DAYS 3 AND 4 OF PARATOBER

DAYS 3 AND 4 OF PARATOBER

Day 3: Time

Day 4: Lost

PARATOBER DAY 9: EASTER EGG

posting this one by itself because i am very proud of it

PARATOBER DAYS 5 AND 6

Day 5: Internet

Day 6: Loud

Ive seen many people talk about the tsp fanon lately so im gonna throw my hat into the ring today...

Something that i really miss when it comes to the tsp community is the fact that it made 0 sense. Ive said this before about the line's design briefly, however it really applies to the ENTIRETY of the game. It's designed to be a meta-narrative.

Of what? Does it matter? Why should the game care what it is and isn't trying to convey? These are all very good questions, and answering them completely neglects the point im trying to make here– this game is absolute nonsense.

There's many, MANY pieces of this game that can be picked apart and analysed to hell and back, however once you zoom out of your narrow view of this word-spaghetti of a game, you realise that the rest of the story is just a mess of letters and mysteriously placed numbers scattered throughout the bowl.

Don't get me wrong, theres a lot of intentional subtexts and messages hiding among the goofs and gags, however that's not what hooked you on the game, is it?

What kind of game adds a bucket that alters every single pathway for no apparent reason? What kind of game would intentionally pick out a single review from steam and in response completely turn it on its head in the most horrifying way possible? What kind of game lets you COMPLETELY derail the entire "story" just so you can piss off that old man???

As much as I love all of the headcanons, and the designs, and the 'making sense of the world around them', this fandom has proven that if you attempt to rationalise and build on EVERY single thing in this game, you're eventually going to end up with an entirely different cast of characters.

By all means, keep making fanon! Keep making designs! Keep making OCs, AUs, Headcanons! Make the things you love! But please, by all means, do not forget how ridiculous the source material is...

not to rain on everyone's parade, but sometimes i do think there's something almost sad to me about the fact that I have seen so much stanley parable fandom content that exclusively revolves around alternate universes that have progressively grown further and further off-track from the narrative of the original game to an extent that i find barely recognizable at times. something about how whether or not it's true (i can't tell people that they don't enjoy something 'enough', i have no metric by which to measure how cherished the original is to people making this content) it almost feels like one of those cases where fanon precedes canon in terms of how much enjoyment people find in the content, as if people wanted the story to be *more* than it was to an extent that makes them override the original mentally. i think it doesn't help that a lot of people perceive fandom content as existing to fill some kind of 'deficit' in an original work- to give people what they didn't get in the original, so to speak. you've probably heard the spiel about how tragic tales have the most coffee shop AUs drifting around in their fandom tags, and such. the difference is that in most cases, those coffee shop AUs aren't more commonly posted about than the source they're based on. i can't really say the same for the stanley parable at this point. people are so enamored with AUs and versions of the game's story involving modifications of the narrator or the limited range of setting laid out by the game itself that i'm sad to say i don't see people engaging much with actual moments from the game itself all that often.

is that just a matter of personal preference? yeah, totally, but it does make me sad. I really *like* the fact that the Parable is so limited. I think it does the narrative a massive service that there truly is no finite ending or escape, that the Narrator is never given form nor further interactability with the game, that nothing ever goes wrong or changes in a way that matters. It's a fundamental part of the narrative to me. Changing that is fun to people, and I get that- but at some point to me it just feels like so much about what I love about the game's narrative is just being reduced to the meaningless backdrop to shipping and the opportunity for something people Want to see more.

umm i need reassurance that my presence is wanted but i can’t ask for reassurance because that’s really Embarrassing and it wouldn’t feel genuine if i asked for it