Whether you've been a constant companion on this trip, or you've somehow just stumbled upon this party, you are welcome to accompany me on this adventure down my metaphorical memory lane. It's alright. I've done this introspective song and dance before. I've never done it quite so thoroughly down my own timeline, but it's a party and one can be indulgent. Take my hand, if you so please, and come along with me. Let us celebrate and discover what made this blog tick, and how it grew and changed as I so did. Let the Frezno festivities... begin.
ORIGINS OF THE BLOG (2012-2013)
At some point, you have to pick a starting point among the daisy chains of coincidence and causality that make up your life. I have selected this link here. Sometime in the year 2012, I was browsing the Doctor Who thread on the Something Awful forums. How I got to be in such a place is further back on the chain, but suffice to say that it was because I had a vested interest in both gaming and performativity. The first spark is lit when a forum user posts a link in the thread. It is a link to a blog post about a Doctor Who story called The Two Doctors. This is how I discover TARDIS Eruditorum, and the work of one Elizabeth Sandifer.
Instantly I became a massive fan, and binged the backlog up to that point. Taking something as beloved as Doctor Who and turning it into a sprawling critical analysis/psychochronography of history itself, along with its whiff of the alchemical and transformative? It lit my fucking imagination ablaze. I read the whole thing, and eventually got E-Reader copies of the first three volumes just in time for my summer vacation in 2013. When I was not taking in the summer sun of scenic Newfoundland, I was in a cool basement reading these words while listening to Janelle Monae or David Bowie. Life was good.
Life then proceeded to get not so good. I shall not relitigate the personal details, but suffice it to say I had some shit to get together. It was still the summer of 2013, and while I was dealing with this I remembered another blog project by El Sandifer. It was called The Nintendo Project, and it was an attempt to blog about every US-released game for the Nintendo Entertainment System, alphabetically. I knew of other chronological game analyses of the NES library, like Dr. Sparkle's Chrontendo or Jeremy Parish's NES Works, but this had that same gonzo mysticism and alchemical sparkle which made me such a fan of TARDIS Eruditorum.
El never finished The Nintendo Project, petering out somewhere around the letter H. El also once posted on that old blog, in talks about perpetual copyright or something to that effect, that she was declaring The Nintendo Project to be in the public domain. The sparks ignited then. The blog was in public domain, which gave anyone carte blanche to use its ideas as they wished. I needed a major distraction while my very fate teetered in the balance. Out of deference and respect to my inspiration, I sent a quick Tumblr DM their way asking for her blessing. She gave it, and the spark of an idea hit the powder keg of permission.
I was granted permission to resume The Nintendo Project, and so my blog was born. How in the world could I have guessed what the next ten years would bring?
THE NINTENDO PROJECT RESUMED YEARS (2013-2014)
What do I say about the Nintendo Project Resumed years? They're sort of a paradox, simultaneously my voice and not my voice. It's my voice, obviously, because I wrote all those entries and made it from the H's all the way to the letter N in the alphabetical Nintendo library. It's not my voice because, well, it was me being performative. I had this idea of what the Nintendo Project ought to be, and so I attempted to emulate it. El's writing from the time was often tinged with both the philosophical and the alchemical, and so that is what I tried to be for that year.
I found a way to work the inspiration of the alchemical and hone it based on my own aesthetic, of course, but in 2013 I wasn't there yet. As such, I kind of view the Nintendo Project Resumed in a poor light. It's performative pretension, me playing at this grandiose erudite type of writing because that's what my main inspiration was doing and I wanted to be that. It's not my style, and I needed to find my style. If nothing else, it's an interesting stepping stone towards me getting to that aesthetic. At the end of the day, we're talking about ten year-old posts on Nintendo games that are buried deep within the archive of an obscure blog.
-0.png)
Now, to be fair, in the hands of an experienced writer/alchemist, making shit up can result in imbuing it with symbolism. I lacked that fine control, and so the lead I was dropping into these posts did not exactly transmute into gold. Things like "Valya" and "Peko The Destructor" have meaning to me, but I was unsuccessful in giving them the sheer heft and power they needed to give meaning to you at home reading the posts. That one's on me. My bad. Does that make the Nintendo Project Resumed an abject failure? Not entirely. There are moments, rare ones, where my amateur alchemy actually accomplished something. Where I wasn't just playing around, but actually found subject matter that really meant something to me. Where I truly did advance the power of the Nintendo Project. Let's talk about those moments.
