I went to see it tonight. I'd never seen it or even heard all of the music before, so I wasn't fully sure what to expect, other than a general familiarity with the original myth and various retellings.

Turns out it's absolutely gorgeous and a work of art in every way (as retellings of Orpheus and Eurydice should be) and I cried, and I hoped so badly that it might somehow end differently, which is of course so very appropriate given the musical itself and its final note.

Another thing that struck me about it, which strikes me again and again and again as I experience other people's art and think about it (because I naturally overthink everything, it's what I do) - the setting isn't quite literal, and it isn't quite an allegory, and it isn't quite consistent, and I feel like if I wrote something with the setting like this, I would get critiqued and told that the setting needs to be one or the other. I have internalized critique so fully that I am absolutely paralyzed with insecurity about my own writing, because I know it has flaws or inconsistencies, that my settings are not airtight and my plots and characters are imperfect, and also that my style is off-putting for some people and Generally Understood Wisdom tells us that "purple prose" is an insult and we had better try to avoid it in our own work or we'll render ourselves unsellable.

Yet again and again and again, I find that other people's stories break the rules, sometimes in quite dramatic ways. There may be plot holes you could drive a star destroyer through, or character motivations that defy belief, or settings that look pretty and are all about the vibes but don't actually hold up to scrutiny. And you know what? These other stories still manage to succeed at what they do. People enjoy them, sometimes love them, despite their flaws.

I wish I could turn off the voice in my head that points out what's wrong with my own work and tells me that it needs to be fixed or the whole thing is too fundamentally broken to bother with. I've always gotten the best responses from readers when I write unabashedly in my own voice, and yet even when I throw posts like this together, I'm so insecure about my own voice that I struggle to cut all the personality and character out, instead of just letting it flow naturally and sound like me. I'm writing this after bedtime so maybe it will be more successful at sounding like me than usual.

Everything I love has flaws, but I love it despite the flaws. And these so-called flaws aren't even actually problems at all in many cases - they're simply not priorities for the creator, or necessary for this particular piece of art. I think there's value in recognizing the strengths and weaknesses of the things you love, and taking away from that ways you can grow and do better as a creator yourself, but I think I'm far too preoccupied with what's wrong with my own work. I have received so much criticism over the years that it's all I hear and all I think when I look at my own works, and as a result I am paralyzed with all of my projects.

I've recently pulled some of my writing projects out of the deep freeze, because I'm getting a little more of my brain back as my health improves, but I am so scared of working on them and so very full of doubt.

Hadestown is a gorgeous work of art. It doesn't need to have answers to every question. It doesn't need to be able to withstand the kind of critique you get in workshop groups. It holds up incredibly well as what it is, and it does everything it needs to do, and that's good enough. More than good enough. It's amazing.

I need to internalize this. I hope someday I will.

Been thinking about Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon since yesterday, and my goodness, I love this game already.

Edit: Woops, this post turned long, better title the subsections

The Music is so good

For starters, the musical score is epic. The main theme feels like a rollercoaster, such orchestration. It gives me the same vibes as the music I hear in theme parks like the Efteling, which is something I'd consider a praise of the highest standards. I felt blown back in my seat by it. There partner's leitmotif is also incredibly cute.

The writers are clearly having a TON of fun

I also adore how silly the direction of the game is. The character dynamics are fun, even if it's not up to the fabled standards of PMD:EoS. But I do think that's a tough one to live up to. I haven't played a single game, in the pokémon franchise, or even outside of it, that made me feel that emotionally attached to characters and was actually this lifechanging for me.

However, Super Mystery Dungeon is already off to a good start. The writers were clearly having fun with it and going crazy with it. And I appreciate that so much in a game. It's not a pinnacle of artistry, or the deepest, most complex, most skillfully crafted story, but whatever they were doing, they were doing it with love. I love seeing artists having fun more than anything.

The character dynamics are promising

The partner and protagonist have a fun dynamic so far. The partner has their whole dream of becoming an explorer and wanting to become an adventurer and they lean heavily on the protagonist for support. All part of the standard formula. I would have to keep playing to see how it goes. I think what I am interested in most is if Super Mystery Dungeon manages to hit the same kinds of emotional notes as EoS managed to do for me.

