the ramble dump

Reviews of Titus Alone are usually prefaced with a note about Peake's decline in mental health at the time of writing, and the consequent deterioration in the quality of the novel compared to its predecessors. Thus, when I had finished the fantasticalness that was the first two books, I didn't really know what to expect of this third book. On the one hand, I wanted to save Titus Alone for later reading anyway because it would be something to look forward to; but on the other hand, the fact that many fans of Peake had seemed to treat it like some withered limb attached to an otherwise fine body of work, its mention tacked on to the end of their reviews as a hasty afterthought, made me slightly afraid that it had all gone horribly wrong. I know from experience that a bad sequel can taint the memory of a good original. But just as the year was coming to a close, in the face of all reasons to put it off, I succumbed to the urge to read it.

Is it, in my opinion, as satisfying, thrilling, fulfilling, lavishly detailed and imaginatively awe-inspiring as the first two books? In all honesty, no; it isn't.

But is it then, in my opinion, a horrible withered limb that ought to be discarded and forgotten? Not at all. In fact, in a trilogy of appallingly underrated books, I think Titus Alone is maybe the most underrated of them all.

The main problem many readers will have with Titus Alone, despite being published in a volume perhaps misguidingly titled the Gormenghast Trilogy, is its lack of Gormenghast: the scale and detail of the surroundings; the immersive gothic atmosphere, grand yet claustrophobic; and, above all, many of the denizens we've grown to love and hate. Titus Groan has left Gormenghast for a fresh start in a very different world, a jarring transition that might leave the reader feeling just as disorientated as the protagonist. Suddenly there are cars, planes, floating mechanical globes, death-rays, and fish-eye screens that allow long-distance communication. After living in the winding, dream-like rabbit-hole of the archaic Gormenghast, this intrusion of unspecifiably advanced technology is almost offensive to our corridor-dwelling sensibilities. Colour me Barquentine, but the change more than once left me grumbling and yearning for a return to the castle.

The new world that we are shown of cities and technology still has plenty of room for its own strains of the dark and macabre, especially in places like the Under-River, but it never achieves quite the same level of immersion. Above all else, the world in Titus Alone suffers from lack of detail. The level of technology is unclear, as are the intentions and explanations of the Scientist, his factories and his strange, gliding, helmeted men. Whether these were left deliberately mysterious for some reason or other is hard to tell. We are only offered small glimpses of this new cityworld. Peake had spent much time delving deep into the world of Gormenghast, never needing to explain every last technical detail but at least giving us the impression of the castle's expansiveness. The impression of the cityworld, on the other hand, is only vague and patchy.

The other thing about this change is that it is sharp enough to seem like it's trying to sever itself from its prequels and to make room for a new series of characters and stories, but at the same time Titus Alone can't quite stand on its own. It isn't a withered limb, but it is very much a sequel, despite the drastic differences between the books. Much like Titus himself, and through his struggles to establish his own identity, Titus Alone is constantly referring back to the people and events of the previous two books, and Gormenghast plays an increasingly significant, almost overly contrived role in the preoccupations of not just Titus but of the new characters around him. The result is that Titus Alone is more of a 'Gormenghast' book than it first appears, but also that, while this apparent conflict in its intentions does a good job of mirroring Titus' own confusion, the third book in the series ends up as something of an odd creature.

Despite all this, however, the most important aspect of Peake's writing, the depth and complexity of the characters, is still there. While it felt like there were a few too many 'mysterious' characters who could have done with some elaboration, such as the Scientist, the Scientist's wife, the helmeted men and 'Anchor', the main featuring characters are described very fully. If anything, I found Titus to be a more interesting character than he had been previously, mostly because of the dynamic between himself and the other most notable characters: Muzzlehatch, Juno and Cheeta. As Titus enters their lives, we are given detailed insights into their idiosyncratic thoughts and feelings, emotions and drives in the same way that made the previous books so interesting, especially in relation to how these characters affect each other. Titus' complete bluntness with the other characters is fascinating to read, and to say that it gets him into a bit of trouble would be an understatement.

Muzzlehatch has to be one of the most compelling characters of the entire trilogy, and Peake draws his relationships with the others in a way that feels very genuine -- especially with Juno, through whom Peake creates a very dignified, sympathetic and human character. Cheeta, the Scientist's daughter, feels a little less real in her designs than the others, and her transition over the course of the story feels less believable and sometimes a little hurried. She does, however, set the stage well for the finale of the book, which serves as both a narrative and thematic convergence, and sufficiently satisfies the stories of the majority of the characters, giving some sense of closure even if we never find out what happens to Titus next.

