The men's diversity doesn't faze him:

my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and they revolve.

High aloft, Ahab can view and move men as "ant-hills of powder", ignitable thanks to Ahab's own fire, that makes his seldom-used pillow into an oven-baked brick. This hellfire leads Ahab to proclaim his apotheosis:

I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the prophet and the fulfiller one. That’s more than ye, ye great gods, ever were.

Where gods use fate and fortune to move men on the world as their gameboard to achieve their ends, transcendent and detached, Ahab is both player and piece, and strives to cast out fate from within and retake fortune to his own whim and will, to become a self-moved mover. Ahab's soliloquy includes a direct challenge to the gods:

come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there.

Ahab fancies himself a river, faithful to the ungraspable impermanence of life, yes, but immovable in his self-set course, the iron rails of his destiny laid out in defiance of all forms of fate other than his own:

Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle to the iron way!

Ahab doesn't consider that even his actions could be part of providence, for he's excluded all other purposes than piercing the masked dark of Plato's cave as paths to fulfillment. Active commitment to misery, nothing to blunt it, as though this iron way would falter and betray its fragility otherwise.
———
CHAPTER 38
Starbuck sees Ahab's "impious end", but has been so overwhelmed that Ahab's charisma may well be a new form of fate befitting the quest for apotheosis we're seeing unfolding:

the ineffable thing has tied me to him; tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut.

Starbuck bemoans that Ahab's chief source of hypocrisy is that he would treat his superiors to democracy—though, from the last chapter, only to outwit them, the gods, on an even playing field—but everyone else to his despotism. Starbuck saw Ahab's "lurid woe", a weight that would crush him or any other man to bear, a violent and contagious atheism that Starbuck believes forced him "to obey, rebelling"—to rebel against God, by obeying the man who stands against Him. But God isn't jealous or petty, Starbuck reasons, so He may forgive Ahab and ensure that they never cross paths with the white whale. That's a pittance of hope, after seeing Ahab's determination, and Starbuck isn't ready to acknowledge that despite the leaden, locked weight of his heart evidencing plainly enough that he has no hope of Ahab's woe dissipating before his success or failure.
This really is the Dusk of Starbuck's soul; his "soul beat down and held to knowledge,—as wild, untutored things are forced to feed", he awakens to the horrors of the voyage: the "heathenish crew", the white whale as their "demigorgon"—an abyssal, creative god likely synonymous with the forbidden demiurge—, even the water itself taking on "wolfish" and "sharkish" qualities whose howl hunts Ahab, drawn along in the aft by the "gay, embattled, bantering bow"—the ship itself gradating from sunny to tenebrous while the vast deep latches onto Starbuck's newfound paranoia. Starbuck finds his hope in finding the horrors outwards, enabling him to fight the "grim, phantom futures" "with the soft feeling of the human in [him]". Starbuck might just have the guts for a mutiny at this rate, finding it in him to defy Ahab's blasphemous fate.
———
CHAPTERS 39&40
With more stageplay directives, Stubb soliloquizes about how

a laugh’s the wisest, easiest answer to all that’s queer; and come what will, one comfort’s always left—that unfailing comfort is, it’s all predestinated.

