An overdue video essay update: Luca and Zelda

So I meant to have the Luca video out by now. I was actually maintaining a pretty good pace, but I had to step away from it because I had a trip to go on, and then I needed to fulfill my obligation to do a playthrough for the quarterly patreon vote, and then I suddenly found out that I was moving house.

I'm coming up on the one month "anniversary" of moving into a new house with Andrew, and I'm admittedly very disoriented and lacking routine. I haven't really made videos for the third channel, nor have I been able to work on video essay scripts. I haven't even cut my hair lol. I've kinda just been doing the bare minimum to keep the let's play channel moving, and the rest goes into trying to figure my life out, responding to unexpected social plans, and generally feeling tired otherwise.

Frustratingly, I meant to have more frequent updates about video essays for my Patreon supporters. Progress reports, at the very least. Posting script fragments made sense to me, but in reality I have such an annoying nonlinear approach to writing that my own WIP scripts always felt unpresentable. I thought that I'd get them into a better state first, but then months pass by and the result is me being continually silent on the topic. Whoops.

So here's some shitty WIPs, for people who are into that sort of thing. First up is my Queer Reading of Luca, which is itself a response to the weird comments I got in response to my opening section about Luca in the Beastars video. It's both a straightforward queer reading of the movie, and a response to the narratives that people use to silence queer voices. When I left off I was nearly finished with the first and was gearing up to tackle the latter.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bOfR8QG90R121v8cwvvHil31_LCwsvRrydZpv25HdyA/edit?usp=sharing

What really hurts my pride is that Luca was meant to be an easy, small side project, so the complications that have arisen have been frustrating. I'm just really bad at writing video essays, I guess. Like, I think they're fairly good? But I'm bad at actually getting them written.

The project that Luca was meant to be a break from was my video about The Zelda Formula. Basically, I think Echoes of Wisdom and Tears of the Kingdom are fairly bad, so I was going to trace the changes made within the franchise back to their origins: Breath of the Wild, A Link Between Worlds, and Skyward Sword, to see where the series lost its way.

At first I was like, wow, I'm writing so many words! Writing about video games is so easy, since I talk about them all the time, look at me go! But I think I lost sight of my planned structure for the video. It's meandering and unwieldy, and will like require a full rewrite at a later date. In particular, I need to reel back my instinct to write full reviews of Echoes of Wisdom and Tears of the Kingdom where I complain about other things that don't reinforce my thesis.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1B78GIkX1JLeMriNL7v9fRbzcvU8IzHbkxrcA0CiwFFc/edit?usp=sharing

I also got sucked into this whole tangent where I was recording myself playing through the main story of TOTK while engaging with the building mechanics as little as possible, and documenting how often the game actually requires you to attach a thing to another thing to continue, let alone actually build a contraption. I wanted to make a point about how superfluous the whole mechanic tends to be despite how much focus it gets. But my Switch has been dying and frequently overheats, and dedicating so much time to a non-let's play gameplay is obviously a lot to stack on top of my schedule, so I shelved this whole mess to do Luca for a bit.

Which kind of gets to the larger struggle. Once upon a time in a Patreon Q&A someone asked if I would ever make video essays since I like them so much. I said no, because there's no way that I would ever have the time. And I was correct? But I started doing them anyway. I was able to do this because, frankly, I was a huge loser with no social life and we were also on the tail end of the pandemic. Ironically, all the furry stuff that came from my Beastars and Adastra videos has led to me forming a ton of connections with people, going out into the world, and having more of a life, which has made it so much harder to juggle all of these creative projects all of the time.

The difference between a video essay and, like, a drawing, is that you can just look at your drawing to know what it looks like, and decide what you should do next, even if you haven't looked at it in a month. A video essay script is just 10,000 words on a white page. You have to read the whole thing again every time you want to even assess where you are on the whole thing. And then you have to interpret where the hell you were trying to go with it, and by then you might be a kinda different person? So maybe you don't even feel that way anymore. Sometimes you have a new perspective to add, but sometimes you just kinda lose the whole thing and aren't sure if you even want to continue it.

I think it's this part, the bit where I inevitably have to pick up a project that I had to step away from when life got in the way, that is the biggest obstacle that stops me from finishing anything.

IDK, I need to figure it out, or what to prioritize, but I also need to figure out how to function healthily day to day, too. Anyway, don't be too surprised if I get further sidetracked and pump out a short script about Eminem. That's not really even a joke.