Author: Gabriel
When it’s you

When it’s you

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Professional Book Slammers

The point of interaction between created work and end user is a dynamic one. There’re a lot of reasons for making art and one of the most common is to create some kind of effect in the audience (there are exceptions but they’re not relevant here). So, this dynamic point is where someone or a group of someones’ intentions interact with another human. Dara Ó Briain has famously stated that this point of interaction is so pronounced in video games that they are the only medium to kick you out for not doing it right. A book doesn’t slam itself shut if you aren’t picking up on the themes. This is somewhat inaccurate, as the book will shut if you’re not getting it, it’s just the agent in this case is you. Videogames take what all other art does and makes it official.

In this, there is a lesson that there are rights and wrongs with art, and that sometimes the wrong party is you. Games make this clear and yet it is still such a difficult thing to get people to realize that sometimes the fault isn’t external. The blame for this process being harder than it should be lies with the types who lord their knowledge over others, or craft a thin personality from the illusory prestige that comes with swaddling oneself with socially constructed high art. But a third party making a point look bad isn’t the same thing as a point not existing. Sometimes it’s you. But to make this easier on you, the rest of this will be about how I’m the idiot.

We, Aaron and I, well, he, played Sekiro recently for some dumb YouTube channel and at the point when that video was recorded, I’d only played a little bit of the game. In this time, I had formed several thoughts about the nature of it, its pros and cons, and expressed a few of them over the course of the video. Being already aware of this as a problem already, I’d prefaced these with the disclaimer that my experience with the game was short, and my feelings did change over the course of the video (particularly in regards to the environment bounding). But by the time of this writing, I have played a lot of Sekiro and, over that time, learned just how much of the problem was mine.

It’s important to reflect on things like this because failing to runs you the risk of missing out on fun things as a consumer, saying dumb things as an internet talker, and/or not growing as a human. And god help you if you call yourself a fucking critic.

Cratin’ for Granted

Just because you are good at something doesn’t mean you’d be a good teacher of it. Much like how you don’t have to actively think about walking or getting a fork into your mouth, the things we practise a lot become automatic and we lose sight of them as they become parts of larger patterns. Remaining aware of these pieces is a key skill for educators. This is why watching my lady-friend, who only ever plays games like Factorio, play Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey has been a great refresher course.

There’s a point in Odyssey where your genetic VR avatar has to get a beam of light to point at something. Even if you’ve not played the game, this is probably already creating a picture in your head. Twisting and shoving a mirror about, that sort of thing. You’ve probably already solved it without even seeing it, and you’d be right. So I was concerned when my lady-friend was hopping all about the place and grumbling about how hard it was.

The kind of craftiness it would take to hide severe mental retardation from me would still require at least an average IQ, so I dismissed that as the problem. Then I sat there and watched. She jumped about, swung the camera over the obvious solution, didn’t see it, and jumped about some more. This repeated several times. Then I finally got it. The obvious “shove these things about” signals, like a bunch of rectangular and square boxes within a bounded shoving zone, were meaningless to her because she’d never seen them before. Show an illiterate tribe some words and it won’t even occur to them that they are a thing to be decoded let alone begin decoding them.

But this isn’t about her. This is about how long it took for me to figure it out.

Stand. Lion. Two Reeds. Stool. Twisted Flax. Folded Cloth.

The mistaken idea that hieroglyphs are ideograms, pictures representing ideas, is something that’s still fairly common today. It’s not an unfair thing to think, as few writing systems use characters that are so recognisable as representations of objects in the world, but they’re actually letters that represent sounds similar to modern alphabets (they can also be the things they represent as determinatives when combined with spelled words but that’s not relevant here). A researcher from the 5th century CE, Horapollo, is mostly responsible for this. He believed the writing system to be ideogrammatic and his treatise on it shaped its understanding until the Rosetta stone allowed proper translation in the early 1800s.

Prior to that, every attempt at understanding them began at an incorrect initial assumption which was only going to produce incorrect understandings.

I am very familiar with the languages videogames use to express themselves, but this does not mean I am immune to misunderstandings. Horapollo wasn’t malicious or even necessarily bad at what he was doing. He made a basically understandable mistake and that shaped his subsequent work. Illiteracy is not the only means of misreading, and this was my problem going into Sekiro. I was familiar with languages, even ones very close to the one I was currently reading, and this is typically something beneficial. Unless you’ve made an incorrect initial assumption.

