Fatal Frame meta for Fandom_Level, level 1

[estirose]

I'm doing five levels (40 metas) for Fandom_Level. I figured it would be a change from writing fic.

Here are the metas I'm using to clear level 1. Note that these are all spoilery for the games.

1: Abduction as Seduction, or an alternate view of Mafuyu's motivations at the end of Fatal Frame I.
2: Amnesia, or the awareness of ghosts in the games.
3: Angst, which pretty much describes the whole game for players, characters, and ghosts.
4: Alternate Universes, which ponders how the various game endings can be thought of as semi-canonical alternate universes.
5: Bad Boys, or why Itsuki's good idea to rebel ultimately caused everything to go wrong.
6: Blindness, or tactics of the blind and blinding ghosts of the game.
7: Girls, or a discussion on International Womens' day of why I like the Fatal Frame games.
8: Blood, and how it's used to great effect in the games.

Also, thank you to the people who maintain the wiki at "Beyond the Camera's Lens", which I've found very useful for checking my facts.

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Meta 3: Angst

[estirose]

Would you like some horror with that angst? 1259 words.

Angst is defined as a "feeling of dread, anxiety, or anguish" according to dictionary.com. Between the player, the playable characters, and the ghosts themselves, there's plenty of angst to go around in the Fatal Frame games, which have to deal with things going wrong which resonate through the present in the form of repeating, tragic events.

On the player level, this angst is caused by the game itself. There are few narrated Let's Plays that don't involve cursing by the players, and part of it is the fact that this game makes you feel dread and anxiety when you're playing it. This is accomplished several ways, from the limited healing items (especially in the first three games, where you had to find them), to limited/weak film, to the fact that if you don't run all the time - and you can't in Fatal Frame 2 when Mayu is with you, or she complains - a random ghost is likely to show up at precisely the wrong moment when you're short on both or are on your way to a terrible ghost fight - see the 4player podcast clip where a Broken Neck suddenly appears when the player is trying to save, much to the player's vocal terror! And let's not even start with the canon endings for the first two games, where you will lose someone you love.

In addition, you're fighting in dark areas, it's almost always night (except for the daylight portions of Fatal Frame 3, which can get scary because the ghosts are invading your house), and you're often in scary, run-down areas. Some areas are scary because you have a limited amount of room or are otherwise restricted in movement. One example is the fish tank room in Fatal Frame 1 - it's not small, but it's extremely inconvenient to fight in due to its layout. There's a reason why people online cite it as one of the scariest rooms in the game, and why it reappears in the Himuro Mansion portion of Fatal Frame 3.

But at least the players can put the controller down and walk away from the game. The characters and the ghosts are trapped within. For each of them, there's the threat of becoming part of the scenery if they don't succeed - with the possible exception of Choushiro, who we find died before we're introduced to him and is therefore already part of the scenery. Miku in the first game has to run around, not only looking for her brother, but a way out of the mansion - she, like the rest of the characters, is stuck as soon as she steps inside. Likewise, Mio and Mayu cannot leave the Lost Village until the mystery is solved - the village is stuck in a kind of time loop. Miyako Sudo notes that she can't sleep, and surely there's no food - the place itself is slowly rotting to pieces. There's no escape from the Manor of Sleep except by waking up (and a lot of people don't do so one day). And of course, in the fourth game, while the players can leave the building, there's no boat off the island - even if they weren't too busy trying to solve the mystery of their pasts.

In fact, in all games except the first, a lot of the characters' actions are motivated by some form of angst. In the first, not so much, though Mafuyu feels that he should find what happened to Takamine and co and Miku is worried about her brother. In the second, Mio has to keep her injured sister alive - a sister who keeps wandering off and is possessed by an evil sacrifice. Likewise, the whole theme of the third game is about anxiety and anguish. Rei is filled with guilt and anguish about the death of her fiance Yuu, and Miku likewise about Mafuyu. Mio, who is seen but not played, is the same way about Mayu, and her uncle Kei is filled with anguish about Mio. And in the fourth, all of them are seeking to figure out what happened a particular day, in which they lost their memories – or in Choushiro's case, are trying to figure out what's going on.

The ghosts, too, are filled with their own form of angst, mostly anxiety or anguish. Since there are too many to list here, I'll mention a couple from the games, mostly the first three. In the first game, there's Blinded, who keeps wandering around because she was blinded in a cruel ceremony. She's lost, looking for someone to help her – her two phrases are "It's dark" and "There's nobody here", and while she's attacking you, "My eyes!". Likewise, Yae, the folklorist's wife, worries about her daughter's disappearance as you fight her. And Long Arms screams "Give back!" as he thinks you're responsible for taking his daughter away. In the second game, there's Chitose, who spends a lot of time during your fights saying "It's dark in here, Mutsuki! I don't like it!", Yoshtasu Kiryu, who isn't happy about the ceremony and having to lose a daughter, and Itsuki , who anguishes that he couldn't either complete his ceremony correctly or save Sae and Yae from theirs. In fact, probably the only hostile ghosts who aren't angsting are the trio of Osaka children who want to play hide and go seek with you, much like their Demon Tag playing counterparts in 1 (Clock Boy, Girl in Well, and Crawling Girl), who do know they're dead but happily will "play" with you to death. There are no happy ghosts in three, though several of the handmaidens will happily try to stake you to death – most of the rest of the ghosts are either worrying about Reika's sacrifice failing, such as the family head, or full of guilt and anguish about the people they lost, such as Yoshino Takigawa. There is one possible exception, Kyouka, who is much too busy waiting for the missing Akito to fall under the other two categories. Even Haibara You of the fourth game is worried about Choushiro catching him. And while you don't learn about the stories of some of the non-hostile (vanishing and hidden) ghosts until after the game, they have their own angst, their own worry, that is sometimes evident as you go through the story.

In fact, the "boss" ghosts, the main antagonists, also deserve mention here. Kirie's love was killed and then she was strangled to death, and she wants nothing more than revenge for her pain. Sae wants nothing more than her sister to come back and is upset over Itsuki's death. Seijiro Makabe, the Kusabi, was tortured to death in order to try to keep the world from ending, and now is stuck in a nonthinking revenge. Reika wants nothing more than her pain to end. Sakuya might be the one exception - but she was dying of a disease that was slowly robbing her of her memories and herself in life.

In other words, other than a few kids throughout the games, everybody in the game series has angst. After all, this is not a happy game series. The whole premise is that something goes terribly wrong and it's up to you, against all odds, to fix it. And even if you fix it, things might not end well for the character that you've become invested in over the last few hours. It's a game that's loved for the scares and the angst, and it delivers both well.