Endless Adventure, a post done on the two NES Legend of Zelda games, succeeds by going all the way back to a concept that inspired El Sandifer in the first place: that of psychogeography. I take a quick walking tour of the place I grew up in, and imbue it with the concept of exploration and adventure as promised by those Zelda games to create an adventure of my own that explores my own history and the places that have deeper meaning to me. Freak Out In A Moonage Daydream takes the charming Capcom platformer, Little Nemo, and turns it into a sequence of abstract dreams and nightmares. Its depiction of interior anxiety nightmares may be a little melodramatic, but there's an honesty there... along with the honest feelings of other people whom I have inspired to cut against it. Choose Your Own Adventure is my attempt at writing a poem about the original Mega Man, and in its pretension I find some level of creativity. Finally, Haunted By The Hallways In This Tiny Room is about Metroid, and kind of has a just-right mix of my pretend mysticism and being frank about how I feel about Metroid.
For those of you keeping score at home, the first year anniversary of the Nintendo Project Resumed would have been in August of 2014. August of 2014 is also the time when the world of video games became a toxic fucking cesspool. Yes, Gamergate happened, and it sapped most of my will to try and find the magical alchemy of Nintendo games. This was radioactive putrefaction of a beloved medium, and the only reason things haven't gotten worse is that the radiation spread out of video games and into the actual culture. From this massive psychic wound on the medium, you can build your trail to elections and tiki torch rallies and actual fucking coup attempts. No wonder I didn't want to write this shit any more.
I took a break from this Nintendo Project to sort my thoughts out. I ended up sorting them out, alright. I never returned to the Nintendo Project, however. Best to leave that in the dust. My faith in the power of gaming had shattered, and this play pretension was left behind. Time to go on my own journey. Time to try and find a new voice, and maybe even find my own voice amidst it all.
THE AIMLESS WANDERING YEARS (2015-2017)
Among the many concepts El's Nintendo Project used which spoke to me was that of the "secret history", which is defined in one entry as "the history that was going on unseen while you were busy experiencing your own version of history.". Let's pull one last bit of alchemy from the Nintendo Project. 2015 to 2017 contains my secret history, worlds of introspection and inspiration which will fundamentally shape me into the me I am. From 2018 on, as you will see, I am very good at roadmapping my internal landscape for readers of the blog. This aimless wandering period is fundamental to who I will become and what I will hold important... but I never really wrote about it. Let's flip the secret history from macrocosm to microcosm. While the world was experiencing its own version of history, here is the secret history I experienced in my mind, unseen and unwritten about until now.
Boss Dungeon regrettably goes down in 2015, but in the leadup to Series 9 of Doctor Who I pull a double header. I simultaneously archive my old reviews of Series 8 from the site and add new thoughts I give on a rewatch of it. From The Boss Dungeon Vaults are my first foray into critical analysis of the phone box show, and that's something I maintain to this day. In another bit of boldness and shocking surprise, I somehow manage to end up writing for TARDIS Eruditorum. First it's a piece on the 11th Doctor video game, The Eternity Clock. Then, because I contributed a guest post, I am invited to participate in the "finale" to the blog, the Silence In The Library post. Two years on from discovering this blog, my words are now immortalized on it. Not bad.
I discover another blog, through happenstance or a Tumblr ask or something like that. I am made aware that someone has done an Eruditorum-esque critical analysis of all of Dirty Pair, and I read those words on a blog called Vaka Rangi and enjoy them a great deal. I think the failure of the Nintendo Project Resumed is on my mind now, and that is why I decide not to deep dive write about the show on my blog. I make an attempt to write about it somewhere else, but that's lost to time and I don't even know if I have it on my PC any more. C'est la vie.
2016 now, and this is where things begin to take shape for me. Despite quitting the Nintendo Project Resumed, I haven't quit video gaming. I take on the sporadic game writing project here and there, and something strange happens. There's still a whiff of that Nintendo alchemy stuck within me, but the pieces I craft aren't pretentious pretending. Maybe it was Doctor Who helping, maybe it was just time and maturity, but it is here at last that I begin to find my own voice. If I have to pick one to highlight? Let's be cheeky. Let's dust off Dr. Strangenep Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Goddesses. In many ways it harkens back to my inspirations of the time, those being anime girls and video game alchemy. In many ways it resonates forward into a future I could never have dreamed of at the time.
