post #7: FNAF: the failures of fiction(?)

I have tried writing variations of this for over half a decade at this point. I'm feeling spirited now, so i will take another pass at it.

     This essay is about how I understand fiction and what I perceive its boundaries to be. My thinking on fiction is informed by many things. I've tried for years to precisely articulate that genealogy, but it always spirals out into nothingness (or a semester-late final paper, but we don't talk about that). The biggest inspiration I usually cite is Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" and especially the reading Patricia Taxxon offers of the film and what it says about fiction and its inextricability from authoredness (and what that means for the limitations of fiction). The words to render all of this-- I haven't found them yet. But since they're (the film and the video essay) important (to my thinking), I'll still give you a couple (of words).

     Taxxon uses the metaphor of power scaling debates to describe how fiction functions. In power scaling, a genre of YouTube video and otherwise internet-located discussions which seek to procure a kind of scientism for the strengths of characters within and across media (usually this centers Superhero or Shounen media). Taxxon contests the genre's premise saying that such a framework of objectivism fails to address the realities of fiction. That is, fiction is not real, it is constructed and it is located elsewhere (in neurons, for example). Following from this, Taxxon says that the winner between Goku and Superman (I don't remember the exact analogy it uses, but it's something like this) depends on who's writing the fiction. Because fiction is not intrinsically bound by physics, the motivations and actions and mechanical properties of a given fictional world operate as the author describes them to (explicitly or not). Goku wins if an author describes that to be the case, Superman if the opposite is the case. Because authors can invent any fiction, objectivist litigations maybe don't make sense within their contexts.

[^^ drawing of Patricia Taxxon and Freddy sitting together ^^]

     My recent thinking about fiction has largely centered around FNAF. I've also been thinking about other fictional worlds such as Pokemon. The issue that I've been coming back to is the issue of history. The history of the world I live in is multitudinous in all kinds of different ways, but, regardless, the relevant point is that it's series of contained events led to today, causing things to be the ways that they are. Maybe I don't believe this precisely and there's room to contest this statement as to what causality means and what history means, but for this essay, these questions are not relevant right now. Anyways, given the complexities of the history of the world that I live in, what does it mean when a fictional space looks different (i.e., exists)? The biggest recent example would be the recent COVID-19 pandemic (which is still ongoing-- but again, besides the point). Fictions which narrate a temporal space that includes 2020 or 2021 ought to bump up against the histories and realities of COVID, but I think they don't always do so. Lacking concrete examples, my sense is that instead of the realities of history, some general vague image (maybe similar in name to the history of this world) is appended to the functioning space of these fictions. *the point on pokemon is not related to history. i'll touch on it briefly at the end.

[^^ drawing of orange guy / william afton as funny games home invader ^^]

     With this alone, there are many ways to take things. Since my thinking has been caught on FNAF, I'll explain where I've been getting with regard to fiction, history, and FNAF. Whether it's unique to FNAF discursive spaces or not I can't say, but anyways because of the prevalence of a certain mode of theorization for interacting with FNAF's texts and playing with their fictional worlds, historical details variously enter as relevant or non-relevant to assessing some given point. For various reasons, creating timelines of when events and games in the series happen is a popular genre of theory in the FNAF community. Taking the first game (FNAF) as an example, people disagree on when this game takes place. Some popular candidates include 1993, 1992, 1989, 1998, 2003, among others. (One reason why there's so many theorized dates for when this game takes place is due to the fact that the series has been going on for 10+ years, and thus many different numbers have been thrust into the FNAF temporal milieu, which then you pick and choose which ones you're working with for how you come to a given conclusion). A frequent device people use to place FNAF games is to compare the paycheck you receive at the end of the game (in the first two games) to the national or state minimum wage in Utah in a given year. For FNAF 2, if you do a calculus that ignores tax, you get the 1987 on the dot, which the game confirms as well. I use this example to say that people use facts or trends of the history of the world I live in to assess the events of the fictional world(s) of FNAF. I wonder if this is so simple, though.

