Something is currently wrong with me, with the way I’m living my life right now. To figure out what, I’ve decided to go over the following: this sample I wrote over a year ago while applying for The Michigan Daily’s Arts section on comedian Bo Burnham’s “Inside” — a sample I remember spending a full day locked in my apartment working on through multiple drafts and angles. Rather than editing the content itself (except to align with The Daily’s style), I’ve decided to annotate it instead. These sections will serve to update and contextualize my previous writing. Just as “Inside” was a time capsule of life during the pandemic, this piece is my personal time capsule of almost a year of post-pandemic life — perhaps a simpler time, maybe a better time, a time I was living my life correctly. Let’s unbury it together.

Almost a Year Later, Bo Burnham Reminds Me to Go Outside 

I first watched “Inside” at the age of 19, the same age Bo Burnham (“Eighth Grade”) debuted his standup comedy after years of being a YouTuber. It was released after over a year of the pandemic. My immunocompromised status left me in a heightened state of physical isolation from my friends and emotional isolation from my family. Watching “Inside” after being fully vaccinated and reuniting with my friends felt like a flashback. It made me feel as if I was regressing to the hollow shell of myself quarantine turned me into. 

Fun fact: The first sentence is factually wrong. Burnham started performing at age 17 but was 19 when he released his first special, “Words, Words, Words.” Anyway, that’s quite the note to start on, no? This paragraph actually started the last section of this sample’s first draft. I figured all of the analysis would happen, then I’d dedicate the last section to my personal angle. That conclusion ended up being nearly as long as the analysis itself, so it had to be cut up somehow. I opted for spreading it out through the argument, to switch between the two modes as a creative form and as a tribute to the dualism of “Inside.” It kind of slaps you in the face with my disability and my mental low points right out the gate, and then immediately pivots to a completely different subject — not unlike the special. I don’t know if I’d start an article that way now. Before we get intimate with my issues, we need some foreplay, right?

Satirizing issues surrounding mental illness is difficult because satire requires elevating a concept to irrational heights while mental illness seems to normalize that irrationality. Burnham’s “Inside” thusly (sic) presents its theme in layers of satire surrounding a myriad of other topics including but not limited to the coronavirus pandemic/quarantine, the current capitalist-exploited sociopolitical climate and social media’s corrosion of society and self. However, a common criticism of the work is that when you pile so many layers of meta, irony and self-reference, it reduces the base message to nothing of value. This is something that “Inside” does acknowledge. It’s very easy to feel like you’re drowning in the layers of irony that you’re drenched in, to the point that everyday existence feels like your last seconds of trying to just get a breath of fresh air. Burnham dives into these waters, and like a deep-sea documentographer (sic), goes as deep as he can to see if there’s something worth it on the other side. 

The thesis of this article came from two TikToks I watched that were originally mentioned in the first draft. The first was a man who watched cooking videos and got criminally offended if any ingredient was even the slightest bit unhealthy, and the second was someone else stating that aforementioned “common criticism” — that this self-layering negates any genuine meaning. While I just wanted to challenge the latter, the former was more interesting to me since comments would claim the man was satirizing eating disorder culture — but the reality is that behavior could still trigger symptoms of eating disorders. Irrational elevation still mimics and can even trigger irrational behavior. So take that irrationality and layer it with other irrationalities until you find … something? Something true, something real, something that is left after all the bullshit of the world is blown away? I think when I began with that thesis, I just wanted to talk about something different than all the other discussions surrounding “Inside.” I wanted what I said to matter. I want anything I say to matter. Maybe I’m unsure if it does anymore, if my actions do.

Listening to the special’s soundtrack when I was forced back home after cracking a bone in my leg last semester flashed me back again. I couldn’t bring myself to rewatch it until snow barred me and my classes inside. For the sake of writing this piece, I let it play in the background while cooking lunch for myself in my apartment. I have three roommates here, but we’re all so busy with ourselves, it feels like I live alone — my girlfriend or a friend coming over occasionally giving me brief respites from isolation. 

Those people are gone. I have more people in my life now, though it’s usually me going out for respites from isolation instead of others coming to me — the consequences of a North Campus apartment (I’m moving to Central Campus soon). Part of me wants to explain more of the details of that living situation, but most of me knows it doesn’t contribute what I once thought it would. Yes, I’m getting personal, and yes, that helps to make it distinct — it connects this piece to me. But does that actually improve this article? I’m no longer sure. If I didn’t discuss this, would you be more or less engaged? And that issue raises its head again — I think externally these conditions have improved, but then what’s still wrong with me?

An important distinction has to be made in unpacking “Inside.” The fact is, Burnham is incredibly vulnerable in this work but is also incredibly dishonest. Burnham is starring as and compartmentalizing into his character Bo. Evidence for this is littered throughout the special, but a scene where Bo is waiting for midnight is the titular example. He waits for the day to pass into his 30th birthday, presumably when the clock changes from 11:59 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. However, in the beginning of the shot, you can see daylight filtering through the window. Bo’s breakdown: His delusions, his suicidal thoughts, even his scraggly hair are a character that Burnham manufactures and presents. Burnham’s experience informs Bo but does not indict Burnham in Bo’s insanity. Bo stares into the abyss of his filming camera, and it stares back. Burnham stared into the abyss within himself and became willed to fill it.

I only noticed this scene’s details from a TikTok analyzing it. I’m particularly proud of the last three sentences, especially considering, again, it wasn’t just describing something I saw on TikTok. What’s special to me about Burnham’s choice is that his choice to hint at his dishonesty makes the piece more honest. Every entertainer lies to you — their very nature is performance, made even more ridiculous by the privilege they experience while pretending to relate to their audience. What separates Burnham’s performance from an hour-long version of those celebrities singing “Imagine” is that Burnham constantly reminds us it’s a performance. But more than that, Burnham’s methods became an object of my personal fascination: How could you reveal everything about yourself — these irrational behaviors, these bits of trauma, these honestly-worrying admissions — while being ultimately invulnerable under the facade of vulnerability? How could I do that? More importantly — how could I make it matter? Does pain matter simply because it’s pain? Or is the world so filled with it you have to dress it up in whatever way you can? 

At one point, I just made a rule for myself: The only personal topics written for publication would be what I had processed in therapy. The fact is I’m physically disabled and mentally ill and I want to be a better person than I’ve been because one day I won’t be able to. All of those lengthy articles linked could be boiled down to these simple facts about me. Every time I publish something, it becomes a little time capsule all of its own, of the different person who wrote it. Maybe what’s wrong is the hole I’ve dug for myself here. I’ve always wanted to be a writer who could be vulnerable, but maybe all I can think of doing now is peeling off layers of myself to publish until I’m naked to the world. Peeling off layers until I’m skin and bone, until I’m just nerves and electricity, until I am nothing left.

I watch Bo as I chop vegetables to bake and boil pasta. I pause the player to audibly laugh at visual gags I didn’t see before. I shrug when he asks if he’s on in the background. I lightly dance to the beat of Bo singing about how he feels like shit, revelling (sic) in the use of my still-healing ankle as I stir the baked veggies and penne together. I finish cooking and bring my laptop back to my monitor with food, still watching as I have my meal. I finish eating as the special reaches its emotional climax. While the irony of needing to overstimulate with “Inside” is not lost on me, I focus as the final song reprises the entire special. I look down at the circular mirror that sits below my monitor and my layers are blown away. As Bo ends the special with a twisted smile, I remember the picture I saw of him watching Phoebe Bridgers perform a cover of his song. With every layer peeled away, I am nothing, nothing but the people I love. Every single one of us are nothing but those we love. Isn’t that such a wonderful paradox?

