Tsp Spoilers - Tumblr Posts

argiepeppersalt

2 years ago

Oh. My. God. Oh my god. OH MY GOD-

the big fucking bucket post aka the big bucket fucking post

the stanley parable emotional support bucket is

a series of sitcom gags

a pre-empting of complaints about the sequel tainting the original content by doing it, like, super hard, but on purpose

a level of stale overfamiliarity with the office that leads you to recklessly squeeze every last bit of amusement from it

the secret theater from metal gear solid 3

it's also one of the narrator's most openly neurotic creations, which means that it was created to cope with something! it was created to cope with the original stanley parable, not only as a game, but as an experience he's gone through.

let's go through the whole thing. it all operates on two levels, the commentary level and the character level. the bucket offers various commentaries on sequels, but those only come into being through the narrator projecting his various anxieties and longings on it.

we know that the skip button incident (the wait for the sequel) gave the narrator the chance to completely reevaluate his priorities and his past. the subsequent reset didn't entirely erase these revelations, but i think it did bury them at the unspoken, unrealised level that would require a bucket as an intermediary for expressing them.

yes, my take is that everyone's the bucket and the bucket's everyone and i'm officially an accomplice to the joke.

receiving the bucket

commentary:

[EXPO] A common complaint of The Stanley Parable was that it was confusing and paradoxical. That it engendered a chaotic sense of reckless despair in those who played it. Well, I'm happy to say that, after much consideration, I've engineered a clever solution to this fundamental problem with the game. And to be honest it's a much more convenient solution for me than actually re-designing the game to be less uncomfortable. Can you imagine what a pain in the ass that would be?

making your work more palatable to a broader audience at the expense of its uniqueness and so on.

character:

well, the narrator still hasn't gotten over his craving for universal validation. of all the things he could've taken away from the memory zone, it was being UNNNNNNFUNNY.

when i first played through the expo, i had absolutely no idea that these gimmicks were more than one-offs. i was positively blown away by the new title screen, watched it for two hours and passed out.

when the bucket returned, i thought that it would make the endings "make sense" by conventional game logic, that it would rob the stanley parable of its spirit, and there'd be an arc about how that rings hollow, and then that'd get the narrator to lay off the people-pleasing for a bit. that is, in itself, conventional story logic.

the very first ending i thought of was the countdown ending, and i imagined that the bucket would be the secret key to defeating the narrator in an honest-to-god boss battle, and it would be lame.

and i think that would've been interesting enough, the narrator giving you the key to "defeat" him when both of you have long since moved past taking the fight seriously, going through the motions for someone else's benefit - god knows who.

but it's not even that. it's not even that!

he completely refuses to harm you at all! none of the bucket endings make more sense or are in any way less unsettling than the originals (and it's cute to think that he tried, but simply has no idea what is and isn't unsettling to humans), the fundamental difference is something entirely unrelated.

the narrator now seems ready to take the game on as a team. he goes along with whatever you want to do. he doesn't write any more scathing takedowns of you as a person. even when you're making your way through the office, he no longer scolds you for taking the wrong turns, he simply justifies it on the fly - the bucket told you to go there, or maybe not, nevermind, whatever.

[SKIP] I have had time to think about you, and about us, and about everything we've been through. I've had so much time.

the disobedience doesn't upset him anymore. it doesn't thrill him to reassert his authority, either. he can't even pretend that he's still the same person, he can't even perform the role for the new content.

[SKIP] To begin with, there is only regret. There is only the turning wheel of missed opportunities. I felt nothing at all but regret for the longest time, Stanley. Days, months, I lost it all in a blur of the deepest longing to undo the past.

the bucket is very literally an opportunity to return to the past, to redo the endings. he created it for this purpose. what is he actually concerned with, then? the story? the critics? is there anything else?

[SKIP] Not the outcomes, not the story, none of that matters anymore. I'll give it all up, I'll give up every branching path, I'll burn my story to the ground! One single thing I need - and god I can see now that I need it more than anything - is to know that someone else is taking it in.

the narrator plays what barely even qualifies as a trick here, which is that he acts as if the bucket endings are naturally-occurring around the bucket. he narrates it as if the bucket's presence is by itself enough to change everything.

what's actually happening here is that the time for you to make choices is over, and now it's time for the narrator to redo his own choices, the choices that were never treated as such, the choices that have been so naturalised and obscured and set in stone all this time. and he's choosing to be someone you can be with.