Also started in 2016 was my 31 Days, 31 Screams series. For the month of October I did quick posts on spooky media. Fittingly, the very first entry is on the Halloween episode of the Dirty Pair OVA series. This is a series that continues on the blog to this very day, though in recent years I cut the output in half to only 16 days. That moves us nicely into 2017, which is more of the same sort of growth that I've been undergoing. There's another round of Doctor Who First Impressions on Series 10, another 31 Screams for Halloween, and a few more dabbles into the world of games. Let's highlight Don't You Mess With A Little Girl's Dream, Or She's Liable To Grow Up Mean as a good gaming piece with that Nintendo alchemy still present, still changing, still becoming my very own brand.
At one point Li's Tumblr, which had been the mode of correspondence we'd had thus far in me asking what stories to skip, went dark. For a moment I felt a sense of disappointment at the loss of this, adrift in the middle of a minefield of potentially sour space stories. That only lasted a short while before Li found me on Steam, of all places, and continued giving me episode advice. She cared enough about keeping me on course, and about corresponding with me, to maintain that correspondence. That, of course, helped me grow closer with this blogger friend of mine, and she inspired me in turn. In the Nintendo Project days, El was an inspiration. Li became not just an inspiration, but a friend. The stage was set. Inspired by a renewed love in anime, and this new adoration for space utopia, the me that had been building up through this aimless wandering period was ready to come forth.
All that me needed was a vibrant transformation into something new and beautiful.
THE UTOPIAN IDEALIST YEARS (2018-2022)
The dawn of 2018 was the moment when everything finally coalesced for me, and two little words inspired a burst of brightness and an influx of imagination. I was transforming, regenerating, and there needed to be an outlet for this sudden burst of energy. What I plugged into was an old anime from my childhood, and one I revisited briefly in my teen years as an act of rebellion. I would rebel one more time, and in doing so I would become a new me. Over the first half of 2018, I watched through the essential Sailor Moon. This was a long project for me, taking six months to watch and then three more to write down... but I did it. I put it out there for all to see. Moonlight Shines Eternal is, by any act of my own internal landscape, a game changer.
The next project to follow from this was subject matter covered by my newest inspiration, sort of. It was Star Trek, but not a series that she ever covered in full. 2019 saw me going back to Star Trek's past with the show Enterprise, and To Boldly Step Forward was my coverage of watching that show with episode by episode reactions. Much like covering Star Trek wasn't really my own uniqueness, Enterprise ended up not really being my Star Trek in a personally resonant way. There were glimmers, of course, but my God did that show do things that set me off. Its final season shifted from a show set in Star Trek's past to a Star Trek prequel, becoming reference porn for Captain Kirk fans, and that upset me quite a bit. In retrospect (and in fairness to that final season's recently deceased showrunner) at least its only crime was being continuity-obsessed. At least it wasn't morally rotting, like my other sci-fi love Doctor Who was at the time.
There's a double-edged sword to that statement. Being mine means that its strengths and triumphs are my own strengths. It also means that its weaknesses are my own weaknesses, and the project and this era are not without their weaknesses. The Symphogear project, and another one or two to follow, have a weakness that sticks out to me. The project is somewhere in the ballpark of 20,000 words. Far too many of those words, for my liking, are a plot summary of Symphogear. I think my reasoning at the time was that I wanted to give context for why these things moved me the way they did. Looking back on it with new eyes, I think it bloats the project out. Maybe you at home don't think so, and think those words with their summary stand fine and proud. I thank you for your generosity, but in my own head I'm much harder on myself. Part of this is all on my own hangups and pet peeves.
The whole notion of "I am going to summarize the plot of the thing without brevity and add slight insights and commentary" is an old Internet critic notion. In my mind it harkens to the excess and rote repetition of someone like Doug Walker, and that was never a flattering comparison. That is not the type of person I wanted to become, but through my own ineptness my anxiety-addled brain convinced me that I had become that thing. That's not to say there aren't powerful and moving moments of critical analysis and heartfelt resonance in the Symphogear words, but they're buried within this machine summary that just isn't the me I want to be. Again, that's probably just me being too hard on myself, but this is my retrospective look back on myself and this is the truth of how I feel. I said it just a while ago when I revisited Symphogear, but my work has a shelf life of about six months before I pick at all the flaws in it. This is just how I am and how I feel, and it is the truth.