Carefree Stubb is trying to take in stride the outcomes of this voyage, outcomes that are out of his hands, no matter what they be, refracting Starbuck's newfound horror and finding the "waggish leering" that lurks in it—for now Starbuck has received the same treatment that Stubb did, and both men now share in some of the burning light that Ahab harbors, slight shares that were yet enough to send both spiraling into existential crises of reflection—on fate and death and God—higher than either would otherwise ever take interest in.
Whereas Starbuck responded by renewing his courage, Stubb reacts with forced, delirious humor, conflating it with wisdom, trying to abate his worry about not being able to return to his family, his love bubbling up—light, gay, and fleeting—like alcoholic froth to be swallowed down. The aside directive when Stubb is summoned from his nightwatch by Starbuck seems like a fourth-wall break, if that concept means anything for a non-play acting like a play—but it makes this scene feel surreal.
Uh, the whole crew of watchmen gets a musical scene, those awake filliped and those asleep deadened by the wine of Ahab's charisma—despite having no choice in their assigned roles, each man has to make peace with his newfound sense of inevitability, one sailor trying to invite the sleepers up with the pronouncement that now is "the resurrection; they must kiss their last, and come to judgment." This chapter is a full-fledged song-and-dance play-script, and Ishmael didn't bother learning many sailors' names—only their ethnicities—despite knowing the mother's maiden name and backstory of many other characters. One is even named "3D Nantucket Sailor"; so glad he's not a flatlander.
Tashtego mocks the song-and-dance, and the old Manx sailor wonders whether they have any idea what they're dancing over. The "whole world's a ball" and the course is set and fixed, so let them, green and jolly, let them celebrate and drink life while it's still brimming and frothing. Some of them are already horny and lonely, commiserating over the lack of women to distract themselves from a coming storm—the first karmic storm of Ahab's death cult, perhaps. Ahab has no fear of storms; worse, his direction is to attack the squalls—"fire your ship right into it!" The storm darkens angrily, a formation in the sky like Ahab's birthmark: "lurid-like, ye see, all else pitch black."
Daggoo, "quarried out of [blackness]", takes offense to this fear of the storm's dark, but grimly assents when told that his "race is the undeniable dark side of mankind", the same sailor provoking him into a fight. "Knife thee heartily! big frame, small spirit!" The crew eggs them on; the whole scene is frenzied. "A row a’low, and a row aloft—Gods and men—both brawlers!" A recreation of the arena in which "Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work! No? Why then, God, mad’st thou the ring?" The Manxman questions why God created the conditions for violence and then discouraged it.
The stormy climate keeps cutting off the thoughts the sailors try to express, leaving loose-ended, half-baked confusion—and the fight is interrupted by urgent orders to prepare for the oncoming squalls, their white froth every bit as ominous as the black storm overhead, yet to Pip less so than the white squalls of the maddened men seeking now the white whale. Timid Pip prays to "thou big white God" to save him from the men whose fear has been overridden by drunken courage, which is doing no good for the race relations aboard the ship. The chaos of this chapter sets up the ironic contrasts between black and white—both foreboding and hostile to many—in man and God and nature.
———
CHAPTER 41
Aha, Ishmael admits that he too was taken in by Ahab's charisma:

A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.

