One thing that's surprisingly satisying about writing with ink is that when you spill a drop of water on the page, it blurs and smudges out so photogenically. Look, I'm a goth at heart, I cannot resist the "tearstained letter written out in ink with a steel-nibbed pen"-aesthetic, it's a classic.
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There are a couple of strategies you can use when creating a nonbinary cartoon character that's supposed to be from the golden age or rubberhose era of cartoons and you want them to be plausibly era-apropriate.
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Folk rules are a related phenomenon to house rules, wit the difference being that with house rules, people are generally aware that they are hose rules, while with folk rules, people are under the impression that these rules are actually part of the game when in fact they aren't.
Funnily enough, folk rules often exacerbate some element of the game people often complain about. For example, people often complain about games of Monopoly going on for too long, but many of the folk rules around the game, like putting money under free parking, make games run for much longer than rules as written.
It's like people have an idea of the game, and then they adjust the rules to match that idea, then critique the idea of the game they themselves are partially responsible for creating.
Spellcasters being too powerful in a lot of TTRPG is often an example of that. In the text magic is often portrayed as something potentially powerful, but tempered by how fiddly it is to get spell components or to set up spells, and a lot of players have this idea that mages should be able to just wave their wands and get anything to happen, so they abstract away a lot of the balancing mechanisms, thinking they are mostly busywork, and thus they end up in a situation where spellcasters are distinctly unbalanced.
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Giggleland is an interesting example cus it's definitely part of the tradition I'm complaining about, superficially cutesy cartoon mascots that almost immediately give way for generic glitchy horror, but if some of the theorycrafting around that ARG is to be believed, it might actually be a case where the mascot horror part of the story is itself a front for a different kind of horror story, which would be quite the fascinating evolution.
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As a fan of cartoons and a fan of horror, I feel some type of way about how "subverted cartoon" has become such a horror trope that it's no longer even a twist in some contexts, you see an indie game with a cutesy wholesome mascot character and you pretty much expect it to turn dark.
Like, I like cartoons, I like horror, I like cartoony horror and horror in cartoons, but there's something about rubber-hose cartoons becoming the next creepy clowns that rub me the wrong way. It's taking an artform with a long tradition of delighting people, seizing on a couple of things about it that comes across as a bit eerie by modern standards and twists it into a generic horror aesthetic and that feels a little bit disrespectful.
This is another case where a thought was provoked by the Pendog ARG, even though the pendog ARG is actually a really bad example, cus it's actually doing this trope REALLY well.
What Pendog does that's lacking in most cases is that it displays an understanding of some of the ways cartoons are intentionally scary and weaves it into the story.
It's actually displaying a really strong understanding of different genres of cartoon horror, from morbidly funny black and white cartoons, to puppet shows for children that's intentionally created to be an accesible entrypoint into horror. Even the archetype of "troubled tumblr artist with a cartoon aesthetic who created edgy vent art" is featured in the story.
I think understanding cartoon horror is crucial for using cartoons in a horror story, cus it gives you so many tools to build atmosphere with before you reveal the non-cartoon horrors you got in store.
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In retrospect, it's not a good example of what I'm talking about at all, there was one article that kinda glossed over the production details of a failed movie, but that's mostly cus it's covered in details elsewhere.
There's even one article that's a really good example of including details that make the description of a failed movie project specifically feel more real:
"The conditions were notably horrible with several actors and actresses passing out on the set due to the stress. Several props caught on fire, one of the actors was poisoned by aluminum dust, and multiple writers quit mid-production."
So yeah, at this case, it was really only the one article that was omitting details for brevity's sake and it's not an actual example of the issue I was gesturing at.
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The ARG I was reading was https://pendogcreativelibrary.org/ , although to be fair, for the most part it's actually really good about providing details that help with verisimilitude, they even do the thing I describe a couple of times where they take an episode from the biography of a real-world public figure and fictionalizes it to the point where it becomes its own thing.
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A stumbling block I've seen in ARG writing is that they'll sometimes go for this tone of tantalizing vagueness in situations where a realistic document really wouldn't.
I was reading one ARG site that styles itself as a gallery for cartoon lost media, and in a couple of cases it hints vaguely at an attempted movies "disastrous production history" without really elaborating and that would've been my main tell that it's fiction.
If this was something that actually happened, there would have been a whole bunch of very specific things that happened that this blog could have elaborated on. It's hard to imagine a movie having a tumultuous production history without SOME juicy details you could spill.
