I have an addiction to webcomics. Currently, I read 16 active to semi-active webcomics concurrently, 2 that are on extended hiatus, and countless more that have already finished. For those who don't know what a webcomic is, the basic form is exactly what it says on the tin: a comic (like a newspaper comic, or a comic book) published on the internet. However, two of my favorites go beyond that. PREQUEL -or- Making A Cat Cry: The Adventure is a comic following the misadventures of a Khajiit (anthropomorphic cat from the world of The Elder Scrolls games) named Katia Managan who tries (and fails, at least in her mind) to make her life less miserable and pointless. From the official about page: "PREQUEL is an interactive story where readers serve as the protagonist’s subconscious" and "I hope you enjoy reading my story about an alcoholic cat who hears internet voices." It was inspired by the aforementioned Elder Scrolls universe as well as the other webcomic I referred to earlier as "[going] beyond [being 'a comic on the web']," Homestuck. Luckily, I'm not crazy enough to try to discuss Homestuck at any length (let it be stated simply enough that it currently occupies the spot as longest webcomic on the Internet, and as would be expected there's a whole lot to talk about there), but it's useful to discuss why these two webcomics are so different than mundane "comics on the web."
First of all, looking back at Kazerad's (author of PREQUEL) description of the webcomic, they call it "an interactive story where readers serve as the protagonist’s subconscious." That is, readers submit ideas to Kazerad for Katia to... think, and act upon, and Kazerad strings it together into a cohesive narrative about a cat trying to discover that she isn't as pathetic as she thinks she is. This is derived from the style created by Andrew Hussie (author of Homestuck, and other "MS Paint Adventures" (MSPA)), wherein he had a suggestion box posted on his website underneath the ongoing comic that readers could use to suggest the next action to take place (a la "Break through glass with fist to unlock door."). Ostensibly, he took the first intelligible suggestion from the box to make the next page of the comic, which consisted of an image and text underneath explaining the events that take place. As time went on, he cherry-picked suggestions to make the story actually go somewhere, and eventually eliminated the suggestion box altogether so he could take the story directly where he wanted.
This brings us to the second reason I so enjoy these comics. Earlier, I stated that each page of MSPA consisted of an image followed by some amount of text. Starting with his first major story, Problem Sleuth, Hussie began interspersing animated images (.GIFs) instead of static pictures into the mix. His next project, Homestuck, took this even further, by incorporating Flash videos into the mix with action and music, then going even further and creating interactive videos, and then creating entire games within the comic that had to be completed to understand what was occurring in the story. One video was so big and watched by so many people when it was first released that it crashed Newgrounds, a site Hussie had specifically sought out to host the video because he knew his own servers would not be able to handle the load. What all this is getting at is that MSPA (and PREQUEL too) successfully utilizes the "Infinite Canvas," the concept that because a webcomic is not necessarily published in physical form, it can do things beyond that constraint (the name comes from the idea that theoretically you could draw infinitely in all directions and still post it, but the same concept can be taken further to include things like animation and such). If you're interested in this idea, Kid Radd was one of the first webcomics to include animations, and Subnormality is the quintessential "infinite canvas" webcomic; both come highly recommended.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(first skippable point [PREQUEL stuff])~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now, all of what I just talked about could be discussed at length for its particular... post-modernness. But I'm here to talk about getting out of your head, so let's get there. For those of you who skipped, we're talking about PREQUEL -or- Making A Cat Cry: The Adventure. Anyways, I trailed off into a discussion about why I like this comic (and its predecessor Homestuck); to sum it up, it's because instead of limiting itself to be a "comic on the web," PREQUEL takes advantage of its non-physicality and features animations, immersively HTML5 pages, and games. But, the craziest part about it is that to follow the story, you must actually play these games, get through the unnaturally tall HTML5 page, and watch the animations.
What particularly interests me is how these gimmicks are used. If you'd indulge me, look at this page. If you didn't, I'll sum it up for you: Katia (the main character), who is in a nightmare, tries to face her fear (a king), but when she does so, it breaks the comic. The king slices with power so great, the very panel he resides in is destroyed, and Katia falls into a blank, white space. On the next page, Katia hides in an "other commands used" box, which is normally not expanded until the reader clicks on it. She stays there for a number of pages until the king breaks in and kills her, and she wakes up. The effect of the gimmick of hiding within the architecture of the website is that we share Katia's fear of the monstrous king tentacle beast. This thing is so powerful that it breaks the comic itself, and we have to resort to constructions around the comic just to get away.
