You Didn't Get Rogue One: A Monograph of Essays on Star Wars RELEASE

Despite its box office and critical success, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story faces an astounding number of misinterpretations. Rogue One is a controversial film, inspiring some with its improbably radical politics, while seeming to distress as many others with its unconventional storytelling and seeming break from the tone of Star Wars. Misreadings range from the well intentioned ("It was fun but the characters had no agency!") to the insidious ("Is the Empire really so bad?"), but they share one quality: for one reason or another, their writers just didn't get Rogue One.

Featuring revised and expanded versions of Storming the Ivory Tower's Star Wars articles alongside essays exclusive to this collection, the new monograph "You Didn't Get Rogue One" lays out not just a defense of Rogue One but a defense of the more radical potential lurking in the ostensibly thoroughly corporate Star Wars franchise. In order to do so, though, the essays have to take down decades of misreadings by everyone from Catholic pundits, Internet shoutymen, and even... George Lucas himself! The Dark Side clouds everything, but this collection takes a step towards bringing Rogue One and Star Wars into a new light.

You Didn't Get Rogue One can be read through Storming the Ivory Tower's Patreon:

• For $1 you can read the raw text of the book
• For $2 you can download the open source graphics used to illustrate the book
• For $3 you can hear the podcasts that accompany the articles
• For $5 you can download the full monograph in epub form, fully illustrated!

Sense8 and Identity

What if Sense8's production and form was as diverse as its casting? As the show's rapid dance between states of cancelled and not-cancelled continues to bewilder me, I try to parse out the show's interest in difference, and some of its current limitations or failings.

It's Basically Fucking Ridiculous That Sense8 Got Cancelled

Sense8 is dead. But all the pieces were there for it to be revolutionary. I don't even have a good summary for this article I'm just fucking pissed that we had all these pieces in place and still for some reason it didn't come together, and I'm left with this multi-part series that I wrote most of before the show was cancelled so like what the fuck. Here's some bewildered rambling about tech history I guess.

Back to the Past: Why Samurai Jack Season 5 Was Great; Why The Ending Failed

Samurai Jack finally got back to the past. But why has the ending left so many feeling let down, and what does the show's brilliant animation reveal about the narrative's fatal flaws?

Infin8 Stream: Is Sense8 The Future Of TV?

We live in an era defined by the Epic Streaming Show and Netflix. But is the Netflix hit Sense8 the precursor to an even stranger and more brilliant kind of hypermedia storytelling still to come?

Announcing: A Star Wars Collection

Rogue One is a controversial film, inspiring some with its surprising, improbable radical politics, while seeming to distress as many others with its unconventional storytelling and seeming break from the tone of Star Wars.

This upcoming (as yet unnamed) collection, featuring revised and expanded versions of Storming the Ivory Tower's Star Wars articles alongside exclusive content to tie it all together, lays out not just a defense of Rogue One but a defense of the more radical potential lurking in the apparently thoroughly corporate Star Wars franchise, and takes aim at the various misreadings of the series propagating on the Web.

The collection will be available in downloadable epub form, alongside four previous StIT collections, to $5 supporters of the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon, and the raw, unformatted text will be available for just $1. Subscribe now as a $5 Patron to get your name in the final book as a sponsor of the project!

(Note: Twilight of the Superheroes is still happening, it's just much much more complicated than I expected, so I'm pushing out this collection while it's fresh in order to tide everyone over while I continue working on the Superhero project in the background.)

Nerd-On-Nerd Violence: Why Is Geek Star Wars Crit So Lousy?

"Star Wars fanboys don't know what they're talking about," grouses Mr Plinkett! But aren't all these bad Star Wars theories, Red Letter Media's popular garbage videos included, totally characteristic of fanboy analysis? And does geek culture encourage us to disengage from the empathetic core of the Star Wars franchise?

You'll Teach Me And I'll Teach You: Do Pokemon's Mechanics Actually Work?

Pokemon has a brilliant mechanical narrative where you're encouraged to treat your pokemon as living creatures, and use them to fashion an identity for yourself... or at least that's how it works in theory. In practice, do Pokemon's mechanics actually work... and is Ian Bogost right to suggest that maybe chasing after narrative in games is a lost cause?

