spoilers for PALISADE up to the start of the finale (PALISADE 46) as I consider perennial, gur sevraq, and some ways to interpret their roles in the podcast
there are many reasons to think about perennial as a GM, author, or player stand-in. game metaphors come up a few times: her magic is compared to reloading a save in a video game in PAL, three-fold repetition in chess is called "Perennialās rule" back in PZN. both her physical and narrative positioning establish her as someone who has to act through others, is defined by distance and arbitrary rules, has a certain set of available tools or heroes or characters available to play with. she likes to bring back her old toys (Vessel's Gold's arms, Gur Sevraq, the Day's Eye, the Hellebore). sometimes she gets new ones.
gur sevraq is also in a similar position, but rather than an author I'd call him perennial's narrator (figure?). I'm lacking some terminology here, but I think gur's status is distinct from someone like layer luxurious or particular emphasis. he always exists in relation to a god (GM, author, player) and he has been able to address the audience from the start. as his role has evolved, he can narrate even when it doesn't make logical sense for him to be audible or recorded.
gur, perennial's narrator, who was the first in the PARTIZAN trilogy to dare the audience to draw a new shape, has had all his works dismantled and it has become clear that he, too, was compromised from the beginning. and they were compromised from the beginning because they live under an empire and because they were being used by perennial and autonomy itself. the shape of empire is fractal. now his voice weakens and becomes one of many. they cannot speak for or with perennial.
it's interesting, with all that in mind, that perennial's authorial (etc.) qualities became more overt in PALISADE while her ineffectuality has also been increasingly underscored. if some of the questions perennial and gur bring the audience to ask are: what should we do in the face of despair? can the world really be changed as capitalism and fascism continue to entrench themselves? how do we go on knowing that we will never be uncompromised and free of our material conditions? then considering them as author and narrator we could also ask: is it worth it to speculate? what is the point of doing so if it does not change the world? what if our creative voices are co-opted into just another thread in the fabric of empire that constrains us? what if the fact that our very ability to imagine at all already came from a world of constraint means our dreams, too, are compromised? etc.
this feels especially potent as PALISADE is so far the FaTT season with the most straightforwardly heroic main characters, who are capable of almost warping reality around them to that end. but they're on palisade, which is now in the mirage, which is temporally, spacially, and metaphysically distinct from what you could call the real world of the galaxy surrounding. it's almost a microcosm of speculative possibility. we have yet to see if a potential victory within the mirage can break through back into the wider world.
note also that this speculative bubble is one perennial (seemingly?) finds it difficult to affect, and very loud... as though the play moves itself. or as if, ultimately, it is not through one author or speaker or one way of imagining how to break the wheel that we will ever manage to do it.
there's a lot more to say about how the speculative and the material are being structured in this story. it's not like the story and play of this podcast can be summed up with a single interpretational lens. these are just some things I'm thinking about!
