November Of 2020, Red Barrels Did A Charity Stream For Extralife That Was Pretty Lowkey. Sadly, Only

november of 2020, red barrels did a charity stream for extralife that was pretty lowkey. sadly, only a few people attended, so i’d like to document the info we got from writer jt petty for the fandom!

i’ll divide what we discussed during red barrels’ charity stream into sections: games and comics. some of this could be misremembered or misquoted, but i’m trying to stick by the facts that i recall.

OUTLAST & WHISTLEBLOWER:

outlast is, as a matter of fact, under the ‘dating sim’ category on steam. jt says that he wrote a lot of the characters in this mindset. he also said it probably says more about him than the characters.

miles is the kind of guy to get fussed about the difference between ‘carport’ and 'garage’ and 'eclair’ and 'boston creme’. this is about the only insight we got into his personality, because jt couldn’t talk about him: miles and waylon were pretty firmly off limits.

as for waylon, his taste in music is heavy metal! he’s kind of the cool dad, or at least perpetuates the cool dad myth. he would definitely play mario kart with his two boys. gamer dad!

chris walker was from a military family. after returning home from afghanistan, he struggled to make a return to normalcy, and didn’t have many connections to others nor friendships. jt doesn’t believe he was ever involved romantically. he said that he feels chris was in the process of trying to heal by looking for something to protect. chris is also his and vincent’s favorite character.

father martin enjoyed painting landscapes before the art therapy program was cut by helen grant, according to red barrels. when asked if he liked bob ross, they responded, ‘who doesn’t?’ when my friend said that he was the creepiest character in outlast, jt said that’s totally on her.

rick trager was born into money, and his father’s estate and success made it nigh impossible for him to measure up to his legacy. he was the classic disappointment son of a billionaire and never lived up to his father’s expectations. in a bit of trivia, we learned his favorite food is croissants: spinach croissants in particular, because he hates himself. jt also mentioned that rick likely believed he would really profit from selling the body parts he amputated from the variants and miles, and figured he would make out just fine. and that, ‘he probably will.’ if he had a dog, it would probably be something sickly and overbred, like a pug.

langin is named after jt’s wife. he names characters he dislikes after people he likes, and vice versa.

jeremy blaire is probably the most reprehensible character in outlast: the one who is most capable of assuming responsibility for his actions, a face to the name of the murkoff corporation. he enjoys christmas because of the capitalist reason for the season. he would probably give pretty lousy and cheap gifts to his employees. he’s named after two people jt likes.

furthermore, murkoff isn’t the sort of company that gives permission for holiday parties during work hours: if you want to celebrate at all, you do it on your own time or your break.

frank manera would probably be a fan of phil collins’ music since his songs often have a very slow buildup before the payoff. jt interestingly compared this to cannibalism, and how it requires dedicated patience. frank had to go without before indulging in human meat.

frank would most likely get along very well with eddie if they’d met under different circumstances, such as at a party. he sees the two of them as being very unlikely friends, the two dissimilar guys you never expect to get along as well as they do.

eddie was jt’s favorite character to write for due to his ‘flirtatious’ and fun dialogue. he truly believes in his delusions, or rather that they aren’t delusions at all; he was described as being blind to everything else around him when he thinks that he’s in love. if he had a dog, it would be a corgi.

OUTLAST II:

lynn was inspired by people jt has met in the film industry, and her ambition highlights that.

knoth is pretty cultured when it comes to his taste in music, and he has a lot of knowledge of older artists. i believe jt said that he mostly enjoys the blues. if he had a dog, it would have attachment issues and be extremely eager to please, like a shepherd or cattle dog.

marta’s goal of becoming perfectly brainwashed to the doctrine of temple gate was realized. in trying to please knoth, she erased any lingering doubts or traces of guilt in what she was doing, and she no longer feels much emotion at all due to how she has absorbed the cult’s mentality. she is ultimately feared because she is the perfect example of obedience to knoth.

she/her pronouns were used for val. jt corrected himself quickly to they/them, but it still stands.

jenny roland, the pathologist mentioned in documents in both the underground lab from outlast and well-hidden field report from the lake chapter of outlast 2, may very well make an appearance in future games. she seems to be quite important, as jt couldn’t talk about her outside of one personality detail i got out of him: she doesn’t wear either slippers or socks in her home because she’s a clean freak and instead goes barefoot. she’s the sort of person to have everything neatly organized in her home, all the shoes lined up by the door, and not a speck of dust in sight. he was pretty genuinely surprised by all the interest in her character, and red barrels suggested making joke merch for her. socks and maybe fingerless gloves? i’d honestly buy some jenny socks.

