yeah I didn’t like this one bit!
I must (sort of) disagree here, having just played Fusion again yesterday.[1] Fusion’s storytelling language is definitely pulp and definitely trash in the Pauline Kael sense of the word, but I have to argue that it’s more dignified than the dumpster sludge that Dread’s narrative digs down into. Agree with exodus’s expo-dump gripes, every piece of written text in the game goes in one eye and out the other, they pull “Any objections, Lady?” out of the dusty old closet within the first two minutes of the game, and the Chozo names are wicked dumb. On that last point:
“Quiet Robe”??? “Raven Beak”???
- These really do sound like names you’d find in a paperback from the '50s (referring to people you know those authors had no business writing about)
- All the location names, species names, etc etc in Dread and across the series are not derived from Real Earth English. Even if the alien place names mean something literal in an alien language, translation convention says you don’t just translate that into English. We call it the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, not Elysian Fields Avenue; Tōkyō, not the Eastern Capital.
(we do call him Suda51 but that’s a name he gave himself… - OK, OK, instead of following convention and simply transliterating their Chozo names into English–or maybe they only speak sign language (which the Chozo do not) which can’t be transliterated[2] and English names must be invented for them–why “raven”? A colloquialism for a medium-to-large bird native to Earth’s northern hemisphere. What word in the Chozo language could possibly correspond to something so specifically Earthen? Furthermore the Chozo are birds, yes, but would they really have names describing their birdness if they evolved on a planet separate from any of the other species native to Earth? Might they sooner refer to themselves by a more general term for “being”? Ditto “beak” vs “mouth.” I’m trying to have my cake and eat it by calling this proposed naming convention ridiculous because it is obviously rooted in human perspective and then demanding it be judged according to human standards of naming, and I’m full of hot air here but MAN I dunno it just rubs me the wrong way
ALL OF THAT SAID, I still liked Dread, not trying to be a hater
weird coincidence @antillese, I didn’t see your post until afterward ↩︎
although the Luminoth language can, 1:1 with the English alphabet ↩︎