That’s why isolation makes us feel like nothing. Burnham genuinely smiling at a crowd enjoying his song reminds him and us that isolation eventually ends. The irrationality that isolation can plunge us into is exposed for what it is, and Burnham becomes a rich white man pretending to cry in a $3.25 million dollar guest house. The tension rewatching Bo releases as I take a breath of fresh air. My beard and bedhead hair are reflected in the mirror and in Bo, and realize I need a trim. I’ll get one tomorrow, when I go back outside.

I didn’t actually get that trim for months — I need one now, to be honest. But that moment of true vulnerability, where it finally feels like Burnham drops the facade, is more important to me. There’s the look of plain disgust when he concludes in his first special that “art is dead.” In his following special, he chooses a finale literally orchestrated by his naysayers and just dances to the art made of it in “We Think We Know You.” In his last special before “Inside,” he can do nothing but scream at the audience, reminding them that he “Can’t Handle This” because he had started to experience panic attacks during onstage performances. Then there’s that very last frame of Burnham smiling in “Inside” to grinning (perhaps) more genuinely at Bridgers’s performance. Maybe this is what we need — we need to believe the only real thing underneath all the layers of life and art is the joy to participate in it. 

“Inside” no longer brings that feeling of regression within me. It encapsulates all of this metamodern melancholy the way my article reflects my own post-pandemic anxiety, but now I just smile at the joy of being able to create and live. It’s a joy I’m feeling right now, one that I’ve been so blessed with for so long. So I should stop lying, too: There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m actually doing fine — great, actually, in large part thanks to the people that form me. If I’m being honest, drawing back on my painful experiences to write has just become kind of stale for me, so I find myself needing to make it a little more interesting. 

When something dramatically alters your life, something that changes how you live it day-to-day and invites questions about it from others, it just becomes pragmatic to have writing on it to already answer those questions. That’s how this all started. But if I’m nothing except the other people in my life, wouldn’t it be natural to give that all back until I’m nothing again, until the people in my life restore me again so we can all keep giving back to each other? What has become more important to me in art is not what one reveals about themselves, but how they reveal themselves: One indicates experience, the other artistry. But if just one person feels seen or helped by what I’ve written, then it was more than worth it to reveal myself — what I did was enough to matter. But that’s enough out of me. I’ve been stuck inside too long writing this. I’ll meet you all back outside. Oh, and Bo — thank you, you weird man. 

Summer Managing Arts Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

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Whenever my family and I return from an extended leave from our house, the smell of hardwood always fills our nostrils. My sister and I turn up our noses at it, and I promise myself to use the time I have left to replace it. Over that time, I work tirelessly, taking care of my family’s chores, of course, but also to fill up the house again: lining a pressure cooker with ghee, dropping cinnamon bark and cloves and coriander seeds, chopping onions to sauté, peeling and grating never-ending cloves of garlic and ginger, throwing in staple spices — like jeera, haldi and lal mirch — measured by nose alone, then pureeing some tomatoes to roast with salt and pepper and whatever protein I’m actually cooking. In no time, the smell of the hardwood goes away and a new scent settles over the house — or for me, a lack of scent. 

A different smell washes over me during my family’s weekly trips to the Indian grocery store, the accumulation of countless Desi foodstuffs being packed as densely as the shop owner could in his portion of the strip mall. That scent is familiar to me, synonymous with begging for mango juice and sitting on bags of rice bags when I wasn’t boxing them. In my childhood naivete, that Indian store was the only one that existed. Of course, this would be dispelled by visits to multiple stores in the Detroit area — these collections of Indian groceries were far more massive than anything I’d ever witnessed. The aroma was the same, however — from the quaint store of my hometown to the Patel Brothers in Detroit, all the way to Ann Arbor’s own Om Market — a smell that knocked me back to my rice bag seats.

Every time my family has traveled somewhere, we’ve always stopped at an Indian restaurant. My sister and I have teased this habit of seeking our own cuisine in new locations, but I’ve come to understand it more now. When you’re in a place foreign to you — whether it’s been a couple years or nearly three decades — it helps to find familiar food. It helps to take in the sight of foods eaten in my house’s thalis recontextualized in restaurantware, to flood your tastebuds with the flavors your parents made, to tear roti and dosa with your own hands and eat until every sense is full. Of course, you can smell it first before you see, taste or touch it, mouth watering before the restaurant is even entered. That sense comprises one-fifth of my reality but contributes even more.

Some aromas elevate me above my reality. In any house I’ve lived in, we’ve always had a room with a cupboard. Idols, pictures of gods and passed loved ones, flower wreaths, religious texts and, of course, incense sticks are all arranged together. The cupboard shrine was built before a temple was built in our area, but we still use it, lighting that incense every Sunday so that the room they live in is dedicated to the divine aroma of our gods. Every Sunday, that incense elevated me to somewhere beyond this room with a cupboard we’ve packed religious memorabilia in. Since I’ve moved out, I haven’t been able to take in that earthly perfumed fragrance as often. Any time it’s lit now, I ascend again.

One night I was biking through my hometown, closer to the downtown area, and in a flash, some odors struck me in combination, like vague burning smells and the exhaust of traffic but they weren’t odorous to me though — the urban scents of my parents’ motherland. Across all the time and space from my last visit, I could almost fill in the vendors and cuisine and temples stuffing the city my parents grew up in. Pausing for a second, I closed my eyes and ears to take as much of it in as I could, as slightly damaging to my lungs it might be. These scents all blend together for me: a city whose smell I can still remember, the packed scents of Desi grocers’ wares, cooked until fragrant in an American restaurant’s kitchen, some served as prasad from the cupboard under the smoke of incense, all wafting through my house as an aroma I can’t ascertain because I grew up in it. They’re all wrapped in the scent of my family’s hugs. They smell like home.

MiC Columnist Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

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To quote essayist Ro Ramdin: “Fuck John Mulaney.” Yeah, that’s a bit of a tone-setter, but this is the stage we have to set before we give Mulaney (“Documentary Now!”) the spotlight. To be clear, I refer not to the parasocially fueled drama of his personal life, but more specifically to his very public decisions, like his choice to feature comedian and “old man yelling at the trans community” Dave Chappelle (“What’s in a Name?”). It’s why I hope this article will not serve just as another platform for Mulaney but as a necessary addition to the conversation because now that the stage is set, audience laughter is what rings in his latest special, “Baby J.” As the lights slowly fill Boston’s Symphony Hall, Mulaney opens by acknowledging his past years of tumult, stating: “The past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself.” He then very appropriately adds, “And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”

Of course, the largest source of upheaval for Mulaney’s life and the main subject of this special is his experience with drug addiction. The first seven minutes give no indication of this, however, as he follows up his introduction with a tangent on attention-getting in elementary school and the deaths of grandparents. Comedy is tragedy plus time, but even before Mulaney broaches the comedic potential of his personal tragedies, he presents himself above his problematic peers — not repeating tired transphobic tirades or taking shots at the women in his life, but still just being funny as he deconstructs the mechanics of who gets to sit in the beanbag chair during reading time. After a short self-aware a cappella song, Mulaney apologizes for the aside and begins the meat of his special with a simple, “Here’s what happened.” It then cuts to an extended intro credits sequence and makes you wonder if Mulaney’s comedic confessions will be skipped — as well as be shocked that David Byrne (“The Last Emperor”) is scoring it.