To add insult to injury, the end of Zombie Land Saga's second season combined with some ancillary spinoff material I learned about suggested that this shit was going down the same way as Doctor Who and Enterprise. Alchemical macrocosm run rampant under the banner of continuity porn. This was the tragic conclusion to these four years of the blog. A burst of brightness and an influx of imagination created this new me, and it was a powder keg of regret and frustration at media that was about to reach its breaking point within me. Something had to change, before I destroyed myself in a frothing fit of ego death. A new self had to be born in order to soothe the raging waters of my soul.
THE MELLOWED-OUT BREVITY YEARS (2022-PRESENT)
The self-destructing ego death occurred one year ago, in the summer of 2022. In the buildup to my newest project, I wanted to make my stance known. I took everything that had been building within me for the prior four years, all the utopic betrayal and macrocosmic lore and self-referential navel gazing and just let it loose onto the page. Star Trek, Sailor Moon, Symphogear, Star Wars, and a couple of other things while we were at it got put on blast for how they let me down. I stared down the planet-sized monster that was at the heart of me, and I fed it every last bitter hateful thought before retreating away from that grandiose world. So it was that Dr. Frezno Inferno stepped into a quantum microcosm... and vanished.
What followed, then, was a summer of reconnecting with the microcosmic world and what truly mattered. A Quantum Microcosm, Adrift On The Sea Of History was me delving into 90's TV series Quantum Leap and getting away from all this madness. Within its 97 episodes I discovered the concerns of the ordinary world. No grand universe-ending stakes, no melodramatic betrayals, no obsession with lore. Just stories. Stories of ordinary people in American history circa 1953-1987, facing the ordinary injustice of the world. Sexism, racism, classism. All terrible things that should be fought, but terrible things that relate to the actual real world. Concerns from someone who has actually touched grass instead of nail-biting concern over reruns of a 20 year-old space show being inconsistent with the later lore.
The writeup itself isn't exactly perfect, structured as an episode-by-episode writeup and at times still dipping into plot summary more than analysis. I have healed my soul at this point, but not fixed my writing style. Still, one improvement at a time. The fact that this was able to calm me down shouldn't be understated. There's more symbolism behind the resonance, too: after all, this was a show led by Scott Bakula. I was not only healing the negativity in my heart and exorcising the bile, but I was regaining that which I lost when Enterprise descended into the macrocosmic.
You can really tell how the show changed me by looking at the opener to that year's Halloween marathon: Ghostbusters Afterlife. The old me would have ripped that shit to shreds for becoming this beacon for the worst type of nerds. WE REMOVED THE GIRL ONE OUT OF EXISTENCE TO REPLACE IT WITH REVERENT REFERENCE TO OUR HOLY SACRED FILM, GHOSTBUSTERS! WE WIN! I did not take that tone with it. Mellowed as I was, I saw the film for what it was: middling fanservice with a funereal tone. It did nothing for me, but it also did not inspire bile in me. I wasn't a vengeance-filled angry blogger frothing at the mouth about betrayal any more, but this transformation was not complete. I needed one more piece of the puzzle, and that came at the start of this year.
One thing I've noticed in my life is that good things only happen to me when I'm not actively attempting to make them happen. It is only when I am not looking for them that I stumble, Zen-like, into the true enlightenment. This holds true for interpersonal relationships, and it holds true for my writing. In 2023 I feel like I became way the fuck better at writing than I have been up to this point, and it happened completely by accident. Here's what went down. In December of last year, on some sort of whim, I began to watch another show from the 90's: Twin Peaks. This was not done with the intent of being a project, but a show that I wanted to watch for me. As such, I just sort of watched it without having the back part of my brain thinking about things like "oh what will I say about this part when I get to typing it out?".
In January of 2023 I finished the show, having begun watching in tandem with my friend Joe. (He will come up again, in a moment.) Joe reviewed the show on the movie social media site, Letterboxd, and it inspired me to do the same. My review is not a grandiose 4000 word essay that spends half its time summarizing the plot for you. It is a simple and succinct metaphor for what the show is and what it meant to me. Twin Peaks is like a dream. I shared this review with Li, the friend I met from blogging about Dirty Pair who inspired me to watch Star Trek (and inspired/continues to inspire me in so many other ways that I cannot elaborate on here). She loved it, calling it some of my best and most poetic writing thus far. It's when I shared some of my personal history with Twin Peaks and how I knew of the series that she wondered what kind of project I would make of it. Wait. I have a project out of this?