Praise it.

The language of From Software games is distinct enough that, while perhaps not the originators of it, they are certainly now the most prominent speakers of it. It is something so profoundly identifiable and describable that one can almost know exactly what to expect when buying one, a fact reflected in their odd but dedicated fan base. It’s a language I love, but it was exactly that familiarity that brought me to fault in my understanding of Sekiro.

I am a Beef Unit. A cube of mass atop slow but sensible legs that can’t move out of the way of attacks but has since learned to absorb an awful lot of them. I tend toward this approach in my games as well, but this has been particularly prominent in my Dark Souls builds. I swaddle myself in thick armour, grab something large or long (the halberd was a favourite in DS1), and then wallop whatever is in front of me while showing little regard for nonsense like parrying or moving.

I beat all three of the Dark Souls series this way, without summoning, so while I’m not one of those lunatics who do a throwables only run using a disagreeable rat as a controller, I don’t consider myself bad at the series.

So in I dive to Sekiro. Like Horapollo, I am presented with things that very closely resemble things I am already familiar with, so I approach the game with tools I already have. Because Sekiro is so familiar in so many ways, I’m not actually listening to what it’s telling me, and what it is telling me is pretty bloody obvious when I went back over it.

Firstly, there’s no stamina bar. This should stand out. The absence of a whole meter should be fairly obvious, but I was still playing the game like I was a strong but otherwise out of shape goon in a metal shell. You don’t get to be too aggressive for too long when you’re gassed after 3 swings. Gabe, there is no fucking stamina bar in Sekiro. You don’t have to retreat to catch your breath, doing this just lets your enemies regain their balance, you are to press hard and parry when needed. The game is built around this aggression, you are not rewarded for the kind of fighting I’d used in Dark Souls and yet it took me ages to figure this out. By the time I did, I realised that formerly daunting bosses like Fatty Drunkospew were actually fairly simple.

Secondly, the parrying. This game doesn’t have dozens of possible forms of weapon and it doesn’t even have a shield, so the parrying is exactly one reaction point that is based around the point of impact. Couple this with the 60fps frame rate and, with a little practise, I was getting to understand the ways this, combined with the aggression, made for some excellent swordplay. One could poke and whittle an enemy’s life down but it was far more fun, though riskier, to learn parry patterns and push for the shinobi kill.

None of this was hidden behind a Byzantine series of NPC conversations. I didn’t have to look this up on a wiki. All of this was presented in plain English at the start of the game, but I was too front loaded with preconceptions to recognise it. I have seen many pictures of ducks, so when I saw another one, I failed to see any other possibility. And that is the important element here, the I. I failed to see something, the game didn’t fail to communicate it.

“I don’t know” is the first step toward wisdom

No games slam shut. You die, that’s it. The game is still there. It doesn’t uninstall itself and send your family your internet history on the way out. You just lose and don’t want to go back. Like the book, you are the agent of its ending, even if it is more explicit in telling you that you aren’t getting it. Sometimes you won’t want to go back because the game is a genuine piece of shit and there will be more of those than good games you mistakenly abandon.

But like with the hieroglyphs, this is teaching you an ultimately bad lesson. It turns you into a blind spot, the impossible option that makes every issue the fault of the art. To say every game is an unappreciated gem is obviously incorrect. To say you have never been wrong about one is as obvious. This goes for largely any work. I’ve returned to things I’d dismissed and immediately felt like an idiot for doing it. You gain nothing by defining yourself by terrible art you don’t engage in, so aggressively manning that wall will just cut you off from good things. I tend to be a little gentler in my approach today and that’s an approach I’d recommend as, after all, the problem could always be you.

By Gabriel

Content for the discontent

Content for the discontent

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Alert your eyes and fire up those second-hand contraceptive sponges you call language centres because the following words are beyond your type’s usual communicative tools of wails and empty bean can throwing.

Well, it appears medical science can turn my father into a wriggling finger-pede and nourish a vast celebrity head as a pet but there are still some things beyond it. While this thankfully means we’re still in science-fiction country and haven’t yet veered into fantasy, the anti-vax of genres, it also means there are some sad things to report:

  1. There is no medical solution to that hacking mound of serpent pus, Janice.

And

  • They can’t fix Aaron’s spine.

