Am I the only one who really wants Holt and Kevin to have a daughter?
And by that I don’t mean I want him and Kevin to adopt.
I mean I want it to be an average day at the precinct when Holt walks out of his office with a young woman. They shake hands, bid goodbye and Jake walks over to ask who she is.
“Who’s that? Someone from city hall?”
And Holt just casually replies. “No that’s my daughter.”
And everyone in the bullpen just stops, stunned. Because he’s never mentioned it before, ever, even in passing.
“You have a daughter?”
“Yes, her name is Claire, she is 24 years of age and studying at Jon Hopkins.”
Everyone turns to look at Amy who’s frantically flipping through six, thick binders, freaking out because she has not even a footnote on Claire’s existence!
Charles: Amy, how do you not know this? Doesn’t the captain have photos of his daughter?
Jake: Yeah, I thought you investigated everyone that’s breathed the same air as the captain in an effort to bond with him.
Amy: I thought she was his notary!
*cut away*
Holt: Here is your certificate confirming you completed volume one of my mentorship program.
Amy: Thank you Captain! So official, it’s even notarized!
Holt: Yes. Here is a photograph of the notary, Claire.
Amy: Oh, I saw her in a photo with you and Kevin, I was wondering what your relationship was. Did she notarize your marriage certificate?
Holt: *looks at watch* Given that it is 30 seconds after official work hours I will permit this single personal question. Yes she did.
*cut back*
Jake: You didn’t think it was weird he had a photo of his notary on his phone? Wait, no. That’s the sort of thing I wouldn’t have questioned either.
Those willing to poke gentle fun at American Baptists say: “No dancing, because it might lead to sex. And no sex, because it might lead to dancing.” So yes, there actually was religious resistance to dancing, which has persisted beyond all belief. Not to mention the suppression of various types of folk dancing as European immigrants were assimilated into bland whiteness and encouraged to do “non-ethnic” dances like square dancing.
I’m a Canadian white and it’s also my observation that the British colonists especially brought the notion that civility, culture, class, professionalism, and correct behaviour were all undergirded by the ability to sit still, stand straight, and maintain an unemotional facade no matter what. “Stiff upper lip” and all that. Acceptable forms of dance among Whiteness are often formal, complicated, and difficult to pick up without paid instruction. White people often make the mistake, even when writing about our own culture from a couple hundred years back, of thinking that dance is ONLY a mating ritual–you don’t dance for sadness, or joy, or anger, or fun. It’s not an accident that anti-colonial resistance by Indigenous groups, people of colour, and non-English white people, have in many cases used dance as an avenue of resistance and identity. Nor is it an accident that moral panics have often been over white people enjoying “ethnic” forms of dance and music like jazz, swing, hip-hop, or rap.
By denying people dance, rhythm, and movement, colonizers denied them a powerful kind of literal medicine, a form of resilience that could have allowed them to heal enough to defy colonial rule. But it’s no accident that the intrinsic motions of colonialism–dictating what people wear, where they live, who educates their children, what they eat, what language they speak, what music they can make, and how they can dance–are those that contribute most directly to PTSD and widespread mental health and addiction problems.
When mental health professionals work to heal trauma, there’s a growing understanding that rhythm, music, and dance are all deeply powerful tools of healing and resilience. Our bodies are primed to thrive on rhythm, beginning with the heartbeat of the person gestating with, moving to being rocked as a baby. It’s why the stereotypical shellshocked person rocks back and forth. It’s a primal self-soothing mechanism. And that’s why we’re increasingly doing not just breathing exercises, but encouraging drumming, clapping rhythms, and basic dance. It’s why I’m starting to ask my clients to share songs that are important with me. It’s something that white settlers have literally been trained for years to think of as not just unimportant, but dangerous and alien.
Okay, here’s one that’s been bothering me for a while.
The epistolary novel is a mode of storytelling in which the story is communicated in the form of a series of fabricated documents ostensibly authored by the characters who inhabit that story. Letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles are traditional, but contemporary examples of the type may also include emails, chat logs, social media threads, and video transcripts.
If we switch from literature to cinema, one popular equivalent is the found footage film. The framing is usually a little more immediate, and the plots tend to be constrained by the need to restrict the action to situations where one or more of the characters involved would plausibly be recording video, but it’s the same basic idea.
So here’s the question: what would the video game equivalent of the epistolary novel be?
It can’t be a game where you read letters or watch videos authored by characters in the game – that’s just using the gameplay as a framing device for conventional epistolary storytelling. It’d have to be something where the gameplay itself constitutes a found document.
I’ve run into attempts at the form where the game is presented as having been coded by a fictional character, so there’s a metatextual layer where the game you’re playing is part of the fiction, but that’s not quite there, I think.
It’s hard to imagine an exact analogue because people hardly ever code video games about what they’re doing.
Also video games in general don’t have the same… Okay, text is routinely used to record or transmit data, often with no particular purpose or direction. Video too. The concept of the epistolary novel is that it’s in the form of this data transmission or recordings that don’t have to have a plot or a purpose or an anything, but really! it has a plot!
Whereas you can’t really have a video game that’s just sort of not doing anything. It has to be doing something.
Maybe something like… a puzzle game which is designed to look like a piece of educational software of some kind? And there’s a narrative hidden in there somewhere? No, that still doesn’t quite make sense to me…
I’m imagining “Mavis Beacon Teaches How To Summon Cthulu”.
jade: their about is too short but you trust them; lowkey furries
john: morbid but fun and funny; john lesbians are often powerfully cursed, but all john gays are Friends
rose: either heavy grimdark or xtreme shitposter
dave: kind despite everything, good taste in music
jane: flawless, powerful, can kick your ass and mine
jake: love the tiny island son; will murder manipulative fucks, ask them abt obscure cinema
roxy: v funny, does makeup, will fight u with their fists if u draw post-canon roxy drinking
dirk: Precision Mess™; they’re all into dirkjohn
calliope: rare but generally either flawless or Yikes
caliborn: rare, edgy™, write smut, had someone awful and self-pitying in their life at some point
aradia: goth but very lightsided; love obscure poly ships.
tavros: incredibly rare, protect them
sollux: rare, high quality; unpredictable
karkat: loud but also mysterious, love karkat but understand that he is embarrassing. probably communists
nepeta: love obscure girl ships and only blog about the characters hussman screwed over. casual equius fans, have a RP blog, DEFINITELY furries
kanaya: strong opinions but don’t always admit to them, reblogs artistic nudes, into bloodswaps
terezi: write incredibly long meta posts. leading the pack in depressed lesbian content. LOVE vrisrezi, varies on whether they ship it fuk’d up or sweet
vriska: either openly “morals aren’t real” or just very powerfully gay
equius: very trans and better than you; can draw, ur all bottoms and you know it, ask them about music genres
gamzee: either softcloun or Angery; we’re all mentally ill
eridan: too many feelings, slippery grasp on emotional control, flawless sense of aesthetic
feferi: well intentioned but sometimes Too Much; have a pet snake probably, creepycute horrorsweet
i do NOT have time to do a historical fantasy avengers au about the War of the Stars, where the red star and the white star are symbols of warring houses and everyone’s wearing pearl-studded doublets. i’m not doing it! stop asking!
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