It’s at that point that the intentionality of the special’s editing is evident. In addition, its multi-camera setup has some placements for extremely specific shots. The camera moves closer or farther from Mulaney depending on if his physical self-caricaturization needs to be captured. The comedian’s back is shown as he addresses the audience directly and their role in his comedy. One very low shot in particular that captures a ceiling spotlight forming a halo behind Mulaney’s head as he states, “They think I’m dirt. I’m not. I’m God.”

Mulaney’s self-exposure is at points very obviously uncomfortable, but he still acquires comedy from this uneasiness, earning repeated laughs from his tales of addiction. That particular line above is Mulaney recalling his coke-fueled train of thought while committing h(igh)jinks, but it’s definitely not the last of his memorable writing from the special. What stands out the most is when he drops the stand-up act to be sincere — acknowledging that even through his absurd actions at his “star-studded intervention,” his friends saved his life, or the very sobering (pun unintended, I promise) realization that “When I’m alone, I’m with the person who tried to kill me.” Of course, this is a comedy special, so things can’t stay serious for long as Mulaney exclaims, “What, are you gonna cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him! I almost did.”

What really is funny is that as unhinged — almost Kanyesque — as these statements sound in writing, Mulaney’s delivery is transformative, his oft-discussed “boyish charm” now tinted with a certain edge. He elevates his writing to some of the best punchlines he’s ever struck, all while doing very important work in destigmatizing addiction and condemning his self-destructive actions. What’s complicated, however, is that Mulaney’s public, “cancellable” acts — like the one referred to at the start of this review — aren’t things that harm only him, something he could escape from by sardonic threat of suicide or by the claim that they’re just jokes. He and the rest of the stand-up community wrapped up in their commentary on cancel culture miss or just don’t care about the material reality of the marginalized groups they can harm; the same way my own puns just now do nothing for addicts and the mentally ill, their material forms the national culture on how we perceive vulnerable people. 

This drapes the special in another layer of discomfort, one that can’t be escaped through comedy alone. Even as the set is called “a wide-ranging conversation,” it doesn’t address his responsibility to at the very least make sure his audience feels safe seeing and supporting him. One of the special’s last statements and the punchline that defines its teaser was his self-cognizant conclusion for that cocaine story mentioned earlier: “As you process and digest how obnoxious, wasteful and unlikable that story is, just remember, that’s one I’m willing to tell you.” I still want to be told more. And maybe that’s what he wants.

Summer Managing Arts Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

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What is art? What is an essay? How are the creation and the criticism categorized? When does analysis become an art form in itself? If you evaluate even this article right now, do I then become the creative instead of a critic, and you become the analyzer rather than the audience? 

The Leftist Cooks, power couple Neil Farrell and Sarah Oeffler, attempt to answer these questions: through interviews with fellow video essayists, through the words of artistic exemplars like Orson Welles, Simone de Beauvoir and Oscar Wilde and through talking about the Muppet Gonzo singing about home. These disparate elements are organized into segments such that each addition feels fresh, but its entropy then comes to be expected — almost comfortable. This form is their first attempt to stay true to the work’s title, breaking down the video essay first in structure, then in intent. They come to the crux of the conflict between creation and criticism: how to categorize what we create. 

Humans’ attempts to make the nonsense of the world make sense traps us in this issue. Does art arise from the work’s invention or interpretation? Would you say both? Can something really exist in both the giver and the receiver? These contradictions are created by our categorization, so we must be the ones to resolve them. The cons of categorization reach far beyond this artistic issue, however. Farrell stretches it into the stars, where they sing on Pluto being prohibited from the planets. The interviewees and interviewers extend it into themselves, where many of their current essayist positions arise from bodily and mental conditions that decategorize them from traditional work. Oeffler carries this categorization to the furthest possible end, discussing the creation of artificial barriers in all-too-real conflicts: race, gender, sexuality, class, disability. But of course, these essayists suffering from the crimes of categorization still encapsulate them all within art. Art still encompasses all of this.

So where do we push to and break these boundaries? How could categorization come to collapse? What could be at the basis of all that we do, all that we achieve, all that we are?

Well, maybe there’s love. There’s the connection that people make to its fullest extent, and then what isn’t love. No, there are still lines drawn there. There’s home, the spaces that love creates, the places where people feel loved — then there are the spaces they aren’t. There’s still a line there. What about existence? There is life, living, surviving, then there is not. There is death. 

There is death. 

Everything that art is and isn’t, everything that we can understand and cannot, everything that the world is and everything that it cannot contain — the weight of their discussion then breaks this video. As we enter Act 3, Farrell is in a forest and Oeffler is on a couch. The video switches between Oeffler’s partner and Farrell’s wife in the most indescribably vulnerable and beautiful monologues I have ever had uttered to me through a screen. I cannot describe it. I refuse to describe it, whether by my own analytical incompetence, artistic ineptitude or simply because you need to hear it for yourself. Maybe instead, I can tell you what it made me think of.

I thought of hearing about my friends’ almost and actual car accidents. I thought of seeing the grays slowly creep across my parents’ scalps. I thought of the taste of blood in my mouth, staring at the red that was spat into the sink as my heart began to pound. 

What is art? What is an essay?

Is art an attempt at immortality? Do essays aim to enhance that attempt? Or is art just how we are — to create something simply because it didn’t exist yet? Are essays what expand how that art exists? Will art be what saves us? If art kills us, then will it let us live on? Maybe asking these questions isn’t the way to answer them. Maybe it’s holding your friends in your arms when you get to see them. Maybe it’s running your hands through your parents’ hair while you still can. Maybe it’s taking a swig of water to rinse your mouth and swallow your meds. Maybe it’s living a life worthy of art, made worthy by art. Maybe it’s looking the Reaper straight in his hollow eye sockets and ripping his robe to ribbons, fashioning the threads into a brush and using the inky black void as a palette. That can be art. This essay could be art. Whatever the case, know that “This is Not a Video Essay” is art, the kind that makes you feel like your life before viewing it was a different one. The Leftist Cooks have created something I will go back to someday, over and over — a work whose only flaw is that I didn’t watch it sooner. Please don’t repeat my mistake. Take part in the great art of our lives while you still can.

Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

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During their presentation at E3 in 2005, Nintendo unveiled gameplay for a Kirby GameCube mainline game. However, the GameCube would only receive the spin-off “Kirby Air Ride,” and this trailer and its concepts would become the only evidence of a home console main series Kirby title for over a decade. I watched this footage religiously as a child, not even knowing what the GameCube was (my allegiance to Nintendo home consoles began with the Wii). I loved Kirby — I still do — ever since I played my favorite game of all time, “Kirby Super Star Ultra.” I’d glue myself to airings and YouTube clips of “Kirby: Right Back at Ya!” I would even draw my own custom Kirbys and show them to all of my elementary school classmates. Above all, I’ve always loved sharing my friend Kirby with the rest of my friends.

