Hi Tsp Args I Love You All But You Have Kind Of Lost The Plot - Tumblr Posts

9 months ago

not to rain on everyone's parade, but sometimes i do think there's something almost sad to me about the fact that I have seen so much stanley parable fandom content that exclusively revolves around alternate universes that have progressively grown further and further off-track from the narrative of the original game to an extent that i find barely recognizable at times. something about how whether or not it's true (i can't tell people that they don't enjoy something 'enough', i have no metric by which to measure how cherished the original is to people making this content) it almost feels like one of those cases where fanon precedes canon in terms of how much enjoyment people find in the content, as if people wanted the story to be *more* than it was to an extent that makes them override the original mentally. i think it doesn't help that a lot of people perceive fandom content as existing to fill some kind of 'deficit' in an original work- to give people what they didn't get in the original, so to speak. you've probably heard the spiel about how tragic tales have the most coffee shop AUs drifting around in their fandom tags, and such. the difference is that in most cases, those coffee shop AUs aren't more commonly posted about than the source they're based on. i can't really say the same for the stanley parable at this point. people are so enamored with AUs and versions of the game's story involving modifications of the narrator or the limited range of setting laid out by the game itself that i'm sad to say i don't see people engaging much with actual moments from the game itself all that often.

is that just a matter of personal preference? yeah, totally, but it does make me sad. I really *like* the fact that the Parable is so limited. I think it does the narrative a massive service that there truly is no finite ending or escape, that the Narrator is never given form nor further interactability with the game, that nothing ever goes wrong or changes in a way that matters. It's a fundamental part of the narrative to me. Changing that is fun to people, and I get that- but at some point to me it just feels like so much about what I love about the game's narrative is just being reduced to the meaningless backdrop to shipping and the opportunity for something people Want to see more.


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