Meat Puppets (NSFW -- Maybe)

mummblemouth

Hey everybody,

This was my first Twine creation and I thought I should finally get around to sharing it. It's dark and full of human vice, but is hopefully of some literary quality. In this light, it doesn't pursue the gamification of IF, and the multi-linearity is limited, though there are six different endings. Rather, it focuses on creating the sense of a traditional narrative while still exploiting the possibilities of the medium. That said, it's currently hosted on Google Drive so multimedia resources have been limited and in some instances eliminated in order to help with load times. I'd appreciate any feedback readers may have regarding issues of writing, multimedia, aesthetics, and...well, everything.

As for general specifications: there are 62 passages and 116 links; it is 14,256 words total, with any given traversal consisting of about 7,000 words; and video has been cut, but gifs, images, and audio are all present. Finally, please find an overview map of the story below for those who are interested in such things. Meat Puppets can be found at http://gdriv.es/meatpuppets.

Regards,
MM

loopernow

When the story started, I thought it was going to be homoerotic--about Daniel and Simon. I was a little disappointed in that regard.

I thought that was the strongest part of the story, was Daniel's past, his predicament, his relationship to Simon, his thoughts about the saxaphonist.

The theme of the seediness of life, the philosophizing about this, seemed a little more forced, overdone at times, but that's not to say it wasn't at times effective.

But I definitely preferred what to me seemed more nuanced, the stuff about relationships and aging and deferred dreams.

I did like the surprise of the puppet. But in general to me the twist was not as powerful as the original premise. Nonetheless it came together pretty well.

Some really nice writing. The writing in the very last paragraph seemed a bit rushed, but on the other hand the very last line was great.

Thanks mummblemouth!

mummblemouth

Hi Looper,

Thanks for the detailed reading of the work. Good criticism, to me, generally tends to be criticism that confirms suspicions of what the artist already knows. Yours is of that nature. Thank you.

Regarding that, I find that many of the things you point out, loss of nuance, overwriting, etc, are symptoms of writing multilinearly as the production of divergent flights of fancy taxes cognitive, creative, and temporal resources far beyond what the mind can, or at least has been trained, to handle. Considering this is my first piece, that is particularly true here. Likewise, I think the average reading population still has difficulties reading in such a manner. Indeed, this lack of literariness and literacy in the vast bulk of e-lit and the reading population are two of the main reasons I think it's struggled to really establish itself.

The flip side of this is the masturbatory intellectualization that accompanies most of the 'serious' e-lit. Yes, I'm having a laugh at myself right now, but I'm sorry, didactic stories and poems about the medium you're working in won't hold interest, and using code as a laboratory for theory rather than a medium for literature (art, music, etc), in my mind, completely misses the point, producing generally anemic writing.

Tangent aside, thanks again for giving Meat Puppets a read and I'm glad you seemed to have enjoyed it. See you around the message boards!

MM

loopernow

For sure! I definitely enjoyed reading it.