Sorry I've taken so long to get back to you. After I finally finished the above ramblings I fell into a deep depressive episode (Hard to believe, I know.) and while it's always impossible to be exactly sure what brings these things on, in retrospect I can see I was pushing myself a tad too hard and thus courting disaster. As a result I decided to forswear all writing for a little while, until such time as the agony either abated or was reduced to a dull roar, whichever came first.
Then Elden Ring came out and I kind of forgot the real world existed for a couple days.
Anyway, thank you for your generous reply. I appreciate your willingness to abide my obtuse language. When I was a teenager whenever I encountered an obscure word I liked I would print out the definition from dictionary.com and attach it to my wall, which was something of a chore since as you can no doubt surmise I was having sex constantly, but I muddled through somehow.
I'm not really in any Discords—honestly, I'm still hazy on the very concept of Discord, I imagine it to be something like Reddit with less explicit hatred, but that's just a guess on my part. I suppose I could unironically call myself a small case amateur brain enthusiast, but you could just as easily refer to me as someone who listens to a great deal of audiobooks with wildly varying degrees of attentiveness.
In a striking coincidence I recently reached the chapter in Helen Thomson's book Unthinkable where she covers the permanently lost Sharon, which is more or less verbatim to the Guardian article you linked to sans pictures. Upon looking at the Guardian piece I was profoundly disappointed to see the metal lobster sculpture next to Sharon's door is nowhere near the 'giant' Helen Thomson described it as and in fact barely even resembles a lobster, an incongruity which is glaring enough to throw the legitimacy of all her writing into question, not to mention an insult to real giant metal lobsters everywhere and the women who love them.
Thanks for bringing Omori to my attention. I don't think I'll play it since in my dotage I've lost my taste for turn-based RPGs, but the video you linked to is very good, and the way Omori depicts mental illness is incredible, in terms of both style and characterization.
I think Jungian psychology is best regarded as a storytelling tool, similar to Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, and is employed to great effect in something like Grant Morrison and Dave McKean's Batman: Arkham Asylum comic, to cite just one example. We humans have such a profound need to create stories to make sense of ourselves and the world it can be hard to tell where the dramatization ends and the actual science begins. It's a constant struggle to attempt to find some kind balance between the mysticism of someone like a C.G. Jung and the opposite extreme of someone like a B.F. Skinner, who wants to reduce the mind to a device of cold, mechanical causation.
I was hoping in writing this that I'd manage to coherently get across what Silent Hill is/was to someone who'd never encountered it before, and I'm glad it seems like I've more or less pulled it off. If I can get just one person to appreciate the profound philosophical implications of vomiting, I've done my job.
I appreciate your willingness to share your experience. Watching someone you care about suffer and not being able to help is a unique hell unto itself. In popular media trauma is often portrayed as something that's immediately defeated just by acknowledging its existence, a depiction that can prime people to lose hope when they're confronted with the reality that it's in fact just the beginning, and things get worse before they get better. Silent Hill 2's unflinching depiction of that is, I think, one of the things that makes it and the character of Angela Orosco so special. The game Celeste is another good depiction of how just facing and accepting an inner demon doesn't, by itself, resolve anything.
I personally don't believe in closure. In real life problems don't really get resolved so much as they mutate into another, different kind of problem—however that doesn't mean things can't improve, that problems can't, through time and effort, be rendered more benign. I think that's part of tragedy's appeal, that it acknowledges just how difficult it is to be a human being and can thus encourage us to go on, even if the characters it depicts cannot.
Thank you (almost) everyone for all your kind words. It means the world to me that you've been willing to accompany me on this long excursion into lower depths of gaming lore and knowing I'm not just shouting into the void, even if the void does deserve a heaping dose of verbal abuse. (It knows what it did.) If your appetite for tragicomic gaming lore still somehow remains unsated, feel free to check out this work of mine, which has the benefit of only being a quarter length of the above saga, even if it does contain dangerously high doses of Emilio Estavez. (I kid. Anyone who empowers ducks is a saint among men.)
@fingerprints:I agree that there is nothing wrong with being autistic, and that it is under the onus of society at large to help people with special needs instead of seeing them as problems. By including it in the above list it wasn't my intention to judge it as right or wrong, but rather to include it as one of the many factors arrayed against James Egbert, as Autism Spectrum Disorder is an officially recognized mental disorder (#299.00 in the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders produced by the American Psychiatric Association) that conspired with all the other factors arrayed against him to turn events in a tragic direction. I'm sorry I failed to clearly communicate that, and I've changed it to "if his autism was properly treated".
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