Reload the Canons! is an ongoing Storming the Ivory Tower project where I play through The Canon of videogames. Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect. You can support Reload the Canons! and my other projects on the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon.

Film Theory Theory: MatPat's Star Wars Theories Are Nazi Garbage

"Save the Death Star!" shouts MatPat, "because destroying it would make the money sad!" How does someone argue himself into supporting Space Nazis? Why do fandoms eat it up? And might Star Wars itself have something to say about the way that the culture we live in clouds our vision, preventing us from seeing the stories in front of us?

Like No One Ever Was: Can Pokemon's Mechanics Tell A Coming Of Age Story?

If Pokemon games are about creating an identity, are fan games just an extension of gameplay?

To Train Them Is My Cause: Why Do We Care About Our Pokemon?

Pokemon games, whether canon or fan-made, live or die based on the bond between Pokemon and players. Can we use the mechanics of the games and the way those mechanics are altered in Pokemon Uranium, Pokemon Insurgence, and Pokemon Infinite Fusion to explain why we care about our Pokemon?

Reload the Canons! is an ongoing Storming the Ivory Tower project where I play through The Canon of videogames. Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect. You can support Reload the Canons! and my other projects on the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon.

Modern Myth-Busting: Are Rogue One's Characters Worthy Star Wars Heroes?

"Rogue One is too dark and gritty," cries the Internet! "It sullies the black and white morality of the Modern Myth, Star Wars!" But are these thinkpieces, reviews, and fandom metas really paying close attention to the movies they claim to love? And what does it say that Rogue One's cast is held to a different standard than Han Solo?

Starkitecture: Should We Be Worried About Black Panther's Concept Art?

A few weeks ago we got our first glimpse of the MCU's Black Panther in the form of several concept art pieces. The images look cool at first glance, but does Wakanda's setting design suggest some deeper limitations to the Marvel imagination, and the potential for this film to give us something really original? And what does a movement called The International Style have to do with it?

An Eternal Golden Helix Fossil: Three Years On, What Can We Say About Twitch Plays Pokemon?

Three years ago I wrote an academic article about Twitch Plays Pokemon. The article was never published anywhere, but despite that blow to its notability TPP continued on, and is still going three years later. This week, I take a look at this article, which in many ways is a predecessor to my Reload the Canons! series, and comment on what I got right, what I got wrong, and how the issues surrounding TPP have shifted and changed over the past three years.

Reload the Canons! is an ongoing Storming the Ivory Tower project where I play through The Canon of videogames. Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect. You can support Reload the Canons! and my other projects on the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon. 

A Galaxy Very, Very Near: Are Time And Space in Rogue One Core to its Resistance Narrative?

Rogue One is a film about resistance and domination, time and space, environment and technology. Can linking these concepts together tell us more about the film's science fiction storytelling... and reveal something about our own forms of contemporary resistance?

Announcing: Two New Twine Projects!

Twilight of the Superheroes

Narrowly winning the recent vote for what book project I should tackle next, Twilight of the Superheroes will collect my critical writing on superhero media that didn't make it into My Superpower is Manpain!, and release it with a bunch of bonus content and an overarching structure drawing upon Alan Moore's planned-but-never-realized superhero crossover epic of the same name. Like If The Train Stops We All Die, this will be released in an experimental Twine format that uses hypertext to imagine new possibilities for a series of essays about the failure of imagination in superhero media.

Twilight of the Superheroes will be available to $5 Patreon backers, and the raw text and bonus essays will be available to $1 backers.

A Host of Gentle Terrors

(a walking simulator)

You remember wandering in a strange and disorienting land, a land of fluid geography and unstable biology...

A Host of Gentle Terrors is a text-based exploration of a constantly shifting world and its strange inhabitants. Currently in demo form, this twine might be called an open-world procedurally generated walking simulator, or it might just be called a free-form narrative about discovery, monstrosity, and being alone in an often surreal and unsettling landscape.

This demo will be available both to Patreon backers and on (as yet undetermined) other platforms in the near future, with a fully realized release possible depending on interest.