Both of these vex me terribly. Janice’s awful lobster pupils radiate the kind of barely sapient pleading that makes you want to smash it out of its misery, and Aaron’s spine has the internal cohesion of an Eastern European state home to more than one ethnicity. I’ve tried everything, even attempting to shrink Janice down and install her as Aaron’s new vertebrae but the foul harridan’s base animal cunning was somehow triggered by the anatomically approximate spine dress I made her wear that day. Took me ages to knit, too.

I maintain Aaron should get heavily into opiates and take up jazz trombone, if you can’t beat ‘em; join ‘em, that sort of thing, but that’s also because I hold out hope he’ll shoot Janice in the face in an Oprah junk induced stupor. Ah, opiates for the middle class, brilliant idea, but I can’t listen to the sounds of them shoplifting a Wal-Mart so its trickle-down fun isn’t nearly as good as Heroin Classic.

At any rate, he’s wandering about, waiting for part of his brain to pity-fuck him some serotonin so there’s not much else going on. I could be doing things, but I won’t as that would give you an unhealthy level of expectation and you sightless cave mutants don’t even read the things I post anyway. I could probably get the Universal Translator to accurately configure my wordplay into something you’d grasp but I’d have to pay the fee for Universal Translator Pro™ for something that would wind up sounding like an anus vomiting.

But I know you dismal incels and she-incels are spoiled for choice when it comes to vaguely functional father figures to cling to like the hopeless remora you are, so I’ll throw you this thing I made and forgot about. You can print it and stick it to things, or just look at it if (when) that proves too complicated for you.

Dust is just jizz sultanas.

Gabriel.

Love in the Time of Solanum

Love in the Time of Solanum

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A sandwich made with some kind of new, proprietary deli meat is always going to be seen in the shadow of the meat, with the experience of it as a whole obscured by the specific elements that compose it. ZombiU is in a similar situation, as part of the release crop of WiiU games it shoulders the burdens of being a “proof of concept” for a console with a lot to prove and standing as a game on its own. In the maelstrom of release mania, this is no small task.

Were I to draw something and hang it up with no other thought than self-expression the honesty of that act carries through. Were I to loudly proclaim that I was making art, draw something, label it “ART” then demand it be accepted as such the resulting picture, even if it were identical to the first, would be far more divisive. In this respect I think there is great value in returning to things once the hubbub has died down and ZombiU, with its unique approach to death, is worth taking a look at with post-hubbubian eyes.

Death of a player character in a game has never been an easy sell. When the structure of one’s interaction with a work is built on the idea that death is a failure, making death a part of the character’s story arc presents a number of inherent difficulties. Make it one of a number of possible endings and it will just be seen as a failure, the typical “bad ending”, meaning players will view it as a negative result of their improper play and invalidate it as an in canon element of the plot. In Resident Evil for instance, it is possible to let Jill/Chris and Rebecca get killed at various points in the game but this is not seen as the “actual” story by either players or Capcom wholly negating any emotional relevance it may have had.

The other alternative is to limit player control or remove it entirely with the endings of Red Dead Redemption and Mafia being respective examples of both. One puts you in a circumstance that it is a programmed impossibility to fight your way out of and the other is just a cutscene. The first time I encountered the former was at the end of the freeware Doom demo when you are teleported to a dark space filled with things that kill you. As a child I was certain that there was some way to avoid it and, much like the more recent generation’s attempts to revive Aeris, I pissed way too much time trying. To my young mind there simply had to be a way out because that was how games work, if you are dying you are doing something wrong and this trained mentality in gamers is what negates the programmed fail point as a viable character end. Ultimately, both are about taking control from the player and this never feels right. Like a character getting an off screen death in a viewed medium like film or TV, control removal is something that is so antithetical to gaming that it’s never really been pulled off. 

ZombiU works around this by changing a traditional aspect of gameplay/story interaction. Your in-game avatar is not the protagonist but the agency of the protagonist and dividing the vessels for player ego projection allows for an interesting and effective approach to the problem of in-game death. The story is not one of someone surviving, it is a story of someone trying to help other people survive and the result is that you are always playing as a supporting character. This is not a choice without risk, by doing this the creators relinquish a significant degree of control over the players emotional engagement with the game. After all, any circumstance where enjoyment of something is predicated on the player’s “correct” interaction with it is one where a player can have a perfectly valid negative experience. The flip-side is that when it does work it tends to be more fun than the ‘cheap pop’ of being the protagonist. Like the saga of Me, Firstarino and Supercoon.

