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But he does cool it, and he starts to "grow up" when he becomes more involved in the protagonist and the story.
It's unfortunate that this isn't even the first thread on "One of the characters said a meme, does this game actually just suck because of this? Do I need to refund the baby with the bathwater?". He's an adult character in a game that is set in the early 2010's, not a nine-year-old coming off from watching Minecraft LPs.
The game isn't gross. Let it ride. If you absolutely can't bear the interactions, you can press Start and then Skip Cutscene. But you'll be missing out on the characters being interesting. You're worrying over nothing.
Need to know before I hit 2 hours on this baby.Just encountered the first other climber and they made a yolo joke which the devs seemed really proud of, what with the camera zoom in and stuff. Kinda leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Is the whole game going to be full of stuff like this? Do things like troll faces and "swag" comments and pewdiepie references come up, or anything else like this?
Thanks.
Oh no now the OP is going to complain about the rainbow socks :P
Seeing as it doesn't do that though, it's all good.
/s
One of the threads of "this game did a meme, does it suck?" actually pointed at the unlockable B-Side levels as evidence that the game was trying to be capitulating and pandering because the emblem of those levels is a cassette-tape, and only hipsters like those. And whoever OP'd that thread needs a dunking in the toilet.
Nothing to worry about.
You don't get much in the way of characterisation because the story is only a couple of hours long (so neither it nor the characters overstay their welcome). But what's there is pretty golden.
Both of them get over themselves after Chapter 5. They're not particularly bad up to that point (in my opinion), but Theo stops trying to be so trendy after that point.
I'm going to go on a rambling tangent, but I hope it will at least help elucidate the fact that this game isn't trying to suck up to people who use words like "yolo" and "swag" unironically. Because those people suck and they also need a good toilet-washing.
The central theme of the game is anxiety and how one uses the energy that being stressed gives them. (You may notice that this isn't a good tone to be consistently dropping "#yolo" in. Maddie uses that energy to beat herself up and tear herself apart, and Theo uses it to be deflective and charismatic, because he doesn't know what the fuϲk he's doing with himself.
There's a part where the game is showing Madeline being encroached by claustrophobic darkness and choking tendrils, and all Theo says is "Are you cool?", because the game is showing something that he couldn't possibly see, and all he sees is Maddie just hyperventilating in the corner. As soon as he figures out what's happening, he swoops in like a friend would.
That setpiece has really stuck with me because that's exactly what it feels like. And after seeing that, it's kind of weird playing the game over again and watching him explain "yolo" to Madeline.
It helps that the music is done by Lena Raine (of Guild Wars 2, among others), who is also a bit neurodeviant, and identifies strongly enough with the protagonist being a basketcase that even the music comes across as anxious and untamed, especially when the Part of Madeline starts dominating whatever scene she's in. There's a lot of really small, really powerful details, and it would suck for anyone to miss them because Theo does a meme because he just met someone new and doesn't know how to act in front of them.
The dissertation of the soundtrack by Game Score Fanfare is splendid, and when you're no longer worried about spoilers, I recommend you give it a watch.
Er. In short, no, the whole game is not a "yolo" cringefest. You've just about seen the worst of it. Have fun, and we hope to see you at the Summit.
You ok there bud?
This is not a joke.
But if you don't care for the story (which does go fairly deep as the game goes on), you can pause during dialogue scenes and hit the "Skip" option. The story is nice, but this is a precision platformer, not a story game.
Not really a joke when she has a childhood picture of herself seeming to be boy, and trans pride imagery is everywhere. Noticed how much blue, pink and white there is? Especially with her hair states and the Summit's cutscenes after accepting herself. And then the trans pride flag from my avatar is in her bedroom :P And that's not even everything there is going in that direction. Notice I didn't even mention pills, which are a fairly weak association.
Matt Thorson, the person who designed Madeline and wrote the game, came out as transgender (nonbinary, they/them) a bit after release, and said the game was so influenced by their struggles that they didn't know how the game should end because they were still dealing with it at the time. Self-acceptance was their personal mountain to climb, and it seemed to be Madeline's mountain too. Half of the game is a quite-literal struggle with the mirror and her reflection.
You mean you can tell from this photograph[vignette.wikia.nocookie.net] which of the two children is Madeline and what their genders are? At that resolution?
A young child is going to have very few gender characteristics unless they are heavily stylised. In this case, those children would either need more hints or more pixels.
Because trans-pride imagery is trendy (and it was when Celeste was released). Have you been on Twitter and seen all of the celebrities who are saying it? Even the guy who voiced Duke Nukem said it.
I know this is also a cop-out, but I'll say it anyway: It is possible to be in complete vocal support of rights that may not necessarily align with one's circumstances. I support trans rights, and I'm quite confident in my gender-identity. It is important enough to people I know and respect that I have even flown the flag a couple of times. Knowing that I wasn't waving it for myself.
I have a bit of an issue with seeing colours, but I don't remember her hair ever turning white. When I'm not so exhausted, I'll see what Liquidmod defines her hair colours as in terms of hexadecimal notation.
It is possible for someone to struggle with their own identity in ways other than gender dysphoria. For this metaphor to hold water as you wish to interpret it, Badeline would have to be a gender stereotype. Her gender would have to be core to her identity, and important enough to bring focus to. Instead, she "just looks like this, okay?". The form she takes is so utterly unimportant that she handwaves it.
But instead, she's merely hostile, domineering, condescending, pragmatic to-a-fault, and aggressively distant. Things Madeline is that she doesn't want to be. Note that this character's gender is not in contention.
