Oh yeah, SugarCube has a lot of built-in structure for it so I forget sometimes that Harlowe is less amenable to it. I get by fine with Stylebot in most cases anyway, so it’s not that big of a deal!
2 Likes
A Triangle for Two
A Triangle for Two is a short hypertext piece about two personalities, Jan and Maria, sharing a body and their experience of revealing this to an old friend, Anna. The revelation is nominally tied to Jan (and/or maybe Maria? I found this a little unclear) having a crush on Anna, but despite the focus this gets in the title and blurb, I felt like the romance angle was almost beside the point; the focus really seemed to be more on how Jan and Maria navigate trying to share a life and their conflicting feelings on revealing their situation to others. Maria seems to be a personality that manifested to protect Jan, and because that’s her raison d’etre, she is incredibly cautious, wary of anything that might cause him problems, whereas Jan wants acceptance for himself as he truly is.
Interaction was a little confusing at times; there isn’t always a clear distinction between links that lead to asides and links that move you on to the next passage with no way to return, so my habit of clicking links that are part of the body text as soon as I get to them led me to miss some things on an initial reading. Other than that, this is a well-written and emotionally compelling vignette.
6 Likes
See You Around
Anyone who has hung around me long enough has probably heard my semi-joking rant about the artificiality of genre categories and how they’re not always the best or most relevant way to categorize a work of fiction (I know I’ve done it on this forum), but they do have an important role to play in setting audience expectations. I mention this because I feel like the “literary fiction” label on See You Around set expectations that were mismatched with what the piece actually is. Of course, the definition of literary fiction as a (quasi-)genre is somewhat fuzzier than most, but I do expect artful prose along with an attempt to grapple with some big themes and/or paint a detailed picture of the psyche of at least one character. I don’t reserve the “literary” label for works I think do these things successfully, but in terms of what See You Around was visibly trying to do, it has at best one out of three, and feels perhaps more aligned with the kind of book generally shelved as contemporary fiction.
See You Around is a hypertext piece about a sex worker, Jasmira, who briefly dated an aspiring musician, Alim, and broke up with him when he found out she was sleeping with other men rather than explain that it was her job. One night she’s at a bar looking for customers, only to find Alim there performing a song that excoriates her for her infidelity. Giving up her opportunity to make rent for the month, she takes him home and they hook up; she finally explains what her deal is, he accepts it, and they are reconciled. Periodically the reader can click links to see flashbacks to Jasmira’s backstory and initial relationship with Alim.
The prose is simple and transparent and the focus is very narrow, so the piece’s literary aspirations are presumably focused on providing a complex psychological portrait of Jasmira (who is mostly the POV character, though once Alim shows up the narration dips into his thoughts occasionally without fully committing to a dual-POV conceit). Her motivations for getting into sex work and the way she relates to her job and the men it brings her into contact with are convincingly portrayed and have a level of complexity beyond the easy stereotypical options, but I found it less clear why she felt she couldn’t tell Alim about it initially, what changed her mind about that in the intervening months, and what made Alim so special to her in the first place.
I’m also not sure the choice to include full lyrics for songs written by Alim and, occasionally, Jasmira was a good one; while there are some songwriters out there creating lyrics that are enjoyable to read on their own, a lot of the time songs depend on the music and performance for some of their impact and feel a little pedestrian when divorced from that, and I did have that problem here.
11 Likes
Dreamteller
Dreamteller is a short mystery work in Twine about a detective chasing a serial killer that is leaving him cryptic messages, with a magical-realist twist.
This is another one of those dreamy works whose meanings and themes I found a bit elusive. There’s something about isolation and connection—the unsought loneliness of the victims versus the detective actively trying to hold himself aloof from others. There’s possibly something about police corruption, or maybe just the protagonist specifically railroading innocent people into convictions; this is touched on in one relatively brief passage but the passive framing of the descriptions made it unclear to me whether he was supposed to be observing an institutional problem or trying to distance himself from responsibility for something he was doing. Most clearly, there’s a narrative arc involving the detective’s sense of superiority to criminals, which is eventually challenged in a dramatic fashion.
For about the first 2/3, the piece is pure hypertext, with the asides done as in-line replacements rather than separate passages. I appreciated that the text-replacement links were italicized, so the difference between those and links that move you forward was always clear. When branching choices appeared towards the end, I also found that change reasonably clear, and I could see the thematic reasoning for it (connected to the aforementioned character arc). The only bit of interactivity I wasn’t crazy about was the part where the detective is given a puzzle to solve and solves it but the work makes you, the reader, type in the answer (that was just stated in the text), but admittedly I would have minded that less if it weren’t so finicky about how you enter it.
So as games of this type go, I felt like this was more focused than most and had an interaction style that was better aligned with what it was doing overall, but I still felt like it was a little too vague about what was going on with the protagonist, which made it hard to be invested enough in his fate for the set of endgame choices to have much weight.
6 Likes