In 2011, one of my other favorite games of all time dropped, carrying over concepts from that lost GameCube footage and incorporating four-player gameplay into the main series for the first time: HAL Labs’ “Kirby’s Return to Dreamland.” This past summer — after researching for my review of the 3D “Kirby and the Forgotten Land” — I went back to the Wii U in my family’s basement to replay a lot of the game. It still held up and looked great despite being relegated to the 480p resolution of Wii games. Maybe that’s part of why I was initially disappointed at the announcement of the game’s Switch remake, “Kirby’s Return to Dreamland: Deluxe.” “Forgotten Land” was such an innovative step forward into the third dimension, so why put efforts toward remaking a 2D game that was barely a decade old? This feels like a common trend for the industry now, as console improvement has begun to approach an asymptote of processing and graphical capabilities. Remaking games and moving the industry into the future would then take innovation, doing something entirely new rather than improving on what’s been done. So what does “Deluxe” do that’s new?

Well, it’s not supposed to do anything new for the first several hours of the game. It certainly looks and sounds like new, and then it faithfully translates the mechanics of the original. Those low-res supreme soundscapes and rendered environments are now in full HD, with thick lines outlining each character to distinguish them from the rest of the colorful world. There are a couple new visual flourishes I immediately noticed, like enemies flying and cracking the “screen” of the game like in the Super Smash Bros. franchise. On top of that, a couple new abilities like Sand and Mech have been added, being two of the most mechanically rich powers we’ve seen so far. Despite bringing in the same levels as before, HAL gives the player a couple brand-new ways to traverse them. On top of that, its minigame collection is the most expansive in Kirby history, even if several of them are repeats — though it’s nice to see them in HD too. All of them are collected in a tributing theme park called Magoland, named for the new player character of this remake, Magolor. Oh, yeah, that’s the newest part of this remake.

Let’s do a ‘lil lore recap. The premise of this game is that Kirby and his friends are helping out an interdimensional traveler named Magolor who crash-landed on their planet. You collect the broken parts of his ship and travel with him, but in the end, the traveler is cast out between dimensions. Magolor lore aside, “Deluxe” brings the epilogue of this character’s story with a fascinating twist on typical Kirby mechanics. Kirby’s arsenal has always been built to be able to avoid any obstacle if needed through hovering and able to barrel through any enemy for cathartic satisfaction, all in an effort to keep the games accessible for all ages. In the game’s new epilogue, Magolor is brought to square one — he is as weak as possible and barely able to keep himself in the air. As you navigate remixed and darkly reskinned game levels, your attacks need multiple hits to beat even the cannon fodder, forcing a smarter playstyle until you’re able to upgrade Magolor’s abilities. As time passes, you’re able to start from your character being much weaker than the game’s other protagonists to being a much more powerful version, giving a sense of well-needed growth reminiscent of the Ability Evolution system from “Forgotten Land.” 

This addition alone justifies the remaking of this game for me. HAL Labs returned to “Dreamland” again because they could take the series’ 2D gameplay even further, just like my favorite game “Super Star Ultra” did for “Kirby Super Star.” As I played through levels I had beaten just months before on the Wii U, it began to feel repetitive until I started to see how intricately this beautiful game was put together at its inception, how much work went into polishing it for the remake. I saw the series’ core beat-em-up puzzle gameplay loop varied on but never fundamentally changed throughout its history. I saw Kirby as both Camus’ Sisyphus and the pink boulder being pushed, content to revel in the evolving-yet-unvarying absurd nature of its premise. Above all, however, I saw what being on the Switch could do for this game. My sister and I blasted through several of the first levels, first downloading it to play in our AirBnB on Spring Break. I took it home and then on a bus to East Lansing to play some of the final levels with my friends. We even set up the Switch at the Arts desk to play after production. Like I said: Above all, I’ve always loved sharing my friend Kirby with the rest of my friends. 

Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

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The career of Fall Out Boy is a long and storied one, but it is popularly agreed to have fallen off after their last album MANIA. Excessive experimentation and pop elements soured their emo/punk/rock following, and the band largely went silent for four years, lost to the annals of emo history. So when the first track on So Much (for) Stardust —  “Love From The Other Side” — follows London Metropolitan Orchestra’s minute-long piano-to-orchestra-symphonic-rock intro with frontman Patrick Stump’s characteristically soulful lament, “We were a hammer to the state of David / We were a painting you could never frame and / You were the sunshine of my lifetime” The band seems keenly aware of their place in that history. They don’t dwell, however. As the constant drumbeat and guitar plucking drive the song forward, the band builds and layers into the title chorus and their mission statement: “Sending my love from the other side of the apocalypse!”  

Whether the apocalypse they refer to is MANIA’s fallout or our more recent brushes with the end-times, love is what persists. Everything cuts out except for those now-isolated piano notes. As in the intro, the orchestra begins to swell in as Stump sings about this painful yet fulfilling relationship with a lover or with music: “I saw you in a bright clear field, hurricane heat in my head / The kind of pain you feel to get good in the end, good in the end.” The drums come back in, starting as cymbal taps crash into a drumroll as Stump repeats, then rejects, a mantra of the music industry: “Inscribed like stone and faded by the rain: ‘Give up what you love / Give up what you love before it does you in.’” 

Stardust tells an apocalyptic love story as both the band’s traditional emo tales of heartbreak but also to honor and advance their own career. Returning to their Folie à Deux producer Neal Avron, it only takes the instrumental intros — varying from five to 30 seconds — of each song to determine the depth of the album’s variation, like the aforementioned orchestral introduction to the album, deep synths starting off “Heartbreak Feels so Good,” more ambient traditionally-emo instrumentation established in “Fake Out,” Joe Trohman’s grungier guitar riff ringing in “Flu Game” and the funky preface of “What a Time To Be Alive.” Some of these intros also pair tracks together: Andy Hurley’s percussive presentations of “Heaven, Iowa” and “The Kintsugi Kid (Ten Years),” Pete Wentz’s basslines with Hurley’s drum bangs bringing in “Hold Me Like a Grudge” and “So Good Right Now,” strings sending off “I Am My Own Muse” and the finale track “So Much (For) Stardust.” There’s also two spoken-word tracks, one sampling Ethan Hawke (“Training Day”) and the other performed by Wentz — Folie à Deux being the last time he performed such a track.

However, this artistic evolution and the almost-autoerotic esteeming clash with each other. It’s evident that Stump’s singing, Wentz’s lyrics and the band’s performance are being pushed as hard as they can, but the end product still leaves something to be desired. There are occasional bright spots that shine in Stardust, but “Love From the Other Side” is a high point that warrants the most analysis because the rest of the tracks rehash similar themes draped in the band’s usual theatrical poetry. They’re somehow too varied to feel cohesive yet too repetitive to feel dynamic. Fall Out Boy understands this contradiction, however, stemming from the album’s own title. So Much (for) Stardust is a simultaneous declaration and dismissal of wonder, or as Wentz terms it, “their dialectical record.” Stardust and star power — these things birth and elevate us, but star power will one day run out and to stardust we will return, whether it’s existence, amour or emo. 

I wanted to love this album. I spent the past months relistening to every album and EP the band has ever released, discovering new tracks and reliving secondary school nostalgia. But sometimes, love alone can’t elevate the artistic value of an album — rose-tinted lenses are nice until you want to see the world back in full color. Still, through the band’s lamentations on love and loss framed through the apocalypse and their temporary emo end, it’s clear that they maintain their fondness for the fans. After “So Much (For) Stardust” reprises lyrics from “Love From the Other Side,” the album ends with the cry: “So we thought we had it all, thought we had it all.” This return isn’t perfect, but it might be a good revival for better things to come, though I still prefer “Grenade Jumper” for the band’s appreciative anthem. We know this is belated, but hey Fall Out Boy — we love you back.

Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

The post Fall Out Boy shoots for the stars but falls a bit short on ‘So Much (for) Stardust’ appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

There’s a boxing match a-brewin’. Now, this is no hand-picked Apollo Creed versus The Italian Stallion, but it seems to be the new imminent climax to a conflict between male online influencers. KSI vs Logan Paul, KSI’s brother Deji vs FouseyTube, Logan Paul challenging boxing legend Floyd Mayweather — these influencer boxing incidents have become an industry, as millions upon millions of online followers fill sold-out seats. The roads to each of these matches are paved with ultra-masculine intentions, deafening with the sounds of diss tracks, chest-beating and emasculating insults. In the past few months, a new beef was born between veteran YouTube commentator Cr1TiKal and Andrew Tate ally Sneako.

Before you click away, let me affirm: This isn’t some drama recap. This boxing prelude is our case study for the masculine conventions at play in the YouTube manosphere. As the Arts section’s resident black belt, I want to frame our points with the pugilistic pageantry they deserve — ringside asides for our explorations, of course. 

HELLO BOXING FAAAAANS! Welcome to the ring! We’ve got a helluva show for you tonight, folks, so let’s do introductions. In one corner, weighing in at a speculated 165 lbs and standing at 5’6” stacked in a self-described “anime character” physique, “Big Moist” Charles White! In our other corner, his challenger weighing in at his own speculated 169 lbs and standing at 6’2” but still unable to beat the stick-arm allegations, “Sneako” Nico Kenn De Ballinthazy! Will this be a fight or a farce? You’ll just have to stick around and see!

This is a brawl of bodies, so let’s discuss physicality first. When you hear those measurements, you are right to assume these men don’t stand as paragons of pugilism. Neither did the Paul brothers or KSI before training for months under professional coaches. Thus, the first engagement with masculinity rears its head. 

Think of the ideal male body — or at least what meme culture posits as ideal. If you compare your vision to someone else’s, those ideals would undoubtedly clash. Masculinity is both malleable and self-multiplicative. Different countries have different beauty standards; masculine ideals shift when viewed through the female gaze. They change depending on whether they are non-heteronormative or trapped in some ouroboros of masculinity viewed through the lens of male desirability.

But what if we evaluate the ideal male body based on function? One look at the varying body shapes of the world’s top athletes — both male and female — immediately dispels a single ideal. Even in boxing, there is a wide physical diversity across weight classes and fighting styles. White’s constant sardonic self-aggrandization of his non-masculine-ideal-conforming height aside, he still closes the gap between his opponent’s “Abercrombie & Fitch from 1998” physique, then simultaneously insults and praises Ballinthazy’s efforts to improve his own body in the same sentence. Of course, Ballinthazy fired the first shot in this entire scuffle.

The challenger shouts something about monogamy and his favorite “clickbait” films and throws the first strike — an upset punch straight to the ribs! Though it seemingly lands, Moist keeps his gloves up and is barely moved. Sneako throws another blow. He throws another. And another. And another! And Moist is just not moving, not retaliating at all and seems unbothered by all these shots. His gloves aren’t even up! He’s just staring. I almost feel sorry for Sneako at this point. We can see the challenger’s getting frustrated, he’s squatting low and — OH! HEÆS GONE FOR THE LOWEST BLOW POSSIBLE! Moist grits his teeth, squats and — OH MY LORD, AN UPPERCUT KNOCKS SNEAKO ON THE GROUND! Moist raises his fist in the air — folks, he’s making sure the cameras see the Moist merch logo on his gloves. Ever the opportunist.

So what started the Cr1tiKal versus Sneako beef? I promised you this wasn’t a recap, but a bit of context is necessary: When White mocked members of the FreshandFit podcast for telling obviously false fables of their sexual escapades, Ballinthazy felt he had to defend his hetero-masculine homies’ honor. On his stream, he threw every personal insult he could at White, culminating in an attack on White’s partner and their relationship. White responded with a short video explaining that he found Ballinthazy’s opinion irrelevant because Ballinthazy enjoyed the highly problematic film “Cuties” and, despite Ballinthazy’s discomfort with his own partner cuckolding him, recommended that every couple try the practice. White’s point is a bit more nuanced — he takes issue not with the emasculating fetish itself or with Ballinthazy’s partner, but with Ballinthazy’s recommendation despite his own discomfort. In White’s eyes, Ballinthazy’s relationship impacted his ethos to evaluate anyone’s relationship. White used the drama for an opportunistic plug of his merch: He wore a limited-offer robe in the video, possibly indicating pugilistic potential.

What’s weird is how women are whisked into this conflict, as they were in the KSI versus Logan Paul press conference, where misogynistic chants filled the stadium at the mention of Paul’s partner. “Alpha males” overcompensated for their experiences with women. It escalated when Ballinthazy delivered a low blow to the woman in White’s life and seemingly ends with a similar dismissal targeted toward Ballinthazy’s subpar sex life. Masculinity’s rocky relationship with femininity is displayed here, playing into a tenet of toxic masculinity: anger at emasculation and femininity. What happens when this escalates further?

The challenger is getting up! On his feet, he seems to be shouting challenges to the jeering crowd. Moist shouts out “You forgot a few!” He looks bored, lounging on the ropes while Sneako staggers his way over. The taller man taunts with his glove, but Moist isn’t budging. Sneako begins to attempt a barrage, but Moist nonchalantly ducks and weaves every one. This aggression is quite uneven, folks, and I’m sitting here wondering where it all comes from. Sneako looks more and more frustrated, but oh? What’s he doing now? He seems to be baring his teeth at Moist, making the loudest chomping noises he can with his mouthguard in. Sneako seems to be threatening to take a page out of Mike Tyson’s playbook, and Moist looks just the slightest bit disturbed. Let me tell you, folks, I am even more perturbed. Jaw agape with screams, Sneako puts all his weight into a quick left hook to expose Moist’s head — and there’s another dodge! But folks, Sneako’s left himself wide open by not retreating his hand and Moist takes full advantage, jabbing with a left upset to the stomach and one helluva right hook! The old one-two has knocked Sneako out, besting him in the ring and in technique! This has barely gone on for a round! I want to swallow my microphone, folks! What kind of pathetic presentation of pugilism is this!? And of course, Moist raises his glove again, showcasing it for the cameras!

After White’s initial video, Ballinthazy spent months fuming and taking petty jabs at White over Twitter and on his Rumble livestreams. On March 12, Ballinthazy tweeted a collage consisting of online figures who had “canceled” him, including White. White tweeted back on the same day: “Holy shit you pathetic, sensitive, soy, little worm. I made fun of you for watching your girlfriend get fucked by numerous other men and also insulted you for defending child porn. That’s not cancellation, that’s just spitting on you for being a pitiful, sad cuck.”

I’ve quoted the full tweet to analyze it as a text. The term “soy,” especially paired with “sensitive,” in this context refers to soy’s pseudoscientific link to effeminization, a term used by both Ballinthazy and White, because it contains a plant analog to estrogen. Note that White also doubles down on calling Ballinthazy a “cuck.” Recall that White doesn’t have an intrinsic issue with cuckoldry but Ballinthazy’s particular engagement with it — but he still uses it as an insult. Even while White deconstructs aspects of masculinity, he cannot resist the urge to engage with its more problematic parts. Why? Maybe because tweets can’t exceed 280 characters. Maybe because White feels the need to stoop to Ballinthazy’s level. Maybe it’s just punchier.

