A Paradox Between Worlds

"What do you do with the mad that you feel
When you feel so mad you could bite?
When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong…
And nothing you do seems very right?"
- Fred Rogers

A Paradox Between Worlds taught me something very upsetting about myself: I miss being an active Tumblr user.

I was just a hair too young to be in the thickest part of the "Harry Potter" fandom. Which is an odd thing to admit, because I was very much into the series, more than almost anyone I knew in real life. By the time I started using the internet, though, HP fans already had their own complex lexicon, favorite fan theories, websites, conventions, and so much more that I got a little scared off. I just liked the fun wizard books, I didn't want to marry Snape.

So when JKR decided to pivot from authorship to eradicating gender variance, I didn't feel the same kind of betrayal many of my contemporaries did. Mostly, I was just sad. I parted with my merch, made the conscious decision not to engage financially with the property anymore, and washed my hands of the whole mess. I understand this is a somewhat privileged position, and that many people had hung large parts of their identity on a series that was now stabbing them in the back, but I wasn't one of them.

A Paradox Between Worlds is a dive into the psychology of a group of people who were exactly that kind of fan. The game is split between two parts: the first is a cringingly accurate depiction of mid-2010s Tumblr fandom blogs, complete with Bee Movie scripts, "Do you love the color of the sky?", and a haunting expy of the "All or Nothing" pitch; the second is a "fanfiction writing simulator," where you choose the details of an epic, universe-jumping "Nebulaverse" story that (Spoiler - click to show)will all but inevitably go unfinished.

The details are accurate down to the letter, in a way that only someone intimately familiar with this sort of community could write. The posts from the self-proclaimed "fandom mom" were so spot-on, in fact, that I found myself searching for a phantom unfollow button every time I opened their blog. Nevertheless, scrolling posts and deciding what to like and reblog was far and away my favorite part of the game, and I think a whole narrative could have easily been drawn from that loop alone.

The other part I am...less enthused about. It's not bad by any means, but I can't help but be reminded of the feeling of writing a book report on a novel you merely skimmed. The fictional-within-fiction Nebulaverse has an impressive amount of lore, but I found it hard to keep track of who was who. To the game's credit, you can access nearly an entire fan wiki of info about the setting at any time, but I found it a bit flow-breaking to have to click a menu away in the middle of a scene because I forgot who Tycho was. The narrative also gets increasingly meta as you continue to write, reflecting your more and more complex relationship with the source material; this is good, thematically, but also exacerbates some of the issues I just mentioned.

I'm about to go completely off the rails of game reviewing for a moment, so if you don't care about the personal media hangups of some white dude from Ohio feel free to skip the next three paragraphs. I mentioned not exactly being a dyed-in-the-wool Potterhead, but I'm no stranger to the feeling of a piece of art that meant something to you revealing its hand as morally repugnant.

I first played the Last of Us at a rough time in my adolescence. I was about to start my sophomore year of high school; I didn't really have any close friends; I had just lost my first grandparent, with whom I had a very complicated relationship; and I thought I had everything figured out. Up until that point, the games that defined me most were the "Mass Effect" and "Dragon Age" series, and I took their ultra-utilitarian approach to right and wrong to heart. In my depressed, dysphoric mind, I felt confident that, should the time ever come, I could sacrifice everything and everyone I love for the greater good. This put some...strain on my interpersonal relationships.

The Last of Us showed me that was utter bull. In the penultimate level, (Spoiler - click to show)I mowed down every Firefly in my path with reckless abandon. I was going to save Ellie, or die trying. It was only when I looked at the path of corpses that led me into the operating room that I realized I had violated my self-proclaimed values. And I would have done it all again.

When the Last of Us Part II came out, I loved it just as much as, if not more than, the first, but there was something...off. What's up with the weird religious cult with no real reason for existing? Why introduce a whole new, underdeveloped faction, when raiders are already well-established? The answer, unfortunately, is that (Spoiler - click to show)tLoUpII, and the series as a whole, is anti-Palestinian propaganda. The Seraphites are savage vermin squatting on the turf of the complex but, ultimately, justified W.L.F. The game seems to try and paint the conflict evenhandedly, with hints that W.L.F.'s aggression may not be entirely justified, but casting one side as transphobic, animalistically violent zealots shows its political hand all too well.

What is there to do, then? Do I disavow the series entirely, as though it meant nothing to me? Do I try to make excuses for it, to pretend the themes are somehow not about what they've very clearly been stated to be, or, worse yet, act as though it's the kind of fair exploration it thinks it is? Do I pretend the politics aren't there at all, the "Hatsune Miku wrote HP" approach? What do I do with the mad that I feel?

A Paradox Between Worlds didn't give me the answer, and I don't think it was trying to. What it did do, however, was demonstrate that mine is not a lonely situation. It showed that my choice to engage with a work I felt betrayed by is exactly that: a choice. It's not one free of consequences, but it's my choice to make. The Last of Us, more than anything else, demonstrated I have a capacity to love that I'd never before explored, and perhaps that's all I needed from it. I think Luna and Karla would agree.

And hey, maybe I'll start using Tumblr again. Maybe.