Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

The book is clever and interesting, expertly weaving in and out of meta-narrative. Occasionally tropey, but in a gonzo, knowing way that tries (and often succeeds) at deconstructing the tropes. This is a book that would have absolutely floored me when I was young: copious literary references, direct engagement with history, time-loops, self-reference, meta-reference, and complex characters exploring themselves and coming to grief. It even offers a lovely little capsule history of and meta-commentary on RPGs scattered through its pages. And while the prose style isn't quite excellent, it's solidly good, and there's occasional flashes of cleverness. The art, on the other hand, is uniformly incredible, almost overwhelming.

All that said, I can't shake the feeling that there's something not quite right about it, despite my enjoyment. There's something kind of hollow or vaguely wrong in it that I can't quite put my finger on.

Perhaps the fault is in me? As I age I find anhedonia rears it's ugly head over and over, and I often struggle to experience joy in things that previously I would have enjoyed.

Or perhaps the book is just a little too precious, a little too delighted with itself? Pretension is something that used to delight me even when it failed, but now makes me cringe unless carried off perfectly (or nearly so). At the back of the collections there's a series of essays by Kieron Gillen about the making of the book and related topics, and reading them was probably a mistake. I found his "non-fiction" voice to be insufferable, like a caricature of Neil Gaiman.

Or perhaps I just found the ending unsettling (as it was certainly intended to be) and am just working through a bit of fiction poisoning? Perhaps my unease with the book is, perversely, a mark of the book's quality? I'm tempted to re-read it to see, which is probably a good sign.

What led me to read this book is that one of my regular gaming groups is getting ready to play the RPG based on the graphic novel. That's right, in a display of dazzling meta-ness, Gillen went on to write an actual RPG, based on a graphic novel about people getting trapped in an RPG, where you play as a person who makes a character and gets trapped in an RPG.

My feelings about the RPG mirror my feelings about the book: younger me would have been enthralled by the many layers and twisting self-reference, older me finds it a little precious¹ and questions how well any of that will actually work. I trust our GM to do great work, but when the pitch first landed, the thought of managing a meta-player and a character at the same time just made me feel tired, frankly.² After reading the comic, I'm cautiously optimistic that it might be a really good time.

We'll see, the Die is cast.