I’m a raging egomaniac so no matter how much of my ego goes where in a division each side gets a lot. I genuinely didn’t want Firstarino (the clever name I’d given my first guy) to die because, even though it would have had negligible impact on game progress, I had projected enough to care about him. By the two hour mark, having killed and raided other player characters who’d not survived as well as myself, Firstarino and I had bonded so even though he was essentially just “a life” in a game with infinite of said, I didn’t want him to go. But go he did, in a suitably epic showdown involving a mounted gun that I stupidly didn’t reload. I lost a life, just a life and my first one at that but I felt bad about it, cursing my own stupidity and turning the game off to think about something else for a while. Upon returning I was introduced to my new life, a big, black security guard. Awesome, Supercoon.

Permit me to explain.

 The Supercoon phenomenon was something some friends and I noticed while watching loads of shitty 80’s and 90’s action films (and you’ll see it in a lot of games too). Most of them have some vast African American killbeast whose badassedness was what we could only assume was a misguided attempt at a positive portrayal. That negative/damaging stereotyping can involve superficially positive traits, “all Asians are good at math” for instance, didn’t occur to these filmmakers as they lauded a man, descended from slaves bred for physical utility, for his physical strength. This irony led us to dub the characters Supercoon, in a deliberate parody of any attempt at racial sensitivity that, due to a fairly basic misunderstanding, backfires wildly.

So in he and I stride to take on the zombie hordes with our mighty strength and righteousness honed through years of oppre—shit he’s dead already. Seriously, he lasted 20 fucking minutes and most of that was backtracking to get to where I had previously died. Now this death stung and serves as an example of what I mean about user controlled engagement. This was frustrating through nothing else than my own personal history. This character had no special background or relevance as far as the game was concerned and hadn’t done anything or been around long enough to otherwise care about. Despite this, his death had a significant effect on me. Supercoon was about to fuck shit up (in the good way), fucked shit up (the bad way) and got eaten. Later characters had similarly short lives but they didn’t matter as much because of what I had projected into the game.

Ultimately, as this is completely non-quantifiable element, it is hard to review its efficacy objectively but as it has the potential to give me such experiences I always appreciate the attempt. That and I never give anything approaching a shit when Mario falls down a hole, or I need to re-load a character after dying. By splitting the narrative and gameplay focus and by giving the ultimately meaningless agents a small degree of personality your in-game lives become more than just a number beside an “x”. This makes death relevant beyond a simple GAME OVER, while still maintaining direct player control. It’s something that I’ve not experienced (at least that I can draw to mind now) and it adds a unique element that makes it worthy of a look.

By Gabe
Bart’s Dog Gets an F

Bart’s Dog Gets an F

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 My Recollection

Dog vision. Lisa mump cheeks. PULL THE BLOODY CHAIN, BOY!

I’ve always been more of a cat person. They are largely independent, I can efficiently rub an entire one with a single hand, and they are technically a fluid. A dog is a brick of clumsy catastrophe that carries a level of responsibility that borders on child. If you don’t know where your dog is, that’s a problem. I don’t know where my cat is right now and there’s a chance she’s in the room with me. But in the feral suburbs, you needed some kind of dog or there’d just be people in your yard sometimes. The dog we got was a good dog because she was neutered. In nearly every other example I had, “being a dog person” translated to “enjoying spending time with a hairy rapist” because nobody could afford neutering when the price of speed just went up.

The first dog rape I saw was a kind of basic Weinstein, not rape-rape but only because the implied threat made further force unnecessary. A neighbour of ours had a giant trampoline, one that could dangerously fit eight to twelve 8-12-year olds, so we all congregated there after school. They had a horse in a dog mask they called Rat. This dog was big enough to hide Greeks in and anime characters tried to ride it. Woofs came from so deep within this colossus that most of the party were dead by the time it reached the mouth, so the only sound it ever made was the kind of flaccid murmur a sleepy dad makes sitting down. This was still the most personality it exhibited as it otherwise spent its time in as much motion as Hanna-Barbera background art.

Except this one time.

