Slated for Demolition
You never really know about cultural differences until you run into them. That’s a vacuous statement, I suppose, but here’s a case in point. When writing Slated for Demoliton, Meri probably thought that ‘marinara sauce’ would be instantly familiar to any reader. However, it sent me DuckDuckGo-ing! I thought I knew the major tomato-based pasta sauces: bolognese, napoletana, arrabbiata, norma… but what on earth is marinara? I mean, this is relevant. Getting attacked by spaghetti with bolognese sauce is different from getting attacked by spaghetti aglio e olio, you know? Drowning in a fresh pesto genovese is clearly a more distinguished way of leaving this earth than suffocating in gallons of carbonara. I’m just saying.
My search led me to believe that ‘marinara’ is a name used, primarily in the USA, for a fairly basic tomato sauce; perhaps it is even more a name for basic tomato sauces in general rather than for one particular recipe. It’s probably the red substance covering the pasta on the cover of Guns N’ Roses’ The Spaghetti Incident?.
Now if I were @DeusIrae, I would be able to segue into a long, funny and in the end surprisingly relevant anecdote about me and pasta – but I’m not, and I wouldn’t. Still, it seemed appropriate to give pride of place to the Italian delicacy in this review, since it plays such an important role in Slated for Demolition. As we traverse the game world, exploring a house, a shop, and an apartment building, pasta stalks us – and attacks us in horrifying and grotesque ways. It’s good that it’s pasta. There’s something funny about pasta; all the weird little shapes, the strange names, the mere sight of somebody trying to eat spaghetti without using a knife… it’s funny! But also slightly horrifying. Pasta with tomato sauce looks a bit like a putrefying human corpse; blood with worms and maggots in it. I mean, check out that very Guns N’ Roses cover. It’s digusting. And kind of funny. And a little too reminiscent of our mortality.
What does pasta mean in Slated for Demolition? This is harder to say. I think the above paragraph maybe captures the why of the pasta; it signifies horror and the body, the feeling of suffocation, but in a desperately comic mode that keeps the game bearable. Then again, it is also possible that it symbolises an eating disorder that was the result of the central trauma. Probably not, but it’s possible. Slated for Demolition is heavy on symbols and light on explanation, and it’s not easy to piece together exactly what happened to the protagonist.
But we can take a stab at it. In their early twenties, probably, the protagonist worked as a group leader at a LARP summer camp. It was hard work, but they had an intense and interesting time with the other group leaders, drinking too much, making out, striking up friendships. But then disaster struck. The guy that the protagonist was developing a bit of a crush on sexually assaulted her. The whole situation was complicated, and therefore hard to understand even for the protagonist herself, but that was basically what happened. (There’s also a side story about another woman who stole him away from the protagonist, but I’m not entirely sure how that fits into the narrative.) Later on, perhaps not much later on, this same guy had to be taken care of when he was struggling with suicidal thoughts, and it was the protagonist herself who was the only person who could get into contact with him and she did so – extremely uncomfortable, but she nevertheless did it. There’s a strong sense that throughout all of this, the assaulter never really understood the meaning of his deed.
The way this story is told is extremely compelling. The writing is strong throughout, and the shape of the game is also interesting. It consists of three exploration sequences: a supermarket, a house, an apartment building. But we have a strange to-do list of objects, and as we explore the worlds, we pick up these objects, sometimes being steered heavily towards them, at other times having to go out of our way to find them – by putting underwear in the freezer, for instance. Each time, there is also something that generates tension. The absurdity of the supermarket prose turning into lists of pasta names. The suddenly revealed trauma in the house. The possible suicide in the apartment building. Although mechanically all the sequences are more less ‘lawn mowering’, they felt fresh and engaging.
Then, in the end game, there’s first the suggestion that the entire game was written to confront the abuser with the reality of their deed. This feels psychologically true – you’d want the person to really understand what he wrought – but also deliciously insane. What’s the chance that your Twine will make its way into their hands? Unless the abuser is one of the handful of completionist judges that you can be almost sure will pick up your piece! (Good for me that it’s clearly set in the USA, then.)
But the game quickly moves beyond this, towards a spell for closure. Here we have possibly the best use of timed text ever, as Slated for Demolition forced me to think whether there’s anything in my own life for which I desire closure. And I sat and thought, and thought, and came to the conclusion that I don’t really understand what closure is supposed to be. For a fictional story, sure. There’s threads of narrative, and at the end of the classic novel, there’s closure. But that’s not how life works. What is closure? Is it the moment where we are at peace with what has happened? But it’s unclear that we want to be at peace with bad things. Is it the moment where the bad things no longer influence us? But how could they stop influencing us? Why would we even want that? What we want is the ability to continue, the ability not to stop hurting, but to once again grow and flower and bloom (even if there’s some hurt still somewhere) – but those are metaphors of opening, not of closure. And so I thought: I just don’t know what closure is.
At that exact point, the protagonist also concluded that she did not know what closure was. @DeusIrae states, in his review, that the climax didn’t really work for him because he didn’t want to overwrite the specifics of the protagonist’s trauma with his own stories. The climax did work for me because I and the protagonist both came to this point of confusion, of no longer knowing what it even was that we were looking for in casting a spell of closure.
Slated for Demolition is a wonderful piece, my favourite in the competition so far.