Would I have fallen into the same bullshit trap had I done that? I don't know. The cynical part of me wants to say probably, but the question is moot. I had something here. I had a story which, thanks to the esoteric and dreamy nature of being associated with David Lynch, could not be easily summarized. I had a personal story of resonance to tell with how I discovered the show. I had the means to tell the story, and no preconceived framework built while I had been watching it because I hadn't been watching it with that in mind. So, I just... did that.
All of this culminates in Twin Peaks The Return, a legacy sequel series that rejects every pandering pathetic platitude that other legacy sequels indulge in to placate their fanbases and skewers it with Lynchian/Frostian genius. It was all beautiful, and I wrote about it all with that sense of brevity and mellowness that I had gained. It wasn't the only perspective I was gaining, though. Remember my friend Joe? He knew full well of the macrocosmic exorcism I was undergoing through 2022, and he had undergone a similar epiphany escaping the gravity of things like Star Wars and the MCU. Joe's Christmas gift to me for 2022 was a year's subscription to the Criterion Channel. He encouraged me to broaden my horizons and seek out new films from new voices that weren't just franchise shit, to truly help me grow as both a moviegoer and as a critical analyist.
So I did. I have been watching movies on Criterion, and giving trip reports month by month on what I've been viewing. I've discovered new and beautiful films that I never would have picked up on beforehand, and used that newfound brevity to get in and quickly explain what impressed me about them. For that, I can't thank Joe enough. The Twin Peaks madness also led to some crazy synchronicity wherein I discovered an old taping of the Twin Peaks movie I had done in 2005 and thought lost forever. Also on the tape was old anime of the time, which gave me a sense of wistful nostalgia. That led to me watching one of the shows in full, and giving it that brevity treatment of just going in there and talking about character arcs and what they meant to me for a bit rather than summarize the whole damn plot. The Warring States Of Love And Hate was a love letter to those old days, and a pretty good bit of writing.
That just about catches us up to the present. I just wrote about Symphogear again, going back and giving it that new treatment of brevity and grace. As much as I hate what I did with those old words, I would dare not replace them with this. There is, within the muck of summarizing, a sense of my authentic reaction and enthusiasm from 2020 that I would never erase. To do so would be erasing the map of my internal landscape. Instead I highlight how I've grown, what I've cooled on with the show, and what new thoughts and influences I found important in my rewatch. It's another fine bit of writing, and I hope to give the same approach to what's next.
That can only come after this, though, and so we have to end off things here. Here we are, then, ten years on from when this started. I don't think it's a half-bad transformation over a decade's time! From performative pretension to aimless wandering to utopic idealist, and then the explosive exorcism which led me to this me, the me writing right here and now. There will be other versions of me in the future, of course. In a year's time some other titanic shift might change me into a totally different writer with a totally different aesthetic. I welcome the change, as I've welcomed all the other changes and shifts in me. If I'm still doing this in 10 years, it will be interesting to pick up the retrospective from this point and go forward to see what I became from there.
For now, though, I leave you with the current me, the me I enjoy being. For those 10 years I always thought of myself as an amateur. A wannabe writer who didn't quite have the skills to stand side by side with my inspirations. I am good friends with several very talented writers, and at times my anxiety makes me feel like I pale in comparison to them. Like I'm a pretender trying to stand with them on my tippy toes. The fact that the writing I've done in 2023 has made them look to me and proclaim that it's fantastic and I've successfully expressed an interesting feeling and aesthetic through in my words is something that makes me proud. I am humbled and honored by it, and you know what? 10 years is enough time to gain a little confidence in my stride. Let's end with a bit of boldness to my brevity.
I'm Frezno. In trying to be a alchemical Nintendo blogger, I spent a decade alchemizing myself into something new and special. These are my raving rants, those thoughts which I believe in above all else, and I transmute them into a gold which inspires and interests others. I stand proud with my inspirations, and don't think of myself as an amateur in the pejorative sense any more. I'm in a Doctor Who fiction book now. I think that counts for something. So, to those of you who have been here along this journey, who have helped make me the me I am today... I sincerely thank you, from the bottom of my heart.
Here's to 10 more years.
No comments:
Post a Comment