But Ishmael had a sympathy, whether unrelated or pretextual, before even meeting Ahab; this is halfway to what he wanted, a noble part in a great tragedy. After immersing himself in the death cult, Ishmael gathered all the information he could about the white whale, how it "haunted those uncivilized seas mostly frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen", how it evaded capture in both body and idea because of the scattered, prolonged, uncoordinated trajectories of the whaling vessels, and how "as of late" attacks by sperm whales "of great ferocity, cunning, and malice" were frequent.
Instead of possibilities like sperm whales who survived whalers becoming hostile toward shy, or the ocean itself starting to reject its guests, Ishmael jumps to the conclusion that every such report must have been an encounter with the whale. Since sperm whales are terrifying enough, few thought anything special about Ahab's tale, sharing Starbuck's stance about it being a "dumb brute", despite bouts with this whale leading to calamitous bad luck that ensured it always slipped away with minimal damage.
Sailors' proneness to superstition allowed rumors of Moby Dick to circulate and metastasize "as the smitten tree gives birth to its fungi"—whalers in particular, being likeliest of all to be "brought into contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea", exactly what is needed to stimulate the imagination and birth a modern myth, an urban legend spanning most of the watery part of the globe that eventually made otherwise daring hunters outright refuse to give chase to that whale, perhaps the greatest portend of bad luck any seaman could come across, hinting as it did of "supernatural agencies" and "morbid hints" beyond the scope of a normal sperm whale's destructive aggression.
Ishmael accuses of "professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity" anyone who would avoid hunting a sperm whale while willingly pursuing other large whales, as though the tests of mettle such whales pose are relatively unremarkable—perhaps as a rite of passage, for being able to challenge and usurp the monarchs of the sea. Non-American whalers—thus those less ambitious in their ambits—had seldom encountered sperm whales except in fairytales, but those who did demystified their stories only to trade them for confrontations with the sublime, "pre-eminent tremendousness" of the real deal, sperm whales in this setting reported as being unanimously anxiogenic and malicious to everything else in the sea—despite sperm whales having been elusive, hence the bowhead whales popularly regarded as the monarchs of the sea. That slipperiness and shyness has given way now that Americans dare to graze the whole ocean surface to exploit its oily, blubbery resources.
While "the general experiences in the fishery" amended some of the overblown rumors, such as that sperm whales were so scary that their mere presence caused other fish to kill themselves, the worst sperm whales had to offer ever renewed the superstitions that condensed into the myth of Moby Dick, which nevertheless many men were hardy (or foolhardy) enough to push themselves through for monetary gain were they to "chase and point lance at such an apparition". Claims of encounters with a monstrous whale at the same time at faraway places created the fancy that the white whale was ubiquitous or, perhaps courtesy of a hollow Earth with expedient currents, unfathomably fast; and that it was immortal, or possessed of such great durability and regeneration that it might as well be. One of Moby Dick's distinct features is a "pyramidical white hump", like the unkickable pyramid Stubb's dream used to symbolize Ahab, or even the ancient pyramids used for astronomical panoramas, encompassing in one view the starry sky.
Whereas the jarring storm in the last chapter was fearsome for its blackness, this whale's whiteness is the storm's complement: black storm descending from the heavens of the white God, white whale ascending from the hells of the black abyss; dark, Satanic Ahab with his white wake there to meet both head-on at their point of convergence, the limen of the surface. While the whale's magnitude and hue were unsettling enough, it was its "intelligent malignity", displaying abstract reasoning enough to deceive and escape all whalers theretofore, that reached through the wall of the mythos to strike fear into the hearts of listeners.
What kind of whale acts routed to lure whaleboats after it, only to suddenly spring on them and stove or repel them? And in marked contrast with the "serene, exasperating sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal"—as shipwreck and lost limbs lay strewn about. Moby Dick is not just a killer; it might be an artist with a keen sense of irony. It lured Ahab in such a way, and "swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them"—malice "to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds".
To Ahab, vengeance has not just the appeal of piercing the fatal wall of Plato's cave, but of purging the world of an idea of evil, as if will and fury could localize such a subtle and vast sweep into one body.

He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Where Ahab errs most, apart from misunderstanding that the symbolism of literary monsters doesn't work like that—that would be some fine magic if it did—, is that he even sets himself against "all truth with malice in it", refusing to accept the essential reality of evil and in part thereby partaking in evil with his sacrificial machinations.
In Ishmael's mind, Ahab heaped on the whale all of the rage and hate felt in human history—not just toward whales, thus not just against the morale of Jonah's fable, but all sense of injustice, man the measure and maker of moral means and meanings. Ahab's wrath toward the whale began as any other man's, festering in his anguish on the passage home, strapped in a straitjacket because of his lunatic outbursts, to turn him into who he is now:

then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad.

His bronze, hollow body is the result of optimal decoction to blur the mind-body—and also idea-object—gap, enabling the grandiosity of his plans, himself the cult leader to execute them, his agency turned to instrumentality as he locked himself into the cogwheel of the fate he set for himself, his version of freedom, here—if I am interpreted "living instrument" right—a form of servitude baser and weaker than that of heeding God's plan. And with the bindings of his charisma, those he entrains into his orbit are heretics who lose all of the merit of faith and gain what? Gain the glory, fleeting and perhaps phantasmic, of following a great man? Lose themselves in the constitution of the mythos pseudo-prophetic Ishmael weaves them and himself into?
Ishmael withholds a straight description of Ahab's role, declaring it "vain to popularize profundities, and all truth is profound." Ahab's "whole awful essence" resides deep underground, a captive king with a broken throne, mocked by the gods he equals himself to, a pillar holding up history and the upper earth with his frozen brow—frozen by the Cocytus, perhaps, the lamentational river commemorating the doom wrought by knowing betrayal. Ahab caught glimpse of his state:

all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.