THE COMICS:

jt said that the pauls (the two murkoff legal mitigation officers, paul marion and pauline glick) are going to be increasingly relevant to the story of outlast as it continues, and that he has big plans to continue where the comics left off. given this tidbit, and the epilogue of the story, could we possibly see paul as future protagonist, or maybe in pauline’s case, a future major antagonist? at least there’s now solid hope for a follow up to the story of the comics, and possibly an explanation as to what led to paul and pauline’s injuries, as well as murkoff’s haste to find paul before he does further damage. his story left off with simon telling him that they have to find the walrider in order to find the answer to where his daughter alice has disappeared to, after all.

likewise, he hinted that alice marion (paul’s daughter) is also going to somehow be crucially important, making mention of the circumstances of her rare blood disease and experimental gene therapy treatment by the murkoff corporation not being any sort of coincidence, and saying that he has big plans for her. could this mean that simon was telling the truth about her connection to temple gate? is she somehow connected to the morphogenic engine? could this also be why pauline says that paul was her target from the beginning? mysterious!

he talked about how the concept for paul marion was created, and how at his core, he’s just a guy doing a job. his dreamcast for paul would be philip seymour hoffman.

a bit of interesting talk about the 'personality’ of the walrider when questioned if miles likes dogs. since his neighbor says they like him, but they reacted violently to his returned presence at his apartment after the mount massive incident, i asked if miles likes dogs as well as they like him. jt and red barrels implied, rather than stating outright, that the walrider itself doesn’t like dogs. it was also mentioned that it’s very protective and overly defensive, very attached to one person, and unwilling to share. interesting attributes given to something that isn’t supposed to be sentient. (edit: later confirmed by jt in one of the anniversary q&a videos to be a sort of sentient hive mind.)

simon peacock is named after the voice director the character himself was voiced by at the end of whistleblower. however, unlike the real simon peacock, the fictional simon is not from new zealand. is he faking an accent? his character will also be further explored as the story continues!

MISCELLANEOUS:

i knew that trials was a topic that couldn’t be talked about, but still suggested my theory on the story connecting back to the mkultra documents found in mount massive in the first game. jt asked if i was someone from red barrels trying to get him in trouble. i think this speaks for itself. :)

he has a giant pet lop bunny named holly! 10/10! would donate to the cause again just for her!

red barrels said that they’re still accepting merch ideas before reopening the store, and to message them if there’s anything in particular anyone would be interested in seeing. the physical copy of the comics will be restocked in the future, and they may restock other items previously seen in the store. they like to make joke merch, too, so keep that in mind!

and that’s about everything outlast related that i can recollect! is there anything you guys are excited about in particular? personally, i’m totally psyched about the hints towards resolving the comics, and the importance of the marions going forward, since they’ve been my favorite characters for quite a long time. feel free to correct anything here if i’ve misquoted. it’s been a few weeks, and my original notes were very short and to the point.

I love Mae Borowski so much, I wish college dropouts were real </3

Nightmare eyes family

Some of my favorite Outlast Steam reviews

The brain scramblies have got me again and I have been thinking a lot about the way WWDITS’s portrayal of male queerness has changed so much since the original movie. So I wrote … a lot of words about it!

What We Do In The Shadows’ Changing Portrayal Of Male Queerness Through The Medium Of The Girlfriend Trope

Come with me on this journey!

PART ONE: What We Do In The Shadows (2014 movie): We Have Girlfriends But You Wouldn’t Know Them Because They Go To Another School

Are the vampires in this movie queer? Yes. But also no.

