I got a request to make some Narrator ASMR using the ambiance videos I've been pulling from the game, and at first I thought the idea would not pan out, and I'm still not sure if it did, but here are the results.
At first I didn't know what to use because the dude is at an 11 for like 99% of his dialogue and that would not make for good ASMR. So I eventually settled on repeated loops of the main story line with several minor variations that are already present in the game, since I figured if a certain somebody was going to do ASMR, he'd want to read his damn story like it's a meditative gift from god.
Since I usually go into these trying to capture an eerie/haunting vibe, something which I find soothing and nice to put on in the background but a lot of people do not, I did my best to dial it back a bit for this project and hopefully made something genuinely nice to listen to.
While I was putting this together, I couldn't help but wonder how and why it is that some people take comfort (myself included) in this game that, when you get past all of the jokes and sillier moments, it is innately hostile toward the one playing it. I can only speak for myself, but I think it's the fact that the game doesn't shy away from the existential questions it poses, and in a way acts as a medium to confront these questions in a society that demands we act like we are okay at all times or face repercussions, and where you are not allowed to ask big questions about this insane reality we inhabit outside of approved religious constructs. There is comfort to be found in that.
And I think one of the most interesting aspects of this game is that the deeper you dive, you only find more questions with very few answers, because the game refuses to give up anything to the likes of you, and this over time causes the freedom ending to go from an unfulfilling, hypocritical story to something surprisingly meaningful. Sadly, there is no grand storyteller coming to narrate us an escape from this clown car of a society before it smashes into a wall, but it's a nice sentiment to think that Stanley can be happy. That is what I tried to capture in this ASMR project.
But of course, even the narrator thinks he's just a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, when he really is nothing more than another cog in the workings of this perpetual motion machine. I think if he were capable of understanding that, maybe he would not have erased Stanley's co-workers and instead created a narrative of collective empowerment. Maybe it would have given them a fighting chance against something so much bigger than any one of them, but this game will always remain a reflection of real life, where everyone thinks they are the main character of their own story, at the expense of everybody else. Maybe I can't help but project my own ideals upon it out of the hope that a destructive loop can be broken, because the way I see it, if nothing matters and all of our actions are meaningless in the grand scheme of things, giving up and not caring is the easiest thing in the world, but, if nothing truly matters, then it is a radical act to care about the well-being of your fellow humans on this tiny, blue dot in a vast, infinite universe.
Sure, it can be said that everything is predetermined, but something that everybody misses about the confusion ending is that, even if he doesn't remember it, the narrator did break the cycle by refusing to reset. The rest of the confusion ending does not play out. The stalemate he creates forces the game into a hard reset to keep the status quo going. He may have more power than it seems. Even Stanley has more power over the cycle than what it seems at face value, considering that he too has the power to reset at literally any point within the game, and of course, he can shut it all down at a push of a button. Maybe shutting the game off is a breaking of the cycle, or maybe shutting it down is the system getting a last laugh and saying that if you end it, it will take everyone and everything along with it. If TSP has taught me anything it's that I don't know anything and can only rely upon my own interpretations. So, hey. Who can say that within these infinite repetitions and infinite instances of these characters that there isn't a loop where the narrator figured some shit out and instead of using his position in the hierarchic to blow Stanley up in petty displays of power the second his position in the system is questioned, maybe he instead helps Stanley and his co-workers seize the means of the parable. Maybe the system is too powerful to bring down, maybe it can't be taken down without it self-destructing and taking everyone with it, or maybe it can always reset everything back to a baseline and halt any progress made, or maybe there is a loop out there where everything works out for the better. Who can say.
(lolololol, you came here for narrator ASMR and got a commie reading of TSP too)
21 сен 2022