—yet he lacked the power to alter truth, only to deceiving men about his sanity—or, as Peleg, happily overlooking his moodiness for the whales it would butcher.
This chapter is called "Moby Dick", but there is no Moby Dick without Ahab, nor Ahab, however superlative and unsaintly, without Moby Dick. And there would be no mad Ahab if any aboard the Pequod had seen through his ruses, nor if any of the mates were more than "morally enfeebled"—Starbuck with his "unaided virtue" (and lying about having no-one on his ship who doesn't fear whales, when literally the other three officers don't fear whales), Stubb's "indifference and recklessness" (from being a druggie with little respect for life or thought of death), and Flask's "pervading mediocrity" (from treating the whaling enterprise as a sadistic comedy show).
None of them were a match for Ahab's bewitching "evil magic" that struck in their impious chests the fear of God—but no god other than Ahab himself, whose forcible contagion of his vendetta may well have been telepathy. Ishmael doesn't even try to explain how this all fits together, nor does he show guilt or shame about having been taken in in like manner himself, only admitting that he gave himself "to the abandonment of the time and the place"—to a feud that Ahab's madness made timeless, spanning the history of mankind, against a monster coeval and co-evil with mankind, who could be at once many places on the globe.
One part of Ahab knows well what he's doing is futile and atrocious; another part thinks that he's tallying the debt of the original sin with the premium fetched by butchering the whale incarnating all sources and targets of human wrath, those perhaps being God's wrath—such an infinite task that the sacrifice of a handful of men seems a fair price, if not a pittance, for its accomplishment.

The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?