This Cool Walking Simulator Features:

• No Leveling
• No Crafting System
• Bullets! (but no guns to shoot them with)
• No Stamina Meters
• No Retro Pixel Art
• Some Zombies?
• Non-Euclidean Geography
• Uncomfortably Biological Machinery
• A Fishing Mini Game Everyone Loves Fishing Mini Games Right?
• Tyranny And Mutation (The Concepts, Not The Album)
• Queer Shit I Mean It's A Twine What Honestly Did You Expect

Keep checking Storming the Ivory Tower and the StIT Patreon for these releases, coming soon!

So Much To Do/So Much To Say: What Even Is Neil Cicierega's Mouth Moods?

This week, rather than the normal StIT article, I'm instead releasing several pieces of more experimental criticism. The first, going up today, is a live commentary on Mouth Moods, the new mashup album by Neil Cicierega. The second, coming tomorrow to Eruditorum Press's blog, is going to be a more traditional article on some apocalyptic music that all coincidentally came out around January 20th for some weird reason. And finally, there will be a bonus Patreon-exclusive piece posted tomorrow as well on a recent form-shattering Idea Channel video.

You can find some guiding thoughts on this whole experiment, as well as links to the Patreon content, below the cut.

You can listen to the podcast here.

My God, Steven Universe is Full of Stars!: SU and Golden Age Sci Fi

The most recent Stevenbomb introduces five episodes of golden age pulp sci fi adventure... but what does the recontextualization of old narrative techniques in this new interconnected narrative form say about golden age sci fi, about Steven Universe's quest for the truth, and... about the fandom's understanding of the show?

Video Killed The Yurio Star: Why Is Yuri On Ice's Soundtrack So Weak?

The homoerotic skating anime Yuri On Ice places great importance on the choice of music for performance. But can its soundtrack live up to its own implicit standards? And what does that say about the rest of the show's creative direction?

If The Twine Stops We All Die

Over this break, I decided to teach myself Twine. As one does. The result, which I'm releasing to all of my Patreon backers as a thank you for supporting me over the past year, is a now hyper version of my last article, "If The Train Stops We All Die." There's nothing too complex going on here, but I've tweaked and expanded some of the text and I'm hoping that the results help to highlight the intertwined nature of this article (which was always written, actually, with a hypertext format in mind).

As my $2+ backers know, I like making my stuff as accessible as possible, and the great thing about these Twines is that you can actually pull them into the program yourself and decompile them to see how they work, in the same way people are welcome to look at my original Krita files to see how I compose the layers for my artwork! This is still pretty dour stuff, of course, to ring in the new year (Happy Yekaterina Bridge! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!) but I really am thankful to all of you for your support, and I wanted to do something extra and experimental as an added sort of end of the year perk.

So check out Patreon to download this new Twine (and something extra...), and if you haven't yet subscribed consider doing so to get access to a couple years' worth of exclusive bonus content!

If The Train Stops We All Die: 2016 In Review

2016 sucked. Let's talk about Snowpiercer, clipping., and seceding from a broken reality.

All art in this article is by Kathe Kollwitz, queer revolutionary socialist engraver.

Crazy Noisy Bizarre Town: Mob Psycho 100, Diamond Is Unbreakable, and... Post-Shonen Anime?

Mob Psycho 100, like comicker One's previous work One Punch Man, has a premise that seems to undermine core aspects of Shonen narratives... or even action narratives in general. Coincidentally, the current arc of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Diamond Is Unbreakable, has developed in ways that also disrupt traditional storytelling. Might we call these two works post-Shonen? And what can a 1961 short story by Kurt Vonnegut tell us about what these shows are trying to do?

Look Inside And You Will Find: Are Glitches Part of the Pokemon Experience?

The fan game Pokemon Uranium has some weird behaviors and some astounding glitches, but are those glitches just flaws, or are they important to make Pokemon Uranium feel like a genuine Pokemon game? And what can it tell us about the hype cycle surrounding canon games Sun and Moon, and spinoffs like Pokemon Go? 

Reload the Canons! is an ongoing Storming the Ivory Tower project where I play through The Canon of videogames. Except I'm not playing the original games. Instead, I'm playing only remakes, remixes, and weird fan projects. This is the canon of games as seen through the eyes of fans, and I'm going to treat fan games as what they are: legitimate works of art in their own right that deserve our analysis and respect. You can support Reload the Canons! and my other projects on the Storming the Ivory Tower Patreon.