As I already mentioned, the way the story revolves around Titus sometimes feels a bit contrived, especially when every character becomes strangely fixated with him, including some of the Under-River dwellers who hardly have anything to do with him. There is, however, a lot to like about Titus Alone, and although it does feel like an incomplete, sketchy work in some respects, Peake remains in top form in others. But for the bizarrely brief chapter breaks which can largely be ignored, there is actually surprisingly little to distract and give the impression that Peake's health was in decline at all. I'd say Titus Alone still definitely worth a read.

Labels: gormenghast, i am the ramblemaster, literature, rabbit-hole theory

# posted by Chris @ 4:07 PM 0 comments

We're approaching the carpark, walking back towards the big, blocky building that is our halls of residence. There are a few of us, and we begin to weave through the cars. The carpark is only sparsely populated. It is mostly dark.

One girl, who I recognise from my English course and who I've only ever spoken to once, clutches the books and paper she's carrying against her chest, a bag over her shoulder. She has black-framed glasses and Scandinavian-blond hair. Her quick strides bring her to my side. 'Do you like Bacon?' she asks.

'Yes,' I reply, turning to her. 'Yeah, I love bacon.' I already know, and do as soon as she has said it, that this is not what she means. Maybe I am being funny. 'Wait,' I say, allowing my mouth to catch up to my brain, 'do you mean bacon as in food, or Bacon as in the writer? He was a writer, wasn't he?'

She rolls her eyes, makes an odd little noise to the same effect, and crouches down by a red car. It's a low, aged thing with a wide, flat bonnet rising in a curve over the front headlights. I can't remember if she's still holding her books. She taps her forehead lightly against the bonnet in an act of mock despair.

I laugh. 'What, you don't like bacon the food? How can you not like bacon?' I lean forward and repeat her act on the other side of the bonnet. Again, I know this is not what she is trying to say. I am being funny.

When I stand up again, I realise that the bonnet has opened. I try to push it back in place, but it won't click shut. I walk away and pretend I have nothing to do with it. The girl has already gone.

I continue making my way to the building, but stop with a few others at the entrance and turn back. Everyone is looking at the car. Now it looks as if it has nearly been flipped over. It looks as if some hidden lever is holding it in place on the other side. But there is no lever. It is moving by itself. The boot has opened.

I still pretend I have nothing to do with it.

The car has now tilted forward so that I can see through its sunroof. The seats inside are rearranging themselves, almost mercurially. I know what is going to happen next and I turn to enter the building. I glance back as something massive, black and blocky has appeared, Transformer-like. Large blocks of the same black, Lego-like plastic move about around it, glowing from cracks with a pale, ghostly green. They send a chill down my spine because of a review of a film I'd read, which mentioned small deadly creatures falling from a bigger monster.

Inside the building is a rectangular stairwell that is not actually part of my halls of residence but of my old school, in bigger, distorted proportions. I run up each flight of steps as the thing outside rises monstrously, shaking and rumbling, like something out of a videogame. It is right up against the wall and I can see it through the glass of the large windows. It is gazing in, though not at me. It is gazing straight ahead with angular, glowing yellow eyes as it gets taller and taller. No matter how many flights I go up, it is always there, its big square chest obstructing my view. I see it lift its arm, a sort of cone-shaped thing with a glowing snout. It is a gun.

At the stairhead of every flight, there is a clump of scaffolding covered in blue plastic sheet. Somehow this tells me that it might all be staged.

I wake up.

I go to a very boring lecture.

Labels: bacon, dreams

# posted by Chris @ 7:25 PM 1 comments

In fending off the accusations of uselessness, in talking about how literature can make you think and make important suggestions, I haven't really said much about the other side of it: the side that is where literature holds most of its power. That is the aspect of literature, and all art, which has that emotional connection. 'What it means to us' doesn't just involve what it means to us in a general, philosophical sense, but what it means to us individually and subjectively.

The art that has left the biggest impression on me has this connection. Titus Groan and Gormenghast, for example, are my favourite novels not just because of what they have to say or suggest about the world, but because, for whatever reason, I find that they resonate within this thing called my brain more than any other books. They are personally significant enough to have made their way into my dreams on several occasions, in the obscure way of many other personally significant things. It is likely that not everyone will experience the same connection as I did because they are different people with different lives. Literature can provide something useful in a general, academic way as I already argued, but so what if it doesn't? It can still be meaningful on a very personal level.