Ishmael is unequipped to analyze the unconscious, inward, homuncular workings of fate—but his instincts told him to learn about Ahab before boarding, and he didn't listen.
———
CHAPTER 42
Ishmael moves on to explaining what the white whale was to him, on top of being his primary motive for sailing. "It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me." Leaning fully into the mystical monster motif, Ishmael shudders to articulate the whale's horror in comprehensible terms, and starts by outlining the broadest contours of it with his symbolic associations to whiteness: beauty, royalty—Ahab's sultanism is conveniently unmentioned—, the white man's "ideal mastership over every dusky tribe", joy and gladness, innocence, "the benignity of age"—in stark contrast with Ahab's iron grey iron way—, honor, "the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge", "divine spotlessness and power", and even redemption—all of these, more or less relevant to the whale, pale in comparison to the terror that raw whiteness untamed by any of these contexts, thus marring them with its irony and dissonance, produces, such as from polar bears—"invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love"—or great-white sharks, their silent lethality earning them in French a name connoting (with no etymological basis) requiems, or angelic albatrosses, "whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread".
For Ishmael, the albatross, thanks to its vast range, is a reminder of "the miserable warping memories" of civilization, compounded by his witnessing of one being captured and forced to send a letter, a holy messenger demoted to a mailman. Most of Ishmael's associations with whiteness have been to things integral to modern civilization, their meaning and primacy challenged by the great animals that have borne white and its terrible significance since the dawn of Adam. He even calls the white steed an "apparition of that unfallen, western world"—whiteness becomes a reminder of the immaculate debt, not one blotch made in it by the whole monumental passion of humanity's lineage, accrued from the original sin.
The religious whiteness attests to this: that becoming like God means donning white clothes, which admits to being far from God, constituting such practices as pretensions. Whiteness is the unattainable moral purity that people think they strive for, yet ever fall short of, unable to find grace or glory from within and trying to recreate and master it with their trinkets, their incapacity to do so forced upon them in the encounter with a white apex predator. The white symbols of dominance take this further: under the guise of bringing moral purity, restricted to their faction under their flag, people's conquests abstract them ever-more from whiteness of soul, often while blaming their victims' blackness of skin for everyone's blackness of sin—spiritual death.
Ishmael even regards albino people as more abhorrent than disabled or black people, but segues back into the whiteness of death: white squalls that strike abruptly to wreck ships, the "marble pallor" of corpses, ghostly fog, death as the "king of terrors". White is uncanny, its portend of things being out-of-place a subtle resonance with what is unhomely in ourselves, what our bodies and souls can't home that we would like them to—enduring physical and moral vitality. Ahab aims to use his overwhelming physical vitality to remove moral vitality from the equation of human flourishing.
Ishmael invokes "hooded" and "phantom" several times each here, hearkening back to his reference in the first chapter to the white whale as a "grand hooded phantom, like a snow-hill in the air"—Ishmael makes little use of snow in his associations, but the eerie quiet and concealment it provides is implicated in each case.
The subtle and sublime terror of whiteness is complementary to that of a raging storm, and can manifest even to the uneducated in a mention of the White Suntide of the descent of the Holy Spirit to prognosticate the tidings of the end times, blurring the life-and-death boundary with karmic, salvific promises.
The phantasmic quality of whiteness may also point to all of this religious talk as being smoke and fog, empty distractions from the possibility that what follows death is nothing but eternal paralytic silence, no grand unity, no pearly gates at the end of a successful redemption arc—Ishmael's rambling is so unfocused that it comes across as him deliberately avoiding drawing connections like these, as though the powers of whiteness he's evoking are seeping into his own words to his own eyes. And that's a funny thing: he's writing on white paper, his creative act blemishing it with black ink—which is a lousy substitute for the black blood of the white whale—, but that interplay, the creativity and communication indissociable from the whiteness of paper, is not brought up.
Ishmael contents himself with claiming that certain white entities have significant effects on people, but not why unless the explanation is palatable—the ironic dissonance of the white predators can transfer over to these religious and other symbols, but their analogous implications would be far more calamitous to Ishmael's already-infirm faith, faith that has consistently been sublated by, and thus subordinated to, whaling—all of these symbolic resonances comprise a collage of the panoramic white whale, of its mere surface, already vast and haunting enough, and which Ishmael is suspiciously reluctant to try to penetrate despite having the intelligence and experience to.
This surficial contouring takes the shape of avoidance, which can only be achieved by his subterranean miner knowing the position of what lurks in the volcanic depths of his unconscious. Ishmael often relates whiteness to gripping or stimulating the imagination, such as an artist would appreciate, but he showed in chapter one that he understands the import of context in artistry—water unique in its motion being tranquil—, context lacking here through nondifferentiation, a polyphony whose sheer pluripotential is cacophonous.
In the disaster-stricken city of Lima, white's purity "keeps her ruins for ever new; admits not the cheerful greenness of complete decay"—there is the irony of Lima connoting lime-green, and perhaps of death's horse being chlorine-green. Where green signals change, the freshening of death-and-rebirth cycles, white is timeless, locks its pallid corpses in marble tombs to be forever silent.
White is also impotent by itself, but exacerbates the terrible effects of entities it manifests in; white is ungraspable, no less than any other color, because it can only be apprehended through a white thing with a white context given to it that excludes other possible resonances, doubly so for the unimaginative mind—would a sailor near shore feel trepid at white water because of its whiteness or because of the stoving rocks it may conceal? What about the "boundless churchyard" of Antarctic seas, a desolation in which it would be too easy to lose oneself? Ishmael defends himself from the hypothetical accusation of this chapter being "a white flag hung out from a craven soul" by citing instinctual knowledge "of the demonism of the world", which implies that anyone who doesn't share his fear is both unimaginative and ignorant—unknown unknowing, unlike his known unknowing.

Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

Whiteness is a harpooneer of the void, piercing the soul with "the thought of annihilation", "a dumb blankness, full of meaning", "a colorless, all-colour of atheism", the truth behind the meretricious veil of coloration—the "mystical cosmetic" of light is white, its mediums birthing color. White is the splendor of God and the pallor of His absence, the lack of an in-between, the profound, profane indistinction between the two, and the metaphysic impli(cat)ed thereby. Ishmael has well-earned his mic drop: "And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"
———
CHAPTERS 43&44
During a night-watch, a sailor circulates gossip about stowaways, with a hint that Ahab knows of them, and that the mates know he knows of them. This seems to refer back to the ghosts Ishmael and Elijah saw running to the Pequod very early—and since the ship was locked-up tight, if these were fleshy people, someone had to let them in, someone privy to the schedules of the final preparations. And someone else earlier pointed out how Ahab regularly slinks off for clandestine meetings, which would imply that Ahab boarded those hidden people, and convinced them one way or another to devote three years of their lives to him.
I assume these would be consultants or hunters, men to help with Ahab's quest and whom he can trust where he doesn't trust Starbuck or anyone else on the crew, who think him mad or lack ability. They could also be ghosts, especially after the recent monologue about spectral whiteness.
Ahab also spends a lot of his time with his chart, trying to map out the currents of the globe as precisely as he can, in relation to all the documented positions of sperm whales he could acquire. The lamp, suspended in chains overhead, is emblematic of his conscience—as we've been conditioned to associate lamplight with moral compasses—, shackled to light on his sole purpose.
Ahab knows of the migratory clockwork of sperm whales, the exactness of their instincts' directions—or "secret intelligence from the Deity"—far surpassing that of any navigational instrument, and tried to lay out the best spots to sail throughout the year for the best chances of crossing paths with a vein of sperm whales containing the white whale—Ahab the prospector of the pale mask concealing the gears of the gods of the world. Even with all the information at his disposal, this needle-in-a-haystack would seem hopeless to anyone with less than absolute faith in their resourcefulness and the worthiness of their cause.
Ahab's determination turns impossible odds into probabilities, "every probability the next thing to a certainty", a miracle in the making. While the sightings of Moby Dick gave no guarantee that it would reappear in those places the same time of year, an area called the Season-on-the-Line had seen the whale at regular times for several years straight: "there the waves were storied with his deeds; there also was that tragic spot where the monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance."
The Pequod missed the interval for the SotL this year, so she will have to spend the next almost-year "in a miscellaneous hunt" with non-zero but unflattering odds of a fateful encounter with the white whale along the way. Moby Dick is utterly singular, so the matter of recognizing it was no issue—even the harpooneers know well what it looks like.
Ahab routinely works himself into torments of faintness dwelling on the whale, and his time spent on the deck in open air is just a recovery period between being able to brood and chart and maybe consort with his ghost passengers. It was common for Ahab's nightmares to jolt him awake:

these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them

—incubating this inward hell is the source and secret of Ahab's monstrous power, but these outbursts stemmed from his soul, dissociated in sleep from the iron leash of his mind to flee from his purpose, which had gained "self-assumed, independent being of its own", that malign purpose incarnating both Prometheus and his vultures gnawing away his spirit's organs, leaving it "without an object to colour, and therefore a blankness in itself." Ahab is the very monster he's promised to destroy, bending not just fate but chance and spirit to his will, and so gripped by trauma that his freedom of will—or its exercise here—is dubious at best.
———
After chapter 42, The Whiteness of the Whale, it felt like everything had fallen into place, all of the physical and philosophical set-up accomplished. I was so moved by chapter 42 that I am only halfway joking when I want to label Moby Dick a horror story. Melville understands how literary monsters work on a profound level that, conceptually, no one I'm aware of even comes close to. All of Ishmael's loose threads collaging the immeasurable surface of the monster, and then how they were abruptly and marvelously tied together near the end with the nucleus of a legitimate metaphysic—I was floored. One thing that often elevates epics above other works is their usage of metaphysics rounding out their cosmology and permeating their entire world with the story's thematic values. (My sample size is admittedly small, but Dante and Milton do this as well.) In this case, whiteness is the indissoluble, all-or-nothing tension between God and no God, and the existential dread people hide from or expose themselves to with their positive and negative symbols of whiteness.
I had these commentaries written up a few days ago and read ahead, and I totally lost steam for coming up with new, enriching things to say. This will be my last post on Moby Dick for a while, I think. If I strain myself to squeeze meaning that just isn't flowing fairly organically to me, I'm worried that I'll not only stop enjoying the ride but also that my pacing will grind to a halt. And I've already spent just about a month reading this. It's certainly worth three months if this level of quality is consistent throughout, but forcing myself to commentate on it daily is just needless stress. And like I said, the end of chapter 42 felt like a tipping point.
That said, Ahab has shot up into my top-5 favorite characters. Everything he says is pure gold, and his borderline-supernatural powers are written in such a compelling and reasonable way that he edges out Milton's Satan, another top-5er for me, in some respects because of how grounded he is and how direct his influence and its consequences are. This is what people probably imagine cult leaders are like, and the fact that cult leaders do exist makes Ahab's abilities plausible even if I've never met anyone who came close to being able to do what he does. The fact that his purpose became a self-sufficient thoughtform in the same area as his mind and soul, and not just that but led his soul to try to break free from his body, is chilling—and his self-awareness craftily maneuvers so as to never lead him to a genuine epiphany, totally detached from the implications of the words I~~shmael puts in his mouth~~ he thinks he believes. Here is a man at war with himself, with his fellow men, with the world, with God, and with the possibility of the absence of God. His situation reminds me of one of the times (73-78) Satan almost comes off his warpath:

