It is my opinion that Alan Hazelden is a spineless coward who chose civility over his responsibility to protect vulnerable minorities in his employ. He has chosen the feelings of his workers who cannot stand to be on the same credits as someone marked with a kiwifarms thread and a few bitter callout posts from jilted TME ex-friends over the safety and dignity of someone who delivered under-time and under-budget for a video-game with a development cycle of under a month. He has suppressed my completed and paid-for work and severed me from his community where I’d begun to feel at home. He has already been spoken to, attempts were made to reason with him by others in his circle, including other developers who had hired me and know the entire story with me, warts and all, and nothing has changed.
It is clear that he cannot handle the pressure of having a marked transfem be associated with him, but he also, embarrassingly, cannot handle the pressure of deleting my work, forcing me to upload my own score separately and tell the story honestly. He has attempted to placate me, told me he wanted to find a satisfactory solution for both of us, which of course can’t include reversing his decision and also conveniently involves me disguising my role in his project further for the sake of his SEO. There’s two ways I can take this, either he knows what he has done is indefensible and is offering to move heaven and earth to keep me contented without taking on any risk to himself whatsoever, or he is only acting this way because he knows I pose a credible threat to him and would simply cast off any other marked transfem with no such care. Both of these possibilities are disgusting and enraging to me.
I cannot in good conscience recommend that any transfem work for him, or any minority with a baseline expectation of artificially expanded criminal records for that matter, and I’d urge anyone working for him who fits that description to exercise caution. I was warned before starting work with him by someone in his community who told me he had previously kicked another transfem member from his developer discord server without trial after receiving similar pressure, and I ignored them, assuming that providing something of value to him would save me. Unfortunately, he has shown himself to be someone in a position of power who will simply fall for the first trick in the transmisogynist handbook if given the opportunity. To save the feelings of his employees, he will discard you and delete your contributions with impunity, while saying to your face that he understands how you feel.
My soundtrack for “The Electrifying Incident” will release shortly. Please do not harass the composer that has replaced me, I greatly respect her work and resent Alan even moreso for putting her in this position. I must offer no more calls to action. I have had nowhere to express my frustration, my crushing anger and disappointment, the pain of my sudden and all encompassing rejection. This statement is a result of the endless wound re-opening that I experienced in my attempts to be understood and valued & to save the bridge over the past month. I have been talked down to repeatedly and every attempt I’ve made to converse and understand the rationale of what is being done to me has left me in tears again. I am tired, and I don’t give a shit anymore. I am not replaceable. I am not tainted by my sexual trauma and my disability. I deserve better.
This is the most fear I’ve felt releasing something in a long while, an especially outsized reaction for a silly fifteen minutes of sci-fi beats, but I truly don’t have faith that my story will come off as sympathetic to my broader audience. I don’t really feel like I have any choice, though. Alan seemed interested in letting this go with minimal public statements in the hopes the controversy surrounding me wouldn’t get worse, but then I would be relying on the good will of someone who has shown himself to hold no value in my work or my feelings, as he perpetually attempts to do the impossible and net me the benefits of having worked for him without letting me work for him sometime before he gives up on me like he has already proven himself capable of. I do not want to hide my work, because in spite of everything, I’m still proud of it. I don’t want to disguise it or repurpose it, because I haven’t yet been able to prove myself as a competent draftsman and my work ethic is shown in my ability to make music that depends on its source as much as its source depends upon it.
Well, whatever happens, here’s The Electrifying Incident (Patricia’s Version).
Also on youtube, please leave some positive comments if you have something nice to say or any comforts to give, i am extremely tired
Every year Akio Ohtori loans his sister out to a bunch of teenagers, grooms said teenagers, makes all of them fight each other several times, does irreparable emotional damage, hopefully THOROUGHLY cleans the inside of his car because Christ alive.
And all of this, all these surreal, intricate rituals, are so he can lose a sword fight with a door.
This has happened multiple times. He doesn’t even seem particularly upset about failing. Every year Akio Ohtori loses a sword fight with a door and somehow does not feel like an absolute clown. Could NOT be me, I would never try again. I would lie awake at night every night after the first attempt agonizing about how stupid I must have looked and how my sister absolutely would have laughed at me if all the organs she needed to do so weren’t getting shish-kebabed six ways to Sunday.
I have my criticisms of Made in Abyss but I will also say that I haven’t seen enough people comment on my favourite aspect of it (and I may be looking in the wrong places, I haven’t term searched), which is that it’s a breathtaking deconstruction of settler colonialism, and of the romanticism of the weird adventure stories of Europeans plumbing every as of yet unexplored corner of the earth and finding strange and wonderful things at great risk. It is a profoundly critical piece and one of the few that while capturing the allure of that genre and the call of the void and the human search for answers, also has the fucking balls to say, “Your choice to do this is to choose death and the loss of your humanity”, “This place is built on atrocity in the name of gold and glory and colonial prestige, every attempt to get further into its depths requires horrendous sacrifice, and the act of settling was fundamentally amoral”, and, as of where I’ve read up to (the end of Faputa’s story), “this capital we’ve built, this land and its blessings that we have, are literally built on endless suffering, it is justified for the victims of that to retaliate, and to dust we shall return”. Every aspect of its world-building is seductive but shows both implicitly and explicitly the horrifying truth of behind the siren song of colonial exploration, from the implications of what happened to the native people of the island to the sickness affecting the current inhabitants to the wrecked ships and remnants of failed predecessors, to the indoctrination of children into dreaming of seeking death, and the overwhelming sense that the Abyss will always, always get its dues
Intentionally or not, it’s one of my favourite explorations of the brutality and futility of the search for El Dorado
This is the first time that I’ve seen someone else say this, but throughout the tale of the Ganja-tai, I thought over and over about how pointedly the arc invokes the imagery and rhetoric of the conquistadors, specifically drawing parallels to the infamous Werner Herzog anti-adventure film Aguirre: The Wrath of God in its entropic narrative while shifting the perspective from that of the violent colonial zealot to that of the sort of vulnerable person whose trust and faith such men prey upon. Manifest Destiny is also in there, and the Age of Exploration more broadly as emblematic of this duality wherein wonder, awe and sweeping Capital-R Romance obscures a hideous venality and pervasive cruelty which exists both in tandem with and apart from the brutality and abjection of the (super)natural world which it seeks to exploit. They march endlessly into the gaping loggerhead’s maw of the sublime in the belief that they will bring back material gain or temporal power or spiritual clout, clambering over broken bodies, only to themselves be devoured. It is the lurid nightmare at the heart of every colonial adventure narrative: “You never should have come here.”
Get in the car, ya friggin otaku. We're going downtown for some "acts that are totally not felonies." Don't ask how I can reach the pedals, that's none of your business
Lemme grab the Super Soaker full of milk one day off its expiration date. We might need it.
Incidental note: You ever think about, before milk actually goes bad, it starts to develop this weird sweetish aroma faintly reminiscent of strawberries? It’s not unpleasant per se but the association is perturbing.