The original What We Do movie came out in 2014 but it was filmed in 2012, and I think it can be seen as part of the long tail of the 00s homosocial movie. Think LOTR, think Ocean’s 11 (there’s a reason why it’s Sean’s favourite franchise but we’ll get to that later): we’re talking movies that create an intricate all-male world in which all of the characters’ needs are fulfilled by their best bros - and yet it still isn’t, like, gay gay.

As viewers we know this because there is always a Girlfriend, in the periphery, someone who absolutely no one really wants to be there but who has to be, because she’s proving the essential heterosexuality of the situation. This is the Girlfriend trope we are going to track throughout this deep dive! Please note that I have all the respect for the actors and writers involved in creating these Girlfriends, and also of you if they are beloved characters for you. I’m not trying to be controversial, I’m just digging into what I personally think they represent in the story.

OK. In the What We Do In the Shadows movie, vampirism is a thing that guys do together after dark. They live together, they sketch each other and get dressed up in gay little outfits, they do cute dances for each other, they are totally immersed in each other. The thing that they are doing in the shadows is, quite clearly, gay sex. But it also isn’t, because at crucial moments, The Girlfriend appears.

The female characters in the WWDITS movie are the weakest part of it, I think, and a big part of that is because no one really wants them to be there. Both Katherine, the object of Viago’s quest for eternal love, and Vlad’s ex the Beast, are The Girlfriend of this movie. They’re interlopers into the world (literally, in the case of the film’s other main female character, desperate familiar Jackie) - they’re outside the polycule and when they appear it’s kind of a storytelling buzzkill. I think this is especially true for Katherine - Viago’s obsessive desire to find her again is so at odds with the rest of the movie. But they’ve got to be there, because otherwise viewers would have no choice but to see that the male vampires are a polycule.

Basically, the WWDITS movie is a perfect encapsulation of 00s/early 10s on-screen have-your-cake-but-the-cake-can’t-exist male queerness: it’s there but it’s not, you see it but you can’t, and The Girlfriend swoops in to ensure that heterosexuality is maintained at the end of the story.

PART 2: 1. What We Do In The Shadows (2019 TV show) season 1: We Are Definitely The Kind Of People Who Might Have Girlfriends. Look, One Of Us Is Even Married!

And then came … the WWDITS TV show. Launched five years later, we’re out of the era of homosociality and into the era of saying a character is gay once, getting anxious about it and not really doing anything with it.

I think this season is most notable for what it can’t even imagine doing. There can be a canonically queer vampire now, but he isn’t particularly happy or settled in himself - he’s married The Girlfriend and the result is not overwhelmingly positive. Nadja and Laszlo first appear as spouses basically chained together for eternity. Their fights aren’t even horny: they’re just angry with each other, trapped in compulsory monogamous heterosexuality. We do get a very clear indication very early on that Laszlo is bi (he and Nadja have both had affairs with the Baron), but it’s something he seems to be hiding from her, and seeing as an affair rather than as part of a polyamorous relationship.

Nadja’s also hiding her affair with Jeff from Laszlo. Where I think the TV show really has moved on from the movie is that in this iteration, the Girlfriend has enough self-awareness to HATE being there as much as the men are uncomfortable having her there. Nadja in season 1 is emotionally not very present, and all of her plots take place away from the group. She’s dreaming of having another life away from her husband - she’s so far from the happy, horny season 4 Nadja, who loves fucking her husband and loves fucking other people and is just generally having a great time. But season 1 could not quite conceive of that as a relationship to show on screen. The Girlfriend is still being used in opposition to male queerness.

There’s one more thing to mention about season one, and that’s the character of Guillermo. He’s basically the new Jackie, and I think it’s really interesting that he’s been gender flipped. Fellas, is it gay to have a man hold your hand as you get out of your coffin each night?? The show absolutely knows it is from episode 1 - the lack of any Jackie-like presence makes what Nandor and Guillermo are doing in the shadows intrinsically, quietly gay, even though neither of them have been allowed to acknowledge that yet.

2. WWDITS TV season 2: We Love Our Girlfriends But Sometimes We Just Need To Jack Off Our Ghost Selves Too

This season aired in 2020, during the first year of the pandemic. Culturally, this was the moment when a lot of people got stuck in their houses for long enough to realise that they were queer and/or trans. It was a real time!

