I had already played and reviewed The Bat in IF Comp 2024. It’s still a fantastic game and it was a delight to play again.
I’ve once again uploaded to GitHub my answers to the exercises I finished this month. I enjoyed the slow play of The Bat. I recognized an economy of elements in both this and the previous slow play of Detritus. I’m definitely learning about taking things away until you can take away no more, rather than adding to things until they are done.
I also had a spot of inspiration for the writing exercise of “take a popular series and retheme the main characters into a different context, whilst keeping the character themes recognizable”. I took the characters of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and grafted them into Pride and Prejudice. It’s awful but fun.
Pride and Pizza
There is talk in Meryton that a new house has joined polite society, in body if not in spirit. Four young men, accompanied by their master of the house, have travelled from the newer parts of York down to Hertfordshire. They have taken up residence in House Halfshell.
The Master of the house is Hamato Yoshi, a Japanese military man who emigrated from his home to take up the role of mentor and majordomo. He had attempted to conceal the young men in York, training them in martial matters, self-command, philosophy and the avoidance of respectable company. Finding, however, that virtue hidden too long is apt to be mistaken for vice, he removed them to Hertfordshire.
Despite the Master’s best training, these four youths are uncouth — displaying enough capability to navigate the social landscape whilst being quite apart from it — mutant, as it were.
The leader of this quartet is Leonard, Leonardo in actuality but Leo to his friends and only his friends. He is strict with honour and manners, but mistakes it for morality. Elizabeth Bennet has described him as “proud, humourless and foreign in manner”. In a rare fit of self-knowledge he has described himself: “I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.”
Elizabeth’s piercing perception has found her equal but not her match in Raphael. His acerbic tongue has burned through much drawing-room politeness. His particular prejudice is not classist, but contempt for those he feels lean on etiquette instead of strength.
Don is the scholar of the group. He is learned across a broad range of topics: conduct manuals, natural and moral philosophy, treatises on fencing, and the mathematical models of social interactions. He attempts to solve society like a machine: elucidate the rules, optimise behaviour, and reap the social rewards. So far no success.
Young Michaelangelo is renowned as the “gentleman of the party”. He is impulsive and charming, and relentless in seeking pleasure and scandal. It is said that he has been taken in by Wickham with stories of glamour and rebellion, and Michael has threatened to run off on many an occasion.
Most of polite society humour the four gentlemen with one notable exception: Master Oroku Saki, a man commanding a good overview of Hertfordshire with his army of footmen. By dedicating himself to wealth, connectedness and a strict observance of hierarchy, he has built up a terrifying empire and will merrily enforce social conventions. He will go so far as to castigate people in front of anyone, giving him the moniker of “Social Shredder”.