A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities: Homestuck and Form RELEASE

Homestuck made headlines in 2012 when it earned 2.5 million dollars to fund the creation of an adventure game based on the series, but few commentators were equipped to discuss the most remarkable part of Homestuck's success:

Homestuck was arguably the first truly successful hypercomic, a comic that can only exist on the web.

A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities analyzes Homestuck in the context of the new hypercomics boom that it inspired. Containing newly revised and updated versions of five articles from Storming the Ivory Tower on Homestuck's formal techniques, the book places them alongside brand new and exclusive reviews of works like Awful Hospital, Ava's Demon, and Neokosmos, digging into the techniques and technologies that make these comics possible. 

Laying out the history of hypercomics for the first time, this book is an essential read for anyone looking to better understand why Homestuck is successful, and the possibilities that its formal techniques offer.

You can instantly access the fully illustrated ebook of A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities, as well as my previous three books, through a $5 subscription on Patreon, or access the text draft for just $1. Additionally, becoming a backer gets you loads of other perks:

$1 Backers: Prequel Adventure Review Is Prequel Adventure a story about making a cat cry, or is it more a story about coming together to dry her tears?		$1 Backers: Ruby Quest Review Ruby Quest is uneven as hell, but might it offer a glimpse into an emerging rhetorical mode for fiction?		$1 Backers: Neokosmos Review Could Neokosmos represent hypercomics becoming the most attractive medium for professional visual storytellers?
$1 Backers: Ava's Demon Review Does Ava's Demon represent the future of how hypercomics are produced?		$1 Backers: Alastere Review Does a JRPG actually need an active player at all to tell its story?		$1 Backers: Awful Hospital Review Does Awful Hospital's blending of form and theme surpass even that of Homestuck?
$3 Backers: Sleuth And His Problems In this StIT Podcast, I ramble in dazed fashion about Problem Sleuth and get distracted by researching the entire history of HTML development.		$2 Backers: Original Art Download the original Krita file I used to paint the cover image!		FREE: Problem Sleuth Review Problem Sleuth, Bard Quest, and Jailbreak may not be as renowned as Homestuck, but they helped put Andrew Hussie on the cultural map. But is Problem Sleuth really a comic? Or is it a game? Or a hypertext? Or is it something else entirely?
$5 Backers: A Bodyless and Timeless Persona			$5 Backers: A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities

[READER,PLAYER].DIE();: What Kind Of Media Is Problem Sleuth?

Problem Sleuth, Bard Quest, and Jailbreak may not be as renowned as Andrew Hussie's magnum opus Homestuck, but they helped put him on the cultural map, and they have a lot to offer anyone interested in the current boom of Hypercomics, comics that make special use of their digital platforms. But is Problem Sleuth really a comic? Or is it a game? Or a hypertext? Or is it something else entirely? 

This piece is the first of a series of hypercomic reviews appearing in A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities: Essays on Homestuck and Form, coming on November 28th to my Patreon backers. Subscribe at the $1 tier to gain access to the full text, or the $5 tier to download the text, as well as my previous three books, in illustrated ebook form.

Populism, Politics, People and Superpeople: Luke Cage and This Fucking Election

Luke Cage is a narrative drawing heavily on popular antiracist politics, so why is it so suspicious, narratively, of populism? And how did the Democratic ruling class's own contempt for populism cost them an entire election and usher in four to eight years of proto-fascist stoogery? This article's two interwoven threads explore these questions and freely allows Perfect to be the enemy of Good, because sometimes "good" doesn't translate to "good enough," and god dammit, there's a whole lot of things that just aren't good enough anymore. 

This article is basically a 4500 word primal scream and it is not designed to make anyone feel better about anything at all. Instead of reading this deeply bitter article you could play this as loud as possible. The experience is probably roughly the same.

Jared Dark'ness Dementia Raven Leto: Is Suicide Squad Mall Goth?