Mirroring that, this is definitely the transitional season in terms of queer representation in the show. We get the first unequivocally on-screen queer moment with Laszlo and his ghost self in the second episode, and the first real hints that something is Going On emotionally between Guillermo and Nandor, but it’s also still shaking off season 1’s anxieties about getting too gay.

This is the season that introduces Sean, and I think there’s a reason for that. I said I’d get to Sean and Ocean’s 12, and here we are. Sean’s favourite Ocean’s movie is 12, and obviously we’re supposed to think this is hilarious, since it’s objectively the least beloved movie in the franchise. But I think the gag might also be that it illuminates something about Sean’s worldview. Ocean’s 12 is the movie where Rusty (inexplicably) Gets A Girlfriend. It’s the No Homo movie of the series. Sean, just like Rusty and Danny, loves his bros. He loves Laszlo so much! But also, no homo! Sean’s a throwback to 2014 WWDITS but he’s also a careful guardrail - because of the standards of media representation in 2020, there still has to be a straight man (hah) somewhere, and Sean is it.

Meanwhile, under cover of Sean, the vampires and their friends are getting queerer in season 2. Laszlo’s equal-opportunity horniness is becoming the warm, sweet non-joke that it continues to be throughout the series. Nadja and Laszlo are less chained resentfully to each other and more delighted by each other’s queer sexuality. And Nadja has found her own Girlfriend! The moment that Doll Nadja turns up, Nadja’s character is allowed to really switch on. She’s not playing in opposition to the men any more - she’s allowed to shine in her own right, and have her own stuff going on. I love this for her!

I actually think that this is the theme of season 2: all of the potential Girlfriends have their own shit going on. The Guide is busy with her job (and she’s only into Guillermo, anyway), Nadja’s busy with herself - the only women who show much interest in the male vampires are the witches. And it’s the kind of interest they’re showing that makes them a new version of the Girlfriend trope in the franchise. They literally steal the male vampires away from the house/ Guillermo, but they’re not trying to have a relationship with them any more, they’re just trying to … fuck them to death for their sperm.

Guillermo defeats them in about ten minutes, of course, because he’s Guillermo - but he does it by suggesting that he should be the one to collect the vampires’ sperm. He’s literally cutting out the middle…women - fellas, is it gay to collect your friends’ sperm and sell it on the black market?

3. WWDITS TV season 3: Everyone Has A Girlfriend Except Us, Two Male Best Friends Who Definitely Do Not Have Feelings For Each Other

It’s 2021, year 2 of the pandemic, and everyone is giving fewer and fewer shits about pretending to be straight any more. So the on-screen queerness is really ramping up now. Laszlo’s getting more and more enamoured with Sean, Laszlo and Nadja are now open and delighted about being poly, Guillermo almost gets to come out (but gets cock blocked) and Nandor’s girlfriend hunt just turns into a series of hilarious rom-com-like beats in which more and more people tell him more and more clearly to just fucking marry Guillermo already.

We have two women in this season who fit the Girlfriend trope (with some more twists): Meg and Gail.

Meg first! Nandor, of course, falls in ‘love’ with Meg and tries to woo her, and after he initially fails sends all the male characters in to try to woo her in disguise. Meg is having none of it because she is a lesbian (in 2021, the Girlfriend can be queer too), but in the course of things she does manage to tell both Nandor and Guillermo disguised as Nandor that they have feelings for each other. This is so fascinating to me because it’s a complete inversion of the Girlfriend in the previous movie era - the Girlfriend is now not just being co-opted into an mlm queer love story, but she’s actually helping the hapless lovers realise they like each other.

The real Girlfriend in this season, though, is Gail (*Nadja voice*: I LIKE GAIL!!). And the way Gail is used is, I think, also hugely interesting. She’s another sign that the WWDITS TV writers are starting to create a world where the dial-a-girlfriend plot device isn’t all they can imagine for their queercoded male hero any more.