The 8-12 eight to twelve-year olds sitting on the trampoline weren’t scared of Rat exactly but we all still maintained a basic human wariness of anything that could swallow us whole, so tensions rose when Rat wandered up to the side of the trampoline. “It’s fine”, said the 8-year-old brother who lived there. It may well have been “fine” but we all still bailed when rat jumped up onto the trampoline, leaving only the brother professing the fineness of things.

There’s something fundamentally wrong about a dog on a trampoline. It’s like seeing a really old person in a bouncy castle. Technically it’s all soft and springy but the subject is so wooden and confused by the situation that you can’t help but expect tragedy. We didn’t get tragedy, exactly. Rat awkwardly walked over to where it was “fine” and half slumped his rear against the 8 year old brother.

Here’s the thing about a dog dick: It looks like someone circumcised a regular dick all the way to and around the balls. There’s a moment of confusion for a bunch of kids when what looks like a condom full of berry smoothie flops over the shoulder of a child. Is it hurt? Are those intestines? How has the Fine Brother not noticed this yet?

Once the puzzle pieces fall into place, that a dog dick just looks like a 5-year-old drew it and Clive Barker coloured it in, giggles started to spread. There’s a dog dick on someone’s shoulder and for a cluster of creatures driven by social instinct to exclude and mock people for any little thing, being caressed by a raw dog boner is like winning the little cunt lottery. You are gay now. Like, gay gay. You are touching a dick. It doesn’t matter if it’s a dog dick, that just makes you dog-gay which is even better. Ha, gay.

There’s an image burned in my head I wish I could have printed out and it’s the Fine Brother looking to his left and having his nose be about a centimetre away from the ruptured beetroot of turgid dog wang. I don’t know what dog dicks smell like and I’m proud of that. The Fine Brother knows and that’s something he will have to take to his grave. Now his pieces are clicking into place. He is touching a dog penis in front of the peer group who have figured this out before him and are mocking him accordingly. Had it just brushed against him, there wouldn’t have been that big a deal made, but it took him so long to realize and there’s just no comeback for being seen luxuriating under a veiny dog cock.

He instinctively turned his head before he screamed as anything else would have invited penis into mouth. This was good, as if you accidentally suck a dog dick in the outer suburbs then you may as well change your name and move. Nobody will ever let you live that down. But as he reacts and starts to move, so does Rat. As much as the Fine Brother wants this to be over, Rat does not want this to be over and he outweighs the shrieking, dog-gay 8-year-old by a bit.

So Rat just sits his hips down on the Fine Brother and smooshes his inside out dick looking dick onto the screaming child’s face. The jeering chorus of feral chimps hears his cries muffled by gay dog penis and goes mental. The Fine Brother kicks about but is in kind of a bind. Struggling to escape from Beneath the Planet of the Dog Penis means moving back and forth a bit to worm his way out. This means rubbing back and forth on the dog penis which means you are wanking a dog with your face. Being molested by a giant dog is one kind of gay but gaying the gay dog back is, like, turbo-gay. You may as well come out that you are gay for dog dicks because we all know you are. So the Fine Brother kicks and thrashes but mostly ineffectively. This goes on for what was probably only a few seconds but, like dog years, dog penis to face years are 7-10 times the length so it felt like forever.

Amidst all this, Rat looks out onto the world like a stroke victim looks out a window. I don’t know what a dog orgasm face looks like but I still assume it’s a face. I’ve seen dogs make faces at things that are tasty or fun, so they must have a face for when they rub their bloated gummi-worm hog on an 8-year-old boy’s smooth face. It’s possible Rat was making a face but it was buried beneath the beast’s immobile crust.

Either way, it’s impassive Moai stare as it didn’t even enjoy face-raping a squirming, screaming 8-year-old is an image that pops into my head whenever someone says they’re a dog person.

The Episode.

Settings are one of the core structural elements of a show and will dictate later plot and character possibilities. A family show means there are characters of different ages and these will occupy both shared and individual locations. Start in the home and the episode can be focused on anyone. Start at the Plant and the scene’s about Homer. Start at the school and it’s about Bart or Lisa (and others later on). Bart and Lisa can’t just be at the Plant any more than Homer can be at the school, so making this happen requires work by the narrative.

This work will both take up space and require some level of logic, which means Homer being at the school can’t just be there untethered, if he’s there he’s being summoned and if he’s being summoned there’s a reason. All of this creates expectations in the audience and takes up time, meaning it will subsequently be part of a large plot element. See Bart’s school trip to the Plant or any episode where Homer and Marge have a school meeting about Bart. As these logical steps and plot elements pile up, you run out of space for your actual story.