Now is when the true altercations begin (yeah, now). Ballinthazy challenges White to a fight over multiple Twitter responses. White, wearing the same branded bathrobe as before, finally releases another video on the matter. He addresses the challenge but, more importantly, a clip of Ballinthazy dancing around with a handgun on stream threatening to appear at White’s house. In the clip, Ballinthazy responds to White’s refusal to have him on stream for screaming slurs — White instead told Ballinthazy to watch his clips — by shouting, “WATCH THESE CLIPS” and brandishing the gun and its ammo. White apologizes for having to be pedantic, then displays a larger handgun and corrects Ballinthazy’s terminology: “What you have there is not (sic) clips. These are mags.” He then pulls out an assault rifle and gives the same demonstration. 

White uses a self-admitted petty opportunity for correction in a masculine display of firearm superiority, as well as a common-sense display of his own defenses, all in the first two minutes of the video. White’s 15-minute video allows himself time for a more nuanced dismissal than a Twitter roast, but also time to take full advantage of his opponent: He criticizes Ballinthazy for being unable to write his own banter and using his fanbase as a tool for venting. He notes that Ballinthazy has ducked on previous challenges and surmises he’s only challenging White because of their height difference.

These new points lie outside pigeonholed masculine conflicts and criticize Ballinthazy’s character as an entertainer and person. White tops it off with his response to Ballinthazy’s challenge: “Even if you beat my ass in a fight, it doesn’t change the truth … When you are getting your feelings hurt and your immediate response isn’t to fire back with insults, jokes, whatever — it’s to challenge someone to a fight — you’ve taken a huge L … the only thing you can resort to is your caveman brain saying, ‘I’ll beat you in a fight.’ … I’m averse to going into a boxing match, especially one that’s just a clout-driven spectacle like this.”

Yeah, sorry. They’re never actually going to box. I’ve been lying to you. 

I’ve been lying to you the same way influencer boxers fake beef and give it an insane degree of hypermasculine hype to pad their pockets. I’ve been lying to you the way Ballinthazy repeatedly challenges influencers to fight online to maintain relevance but never follows through. I’ve been lying to you the way influencer boxers manipulate, market and ultimately undermine masculinity for their own gains. 

Creating narratives around these matches isn’t an inherent ill — the WWE is famous for its scripted yet stunning storylines — but all of these men are seen as role models to large swathes of boys, and they deserve to be deglamorized. White stands above this as he still participates in the internet’s lower masculine squabbles but still deconstructs these issues, even finally having a lengthy call with Ballinthazy to defuse the situation and discuss their differences.

Now that you know that all of this is fake … isn’t this all goofy as hell? Why have you been reading about influencer boxing in the Arts section instead of Sports? Is there ever an appropriate way to insult someone with “cuck?” What’s the proper response when petty clashes of masculinity escalate into death threats? And most importantly: Through everything we’ve discussed, what becomes the value of a man in the mire of modern-day masculinity?

I started writing this because I found these masculine conventions interesting and thought it would be cool to write boxing scenarios after watching “Rocky” last month. While analyzing the world of influencer boxing, I found it as upsetting as it is interesting. It also made me nostalgic. I’ve been a black belt in taekwondo since I was a teenager. Medical issues forced me to quit but, as my boxing gloves gather dust, I find myself missing getting kicked in the face, having the wind knocked out of me or being slammed into a dojang mat. Boxing, like taekwondo, is an art — a martial art — a performance that I miss engaging in with my classmates. Martial arts are expressions of the human body, as artistically valid as any other work in existence — when they’re afforded the reverence they deserve: like YouTube boxing’s respectful spin-off and charity event Creator Clash.

And you know what? I’ve boxed punching bags until my knuckles bled and painted the nails of those very hands for the same exact reason: Because I fucking wanted to. Masculinity can be besmirched, anatomized or dismissed entirely — but it’s an inescapable engendering force. We are defined by how we individually interact with it. So, to everyone that has to — including Ballinthazy, any influencer boxer and even White — please strongly consider what kind of man you are. Maybe when we’re all better, we could meet again in the ring.

Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

The post CR1TIKAL VERSUS SNEAKO: The fascinating masculine conventions of YouTube beef boxing matches appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

I visited the house I grew up in over Spring Break. My family moved a while back, but we haven’t been able to sell it yet, so it sits empty. The room that our Christmas tree would always light up was being painted, and I was taken back to when I was 12 years old — just about to leave primary school — when I got “Pokémon Black 2” for Christmas. I was about two years younger than its protagonist, but a year older than the original protagonist of the series’s progenitor “Pokémon Red and Blue.” Now, I’m 21 years old and adults make up more and more of the franchise’s market demographic. Even with all the arguments that Pokémon will forever remain a franchise for children, the reception for the series is dying off. A once universally-adored series seemed to be running out of steam, reliant on formulas and gimmicks now decades old.

Here’s the thing, though. Through all the noise and the rightful frustration of the infamously irritable Pokémon fanbase, its creators did strike gold with the franchise’s original core concepts. The biggest accomplishment of the Pokémon games is their ability to tie stories so closely to gameplay. Every encounter has the potential to give you a new battle partner for life in your quest to “catch ‘em all,” and every turn-based battle victory is another step on your journey (to be the very best, like no one ever was). It’s what made the series — largely relegated to 2D top-down chibi sprites — so immersive. 

The core mechanics have never changed as the franchise evolved from Generations I to IX between six different handheld consoles; the formula just became more and more refined with each Gen, adding new Pokémon along the way. Fans were satisfied because it felt like each evolution was a new chapter in the same story that pushed the limits of their handheld homes — but this seemed to peak around Gen V, with the “Pokémon Black and White” games for the Nintendo DS. From here onward, the series became reliant on battle gimmicks that wouldn’t return in future games and balancing nostalgia manipulation with proper tribute to the past: Gen VI’s Mega Evolutions, Gen VII’s Z-moves, Gen VIII’s Dynamaxing. These weren’t new chapters or refinement of a formula, but tired tropes being repeated. When new Gen VIII titles were announced for the Nintendo Switch — a truly innovative next-gen console in and of itself, being a next-gen home console that was also this generation’s handheld — it felt like a new story needed to be written, an expectation that was betrayed by the derivativeness of “Pokémon Sword and Shield.” However, is Pokémon ready to tell a new story?

Enter Ash Ketchum. Or rather, exit Ash Ketchum, as the Pokémon anime protagonist wraps up his last episodes after 25 years. During those two and a half decades, he’s remained just 10 years old, as everyone around him was also ageless. He’s received many a costume change and art-style innovation, sure, but he’s never really changed or grown up as a protagonist. Of course, this leads to numerous fan theories on his supposed immortality, but it’s clear he just operates in a “floating timeline” — one that keeps the show updated in the present without accounting for aging. But in many ways, Ash’s eternal youth and marginal maturing symbolize the state of his franchise. That’s why it’s so interesting that they’ve now chosen to finally let him move on, to introduce new protagonists.

Enter “Pokémon Scarlet and Violet.” I’ve written on it at length, but there’s a variety of interesting innovations I didn’t mention: defying Pokémon starter patterns, breaking Pokémon Professor naming traditions, bucking the games’ story conventions entirely. Yes, the games operated poorly at launch and these issues aren’t quite yet resolved, but they’re still vastly interesting entries that aren’t getting enough credit for what they attempted to do — finally tell a different kind of story. Playing through these Gen IX games felt like they were trying their absolute hardest to give the series a new starting point — making “Scarlet and Violet” just a shade different from “Red and Blue.” But did we ever really want Pokémon to change? Are we wishing for what used to make the series so special to us? Or are we slowly realizing that maybe that spark is gone, that it left when we grew up?

