Xator Nova

  An autobiographical story of a transgender woman and her traumatic experiences with sex work.  Personal and intense in its prose, abstract in its presentation.  Defamiliarization and impersonation as representation of the coping mechanism. The game portrays the victim as not herself but other abstract being, a shapeless ghost, as a representation of the mind distancing itself from trauma. A  melancholic, surreal sea of consciousness brings life to fuzzy, drowned memories because it is so difficult to face trauma that repressing it is the instinctive reaction to get as distant as possible from those events. And a fitting pixel-art aesthetic - not just a stylistic choice born from lack of resources but the representation of the raw feelings of an innocent mind. One of the best games of the year so far.

In this post I compile many of my favorite LGBT media, stuff that has been impactful to me, so that others perhaps get to know works that may interest them. I've also probably forgotten a few works, I will update whenever I remember or get to know something new. This is also open to suggestions - I'm also trying to broaden my own horizons since it is new territory for me as well. Books: - Den lille havfrue ("The Little Mermaid", Hans Christian Andersen, 1837) - Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu, 1871) - The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1890) - Der Tod in Venedig ("Death in Venice", Thomas Mann, 1911) - No se lo digas a nadie ("Don't Tell Anyone", Jaime Bayly, 1994) - Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Gregory Maguire, 1995) Films: - Ang Tatay Kong Nanay ("My Father, My Mother", Lino Brocka, 1978) - In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden ("In a Year of 13 Moons", Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978) - Senjō no Merī ...

Here I did a podcast on the anime Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena, Kunihiko Ikuhara, 1997) alongside the American critic and writer Tevis Thompson, in commemoration of the show's 25th anniversary. There was another question asked after the podcast was made, this time by @BeetBeatBit from Twitter, which I felt worth responding as an addendum, since it also includes further thoughts on the director. Spoiler alert on the endings of Penguindrum , Yurikuma and Utena : Q: "What do you think of Mawaru   Penguindrum (Kunihiko Ikuhara, 2011)?" I like Penguindrum , but I feel that I felt it backwards as you did because so many episodes dedicated to the stalker girl in the first half are in fact my least favorite aspect of the show, or at least made me wonder why we spend so much time with this activity that I don't feel adds that much - even when it is revealed why she behaves the way she does, I remain unconvinced. We already understood that she is a messed up...

There is something strangely beautiful about the end of the world in art and the reaction that it draws from its characters, particularly the feelings that it gets from the people facing the inevitable demise, because it is then that you see them at their rawest. Robotron 2084 fits that category as an abstract portrayal of the collapse of civilization by the hands of machines, and to that purpose it sets the player as a survivor in the middle of the catastrophe, surrounded by robots chasing down the remnant humans. You can opt to save them, but the main challenge is to get past the waves of machines. The aim of the developers is that the player feels panic in an apocalyptic scenario, and to that purpose there are two sticks, one for movement and the other one to shoot in a direction, as the survivor's defense mechanism. The repercussion this has on the player is that there's a need to coordinate betwen two forms of reaction: To dodge and to shoot, and these two draw your atten...

In Adventure of Link , the protagonist (Link) is already an adult, and this has certain implications in the context of the genre, filled with heroic adventures of teenagers that leave their home to fight evil and grow up during the journey. With the protagonist already having grown up and the victory against the enemy having already been reached before the events of the game, what comes after?  Adventure of Link focuses itself in adulthood instead, and its subversion comes from being a "post-RPG", a story that would come after what would happen in other RPGs, similarly to (and in certain ways a successor of) Quest of the Avatar . What this game does to accentuate this effect is the perspective shift, where the field of vision moves away from the avatar in a top-down view, blurring itself with less details, whereas the emergent events move closer from a lateral angle. This navegation system allows encounters with visible enemies on the map, trespassing caverns or discovering ...

When we think about Pac-Man , one of its indelible images involves the eponymous character running away from some colorful ghosts and later him being the one that chases them after getting a Power Pellet in order to eliminate them. Because of this, Pac-Man is usually cited as the first game with power-ups. However, the ghosts have a shorter duration of vulnerability after each level, and once you reach the twenty-first screen, those Power Pellets have no impact on them, and instead ghosts are faster, which represents how little actually mattered to director Toru Iwatani to entrance the player with the satisfaction of overcoming enemies they were previously weak to. Pac-Man is a maze game where the player has to obtain all pellets and avoid ghosts that pursue the player to get to the next screen. Before its release, mazes in videogames were more closely associated with role-playing games such as Oubliette and Beneath Apple Manor , two great games of their generation that broadened th...

Fire Emblem is a dramatization of warfare and conflict, where the graveness of the conflict is amplified by the permanent death, forcing the player to deal with loss, and the movement in grid in long maps with emphasis on terrain to enhance the sense of scale. These elements inevitably polarize audiences by not conforming to modern console videogame design, but the result of inducing a mental commitment with the maps is an involving quality of Fire Emblem . What the Fire Emblem creator Shouzo Kaga then decides for the fourth game, even with the risk of polarizing players even further, is to expand the size of the maps and to construct them analogically to the world so that the progress through the continent is directly perceivable by the player in order to magnify the dramatic scale of the conflict. The anticipation to the battle alongside the sense of distance while the days in war pass by. This decision in its planning is part of what makes Genealogy of the Holy War a dedicated ap...