[SKIP] And surely you'll put your own desire to see what's next ahead of my need for company, for companionship. Surely you'll not be so moved by my howls of fitful anxiety that you sit with me and just stay here.

he's going back and, over and over, he's choosing companionship over power. these are the scenarios he keeps writing you into, or trying to write you into, with just enough deviations to not make it entirely repetitive.

the bucket only gives him an excuse to break out of the established script - which, of course, raises the question of whether he always could've done that, whether he was actually the one living in choice paralysis.

signs point to yes.

the countdown ending

commentary:

a very basic self-parody. it specifically stokes anticipation for and then denies you a revisit of the boss battle, but it honestly just feels like a secret theater-type gag.

character:

the ending is this: the narrator puts his entire heart and soul into narrating what it would be like to be cradled in stanley's arms and then they sit down and watch silly bird videos together, forever.

i'm genuinely embarrassed for him.

[NEW CONTENT] If you're still with me, why don't we just reset the game and we'll try to get back to what the Stanley Parable is really about. Just you and me having a great time together like always. What do you say, friend?

the narrator actually starts the game out by referring to himself and stanley as friends, on the same side, and so on, letting murders be bymurders. as soon as the bucket comes into play, however, he directly transitions to narrating the bucket in the position he previously narrated himself in.

[BUCKET COUNTDOWN] He squeezed the bucket tighter, his one friend in the entire world. At this point, he could trust no one except for the bucket. Two best friends, Stanley and the bucket, up against the world.

this later causes him to become jealous of an inanimate (???) object. it also causes stanley (not the player! stanley!) to become fiercely attached to it. stanley and the narrator are simultaneously using the same bucket to sublimate their desire for companionship. soon this situation will unravel like a rich tapestry of psychosexual horror.

The Big Fucking Bucket Post Aka The Big Bucket Fucking Post

the mariella ending

the apartment ending

commentary:

stanley fucked that bucket.

character:

the narrator wanted to fuck it, too.

the phone ending

this ending puts one fact into stark relief: the game does not inherently disintegrate because you unplug the phone. not when the narrator is able to go along with it, taking the blame for not being funny enough instead of accusing stanley of not laughing hard enough.

you know how the memory zone deteriorates along with the narrator's state of mind? you know how he becomes trapped inside that room simply because he's unable to stop fixating on his own perceived failings, how it seems to have physical consequences?

or how about when the narrator gets confused and it seems to directly result in the office building no longer making sense, how he starts using circular logic while you're pacing in a little circular room?

in this case, the only thing that happens to the office is that it rearranges exactly one room specifically to fuck up his comedic timing after he'd become fixated on improving his comedic timing. are we seeing a pattern here?

throughout this retread of the endings, there is a consistent shift of responsibility away from the idea of "the game" and towards the narrator himself. it wasn't that stanley ruined everything by deviating from the script. it was that the narrator was breaking down when faced with an unfamiliar situation, and since the office is so inextricably tied to his subconscious, he took it down with him.

[PHONE] It seems that this place is not well equipped to deal with reality.

he also ended up trapping himself all alone, forever. (a theme.)

every single speech about stanley's shortcomings was more accurately about himself. all the time he spent viciously blaming stanley for ruining everything, for being unable to make the right choices, for being stuck on a mindlessly repeating loop, for being overly anxious and reliant on others. increasingly, it becomes obvious that it was always just about himself.

meanwhile, stanley has the psychological fortitude to drag himself up four flights of stairs without a single unbroken bone in his body.

the confusion ending

commentary:

of course the most popular ending gets the revamp about whether sequels should simply repeat the most audience-pleasing points and trade on nostalgia. i also feel like they call every inanimate object and room in the game a character because they bore witness to the period of time where that's what every fan was doing, which is cute.

character:

the narrator tries to get stanley to destroy the bucket in a fit of what is now violent jealousy, under the guise of wanting to appeal to fans. the really funny part is that you literally cannot make stanley do this. this is it. this is the first time stanley's ever disobeyed the player. i am slowly being forced to consider him a character instead of a vessel.

he can be both at once, of course. it's never a good idea to try to pin anything in this game down, i'll be the first to admit to that.

