Hearing Nightwish close out the episode was much excellent. Great choice of the musics, Julian. I like how personal things can get on NWP. Other podcasts I listen to don't manage to cover their topics, stay funny, but also get deep the way NWP does. I can relate to Julian's fear of letting his mother down. Both of my parents are very loving and they are relatively accomplished in life. My mom and dad each came from large poor families, and my parents both went to college, got 4.0 GPAs, and went on to secure careers and a middle-class life for themselves. I feel a very inherent competitive urge to not only live up to that standard, but I actually want to be better than them. It's one of the reasons I'm so hard on myself, and why I shoot high when setting career goals in level design. I love my parents, but I crave to be better than them and improve on any of their weaknesses that I find. I want to get more education than they did, and I want to be a legitimate evolution in the history of the family. When my parents die one day I want to be able say that I am a legit successor to their family name, that evolution didn't go backwards, and that I didn't stagnate.
In video games one situation that scares me is when I'm dealing with immortals or ghosts. This may be weird and I don't know if I've heard anybody else bring up the concept before, but I'm quite afraid of the concept of immortality. The longer a creature lives, the less you can relate to it, I believe. In video game lore, when you encounter ancient species that have thrived for millions of years (like the Reapers) they are often removed from any morality or social conditioning that would affect a short lived species and the fight for survival.
At the beginning of XCOM: EU they have the quote by Arthur Clarke saying, "Two possibilities exist, either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Either option is equally terrifying." I fully believe in that when it comes not only to aliens but extending out to deities and gods of myth from any religion. I'm an atheist and have no proof yet or reason to believe aliens or gods exist, but if ancient texts and myths actually have any truth to them, I believe the universe will be much more terrifying. If we can actually discover all-powerful immortal beings my first instincts won't be to bow to worship them, my first instinct will be to run silent and deep, and prepare for war if it came to it. I would end up dying. I would rebel because the gods in ancient texts from Christianity, Greek myth, Egyptian myth, Myan, etc, aren't very peaceful creatures. Well, they are peaceful as long as you stay in your caste, and worship as told. If you don't, you get fire and brimstone, genocide, planet flooding, disease, war, etc. I have no desire to live forever, and I am skeptical of the people who have the nerve to seek it out and crave it whether it be for nefarious purposes or peaceful "heaven/paradise" purposes. Believing in immortality at best is wishful thinking, and at worst it's plainly greedy and dangerous. If you were an immortal species, you would have no connection to humans or the understanding of our struggles. You would have no understanding as to why life is precious, because your life would never be under threat. Human beings have no empathy or understanding of the struggles of something as little as an ant or house fly. See where I'm going? If you were immortal would you really be "alive"? Discuss.
So that's one of the things that scares me in real life. In video games I get really scared when I come across enemies who don't die. Like the floating ghosts in Silent Hill 4, or Alma Wade in the FEAR games. It's a surreal and terrifying moment for me when I'm playing an action-packed shooter and suddenly I come across a terrifying little ghost girl, and all the ammunition and karate chops in the world can't stop her, but she can melt people with her thoughts. I'm completely desensitized to monsters. All the hell knights and chainsaw zombies in the world don't scare me, but one little ghost girl can give me nightmares. I actually had a nightmare about Alma once, it's the only nightmare I've had about a video game villain, and that's when I figured out that my fear of her is the real deal. What makes my fear of Alma Wade even more layered is the fact that I'm empathetic towards her and I feel sorry for all the horrible things her dad did to her, and what her childhood was like being a forcibly impregnated test-subject. That game is fucked up, nothing good can come from the narrative in those games. It's bad any way you look at it, and there's really no good and evil, it's just chaos and survival. The people she kills deserve to suffer, but Alma doesn't stop, she is just pure chaos and even if you feel sorry for her, you have to fight back at least for your own survival's sake.
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