In our reality, all the details of a case would exist, relevant to the story or not and it'd be up to the person writing things down to decide which details they need to include, but in a fictional narrative, none of those details exist unless you decide to write it.
And that means there's kind of a 'grain' towards vagueness, you prolly wouldn't create details until they are relevant to the story, or if you do write those details, you're prolly gonna be tempted to include them somewhere, whether they add to the story or not.
I can think of two ways to mitigate this:
One that doesn't work in all contexts but can be very effective when it does is to find the closest real-world equivalent to what you're trying to describe and fictionalize it. Pull a lot of details from the real history and tweak them just enough to fit your story.
This sounds lazy, but honestly in practice it mostly just becomes a fun easter egg when, say, a medieval historian reads your book and are like "wait a minute, this sounds a lot like the wars of the roses!"
The second is to get into the habit of writing a bunch of stuff you're not planning on using. This method is dangerous cus like... you'll end up having the rough outline to at least five sequels before you've concluded the main story and that can feel a bit overwhelming.
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There will come soft pastels
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ARGs are really cool when they succeed, but it's so funny when they don't and you have, like, an army of paid professionals making content for an audience of maybe twelve absolute weirdos in the hope that word of mouth is somehow going to travel from a dozen of autistic shut-ins to the front page of the newspaper.
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ARG as a promotional tactic is always so funny, it is the epitome of a plan that's "crazy enough to work". You end up putting some of your best writing somewhere most people won't see it and then you just kinda put your hope in peoples drive to discover the hidden and forbidden.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QViGVPRGWko
The trailhead for this ARG is one that I actually learned about fairly organically when my gf showed me the Giggleland game trailer. I have to admit, I really didn't care too much about about it. It looked like it was shaping up to be pretty generic mascot horror with honestly pretty cliché ARG elements. I'm glad Nick decided to cover it cus it looks like the initial impression was REALLY burying the lede on what is a very well-crafted oldschool puzzles-and-plot ARG.
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Cat is generally credited with discovering the effect, but it is of the opinion that its girlfriend deserves the credit. It was by noticing a small but subtle change in her vocabulary that it could determine what it is that the ghosts took from them.
"She would have figured it out eventually, I just happened to notice it first," it has remarked. Its girlfriend, in recorded statements, stress that she never in a million years would have thought to analyze a week worth of her own correspondence just to see if a single word was missing and that doing such a thing is "pure Cat insanity".
"It is true that the frequency analysis was my idea, but I could never have done it on my own chat messages," it remarked once "I lost the ability to say the word and mean it a while ago."
Its interlocutor wondered which word it was referring to.
"Rhymes with worry," Cat said.
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This might be a bit disappointing, but in the context of the short this is from, it's "instant girl" in the sense that you add water and a pretty girl pops out of the bottle, it does not instantly make you into a girl.
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One aspect of this audio drama that's kinda funny in retrospect is that this was clearly made before "ghosting" had its modern meaning so they keep talking about "ghosting" someone and it's clear from context that it means "monitor someone from a distance without being discovered", but it just sounds like they are having a very passive agressive dating scene.
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Honestly, it's kind of funny how a lot of the early promotional ARGs are like, an entierly unrelated story with at best a loose collection to what it's supposed to be promoting, I don't know why people decided that a viable marketing strategy was to trick people into reading their sci fi novel by hiding it beind puzzles, but I'm glad they did.
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https://creepy.thebruce.net/axonscenes These audio dramas from the I Love Bees ARG is actually worth listening to even if you're not trying to replay the ARG, they are a pretty engaging audio drama on their own.
(And if you know I Love Bees was made to promote Halo and wonder what this audio drama has to do with Halo, I wonder that too. I think it's sort of loosely supposed to take place in the same universe?)
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o1Jup77oGA This is the video I was thinking about when I wrote this post. It's pretty fun cus it starts out with an introductory lecture on Commedia dell'arte in a very academic style and then the same person who gave the lecture appears in the subsequent performance as Arlecchino.
It's a little like having your professor give a lecture on the history of clowning, walk out and then walk back in wearing a full whiteface-clown outfit. You can't even argue with it cus it's theory and practice, it's good pedagogy, but the change in tone is extremely drastic.
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Melissa: Candace, you just consumed enough THC for half a Woodstock festival!
Candace: Woodstock '69 or Woodstock '99?
Hallucinatory floating zebra in the sky: Hi Kevin!
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text/gemini