One of my physicist friends is still declaring literature useless, despite anything I say. His latest comment was specifically that poetry was pointless; after all, why not just say it instead of wrapping it up in poetic form?

This person, like most people, is very into his music. He likes heavy metal. Ironically, given the position he puts me in during these arguments, he gets very frustrated when people accuse heavy metal of being a load of rubbish. Firstly, they accuse the lyrics of being silly, to which he fiercely objects. Secondly, he claims something that I actually agree with, which is that heavy metal is more about feeling the music, feeling the drive and the energy of it.

To start with, lyrics are a form of poetry anyway, and by defending them as a good quality of the music, he is therefore (hypocritically) defending it as an expressive medium and as something meaningful about the music. How can he claim that poetry or literature is useless or pointless and then defend it as a good quality of something else?

But even if he was to admit that heavy metal lyrics are nothing more than another layer of sound, let's consider music itself. Music is a form of expression. Even if you're just creating music that drives, it's driving at something -- it's driving at a certain feeling. And when you listen to it, you're acknowledging that feeling; it somehow resonates with you. Why bother putting this expression in music form? Why not just say it? The answer to that seems obvious: if someone came up to you and tonelessly said, 'Feel my anger', not only would you suspect that he was not in fact feeling any such anger, but as the recipient of his expression, you would not be able to identify with it. It's much more effective if he starts characterising it through specific intonation and screams, 'FEEL MY ANGER!!'. It's then not hard to imagine how you could progress to music. Music, as a form of expression, is a vehicle for it.

Poetry, as a different form, is just a different vehicle, with different features that affect the recipient in different ways. It might be more effective as an expression of something if it's structured so that it sounds or reads in a certain way. Certain words are used for their phonetic properties, but also for their very specific meanings, which can then allow the poem to develop from a purely emotional expression to something more intellectual. Lyrics can add a self-reflective dimension to music.

Many of the specifically linguistic aspects of literature also involve the employment of these poetic techniques. A novel could be seen as an even more complex form of expression because it has so many layers to it, at the deepest level providing something that could be interpreted as music, while at the top level the author is dealing with various themes or ideas which can be expressed all the more effectively because delivered with all the elaborate techniques in which the prose consists. No matter how complex it might get, it's still fundamentally a form of expression. Everything 'artistic' about it is simply a method or a vehicle for this expression.

Music is an artform. Literature is, above all, an artform -- or even many artforms. Art is expression. Art is an attempt at communication, with yourself as much as with anybody else. And art resonates. I'm not going to be so misty-eyed as to claim that art is the salvation of humanity or anything like that; neither do I claim that it's anything divine or inherently special. But it's a part of us, and if you insist on viewing everything in the world through a 'scientific' lens, you're failing to acknowledge that, for whatever reasons, divine or evolutionary, this need of expression is a part of the mind behind the viewing eye. This expression, this attempt to communicate, is a way for us to try and make sense of the world on a personal level. And if the form aids the function, so much the better.


Edit 22/01/08: Coincidentally, when this ramble ventured into the idea of form, I hadn't looked at the lecture timetable which told me that our 'review' lecture today would be exploring just that. We were given a few quotes, but here's the most relevant:

Had there been a clear understanding of Style as the living body of thought, and not its 'dress', which might be more or less ornamental, the error I am noticing would not have spread so widely. But, naturally, when regarded the grace of style as mere grace of manner, and not as the delicate precision giving form and relief to matter--as mere ornament, stuck on to arrest incurious eyes, and not as effective expression--their sense of the deeper value of matter made them despise such aid. A clearer conception would have rectified this error. The matter is confluent with the manner; and only through the style can thought reach the reader's mind.

--George Henry Lewes, Principles of Success in Literature (1865)

Labels: dreams, gormenghast, i am the ramblemaster, language, literature, rabbit-hole theory

# posted by Chris @ 2:01 PM 0 comments

It returned to that same old fight, as it always does after a few drinks. I was arguing that literature can change the way people look at the world. Then one friend asked me something interesting. She asked, 'But has there really been a book that's done that? What novel has changed your life?'

I paused. The honest answer was that no single novel had ever radically changed my outlook on life. I told her that. But then I told her that literature doesn't need to radically change anything. It only has to make you think.