The idea of following Katia in dreams is continued at the end of her next day, most notably here. On this page (which does not display properly in Google Chrome, fyi), Katia is dreaming of when she was a child, living in a castle (her father worked there). She leaves her bedroom and instead walks down a ghostly, floating set of stairs. However, the action of her walking down the stairs is not a simple image or even animation. Instead, it goes in sync with the reader scrolling down the webpage. Just as Katia is uncertain of what awaits for her down the stairs, the reader is forced to contemplate what will happen when they reach the bottom of the page. Worse still, along with the magic stairs and floating torches to light the way that appear periodically as we descend, strange, tentacle-like blobs stream around the edge of the panel. For those who remember the previous night, a warning has just been issued. Whatever we find at the bottom of the stairs is likely to be related to the previous dream's king tentacle monster. And, just as Katia is scared of what she might find as she steps down from her room, the readers are once again filling her shoes, scared of what the tentacles might mean this time. All this immersive weirdness brings Katia to a clearing where she is again attacked by the king, only to hear a golden voice telling her that she'll be okay. In fact, the golden voice is wrong, and the king kills her anyway, but the voice promises to try to help her when she wakes up, which happens with a snap from page-wide animation to a normal page containing only images and text, jolting the reader from the dream layout back to the awake layout as unexpectedly as Katia is jolted from sleeping to lying on the floor.
But, in both of these examples, we are merely sympathizing with Katia. We cannot possibly experience the same thing she does, so we cannot progress any further. That is, we cannot progress any further, unless we try something new. The most recent page (at the time of this writing, Aggy: Extrapolate) sends the reader into a flash animation. To explain, Katia is talking with the ghost of a Dark Elf witchhunter, who has taken it upon himself to be her guardian and mentor. The two lines of dialogue that you ought to know preceding the page are as follows:
Katia: "I don’t want to disappoint you, but… I’m nothing special. I’m just a wet, homeless, jobless nobody out in the rain because she has nowhere else to go."
Aggy: "Well, I can fix that."
That leads us to the page where Aggy (the ghost) shoots some power bolt into the sky, and there's a link to the flash animation I mentioned earlier.
In the flash, Katia and Aggy have dialogue for a little while. Katia is depressed, feels like she has no hope, and just wants Aggy to leave her in peace. But Aggy has taken up the role of her guardian, and now he can't quit without succeeding. The flash begins with only some background wind noises, but as the conversation continues, some music starts playing. It's bright and crisp and cheery; it's stereotypical "our hero is about to learn something great about themselves and get their shit together" music. In that moment, the reader knows they are about to experience something incredible, the crux of the whole comic, what everything's been building to: we no longer make the cat cry. The conversation continues. Aggy stubbornly continues to insist that Katia is not giving herself enough credit, while Katia tries to tell him about how awful she is, and how many times she's messed up. Finally, Aggy pulls out a table from the tavern they are standing outside of, on top of which lies a puzzle:
If you've ever been to Cracker Barrel, you might recognize this. You jump pegs over each other in order to eliminate them, intending to leave only one peg on the board. Aggy challenges Katia: solve this puzzle, and prove to yourself that you are not a failure. Katia, not wanting to continue a fruitless argument, simply chooses to play along. And that's where the reader comes in.
Once this has happened, the reader is presented with the board themselves. Interestingly, the programmers of this file have chosen to give you the hardest possible starting position for a non-pegged hole. In any case, if you click on a peg, a paw-like hand picks up the peg, and if you click on a valid hole to put it in, the hand puts the peg there. The reader has literally become Katia Managan.
(sidenote: I'm writing this part assuming that, if you chose to play through this file, you did not win very quickly; this is more or less how I felt playing through it)
Katia plays through a round of the game, but ultimately is unsuccessful. She claims that proves that she is a failure, but Aggy counters by telling her that her failure was inevitable. It was her first time even trying, after all! She tries again. Once more she fails. Maybe she does better this time, maybe she does worse, but either way, not solving it in two tries is apparently proof of her uselessness. Yet, Aggy keeps trying to convince her that she is merely "too dumb to see that [she's] smart." At his prompting, she tries again. Once more, she fails, and at this point she is deep in contemplation about all those times she sat, waiting for her breakfast to come out, and tried this stupid little game, but she could never get it. She doesn't say that, though, she just says that the endeavor is pointless. Aggy makes her try again, this time using her mouth. That doesn't work. At this point, Katia is aware of the fact that the dialogue between herself and Aggy has not repeated once yet, indicating that she is in fact intended to continue failing, so that Aggy can finally convince her to believe in herself. The magic isn't in winning, it's in failing, and trying again, and failing again, but better this time. In fact, Aggy points this very fact out. She's kept trying, despite the fact that she clearly doesn't believe she'll be able to succeed. Failure has now been redefined. Failure is now quitting while the challenge is still at large. Katia tries again. She doesn't succeed, but she doesn't fail either. Aggy queries her: what lies on the table before her? He is asking her to look beyond the mere board and see what it represents. In fact, he is asking her to look beyond her mere life and see what it all could be. He goes into a discussion of Mysticism. Finally, he has gotten through to Katia. She is frustrated, sure, but she keeps going anyways. She does not succeed. She tries again. She does not succeed. She tries again. As she tries, she finally notices a ghostly white line appear as she makes a move. When she picks up the next peg, it doesn't appear again, so she puts it down and tries another. A whole series of lines appears, giving her moves that she's already made that will take her closer to the solution. She follows them until she sees no more. She must not repeat her mistake from last time, whatever it was. She makes a move. Then another. Pegs go away, but at the last second she makes a poor decision and is left with three pegs when she easily could have finished it. She's motivated. She knows she's close. There are more lines this time, guiding her back to that unfortunate mistake. She corrects it, finishes the game. DUMB PUZZLE SOLVED, the caption reads.