As trailers for Suicide Squad rolled out, they brought with them jokes about the film resurrecting mall goth and scene kid culture. But we don't joke here on Storming the Ivory Tower, we just do hard hitting serious journalism. If we want to figure out whether Suicide Squad belongs in your local Hot Topic alongside trip pants and Invader Zim hoodies, we have to ask: just what is Mall Goth, and what makes it different from Goth proper?

Which Wicked: Castle Hangnail and Navigating Fantasy Narratives

Ursula Vernon's Castle Hangnail, about a 12 year old girl striving to become master of an ancient magical castle, shares a tradition of humorous and somewhat self-aware fantasy with modern authors like Terry Pratchett and early fantasy writers like Edith Nesbit. Exploring those connections can help us see the way Vernon's book explores ideas about consent, narrative convention, and the vulnerability that comes with being strange. In a world of witches and sorceresses, what does it really mean to be "Wicked," and is it really the same thing as "Bad?"

This article and all the normally Patron-exclusive features accompanying this piece free to the public were underwritten by $10 backer David Formosa. The article was written and edited in a live stream here. To learn when future live streams are happening, and to follow StIT's projects like this, sign up on Patreon and follow the site's Facebook and Twitter.

Tangled in Tentacles: The Hauntological and the Weird

China Mieville posits two types of horror: the Weird and the Hauntological. But the boundaries between the two are sometimes hard to make out, and it's possible to mistake one for the other. This review roundup looks at three different mergers of the Weird and the Hauntological--the Rubbery Men of Fallen London, the skulltopus that is HYDRA, and the phenomenon of Global Warming, and asks: just what is the core of the horror here?

Pierre Metroid Smashes the Canon: 5 Ways AM2R Transforms Metroid II

AM2R--Another Metroid 2 Remake--made the news a few months ago when its long-anticipated release was immediately followed by a DMCA takedown demand from Nintendo. But is AM2R really just a copy of Metroid II, or is it a transformation? And what does a Jorge Luis Borges story have to do with contemporary fan games?

Too Much Horseman: The Reset Button vs Continuity in BoJack Horseman

You enter the pub, as you always do, and find that, as always, Sam Keeper is sitting in your chair. They've been sitting in your chair rambling at you for years now about everything under the sun, but mostly media studies. Criticism may be a conversation but it's hard to get a word in edge-wise!

Nevertheless, that's the status quo, and the status quo doesn't change.

Well, except for the fact that there's a bunch of other freaks here now, including the infamous Lord Humongous, and a couple of unicorns. Oh and everyone's wearing horse masks today, that's new.

Not the unicorns, they just look like that. You think they... live here now?

Still. When you get right down to it, everything around here stays pretty much the same and oh, hey, Keeper has started talking about that very subject.

BoJack Horseman, the show that we're all dressed as because it's the 10th of Halloween, is fundamentally a sitcom, and as such it's characterized by stasis. It's a show that is really about things remaining the same over time, returning to their starting points. But unlike similar shows which might hang a lampshade on their constant use of a reset button at the end of every episode, this is a show where cyclicality is welded deep into the narrative skeleton.

The premise of BoJack Horseman is that there's people, and there's also people with animal heads. Like in the video for Blow! It's sorta... post-furry.

Within that very strange context, the actual premise of BoJack Horseman is to follow the attempts of a middle-aged washed up former sitcom star, the titular BoJack, to move forward with his career and interpersonal relationships. Much of the show focuses on his search for meaning in his hollow and decadent existence, as his life and the lives of everyone around him continually are propelled back into old habits and self-destructive behaviors.

It's a comedy!

So this is a show characterized fundamentally by a consistent return to the status quo. This causes problems in the final episode of season 3, due to the problem of continuity.

Ghost Sam Coper: Hah, of course an underdeveloped version of myself would think continuity is the big problem here. I remember when I was so naive!

Sam Keeper: Wow what the heck? You're supposed to be dead!

Oh, yeah, you guess this person IS supposed to be dead. This alternate reality version of Keeper tried to take over the blog and then was murdered by the original, much less well adjusted Sam Keeper. You really didn't expect that continuity to be relevant again.

Sam Keeper: I really didn't expect this continuity to be relevant again! Who could possibly have predicted that there might be consequences to my long series of disastrous decisions!