We talked about Orwell's 1984. It was her own choice of example, presumably because it has had the label of 'great novel' attached to it. She seemed to view it as some kind of paranoid manifesto against government and surveillance and declared it unlikely. I countered that it served as a warning. Maybe it was unlikely to happen, but it wasn't just about how many CCTV cameras we get captured on every day. I told her it was about the potential dangers of a controlling government, refuting as I usually do the line of thought that 'if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about', because that entirely depends on what the government considers to be 'wrong'. If you have a Big Brother character whose main aim is to stay in power, 'wrong' could be anything that is felt to be a threat to that power. This threat could even be the ability of people to think for themselves: while we were so busy arguing over surveillance, we both completely forgot to mention anything about doublethink, about dumbing down the language, about how this language can be used to control...

1984 isn't important because it makes us go around pointing the accusing finger at every sign of government we see. It's not seeking revolution through paranoia. It's there to make us think. It is there to make us aware of the potential issues, however much we might feel they apply to our own lives, our own government, our own whatever.

No single book has ever completely changed how I look at the world, but countless novels have, for better or for worse, caused countless small shifts in my perspective. Like all art, literature can still have massive influence on the way we think. I think it's worth taking seriously just for that.

Labels: censorship, i am the ramblemaster, literature, morality, orwell

# posted by Chris @ 11:32 AM 1 comments

[Note: this was majorly revised 19/08/08. Before that, it was very unclear and underdeveloped and made quite a few leaps in logic that didn't entirely make sense. I'm kind of hoping that nobody ever saw it, and that this new version is a bit more acceptable.]

I am an English student. English has always been my favourite subject. When my brother trotted off to Manchester to do Physics, we used to butt heads over it all the time. My main argument was that Physics was boring; his was that English, and later Philosophy, were wishy-washy subjects, and that Physics encompassed everything, and that Physics was therefore the most important. I continued to argue that Physics was boring. And it was, back in school.

I know that this was a pretty immature view for me to take of Physics, but I still object to the kind of claims that my brother made. Here at the University of Nottingham, I've been faced with attitudes along similar lines. Certain physicists have declared the study of literature pointless. Clans of scientifically-minded people have tittered and guffawed when they have realised they were in the midst of a Philosophy class. It is massively uncalled for.

The main argument around science-the-subjects versus, specifically, English-the-subject seems to be one of usefulness, and how students of the former are dismissing the latter on the basis of, say, a novel being subjective and fictional and therefore a complete waste of time in spending a degree on. On the other hand, science is supposedly much more sensible and worthwhile because it strives to be objective. Much of physics, for example, is grounded in mathematics and supported by empirical evidence, which gives it the apparent prestige of being pure, solid facts about the universe. Right, so. As it's mostly the physicists I know who seem so rested on their pedestals, I'm going to use them as my main example while I attempt to call such individuals out for being close-minded.

Let's first address the objectivity versus subjectivity deal. Maths, as a form of logic, is extremely useful. Empirical evidence is also valuable, and when this logic is applied to it, we can attempt to construct some pretty coherent theories about the universe. Yes, these theories try to be based on objectivity, but however much they may be supported by validating evidence, how many of these theories contain speculation, educated guesses and offered interpretations of the universe? How far could science get if they didn't? And, pause for thought: how is this so different from literature? By this I mean that both fundamentally require the construction of a narrative based on human observation, whatever logic or specific methodology you may use to support it. The same is true of philosophy, of history, of many other subjects. Both science and literature involve the construction of such narratives from the human perspective: they are, in their different ways, based on human experience--so to begin with, it's worth bearing in mind that science will never be completely objective because we're essentially working from a subjective starting point: our own minds. The evidence may be actually out there, but the whole concept of empirical evidence is that we're verifying its existence based on our own experiences with it--our own observations.

The pursuit of scientific truth, physical truth, is a noble endeavour and has proved to be incredibly useful, but any scientist who really understands his or her subject has to acknowledge the part that subjectivity and storytelling play in the construction of theories, and that establishing 'facts' is always contingent on the reliability of such empirical evidence. I know that rigorous checks can be made to ensure that such evidence is reliable as possible, but science is an ongoing thing and in the meantime, as has been demonstrated countless times, theories of the world can be very coherent and seemingly much supported, but all it takes is the tiniest bit of new evidence to show that what was previously considered fact was actually a not-quite-accurate fiction based on the limits of human perspective up until that point.

