It Takes a Village
I spent this past weekend watching and absorbing the world of Resident Evil Village. While I’m no horror aficionado, I delved into this game expecting jump scares and gruesome murder at every turn—which is the nature of a Resident Evil game. However, over the course of watching a favorite streamer play through the game (Maximillian_dood on Twitch.tv), I realized that the tens of thousands of us watching along weren’t watching Max and the game for voyeuristic reasons. Instead, we were enchanted by the world, by the monstrous villains, and by the communal experience of this game.
By the end of it, I was left feeling rather cathartic, something I never anticipated.
My sister loves the show Sons of Anarchy. My family doesn’t watch horror or realistic drama, so whenever she would recap an episode in grisly detail, each of us looked at my sister as though to say, “Why would we ever watch something like that?”
“No, you don’t get it,” she would say. “When they cut off his balls…you just have to see it.”
I didn’t understand it at the time, but she was talking about the communal feel of experiencing the show. She was talking about the equivalent of the “You had to be there,” joke.
Stop me if you’ve ever heard a story sort of like this:
“So, Tommy gets up on a stage and he grabs the mic and says, ‘Laura, why do you laugh at his jokes and not mine?’ Then he starts making fun of the comic because he wasn’t funny at all. Everyone was laughing, Tommy was drunk, and the doorman had to drag him off stage. And Tommy was WAY funnier than that comic was. It was sooooo funny. You had to be there.”
Apparently so, because Tommy sounds awful.
But I know now, if I had been there, Tommy might still be awful, but I’d get it.
That’s the difference.
Is Resident Evil Village violent and gory? Unbelievably so. Scary and anxiety inducing? Most assuredly. But what I realized when watching the full game was that the horror, the violence, the decapitation, the ominous tension and anxiety, all of it brings the audience together. This is the beauty of horror. We were all sharing in something, and it didn’t traumatize, it didn’t kill us. Instead, we found ourselves enraptured in ceremony; we were there on the front lines and connecting in a way that felt different from most everything else.
Horror has the power to do that.
Something I did not understand until this game.
Man, video games are something special.
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Musical Renaissance
I’m going to tack on a new thing with these Weekly Post-Eds. Music has always been a big deal for me, and since a few summers ago when a friend turned me onto Spotify’s music catering capabilities, I’ve found over 600 new tracks that I now love. Before Spotify, I was a 5-Band guy (Bloc Party, The New Pornographers, Shout Out Louds, The Decemberists, and The Hives), all in regular rotation. Music on the radio was polarizing (mostly because I hate listening to ads), and I just stopped exploring at a certain point.
Now that I’m finding new music weekly, I’d like to share some notable finds. It’s a small thing, but maybe someone will like these tracks, too. Here’s what I found this past week:
- “Fly to Panama” – Panama Wedding
- “Australia” – Conner Youngblood
- “Heavy” – RAC, Karl Kling
- “Your Light” – The Big Moon
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New Short Story Coming Soon
It’s been a while, but a new Short Story will be posted in the next week. I won’t say too much about it, but if you like a more psychological story, this one might be for you.
Here’s the story art in the meantime:
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Hoping everyone is as well as they can be. You’re not alone out there,