Ghost Sam Coper: See because unlike me, a person who constantly rises above my past faults, you're constantly bogged down by your unacknowledged mistakes! Just like the characters in BoJack Horseman, actually. See this is REALLY a show characterized most strongly by continuity, and it's primarily continuity that allows the final episode of season 3 to succeed! If anything, it's an over-reliance on the reset button that bogs it down.

Sam Keeper: Well that's just ridiculous.

Oh great. They're clearly going to hash this all out, with you as a captive audience.

Ghost Sam Coper: Clearly we need to hash this all out, since we've got a captive audience!

Sam Keeper: Absolutely. Let's start by digging into the main arc of Season 3.

A Metroid And Its Human: What Does 'Another Metroid 2 Remake' Tell Us About Environment?

The Chozo Temple Complex is beautiful, golden, expansive. It is a space of lurid yellows, soft oranges, and shadows shading almost into violet, and while much of one's time spent navigating the space and avoiding the various still-active ancient defense systems, it's hard for me not to stop and admire the scenery of this ancient and crumbling structure. Walking across the top of the structure in particular is delightful (if you avoid the native life trying to kill you) as you can see layer upon layer of cavern opening out into mountains and an acid sunset beyond. There's a real sense of depth and space.

I'm not talking about Metroid 2: The Return of Samus. I CAN'T be talking about that game for one major reason: I haven't played Metroid 2, not even once. I didn't grow up in a family where expensive game consoles--and yes, I'd count a gameboy as "expensive"--weren't really a big economic priority, and even if we had the disposable income for them, I get the distinct impression that my parents would've put them in the same highly suspect category as tv shows not on PBS, and music not performed by a symphony. I missed out on most of The Games Canon.

Oh, and well, I guess the other dead giveaway is that Metroid 2 was in black and white.

And yet, I can talk about the vivid colors of the Chozo temple because while I have not played Metroid 2, I have played Another Metroid 2 Remake. AM2R hit the Internet about a month ago, causing significant buzz before basically immediately being slammed with a DMCA takedown notice from Nintendo. Thankfully, the game is still fairly easy to access.

This is a good thing, because AM2R offers up a pretty incredible experience, one that doesn't deserve to be buried under questionable intellectual monopoly laws. AM2R is doing something very special here. It's not just making accessible once more a game made for an obsolete platform. I mean, making the game itself accessible would probably be enough to justify its existence. But AM2R goes a step further, and setpieces like the Chozo Temple help us understand the new value it adds:

AM2R turns Metroid 2 into a game about our interaction with space, our use of space, and possibly, by the end, new ways of thinking about our place within an environment.

I'm Crazy But I'm Not Wrong: Stranger Things and Mental Illness

Spoilers for Stranger Things and Hannibal follow; trigger warnings for gaslighting, medical abuse, and narratively satisfying vivisection.

"I'm not crazy!"

It's a line you hear a lot in everything from urban fantasy to horror to paranoid conspiracy thrillers. The idea is to communicate that what's happening is real, and not just a delusion.

As far as throwaway utilitarian lines go, it's fine enough I suppose, but I think we can come up with a better line. Stranger Things, a Netflix original series which is so aggressively 80s that I keep expecting while watching to spontaneously be enveloped in black leather and chrome, might give us a bit of a glimpse of what a better line might be:

"I'm crazy, but I'm not wrong about this."

The basic narrative of Stranger Things follows a group of kids and adults battling against a Sinister Government Conspiracy and the Horrifying Extradimensional Monster that the government creeps have unleashed. And also there's a girl who can flip vans USING MIND BULLETS.

THAT'S TELEKINESIS KYLE.

What's really notable in the series is that major protagonists are, in fact, crazy, in the sense that they struggle with a variety of mental illnesses and traumas predating the start of the story proper. But that doesn't make them wrong. You can be both mentally ill in this show, and a main character, and correct about government forces fucking up your life. This is important to me as someone mentally ill in an exciting variety of ways, and as someone familiar with gaslighting and people taking advantage of my own uncertainty about my perceptions. This show, in setting out a narrative where people are explicitly suffering from various conditions, and who have to fight against those trying to take advantage of them because of this, is doing something important culturally.

A real good starting point for analyzing this is one of the show's absolute best characters: Joyce "Wallfucker" Byers.