This does not, of course, validate the practice of literary analysis in any way. Literature employs no such rigorous scientific methodology, and for whatever part temporary fictions might play in the scientific process, it would be ridiculous to claim that literature is valuable or useful in the same ways as science. But they're different subjects for a reason. Science, as mentioned, strives for objectivity, whereas literature and literary theory do to much less of an extent, if at all--but this is because they're searching for different kinds of meaning. When we come to analyse literature, the entire methodology is different because we're looking for something different--applying to a novel the scientific method, or the quantitative logic of mathematics, may indeed get you nowhere, but makes no sense to require from literature, or any of the arts, scientific meaning. Science can, to an ever-increasing extent, explain the how and the why of the universe. It may explain its origins, our origins, why we act the way we act -- but it can't explain what any of this means to us. That's the realm of the arts and humanities.* This isn't to say that a scientific approach towards literature is always going to be useless--a science fiction novel that speculates the possibility of a future world could be evaluated for likelihood based on our current scientific knowledge. But to insist on a solely scientific approach to literature is...well, missing the point. In Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, for example, it's not the fact that magic corrupts to which we can attribute much meaning, in relation to our own world--it's the suggestion that power does. The meaning in a world of fiction, or a work of art, will always be figurative. It is representative, rather than physical.

And again, the lack of scientifically verifiable truth in these representations does not mean they are academically worthless--even though it's still an illustration rather than anything physically real. To claim that is like dismissing an illustration or a diagram in a physics textbook. It might be a simplified or distorted or exaggerated representation of the universe, but that doesn't mean it's useless. And that's what literary criticism is all about: deciding whether something that the book or poem represents is oversimplified, biased or distorted, or if it does offer us a useful way of looking at something, maybe even encouraging us to look at this thing in a way that we haven't done before. None of it can establish fact, but it can make important suggestions, ones that we can still apply to our own lives in a way that might apply to our view of humanity in general or our own feelings specifically. Science is the discipline for determining the 'truth' of a physical universe--but if you're going to insist on looking for physical truth in a novel or a painting, it's your own fault if you get nothing out of it.

As for my brother's claim (made a couple of years ago now, whether he still believes this or not) that the 'humanities' are, by definition, too limited for focusing only on humanity--can it really be argued anyway that the aims of science don't ultimately come back to ourselves? Even if science, say, sketches out an aim of preserving an animal species, it comes back to issues of our responsibility. It makes no sense to sever the human aspect from the aims of science. If you're going to argue for the 'usefulness' or 'importance' of science, surely you can't be referring to the construction of some abstract realm of knowledge that just sits there. In this case, therefore, the argument against the focus on humanity doesn't really apply.

I do think it's also worth pursuing knowledge for the sake of itself, purely because we find the world around us interesting. That's part of life too, and the arts do it by the moundful. But it remains true that some questions of science -- for example, facts about distant galaxies -- might be considered academically interesting while arguably having no bearing whatsoever on how we live our lives. Not everything has to be about the direct utilitarianism of something, and there are loads of different functions and purposes to all the different subjects that this rant won't have covered -- more than anything else, I do the subject 'English' because I enjoy it -- but my point is that in terms of this direct 'usefulness' or 'importance' that some of my sciency friends seem to argue for, science can't always claim the highground. Literature, the arts, philosophy...they're all about human interpretion of the universe, which makes them, as already argued, in a way not so different from science. But in often being more focused on what is important to us, they are not only, as a whole, just as relevant as the sciences, but I would argue sometimes even more so. Having everything explained in purely technical terms isn't necessarily meaningful or useful, and it definitely isn't all-encompassing.*

And for all those people who think that literary criticism is just about making stuff up: yes, literature and literary theory can be self-indulgent waffle. Art can be pretentious; but science can be quack. The fact that meaning can be subjective in art, and derived from a novel, say, even if it wasn't explicitly intended by the author (and a lot of literary theory examines precisely this idea), does not mean that it can't be meaningful at all. If, however, someone writes an essay and they are consciously making the whole thing up, or trying to be overly academic or obtuse, and if there really is nothing to it, then the practise of literary theory will, or at least should, reject it as the pretentious crap it is.