A lot of shows get around this problem with tight focus, either character or setting, with these foci tending to be split along the lines of drama for the former and everything else for the latter. Shows like Cheers that are set in a single location have the benefit of the built-in understandings that a known social setting, like a bar, create. Without having to spend any narrative time or energy there’s a premade cast of mains for focal stories, and goofy side-characters ready for whatever comic relief or surprising depth you feel like rolling out. As the settings of shows like this and The Office can focus without excluding, characters can grow without disrupting the show’s core reality.

Archer started with a well utilised audience knowledge of spy tropes to give themselves freedom with settings and events, allowing for quite absurd plots and events to exist comfortably within an otherwise fairly real world. But as the side characters grew into more important parts of an ensemble, the show got kind of stuck. Doing focal episodes means ignoring characters that may have grown into fan favourites. Archer did this for a while but soon fell into the trap of coming up with contrived reasons for all the characters to be in the same setting, even if no real-world logic, or even the show’s looser approximation, supports them all being there. They eventually committed the worst of all sins, making awful jokes about how contrived their own writing is which is insulting to the viewer and actively destructive to the show’s story world.

The Simpsons exists in a floppier version of reality, one more distinctly cartoony than even Archer, so it never needed to hold itself to higher standards. That it did was one of its defining characteristics and part of what made the show’s peak period so good. Because the final way that one can have a bunch of separate plots and characters work together is the hardest and it’s the one Bart’s Dog gets an F chooses. Coming up with a good narrative reason to have all these different characters and spaces meaningfully connect in a logical fashion is hard because there’s just fewer that exist within reality. It even goes one notch cleverer and chooses to focus on the dog.

Had the show focused on Bart, which it easily could have, the show would have been a character focal one that would have had to make choices about what to ignore as Bart’s perspective, behaviour, and feelings require narrative real estate. By focusing on Santa’s Little Helper, the narrative gets the benefit of a perspective that exists primarily through the experiences of the surrounding humans.

The result is an episode that perfectly executes the complex braiding I’ve spoken about, and through that we get several characters at once.

Homer has the lightest elements, but this just reflects his already well-established character. Homer is a sad man, unhappy and only just smart enough to be tortured by that. He desperately grabs at little things to make him happy because he’s too scared to hope for more, so the base marketing of things like sneakers and cookies is beyond his capacity to resist. Happy people own impressive sneakers. Big cookies are a lot of a good thing. It’s typically treated as a moral failing ripe for mockery, and his breaking apart at the loss of a $5 cookie is a good example of that, but when small things can break a person, that person was already close to the edge.

Lisa’s story exists as a kind of adjunct to her mother’s surprisingly stronger one. Her intelligence alienates her from both parents, Homer is a dumb oaf and Marge is a spineless sponge, so her shared episodes with them typically focus on her learning about some deeper level of connection. Though otherwise close to her mother, Lisa sees her and her hobbies as quaintly dumb at best. The quilt, and her mother’s impressive skills relating to it, are that deeper connection. A fact emphasised by Lisa starting a new one at the episode’s close.

Bart has more a functional role in the plot as the primary advocate for his dog and, along with Lisa, the necessary counterpoint to Homer and Marge over the dog’s fate. Bart is a bit like Homer in that his position as source of conflict and wacky events leaves him with a lot of negative personality traits. Occasionally we get a look into the kinds of childhood anxieties and fears that cause these, ones that would be present in a child of a high-stress household, but he’s mostly an unthinking, selfish piece of shit. As such, he’s given only a few basic redeeming core traits. In this case: loyalty.

Loyalty is the participation trophy of positive core characteristics. Thugs, gangsters, and various otherwise irredeemable pieces of shit will, even consciously, cling to loyalty as though it redeems the rest of their miserable personality. Many modern dramas, like The Sopranos will have and take the time to give their pieces of shit more depth, but the loyalty card remains a popular trope. Bart gets it because giving him anything else would force some kind of internal conflict or change.

But it’s Marge who really stands out in this episode, even if it’s mostly because the bar she’s trying to clear is so low. As the straight character, she’s burdened with being the nagging voice of dissent to every shenanigan her husband or children get into and what character moments aren’t that are usually naff mum hobbies we make fun of. Most of her character episodes are simply inversions of that, her snapping and the family having to deal with it. But the quilt offers her something new.