Enter me — or rather, enter my empty childhood bedroom, in the house I visited before break. It hasn’t been repainted and sits now as an empty blue box. Of course, it’s not empty to me. I stand at the entrance and I see the bed where I used to read “Pokémon Adventures” manga on my iPod Touch late at night under the covers. I see the desk where I’d sit and watch every Pokémon YouTube video — every Top 10 list, every Ash Ketchum episode, every bit of gameplay — I could. And of course, I see the chair I spent countless hours in on my navy blue Nintendo DSi, lost in the world of Pokémon. I want to reach out to that kid, to reach out to that simpler time and take it as a salve for myself. 

Pokémon hasn’t wanted to grow up. I empathize. 

But despite everything that fans clamor for — better animations, even larger worlds, next-gen graphics — this series is still going strong because most of its customers are either returning to the world they’ve long inhabited or introducing new generations of kids to its stories. The series developer Game Freak has maintained a super-small team of close-knit developers who have been working on the game since the series’s inception despite having more than enough funds to hire more people — all while still trying to bring the franchise into the future. “Scarlet and Violet” comments on this duality of past versus future, not only in its themes but also by presenting primal and futuristic Pokémon that contradict canon and shouldn’t exist. These forms are fittingly titled “Paradox Pokémon” — because it’s impossible to move forward while pining for the past. Maybe it is impossible to fully recapture the magic of our childhoods, but we can still make more memories.

As the stresses of growing up kept me up at night, I’d play Pokémon music to lull me to sleep. I’d make some of my closest friends throughout middle and high school bonding over Pokémon. And now I’m here, writing this article, having Pokémon to thank as part of my passion for digital culture and the arts as a whole. So please — to Game Freak and to the fans — let’s hope we’ll grow further together. Farewell, Ash Ketchum. You were the very best.

Digital Culture Beat Editor can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

The post Will the Pokémon franchise finally grow up with us? appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

Episode three of HBO’s “The Last of Us” features an introductory sequence of a man in a dark bunker, lit only by the security cam footage of military operations outside his house. Hearing thumps from inside his home, he clutches his firearm until he hears confirmation that the military thinks his house is empty. With the grizzled bass of an alternate timeline Ron Swanson, he whispers, “Not today, you New World Order jackboot fucks.” What follows is the most devastating gay love story — no, any love story — no, any story — that I have ever bore witness to in a television episode. 

Of course, this response isn’t entirely universal, despite massive critical praise. In a show centered on the cross-country trek of its two protagonists — Joel (Pedro Pascal, “The Mandalorian”) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey, “Hilda”) — during a zombie apocalypse, cries of “filler” rang out over the decision to dedicate most of episode three to the love story of hyper-survivalist Bill (Nick Offerman, “Parks and Recreation”), and Frank (Murray Bartlett, “The White Lotus”), the man Bill survives for. Even worse (and even more predictably), many of these negative reactions were steeped in homophobia, especially when Queerness came up again in Episode six, this time involving the protagonist Ellie. This backlash has always existed for the franchise, stemming from the initial reveal of Ellie’s lesbian identity in the game series the show is adapted from: “The Last of Us: Part II” and the “Left Behind” DLC for the original “The Last of Us.” This response has been dismissed ad infinitum, but for this article, I’d like to address them in earnest. Please, if you’ve clicked on this article with the views I’ve just mentioned, I’d love the chance for us to talk — because episodes three and six do elevate HBO’s “The Last of Us” with their Queer choices. 

Let’s touch on elevation first. The inclusion of these two stories are dismissed as filler because they’re not directly included in the first two games, and they focus on much more mundane activities, like Bill and Frank’s homemaking or Ellie and her best friend Riley (Storm Reid, “Euphoria”) hanging out in a mall, when compared to the zombie shoot-and-stealth action of the games. The principle of adaptation requires communication of a story between different formats, but it doesn’t require one-to-one translation. The games feature action heavily as a mechanism to keep their chosen format engaging, but television allows us to slow down. It can divert when necessary into much slower stories where it feels like the stakes are much lower (although they’re still living in a zombie apocalypse, so that danger’s always present). What goes beyond communication in the adaptive process however is elevation, using the format’s strengths to enhance the art. Stories focusing on different characters that aren’t the protagonists aren’t meant to waste your time, but to flesh out the world and its characters even further — and these have always been the franchise’s priorities. I mean, it’s not called “The Last of Joel,” but “The Last of Us,” right?

And so who are these remaining few after everything the apocalypse has put them through? Well, there’s Bill — the Gadsden flag-waving, New World Order resisting, 9/11 truther — and the love of his life, Frank — a musician, a painter, a homemaker. Their dynamic as a man who knows how to survive and a man who knows how to live may clash at times, but they ultimately complete each other. Then there’s Ellie and Riley: teenage best friends diverting to different sides of a post-apocalyptic power struggle but realizing that their love for each other is stronger than either. Also, they’re all gay. This Queerness is interwoven into their identities, their character struggles and how they connect with the world around them. 

Back to Bill and Frank for a second, to these men so clearly worn by the world. Bill offers a different perspective on the apocalypse, one of merry misanthropy from his clear ecstasy at the world’s end, gathering up all the supplies he can after his town’s evacuation for his solitary survivalist Elysium. Years pass and Frank comes by, and after charming his way into Bill’s home, they find themselves at a piano. Frank correctly guesses Bill’s favorite song — “Long Long Time” by Linda Ronstadt — and drums up a cheery, if not amateurish, rendition of the piece and reflective of his experience with love. Bill stops him, then plays his version at Frank’s request — slower, sadder, the toll of the lonely life he’s been forced to live. There’s a moment of silence and Frank asks, “So, who’s the girl? Girl you’re singing about?” With the choked-up and surprising vulnerability only Nick Offerman can produce, he whispers, “There is no girl.” After Bill’s hesitation and heart battle it out, what follows is one of the most tender gay kisses — no, any kiss — no, any moment I’ve ever bore witness to in a television episode.

But that hesitation is more than just shyness, right? The show’s apocalypse started in 2003 when the Supreme Court had just ruled the criminalization of gayness unconstitutional, much less accept or legalize gay marriage. Bill’s town — Lincoln, Massachusetts — would be in the first state to legalize gay marriage a year later, but that doesn’t happen in the show’s alternative history. Instead, Bill — an already graying man when the world ends — has spent decades in this lonesome life. Of course, that hesitation melts away when he realizes the forces subjugating him ended with the rest of the world. If those who opposed these characters’ identities are still with us, can I ask you if you know where that disdain for seeing these two men kiss came from? Is it your politics? Is it your religious beliefs? Well, that’s what this episode is asking you: When the governments and gods fail us, what will we have besides each other — besides love, in whatever form it could possibly take?

“The Last of Us” is a cruel, cruel world. It is dark and vicious and unforgiving, but that’s where these bright spots of tenderness shine through the most. It’s also a world covered with greenery, where the human impact on the environment is decreasing and where Bill and Frank can love each other without obstacles at the end of the world, not in a New World Order, but certainly a kinder one. In that last way, it’s certainly doing better than ours, where people want to end the Queer world: when Queer culture is being outlawed, when Conservative Political Action Conference speakers can say “transgenderism must be eradicated,” when gay marriage is legalized in only 16% of the world’s countries — it makes the world of “The Last of Us” that much more special, where love and identity are able to be cherished.