Note that when either one of these two characters are addressed by gender (for instance, by Oshiro, who insists on using title first), they don't treat it as particularly odd or in need of prompting. And Maddie's presentation throughout the game is generally pretty introspective, and she doesn't seem to think of the concept at all.
And when Theo feels confident enough that he can ask Maddie something as intimate as what depression feels like to her, he doesn't ask her anything about her identity. Even when he theorises the reason why she is climbing the Mountain, a reason even she isn't certain of.
Granted. Some do. That was the joke. I need to work on my material, clearly.
And when asked if Madeline is transsexual, they declined to comment. Granted, this could be to avoid assigning to the game "the Trans Agenda", which would be the kind of can of worms we're cracking open right now. But while there exists room to interpret subtext, I personally feel it would be irresponsible to definitively assign a label. I would like to call a spade a spade, and until it tells me what it's made of, I'm going to read the label it came with.
Again, it's possible to struggle with one's self-concept without making it about gender. Issues like self-esteem, confidence, appearance, social nuance (the antithesis of which is Baddie), aspiration, the actualisation of one's own success (the antithesis of which is Maddie), and so on.
More to the point, though, the metaphor is that Maddie is her own cause of failure. She can't finish what she starts (Baddie is trying to pull her back down the Mountain), she is intense to the point where she is inadvertently self-destructive (Baddie in general), she's skittish and neurotic (Baddie, scared of failing to climb the Mountain), she can't socialise (Baddie scolding Oshiro, Maddie claiming that she gets by with getting drunk and angry online), she can't keep herself together when her anxiety gets rolling (Baddie climbing out of her own portrait)...
These are all valid reasons for someone to resent themself, with corresponding metaphors, without making it about gender dysphoria.
Furthermore, during Reach for the Summit, their interactions are solely based on the concept of supporting each other (and one part about turning-the-other-cheek). As though the only thing that matters is their ability to act and co-depend. If the issue were with self-image, and if it were core to their reasons, why wouldn't they discuss that with each other? Even once? Instead, it seems to be about the ability to use one's energy in ways that are no longer (self-)destructive. This could be interpreted as coming to terms with one's flaws, and reconsidering them as qualities in their own right (while Baddie is mean, she is also remarkably powerful, and can do things Maddie can't, despite being subordinate to the latter), but again, this does not apply solely to gender dysphoria.
I'm sorry. I can tell you put a great deal of thought and consideration into your post, but I'm still not convinced, and at this juncture, we will only agree-to-disagree. And I've probably said a lot of waffle that hasn't advanced the discussion forward one jot.
Then again, the player allowed to name the protagonist whomever they want when they name the save file. So, if the player is themself struggling with their own self-image, they can use the protagonist as a surrogate for themself. And that's okay. But I don't consider the theory to be well supported. There are definitely more than zero corroborating elements to the theory, but I feel that it is spurious. These theories take slightly more faith than I am capable of.
I should not have called it "a joke", or made it into one. It is clearly important to some people. And I am sorry that my non-sequitur became a bait-line that will probably get this topic moderated at some point.
Her hair is incredibly boyish for a young girl - the hair behind her ears is shorter than on top. This appears in the last screens of the game along with the transgender pride flag, as a few pieces of the last bit of Celeste story content we will get for the foreseeable future. A dev team led by a transgender person put those two things there knowing they would be associated, and well, they fit into a lot of things that came prior.
White hair: https://i.imgur.com/df3qN1p.png
Flag: A pride flag waved at a protest is not the same as one kept in a bedroom. Cis people just don't do that. And at some point you have to ask whether a color scheme that keeps cropping up might have some reason behind it, like the aforementioned blue/white/pink hair and the blue/white/pink alternating stripes of the Summit's cutscenes.
Badeline: Every way that Badeline is physically different from Madeline is either more monstrous (pale skin, red eyes, powers) or more feminine - never more masculine. She has even longer hair, smaller and angled eyebrows, a higher pitched voice, and black nail polish. And what you mentioned about "I just look like this, ok" is important because it contrasts with Madeline being upset about Theo taking her picture later in the chapter and not being "photogenic". Badeline is Madeline's Jungian Shadow, concerned with the things that she is not concerned about, happy with the things she is not happy about, and with her own vanity and sense of being wronged or supported.
Devs: An artist's handwaving or lack of comments is not really descriptive of what a story is actually about or what they find important. Orson Welles insisted that Citizen Kane's "rosebud" actually meant the private parts of Kane's wife. David Lynch insisted that Inland Empire was "about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's all I want to say about it." They said these things not because they were definitive, but because they believed the stories are able to speak for themselves.
When JK Rowling said that Dumbledore was gay, as a lazy afterthought for woke points with nothing to back it up in the story, did that pass a necessary threshold of being 'canonical'?
The Celeste devs used their twitters to like and retweet a lot of "Madeline is trans!" things and still do, along with condemnations of Frozen-style queerbaiting and wishes for more media that featured transgender characters without their gender identity being the central focus of the character or their scenes. I doubt they would knowingly betray their vision by putting queerbaiting in Celeste.
And it is also important to note that the devs made Celeste because they suffered from depression and anxiety. That's a limit to how much harassment, both online and potentially in real life, that they are willing or able to subject themselves to. And if you want to have a transgender character for an audience who "gets it" while keeping visibility to transphobic outrage-media to a minimum, then... it's hard for me to see how to do anything differently.