When threading the needle, Marge’s skill in sewing is treated with respect, and her burning her callus makes it cool. Later Marge moments, like the loom, are mocked because it’s a defunct skill. The loom is merely a surpassed technology. The quilt is the expression of 6 generations of Marge’s family. An expression that is manifest only through the actual craft. The quilt can never be surpassed by industrial growth as it is its handmade quality that is the point.

The value of this as an addition to her character depth is demonstrated by her rare shift to the technically villainous anti-dog side. Reflecting from her position as the voice of reason, hers is usually the side the narrative takes, and the audience is expected to. This positions her again as a structural component of the narrative and not a character. But Marge loved that quilt, and even though the story is about a dog and even though loyalty is a positive quality she has enough character to hate the dog for destroying it.

Near naturally the story ends on a fairly trite trope, Santa’s Little Helper just miraculously begins to understand Bart. One shouldn’t lean on this too heavily but it’s an otherwise fine narrative device. A bit like hyperdrive, there’s going to be some level of magical bullshit because without that you’re not a writer but the genius who invented hyperdrive. But this is a minor point, the episode itself is peak Simpsons.

Yours in resisting the beef wellington, Gabriel.

Jokes, lines, and stray thoughts.

Santa’s Little Helper’s (gah, possessives) behaviour is inconsistent with how he is in most of the series, but it’s a dog so I’ll let it slide.

Hibbert seen here in full Cosby. The joke where he asks Marge how she got his home number is a goodun. Similar to jokes where one bleeps an otherwise innocent word, comedy by omission taps into that unconscious aspect where an undefined something will create a stronger emotional response than a known quantity. Horror uses the same technique to scare.

Bart getting stuck in a logic loop is another fun little one because it’s so real.

I’m assuming Nev-R-Break also make the tubes on the Springfield Monorail.

Homer on the phone to Mrs Winfield is a good example of how to use build to make a joke work where the audience already knows the punchline. It’s a great performance by Castellaneta. His little exhalation of rage and his slow walk toward where we know the dog isn’t, punctuating each step with yet another nail in his own coffin, shifts the absurdity from the dog not being there to Homer making it worse for himself. These little shifts within a joke or joke construct are great ways to breathe new life into old gags or to nest more jokes within each other.

Ned walks away in this scene so terribly it’s something I noticed even as a child. It feels a bit like how some cartoons will design characters only to realise that the animation style makes certain shots wildly unworkable.

The mouth interior shot with Hibbert is a goodun. One of those little things where the animators remember they don’t have the barriers of live action.

Teen… STEAM? There’s a dumb teenybopper aspect of Lisa that’s always kind of there but clashes a bit with the rest of her nerd/outcast characteristic. It’s not to say the two can’t blend in certain ways, but Lisa’s aren’t the nerd teenybopper crap. Though this is largely because the early 90s didn’t really have the kinds of cultural fusions common to today.

Babysitter bandit cameo is a nice one as it speaks to the greater lore of the show. The channel flipping also gives us a rare look at a non-Hartman Troy McClure with a great line about white eyeballs. Nicely ridiculous but edging on the believable.

There’s another element of classic Simpsons here and that’s a solid guest character. Tracy Ullman is in quality form as Winthrop. Simpsons guest characters tend to alternate between comic, like Winthrop, and dramatic ones, like Mr Bergstrom. Each exists within the general trope functions of their respective narrative dimensions. The wacky characters can pop in and out fairly easily, whereas the dramatic tend to need the support of more narrative time to work. Winthrop is a maniacal presence, a demented Thatcher-like authoritarian, but her absurdity works because she requires no more framing than “dog trainer” which subsequent years of reality programming have proven to be, if anything, an understated performance.

Characters like Winthrop, who border on antagonist, typically get some kind of comeuppance or challenge to their worldview. She doesn’t, she just respects that Santa’s Little Helper passed his tests. It’s a bit of nuance that few bother with.

Homer dancing at the kids when Marge agrees with him is classic.

“People think only mules can pull carts” is a great gag as it suggests a stranger reality behind the line.

PULL THE BLOODY CHAIN, BOY

The frisbee bouncing off of the dog’s vacant eyes is a great visual gag.