The episode leaves us with the simple heart-struck words only Bill can muster, “I used to hate the world, and I was happy when everyone died. But I was wrong, because there was one person worth saving.” It’s still a world worth dying for — no, worth living for — no, worth loving for.

Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

The post Why Queerness was always going to elevate ‘The Last of Us’ appeared first on The Michigan Daily.

Meeting people I’ve only ever seen in my Zoom physics classes. Meeting a celebrity after months of seeing them on social media. Finding out an online figure I followed for years is an abuser, a sex pest or just an all-of-the-above terrible person. The world is slowly revealing its ill-intentioned machinations. A universe projected or simulated, a facsimile or dream of higher beings. There’s this disconcerting feeling I’ve picked up from many of these situations, one that I find a common thread in — but while of course all of them find their origin in some sort of artifice, we can take it deeper than that. We can sift through these layers of reality and burn away every last one, but in order to cast these shadows out for good, we have to trace them back to their source. We have to dive into Plato’s cave.

Let’s say you chained up several people from birth so that they were always facing the wall of a cave (kind of a fucked up thing for you to do, but just roll with it for the parable). All they have ever seen is that wall of the cave, with one exception. If you were to place a torch behind them, shadows — like puppets — would dance for them on the wall. Those bound would not know anything of light, darkness or life — they would perceive those shadows as their truest reality. But let’s say you freed one of those cave-people (how nice of you). Without the rest of the cave-people knowing, this person turned around to see the torch and the shadow-casting objects in front of it. Furthermore, they venture outside of the cave into the world. For a moment, the outside world’s light burns their eyes, but they eventually adjust. They look out and take in the beauty of the world, eventually realizing — watching objects all around them block the sunlight and cast shadows — that the reality of the shadows was simply a projected one. Let’s say you take them back to the cave (that’s not so nice of you). If you chained them back up (I don’t like where you’re taking this), would they not long to glimpse the outside world again? Would they not attempt to explain to their fellow cave-mates how the world actually works? Would they not be dismissed entirely by their peers in the best case, or, in the worst case, would these claims not enrage the people of the cave so that they would then kill the one you had freed (was that your plan this whole time)?

Now, you might be familiar with this parable, even without me casting you in it. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is one of the Greek philosopher’s most influential passages, published in his magnum opus “The Republic.” The metaphor is clear in his story — the way we perceive reality is conditional, limited by the senses we possess that are unaware of higher, truer realities. Plato used it for his own philosophical arguments of idealism, but the parable holds a broad spectrum of applications. The idea of universal truths existing in imperceptible layers has been interpreted endlessly: from Buddhist enlightenment to Christian ascension and “The Truman Show” to “The Matrix” series. Matrix metaphors as a modern Plato’s cave are used by political movements of all alignments as an analogy for uncovering the insidious inner workings of world powers. Even further is the possibility that the entire universe as we know it functions as a hologram or a simulation (even if my physics major brain dislikes the concepts). However, disregard all of that for a second. For a moment, there’s something I’d like to place above philosophical allegories, religious endgames, Platonic pop culture, governmental gospel and the entire universe itself — and that’s you. And me. And us: all of us, the way we perceive and treat each other. 

Let’s say you built a stage for the prisoners of Plato’s cave (kinda cool of you, good job supporting the arts). The dwellers of the cave are brought up staring not at the cavern’s wall, but at the spotlight upon it. Performers act out whatever they could desire to on Plato’s stage, complete with a catered set design. As the performances go on, systems begin to develop within the players’ minds. They notice how certain performances elicit different reactions from the audience, and which emotions they can bring out from/by the way they play certain parts. Over time, as performing becomes required, it becomes more rigid. Some performances opt to bring out the most positive engagement, while some want to muster up any declaration of emotions they can. To the audience, the props become reality and the performance becomes the actor’s personality. Let’s say you took one of them backstage (where are you going with this, I didn’t like how it ended last time). They see the lamp illuminating the stage and, although it burns at first, they see performers outside of their acted-out existences and they see the cardboard backs of the set. What would happen if you took them back to their chains (again, I guess)? What would happen if the performers were taken with you? What happens when our parasocial parables — the narratives we form with those we think we know — burn away?

The metaphor is clear, right? The phenomenon of parasociality — especially with internet-established “relationships” between cyber-celebrities and their audiences — is not anything new and has been oft-discussed, even here at The Michigan Daily. We form attachments to the projections created by internet personalities, and are repeatedly disillusioned when those shadows are cast away. These performances are catered to both the whims of the audience and to the stage they are performed on — user engagement and the online platform of choice are driving factors. But now that we know this, the solution is clear, right? Never return to Plato’s cave and never mistake the stage for the world. What if, instead, this knowledge doesn’t illuminate shadows but deepens them? 

Let’s say you put the world behind a screen (it’d seem more accessible that way, good job). You still have Plato’s prisoners, but let’s say you gave them access to the “true” world as well (how kind of you). They have spent their lives seeing the two worlds. Some regard both of them as virtually the same — after all, it’s only a screen separating one world from the other. Some do treat the two as separate, as many things happen behind the screen that could not reasonably happen in the real world. Collectively, their treatment of what lies within the screen and the world that lies beyond becomes contradictory: What is beyond the screen is not real, what is beyond the screen is also real and what is beyond the screen is a reality higher than our own — as accumulated evidence of what is exceptional about existence — curated, biased, manipulated as it may be. The light of the screen does not illuminate: It insists that you accept its elevated existence.

And so these Platonic parables become perplexing. The parasocial parables drift further and further into the philosophical shadows. We treat performers as simultaneously everything they project themselves to be and everything that they deny themselves to be. They are cast as people in our lives and as props for our entertainment at the same time. The internet makes actors of us all. What would Shakespeare think? All the world’s a stage and you cannot escape. 

That is, unless you do know the truth. So who are you? What parts of you are personality and what parts are performance? The puppets or the shadows? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. I want you to answer. Look at me. Look at these words, rather — whether they’re in print or on a screen — because I’m talking to you, as I have been all this time. Ask yourself these questions: Do you know the answers to them? My pen is mightier than the scalpel, —would you let me carve into you and answer me?What happens when we’ve parasocially bound everyone, ourselves and the future — the foundations of our realities? 

Well, I’m not sure. I’ve been standing on Plato’s (historically very broad) shoulders to outline this issue, but I don’t consider myself a philosopher. I am, however, a physics major and a student journalist for a lot of similar reasons, most of which involve attempting to dissect the world as rationally as I can. In that rationality, of course, is my irrational and therefore absurd pursuit: I’ve sworn myself to not follow the steps of Plato’s prisoners or their shadows. I’ve sworn myself to the sunlight — to see the truth no matter how much it burns. Plato’s parable and parasociality can sometimes be interpreted as binaries: you’re enlightened or you’re not, you’re parasocially attached or you’re parasocially aware, in or out of the matrix or in or out of the simulation. The problem with the term “parasocial relationship” is that it implies the choice to form a relationship. The reality is, people intrinsically bond to any projection of life — in art, in the world, in Plato’s cave — and if I’ve written this well, we’ve formed something like that here, because escaping the cave is a constant struggle. So in the closing words of our shared parable, I’d like to ask you something. Please, just treat whatever reality you’re given with reverence, with kindness — and just a little bit of caution for what could be behind the shadows.

Digital Culture Beat Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.

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