Gameplay is good, let's see how the balancing feels

The gameplay definitely feels like a major step up from EoS. But again, I haven't played it a whole lot yet, so I don't know how the balance will hold up in the late game, which was where EoS really dropped the ball. I think the new mechanics sprinkled on top of the classic PMD formula work well, they don't distract me, and they keep my brain occupied with every floor, where the old PMD felt like a slog of "just trying to find the dang stairs"

Also this game is gonna punch my gut emotionally I just feel it

All in all though, I am just excited about playing a game where I can be a Riolu. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon has been a very important game for me throughout my life, having helped me analyse my feelings of otherkin-ness, planting the seed in me that blossomed into my identity today. I'm only recently finally nurturing my identity as a Riolu that had been latent since I was a teenager. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, with its promise of sweeping you away from the human world to live in the world of pokémon hits all the right notes for my otherkin self.

Have I mentioned PMD was pivotal in the birth of my identity?

And here comes the big otherkin tangent of why PMD has been the eye opener for so many otherkin people including myself. How it gets every beat right of what it's like to discover your identity, parting ways with your old notions of self, and feeling happy that you're finally reaching a new state of authenticity.

As a newly transformed pokémon, you feel at first confused, preoccupied with the notion of "Wow, how do I go back? I gotta figure out what happened." and then those feelings begin to fade because you realise just how much being a pokémon feels right. Truth be told, you don't WANT to ever go back to being a human. The euphoria has finally broken free and you are your authentic self. You want to be there with your partner always, and being a Pokémon is more fitting for you than being a human ever was.

You don't just get used to it, you don't WANT to return. It's like the universe had given you a second chance to be in the body you were meant to be, and while you're going through the story, you behold all those repressed feelings head on and accept them for what they are, and you can finally find peace within yourself.

It's a whole process to do that, and it's by no means easy. It's a grieving process for both your old self, and for the new self. You have to come to terms with how much you've hurt not having been what you wanted to be for so long. It can be scary, because coming out can feel like it may hurt more, because suddenly you're standing there, acknowledging just how MUCH it scarred you, ripping up old wounds and experiencing all the emotions you've held back, but the alternative is to smother yourself, to put out the flame within your soul, to kill that which makes you undeniably a happier and more whole person. Repressing it is easy, but it's not worth it.

In summary, pokemon mystery dungeon is the most important game for me in terms of my young self discovering their otherkin feelings. I've cried many nights from the catharsis that this series provided me. Laying my feelings bare in front of me, and giving me the comfort I needed when I was in a wild and scary process of forming my identity. And I am sure I will enjoy playing the rest of Super Mystery Dungeon too, with those feelings in mind of what this series has done for me.

I got the record last night in a miscellaneous Spyro The Dragon category (80 Dragons), and I have weird feelings about this experience that I thought I'd try writing about.

This is not the first time I've had a Spyro record. I got the record in Vortex in 2019, in Cheat% in 2020, and in Sparxless 120% in 2021. There's something different about this one though that has been on my mind. For all three of those other categories, there was something big causing them to have a lot of room to grow. Vortex had loads of tricks still to be discovered, tricks that Hop and I started finding and implementing. Cheat% of course had coveless, and the only reason I got the record there is because nobody else had done coveless in the category yet. Sparxless 120% didn't exactly have something "new," but it was a completely new category. I was just the first person to dedicated a significant amount of time to it.

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On the other hand, 80 Dragons didn't have anything new. There are good players that have already run it. I just ran it better than they did. I did try to reroute it, and I do still think the route can be improved a lot, but by coincidence the route I came up with ended up being nearly identical to the route of the previous record.

For all my prior records, I felt like I was a mediocre player showing the community, "If I can get the record in this, clearly there's a lot that the rest of you 'good players' haven't looked at." This wasn't just self-deprecation. I don't particularly enjoy grinding speedruns. If I'm running a single category for more than a few weeks, I'm probably getting bored or frustrated by it. I like being someone who shows other people cool parts of a game that they're missing out on. I was happy to get the vortex record back when I did, but what made me even happier was seeing the number of vortex runners more than triple in the years since. But I just don't think that's going to happen with 80 Dragons.