     Especially within the last two or so years, this methodology has become increasingly tenuous, in my opinion, as the series continues to chew up temporal space into BOTH the past AND the future of its fictional history. See, for example, that the next FNAF game to come out seems to be set in 1979 whereas the previous one (made by Steel Wool) was set at least in 2020 (we think..). With (FNAF's fictional) history becoming more and more divergent (from the history of my world), how useful is historical comparative analysis? In the extreme, I want to say that it's basically invalid. But if I really think about it, I guess that doesn't make sense. Thinking this way duplicates the logic of power scaling objectivism that I earlier dismissed. But I also think it's naive to use it completely unchanged. Nevertheless, there has to be some way in which surmising information about the fictional world based off of how things played out in the real world ceases to be generative / meaningful. Of course, people are free to engage with fiction using whatever frameworks they want, but what I'm saying is I predict diminishing returns. The difficulty, though, is what to do with a fiction that tells you it's a betrayal while also having a history of telling you it's a replica, and of relying on you (you = FNAF community) to pick up on the fact that it is as such (a replica) for to make meaning from the text. That is, the difficulty is that the games continue to emphasize dates and time periods which approximate ones that exist in the world I live in, in ways that suggest that the games are trying to say something with things happening at those dates or times, while also ignoring genealogies which brought the histories of this world into being.

     In essence, I want to know how things came to be this way. This chair I'm sitting in is made of plastic and metal and fabric -- these materials came from somewhere, the chair was manufactured somewhere. The words I use to speak were handed down to me. The language I use has a history of connotations and mutations. The technology I write this on-- there's a history undergirding that too-- how it got here, how it works, etc. There are chairs in FNAF and so I must assume that people make chairs in the world of FNAF. But we don't see this. The fiction does not explicitly orate this, so it's possible that it isn't true. It's possible that in the fictional non-reality non-historical space of FNAF, chairs simply come into being. Fiction does not tell you the terms it is working with-- there is no fiction that does this as it would be impossible to fully explicate how the world that a fiction resides in is chemically, mechanically, mathematically (etc.) identical with the operations of the world(s) of those who engage with it. How do they learn to speak. But this doesn't matter. Because fiction isn't real. And that means something. There's a cost to fiction, yes, but it's not a cost written in flesh and history. It may approximate these things, but it is not them identically. But sometimes it seems like people in the FNAF community mistake it for as if fiction were true. This is world building-- this is the cost of world building. How does this world operate, how do things happen, how does a text not contain plot holes. It does. It is written. It is so.

[^^ drawing of versions of the mimic from the futuristic and past tense timelines of FNAF ^^]

     Even though fiction doesn't exist but through the nodal points of those who create it and those who consume it, the flesh of fiction still doesn't gain form. The history of the author informs the fiction, informs the fictional world, but fiction is not reality. I'm losing the ability to speak again, so I hope I've said something in the realm of what I wanted to...

     To close out on, a note on the fictional worlds of Pokemon. My perception is that Pokemon narrates itself as if there is a kind of limitless potential to exist within its fictional worlds of play. How does this promise of fiction grapple with the material realities of the hardware that's used to play it (and the software that's used to run it)? Take Pokemon Emerald, for example, where the hardware and software place strict limits on the rng seeds the game can run on (in fact, in a vast majority of cases, it runs on the same one seed across all instances irregardless of player intervention). Such a limitation means that there are simply some pokemon (precise variations of certain pokemon, that is) that you cannot catch. In Pokemon Gold and Silver, the game's code means that shiny pokemon can never have max stats (because shininess is calculated by the same variable that determines genetic stats). The narrative the play space offers cannot produce certain fictions. If the player believes this fiction exists when it does not (when it cannot) what does that mean for history, for fiction, for reality? There's room plenty to expand this thinking to consider such things as hoaxes and superstitions too, but for me, my thinking has been caught on the fact that the physics of the world make it so that certain fictions are systematically harder to imagine.