The reader is pulled back away from Katia. No longer are the reader and Katia one and the same. It is at this point that the reader realizes that they could go back, solve the puzzle sooner, and see a new ending. But it doesn't matter. For a brief window of time, the reader occupied the mind of Katia. It doesn't matter that the reader was made of skin and bones, and Katia was made of ideas and bits downloaded from the internet. What the creator of this flash was able to do was set up a situation where the reader felt exactly what Katia felt and went through everything that Katia went through. Playing the jumpy peg thing again would not be able to recapture that moment when Katia contemplated playing in Cracker Barrel when she clearly had never been there. Playing it again would not recapture the moment when the reader felt they would not be able to solve the game and Aggy made them do it again anyways. What mattered wasn't the solving of the game, even though that was nice. What mattered was the immersion into the mind of Katia that occurred in the middle of the game.
To those of you who skipped all that, thanks for scrolling down. Hope your scrolling fingers are intact after all that work. What I was talking about with that webcomic, PREQUEL, was that it was particularly good at placing the reader into the mind of its main character in strange and interesting ways. I see that as one of the main strengths of Slaughterhouse Five. Of course, all writing is, in a sense, attempting to get its readers to occupy the head of somebody else. Academic papers are trying to get you to come inside its author's head so they can explain this cool thing they thought of or found. History, in many cases, attempts to get you into the heads of all the people's and the people as a collective's heads. Fiction tries to get you into the characters' heads. But, some writing is less successful, whether intentionally or not. Some writing is not able to bring you into the mind of its subject but instead must tell you what is there.
Slaughterhouse Five, however, is very successful in pulling the reader into the mind of Billy Pilgrim. Time travel is as jumpy and sudden for us as it is for him. We experience it right alongside Pilgrim. We go from Ilium to war and back in just as odd a way as Billy does. Even if we don't understand what the Tralfamadorians are saying, neither does Billy, really. Billy just goes along with the jumps and the shenanigans and the weirdness, and so should we, or else we'll quickly get left behind and the book won't be successful any longer. That's why places like that second "Listen: ..." are so confusing; for a book that has us going in the mind of Billy Pilgrim, we are suddenly pulled right back out to hear that "Billy Pilgrim says he went to Dresden, Germany, on the day after his morphine night in the British compound in the center of the extermination camp for Russian prisoners of war." Why does he say this? Why doesn't he just do it? What is there to doubt about this happening, if we are to take it on faith that Billy always knew his plane would crash and that he was abducted by aliens and that he was constantly jumping through time?
Why, for that matter, does Billy give the same reverence to the death of water as to that of Wild Bob? The truth of the matter is, it's all subjective. So, to all those people that are just now starting to notice how many times "So it goes" appears in the book, congratulations! Death is all around us, as is life. It's startling that there aren't more chances for it to appear. But, now that you know that, can't you see why Billy says it all the time, even if you find it irreverent? And for those of you who just let it slide past without comment, welcome to the world of Billy Pilgrim! In some small way, your view on death, at least in this book, is in line with that of our boy Pilgrim. Isn't that fun?
The book hinges upon the reader tagging along inside Billy's brain. That's what makes it so successful, that we can see things from Billy's strange perspective, a whole new world of ideas, even though we could totally not agree. I don't fully understand why there are points where Vonnegut breaks that and inserts himself into the story, but it doesn't change the fact that the book works best when Billy and the reader are one. That's what I like most about the book, I think; that I can get out of my head for a little bit and see things like a Pilgrim.
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