More musings about Yuletide fandoms, 2015

[estirose]

I think I was a bit too concise this year, but I don't like to ramble on in DYW letters. So, in comments, I've rambled about my Yuletide fandoms.

Comments

Monument Valley

[estirose]

Once you get past the gorgeous art, Monument valley is kind of a very plain, minimalistic game. The whole storyline is the main character, Ida, is walking around trying to get to a point where she can deposit objects of various shapes above a star-shaped platform. We only get the name of the character in the tutorial, and there are only a few places where she encounters the Ghost and gets monologued at. In fact, Monument Valley is in some ways a five-minute fandom because all one needs to know is about 15 lines of Ghost monologue and the ending of the main game.

I don't mind at all, because worldbuilding is very much a favorite thing of mine. I want to know how other people construct Ida's world and her place in it, how they see the Crow people and the monument builders and everything else.

My own personal headcanon is that the monuments are nowhere as weird and interesting as we, the player, see them. They look that way because Ida is confused, because the spell is warping her mind and making her forget the reality of anything. It's possible that the Crow People are not real, but Ida's guilt stopping her in her tracks. The whole thing is Ida struggling to remember who she is and what she needs to do - restore the monuments - before she loses everything.