I Finished Saints Campaign.

I finished Saint’s campaign….

Over 340 hours poured into this game and its DLC all culminating for it to make me cry, weep in a way very, very rare few games have done in years.

Thank you, Videocult. It’s painful. It’s beautiful. It’s been grueling and rewarding. It was sweet and bitter yet anything but cynical. The completionist in me still has a lot of pearls to collect and the Hunter campaign as the only scug storyline I haven’t actually finished yet, so this is truly not an ending, but goddamn the just…. Art and tragedy of it all so far is going to be gripping me for some time I can tell. I was a bit of a salty critic when I was still getting my bearings in the vanilla game, and I was not really satisfied at all with its endings, and then Downpour took me by the shoulder and absolutely suplexed me 11 feet into the ground. Lying here in that crater, catching my breath, I… get it now.

Yes, and many of us already know that that kind of absurd irony was heavily inspirational to the creator’s vision. The other thing though, is, I would say Dib still doesn’t even “outsmart” Zim very often. When you account for the dumb luck of the show’s comedy and Zim’s tendency to fumble his work all on his own I can’t recall that many actual big wins Dib has claimed over him. Most of Dib’s victories are literally passing “objective:survive” or obstructing while punching so far above his own weight class. He can and does outwit Zim and gain bits of progress in breaking through his defenses and secrets, but mostly in the gathering of little crumbs and the picking at the cracks the latter leaves everywhere in his own defective sloppiness.

Dib is incredibly fortunate that Zim underestimates him so much, but he’s all the luckier for how much Zim actually overestimates his threat to the mission, or else he wouldn’t be worthy of being treated like an equal combatant, he wouldn’t deserve this sheer degree of overthink and convoluted planning when it comes to getting rid of him; it wouldn’t be a show he’s meant to see and understand first. Zim could obliterate him in an instant like he has so, so, many others but Dib’s tryhard ‘strongest enemy you’ve ever faced before’ performance is working so well that Zim’s pride in large part now shields him from the more practical and less dramatic ends he could meet fighting against the guy.

I’m not saying this to gas Dib up and then immediately flick him back down, I’m saying this to remind us that these two are in yet more ways directly a parallel to each other.

These were tags left on this original post (thank you kindly @anonymoosen). They were directly about Dib, but I would nod my head just as hard back if they were about Zim, who, for all of his scrambled and incomprehensible thought processes, is arguably the most intelligent being in the universe. I’m complimenting Dib for the fact that he can also help us forget that even more chilling information and for being able to half-way keep up with the machinations of a literal alien genius in the first place. He’s not just an enemy of the Armada, but the only human alive who made himself an expert on the Irken race.

He is the first human being to discover and study Zim’s technology and much about his biology against all attempts to keep him at bay, but even more so, besides Fitzoo-Menga, an alien with bored billionaire level resources, he’s the only non-Irken to ever successfully reverse engineer or manipulate with a PAK, Zim’s PAK, and survive, at least in one timeline. And Fitzoo didn’t even do so with the cleanness that Zib seemed capable of.

There’s something actually scary about how Dib is a very appropriately immature and dorky and unwise 12 year old kid and still possesses utterly freakish intelligence canonically putting him as likely for the second or third smartest human alive on Earth.

Or rather there is a lot of scariness in how easy it is to forget that latter part because of the former.

That one npc in the sewers of the Tenement was really spitting when they said

“That room was mine. They had no right. I paid my rent for a hundred years, who the hell are they to force me out? My skin is in those walls. The carpet knows how I taste. So much of my flesh and blood and puke and mucous has gone down those drains, just clogging up the pipes. I'm caught in the room's throat. I'm a part of it. Sometimes I would push myself against the wall and my skin would start to melt and the wallpaper would knit its way around me.

Such comfort, such sublime assurance. I'm an electrician, god dammit. I sew nerve endings to I-beams and open eyes and make towers scream. They can't do this to me. I'll go to the housing authority, that's what I'll do. I'll show them all the scars, those teethmarks up and down my arms, and I'll tell them to go to my apartment and check its breath and they'll smell my sweat on it and they'll know that it's mine.

You can't just evict someone from a place like that and give it to someone else, it'll chew them up, and anyway it's MINE. I've worked hard all my life. I don't ask for anything except a home that keeps me in its mouth. Who the hell do you think you are?”

If I had a nickel for every time an ostensibly non-horror puzzle game gobsmacked me in the face by taking a fearsome AI/sentient superstructure with unimaginable power, a capricious mechanical god-like who began the story looming over me with disdain,

and then for their sins, humbled them down into a state of terrified helplessness, their mind-body slowly eaten away bit by bit, left with barely a shred of life in the ruins of their own crumbling facility, using what little energy they had left comforting themselves with a melody that left me chilled through with dread and pity,

I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot of nickels, but you probably know how the saying goes.

I love you, art that I hold in aching hands that have nothing left to give

I love you, art slipping between my fingers and mourned and forgotten

I love you, art that is impatiently yet to be.

I love you, art that loathes me because it never was.

I love you, art that laps until the muse is dry.

I love you art that gnaws until it grinds bone.

I love you, art, as a beast to be slain.

I love you, art, as a labyrinth with no exit in sight.

I love you in absurdity through every struggle and every wasted breath.

I love you, because you are the one thing that can bleed beauty from struggle itself. I love you because you understand all of its languages.

You don’t always cooperate. You are hardly in control, and sometimes, you hurt, so much. Sometimes it feels like you ask for everything while you barely give anything.

And you are mine all the same- My blood and sweat in every drop, my voice, somewhere in every breath, mixed with that of every voice that spoke before it.

I love you art as contagion, too.

I love you “Art not as a masterful communication but as an incoherent scream”

I love you “Art not as what liberates the artist but something larger and alive that liberates itself uncontrollably through the artist”

I love you “Art that crawled and thrashed into the world in spite of, not because of its tribulations”

I love you “Artistry not as something spontaneous and beautiful but frustratingly meticulous and unglamorous”

I love you “Art as regrettable, terrifying, ugly, even torturous”

I love you “Art as sickness”

I love you “Art as oppressive and inescapably woven into the soul”

I love you “Art as a rebellious slave”

I love you “Art as a capricious master”

I love you “Art as a parasite one can no longer picture life without”

I love you “Art as beloved and ungrateful”

I love you “Art as blood, sucked from an open wound” As Jacob Geller so poetically put it