I'm hoping it's clear enough that I'm not trying to put science down. I mean, I love science. Some of my best friends are scientists. But those of them who seek to dismiss the arts have so far not been able to do so on valid or non-hypocritical grounds. Science isn't more important than the arts and the arts aren't more important than the sciences. They are complementary, and the distinction between them is overexaggerated anyway.* The arts have often been lampooned for their multitude of pretentious twats, and probably with good reason. But I think the snobs among the scientists need to get over themselves too.


* This fat footnote exists just to bring together those three statements that have been asterisk'd. For the first asterisk, in relation to 'what it means to us', here's an example: the study of biology and evolutionary psychology may go a long way to explaining how and why we came to feel an emotion like sympathy, but as soon as you start talking about the implications of this technical explanation on how we are now forced to view ourselves, we're into the area of philosophy. At this point, to reinforce asterisk two, it has then gone beyond a purely technical account. Literature might then come in as somebody's chosen form of expression for such an idea.

As for asterisk three, I would argue that the division between the subjects is partially arbitrary anyway: even between the sciences themselves, physics can only explain so far before it becomes a matter of chemistry, and in turn, biology. In this vast spectrum of human endeavour, the sciences would gradually become social studies, which would in turn become the humanities. The arts can operate as media of expression for all of the above. In any case, each offer very specific areas of study. Even if you argue that chemistry and biology could be counted as subcategories of physics, as an area of academic study -- as 'Physics' -- this is just not true. It stops short or has limited overlap before it becomes something that you are not studying, while the Chemists and Biologists are. Likewise, Literature could not exist without Linguistics, but the study of Linguistics does not encompass Literature. No subject has dominion.

Labels: i am the ramblemaster, literature, science, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 6:37 PM 0 comments

The cake is a lie.

A few days ago I downloaded Valve's action puzzle game Portal from their Steam service - which is, to be honest, a pain in the backside, because I usually have to launch the thing at least twice before it actually decides to work.

But Portal...Portal is a good game. The word 'innovative' has been thrown around a lot, which is always one to be wary of, in the same way that people who describe themselves as 'creative' are usually too preoccupied with being 'creative' to actually create anything worthwhile. But Portal does seem quite innovative, while at the same time being a wholesome and satisfying, albeit brief, gaming experience. The following review is very spoilery.

The basic mechanic of the game is actually quite simple, and comes with your only weapon, the Portal Gun, which you can use to set up an entry and exit portal anywhere in a room (surfaces allowing). Using these portals, you are required to solve a series of increasingly difficult and complex puzzles in the form of various 'Test Chambers', overseen by an artificial intelligence known as GLaDOS who continually promises the reward of cake at the end - although you soon realise that these 'tests' are something more sinister, and that you may never get the promised cake.

Due to mandatory scheduled maintenance, the appropriate chamber for this testing sequence is currently unavailable. It has been replaced with a live fire course, designed for military androids. The Enrichment Centre apologizes for the inconvenience and wishes you the best of luck.

While the puzzles themselves are enough to keep you entertained, the Test Chambers in which they take place are quite monotonous in their white, clinical appearance. But what I found was that as the story began gradually to seep through, this made the telltale signs, like the desperate graffiti scrawled on the walls in hidden places, all the more effective in building up a feeling of tension and paranoia. Coupled with GLaDOS's increasingly blatant attempts to trick and murder you (all the while firing increasingly passive-aggressive remarks in your direction), the game becomes an immersive, darkly amusing, and singularly odd experience.

The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube [a big cube with a pink heart on it] will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak. [...] In the event that the Weighted Companion Cube does speak, the Enrichment Center urges you to disregard its advice.

Some of GLaDOS's best ramblings can be found for your listening pleasure here, including 'Still Alive', the song played at the credits after you've fought GLaDOS in the weirdest boss fight you'll probably ever have witnessed.

There was even going to be a party for you. A big party, that all your friends were invited to. I invited your best friend, the Companion Cube, but of course, he couldn't come because you murdered him. All your other friends couldn't come either because you don't have any other friends, because of how unlikeable you are. It says so right here in your personnel file: unlikeable. Liked by no-one. A bitter, unlikeable loner, whose passing shall not be mourned. Shall not be mourned. That's exactly what it says. Very formal. Very official. It also says you were adopted. So that's funny too.

I could go on quoting GLaDOS all day, but I'll stop here. Whoever wrote all this stuff is some kind of genius. Portal certainly has some of the most original storytelling I've seen in a game. I heartily, with a heart just like the Weighted Companion Cube's, recommend it.

Labels: portal, videogames

# posted by Chris @ 2:46 PM 0 comments