The whole I LIKE GAIL! joke is funny because it’s absolutely not true, but it’s also working at a meta level. Nadja’s speaking for the audience: as usual with the Girlfriend, no one likes that Gail is dating Nandor. We all want her to piss off, and when she does we’re thrilled. Again, she’s actually being used in the way an extra girl in the second or third season of a sitcom about straight roommates would be, to drive the two romantic leads together. The writers know Gail’s annoying, and they want us to come to the conclusion that she’s wrong for Nandor … because there’s someone else in the house who’d fit him much better. It’s a standard sitcom plot, but it’s very rarely used to signal a queer connection between two main characters the way it is here.

Nandor’s fixation on the idea of true love being something only a woman can provide is basically the same as Viago’s in the WWDITS movie, but by 2021 it’s been turned into an unmistakeable joke, not a worthwhile quest - a sign that he’s not alive to what he actually wants. But even so, he’s allowing himself to act in increasingly queer ways - in the Wellness Center episode he gets to be the damsel in distress, saved by his big strong bodyguard Guillermo, and his limp-wristed moment in The Portrait could truly not be more gay if he was trying (but I think it’s pretty clear he was trying).

Which sets us up nicely for …

4. WWDITS TV season 4: We Have Girlfriends But We Also Have Weird Feelings About Marrying Them (Because We Are In Fact Gay)

Here we go, here we go, here we fucking go. By 2022, all of those gender and sexuality feelings everyone was having in lockdown are finally hitting our TV screens. This is the year of Our Flag Means Death and A League Of Our Own, and this is the year that WWDITS goes full queer. The vampires are gay, they’re poly, they will fuck you, they will fuck anyone (except for their best friend who they are in love with).

Nadja and Laszlo are fully poly, Laszlo is a queer dad raising his boy with about three different husbands, Guillermo finally gets his big coming-out moment (yay) and (in my very favourite WWDITS moment ever) Laszlo and Nandor get a scene where they yell about reaming each other.

Meanwhile, it’s not hard to work out who the Girlfriend of this season is - and also to see how she’s now being used by the franchise, once again, in pursuit of the gay agenda.

Having struck out with several real-life Girlfriends, Nandor decides to make his own by asking the Djinn to resurrect his 37 wives. Of course, wife is a gender non-specific term to Nandor by season 4 - but he still has heterosexuality as endgame in his head so clearly that he bins all of his guy wives and ends up with girl wife Marwa.

A lot of people have objected to the show’s treatment of Marwa, but I think the key to understanding her place in the story is to realise that she isn’t real. The actual Marwa is dead, and this version of her is literally a re-animated idealised doll, being used by Nandor to shove between himself and Guillermo as a cover for all of the dangerous Gay Feelings For His Best Friend he’s having.

This, I think, is the major change between season 3 and season 4: in season 4 the Girlfriend is being puppeted by one of the queer characters, not just the writers. When Nandor doesn’t want her there (like in the Night Market, when he wants to have a sexy fight with Guillermo) she goes away, but when he needs to use her to prove that he’s cool and normal and still essentially straight (parts of the Grand Opening, The Wedding) she’s there. But still, for all that she is a doll, Marwa tries so hard to have agency. She’s trapped in layers of obedience spells so deep that she hugs and kisses her own love rival at her wedding because she knows Nandor would want to, but she still manages to create her own man cave during the Go Flip Yourself episode. She’s actually an incredibly nuanced and interesting Girlfriend, even with all of the constraints of her plotline. I like her a lot!

Which, of course, brings us to the last few episodes of the season, and Freddie. Fellas, is it gay to turn your reanimated wife into a clone of your best man’s boyfriend???

The Freddie plot is another big turning point in the evolution of the Girlfriend trope, and queerness, in WWDITS. Things are so gay at this point that shoving another woman in between Guillermo and Nandor will no longer cut it - only another man could possibly do. Freddie is the final Girlfriend of season 4, the GirlBoyfriend if you will - his function isn’t, by now, to reaffirm heterosexuality, but to keep up the fiction that what Nandor and Guillermo have been doing in the shadows hasn’t been a loving queer relationship all along.

5. What Next For Our Gay Bros?

And that’s where we are at the end of season 4! I’m looking forward to season 5, when hopefully Guillermo and Nandor will stop titting about and just become each other’s girlfriend. We can but hope.