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I am good at this game now. That still feels weird to say, but I don't think I can really deny it. I'm not really in world record contention for a main category, but I am the only person to have a top 10 time in the three most run categories, and I still think I'm going to keep improving in the years to come.

Before I started speedrunning, I never really felt like I was particularly good at anything. I wasn't even particularly good at other games. I wasn't a trainwreck in all aspects of life, but I wasn't ever really doing anything remarkable either. I've also heard a lot of other speedrunners express similar feelings.

I think it's good that I've found something to feel good at, but I still find myself falling into old mental habits of writing myself off without giving myself much of a chance. It's something that I need to actively catch myself doing so I can stop it.

I came into 80 Dragons the same way I came into every other category. Try to find something new. Show the better players how much time there still is to improve here. Leave happy knowing that I made my mark.

But that isn't how this is playing out. Other players already left this category unoptimized. I am now the good player coming in to clean up. I got the record by 2 seconds, but I know I can do at least 30 or 40 seconds better. If I can figure out some route improvements, I could even take that up to a minute of improvement.

And I want to make that improvement! I actually am enjoying seeing the improvement. It's all the fun I get from improving my 120% pb, except this time I'm at the top of the board, and there's nothing but my own expectations to compare against.

I have had plenty of concrete examples to show myself that I have gotten better at this game. I did not expect my improvement to show itself as a fundamental change in my mentality when approaching new categories. I am surprised to see myself with expectations of being good at something. I don't feel like I have to tell myself that I'm good at it. I just actually really feel it for the first time. I hope this can extend beyond Spyro, and maybe my mental health is taking an upswing, but we'll see about that.

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I don't really have a conclusion to this post since this is just rambly feeling stuff, but here's the new record if anyone is interested.

Right, let me see if I can dig into this a little... so, it's true that I can get bored fairly easily, and often come up with new ideas to keep myself entertained. And I do like to push my limits as a writer, trying my damnedest to grapple with ideas and writing techniques few or none have grappled with before. Yet, I am beginning to realize there are serious anxieties underlying this urge that harm me more than they help me.

I used to enjoy repeating myself, at least when I felt very strongly I'd conceived something worth repeating. I hammered on favorite concepts over and over, I sprinkled certain turns of phrase throughout my work both as clues to connective threads, and simply because I enjoyed echoing them. But within the past few years, I've developed this clawing conviction that once I depict a concept, oh, that's it, it's done, there's no further interest to be had.

Use an idea in flash fiction or a short story? Well, that's dead now, it no longer exists for Ashy. Iterate on things? Create a web of common themes? Flesh out those ideas in greater detail in longer stories at some point in the future? Nope! Can't do any of that! Once others have seen it from me once, they never want to see it again!

And I've grown used to thinking of this as "just the way I do things," which is technically accurate, but... is it really how I want to? I'm surrounded by beings that genuinely enjoy seeing the same ideas over and over, often from the same creators, and not infrequently with minimal changes. Satisfying things remain satisfying, even when repeated. In some cases they even grow more satisfying. Yet whenever I write, I wrestle with this strange conviction that this doesn't apply to me, that I exist under a different standard to everyone else, that I am only worth paying attention to so long as I'm always doing something different.

This probably has its origins at the intersection of my abandonment issues and my creative anxieties, now that I think about it. I'm always afraid of being long-winded, of writing densely, even though that's my favorite thing to do. Even as I see writers, most especially Tolkien, with similar dense tangential styles continue to resonate with new readers right up to the present, I am driven before the constant instinct that I can't do that, that I won't get anywhere.

I'm... I'm genuinely not sure where to start untangling this one. Identifying the problem's one thing, and it's a start, but... I'm truly struggling to fathom how I can return to enjoying the simple repetition of favorite things. I've seen flash-fiction accounts that largely thrive on repeating the same scenario and the same beats, albeit with different wording, on the daily. In fact, they invariably achieve way more success than I do!

So, I'm clearly standing in my own way here, and I want the things I love to retain their charm even after I've done them a thousand times, a million, an infinity of times, but... I'm not even able to comprehend what that would feel like. At the cognitive level, I am genuinely unable to imagine how doing this feels for the creators that do it.

Well... this one's going to take some sorting...