[SKIP] I felt unburdened to manifest any particular outcome into being. I saw that I could allow myself to exist along all timelines and that each of them was simply a strand in the web of my being.

this piece of hard-earned wisdom also applies to the bucket's sentience status: when it's funny, yes. when it's funnier for them to be weaving themselves into a complex psychological web over a piece of metal, also yes. and anyway, making it up is all they have, they might as well be manifesting these things by thinking them.

what is a bucket?

the fact that stanley is not a bucket confirms that he has no circulatory systems of any kind. this is the only lore that matters.

the elevator ending

commentary:

it's about being utterly obsessed with something that is endlessly exciting to you and then finding that nobody else understands what the hell you're talking about and your behaviour is highly off-putting. writing 10k words about buckets, for example, and getting 10 notes.

putting it in relation to the bucketless elevator ending, it's also about a lack of repeat success, losing your audience, come on it's all pretty explicitly out there.

character:

so we've seen two scenarios: one, the narrator is the bucket. two, the narrator wishes he were the bucket. i really do think these ideas are worth keeping in mind to come to the complex conclusion of "the narrator is really quite incredibly needy".

well, here's number three, the bucket is stanley. stanley is the narrator. like, the narrator is casting stanley as the anxious creative, so he's really talking about himself when he's talking about stanley, and the bucket is stanley's perpetually silent friend who he can't quite seem to reach, so he's really talking about stanley when he's talking about the bucket. look, it's more simple than it sounds:

[BUCKET ELEVATOR] And the whole time, he looked to his bucket for a reaction of some kind, anything to let him know that the bucket appreciated what he was doing. The bucket conveyed absolutely nothing at all. Only silence.

i think this also ties back into the original phone ending, these fears of inadequacy, i really think they're a large part of why he freaked out so irreparably when he didn't know what story he could write with an unplugged phone, how he could deal with a real person.

[BUCKET ELEVATOR] He was unloved, uninteresting, he was a failure. And in that moment, Stanley knew that the bucket would never again take him seriously. There would be no connection, no deeper understanding. And Stanley, having for once in his life discovered the warmth and comfort of true companionship, was cast back into the unremarkable normalcy of loneliness.

my man is very very very very very very very scared of abandonment. especially now that he no longer has antagonism to use as a shield! he wanted stanley's approval in the original, as well, but it was a lot more reserved, a lot more easily discarded. even then, he got hurt.

the freedom ending

now we're coming full fucking circle. i am absolutely convinced that this is another "the bucket is the narrator" ending, and it just kind of unfolds into everything else from there.

this is another ending in which stanley and the bucket attempt to live happily ever after, of course. the game itself once again denies them their freedom, and they spend the rest of their lives trapped in the darkness together. that's the story the narrator tells.

come on. come on. that's just them. that's just narratorcore. it's not even the most narratorcore thing, the thing that really knocked me down this terrible path was him fantasising about what their life would look like:

Both of them wanted to begin watching a movie, any movie, then stop it halfway through and begin watching it in reverse from the end. True, it was a simple life they envisioned. But it was one they'd live together. With one another to lean on, to trust, to support, and to-

the avoidance of endings. the playful structural experimentation. the literal fact of the matter that the narrator spends the final sequence rewinding the game, that this is something he's preoccupied with.

that's literally exactly what he would do. that's just unfiltered yearning. that's visions of domesticity dancing in his head.

please think of how he'd denigrated the idea of domesticity in the original apartment ending, and think of how he craves anything so long as it's with someone else now. think of how he mocked stanley when we know he was just projecting. who'd wanna commit their life to you? beyond everything else, i think he was bitter.

nearly all of the bucket endings reflect on the narrator's role in the original endings, the narrator's relationship with stanley, and the narrator's ability to make his own choices, in a way that perfectly ties into the more explicit themes of the segments before and after the bucket endings.

it is a kind of character development, but the missing piece, i think, is that his endings ended up with him alone, before, with stanley dead or gone one way or the other, and now, they tend to end up with him and stanley together, but invariably, endlessly trapped. he's given up on freedom. he's given up on letting go. that's what's left to do, realise that this is also one of his choices.

another sequel is exactly what he doesn't need.

to conclude the whole wretched affair:

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