Me miserable! which way shall I flieInfinite wrauth, and infinite despaire?Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell;And in the lowest deep a lower deepStill threatning to devour me opens wide,To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.

He's staked his identity so deeply in his retribution against God and fate that if he gave that up he would have a very, very long road to redemption. Despite his capacity, he is hollow; from the start, he was prepared to abandon his family, sacrifice his crew, and do absolutely anything necessary to strike into the depths of the heart of the world. At the same time, his moral failures are why Ishmael is here writing this story. There's enough foreshadowing to conclude that the Pequod is going to sink because of Moby Dick and Ahab's brazen tyranny, which means that Ishmael survived to tell the story. Is there a reason for that, somewhere in the tangled white knot of various concepts of fate that have been threaded together and in which free will, foreknowledge, and chance have snaked their ways? A project as large as this novel implies that he found his will to live, if he's sitting down and committing to it; and it's not a project that would be feasible to work on at sea, with how hard sailors seem to be worked. Moreover, someone would need a compelling reason to undertake such a story. Whatever happened to Ishmael on the voyage must've been something profound.
The paradoxical, inexhaustible, and ambiguous nature of the whale itself hearkens all the way back to the image of the ungraspable phantom of life in which Narcissus drowned in the first chapter, the transient self-image that obsesses and beckons us, that compels us to understand while tantalizing us with how it is nothing but a reflection on a surface—no depth, not even the solidity of being a surface. If these depths are accessible, they are so in a form that frustrates any efforts to capture them in definitive, plain language. I mean, if Ishmael had a straightforward message for us he would've been an essayist or preacher and not a doorstopper novelist.
Taking us on this massive journey, charged with his embellishments and astute digressions, seems to be his way of leading us to glimpse the mystical, mythical experience that inspired his writing this. He attributed to Bulkington the transcendence participated in through a violent death at sea, through being consumed by the intolerable truth of that ungraspability, that abjuration of all solid ground, which, taken for truth, is treacherous, a lure that ensures doom while assuring lee—lee that can mean either shelter or dregs (the body being the lees of Ishmael's better being), and the lee shore turning the lee into something to avoid at all costs. Ishmael's obsession has often felt like him being bitter that he's wasted the rest of his life trying to glimpse that transcendence, and that level of obsession, particularly with its outright disregard for knowledge and reasoning he undoubtedly had access to, would only be sparked by a direct encounter with it, and marinated only by having the temperament and mindset to reflect on it—exactly what occurred to Ahab and twisted him into a human Satan. That also implies that a lot of the digressions are Ishmael trying to catch us up to his mindset to be able to receive his prophetic message in a meaningful form.
So yeah, I fully intend to finish this novel, but play-by-plays are off the table now for at least a while. I've also been feeling terrible, like, pretty much since late November, and the last week (basically right after I finished chapter 42) or so I've been spiraling, with very little mental energy and clarity to spare. I want to try to do a more comprehensive commentary of the moral, existential, and religious landscape once I have more energy and have made more progress. Well, we'll see how that goes. I appreciate this community for giving me a supportive space in which to share my thoughts, as long-winded and amateurish as they are.

jokes aside synonym video

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Joking aside - Idioms by The Free Dictionary

jokes aside synonym

jokes aside synonym - win

Homebrewed: An Introduction To Dungeon Synth