Haruspex When?? - Update 04/02/24

Hey y’all, hope it’s going well!!

So, with the dust fully settled on the End of Eva video, I figured this would be a good time to touch base! Apologies on this update post taking so long to manifest but, for reasons we’ll get to, I wanted to wait till a couple things behind the scenes panned out before I wrote this post. Also, I won’t even lie, FF7 Rebirth did claim a solid week or so of my life, but I figure that goes without saying. When Nomura calls us, we of course must answer.

Anyways, we’re going to split this post up into two halves - The professional, and then the personal. First thing’s first, let’s start with the meat and potatoes of what’s in store for the channel:


Pathologic, For Those Who Will Never Play It: Haruspex’s Route

This is now officially my top priority for the channel, and something I’ve already been working on in the background for quite a while now. For the past couple months, I’ve been reading through a small pile of books and plays for research, putting together storyboards with plans to send them off very soon to animators for a handful of key scenes, and just this week I finished what’s going to be my last playthrough of the game before going all in on scriptwriting. Big swathes of the script’s rough draft are already done, I’ve been in talks with many of the people who will inevitably make up the main cast, and, perhaps most importantly, I have an incredibly strong vision for what I want this to be. There’s still a lot more progress to be made, but progress is being made.

Obviously, a lot of what the video will be is going to have to play out in the final product, but I can say this much:

I expect the final product to be somewhere between 6-8 hours.

-Around 5 hours of that will be the actual summary of all 12 of the Haruspex’s days
-10-15 minutes for the intro
-40-60 minutes for the analysis
-40-60 minutes on a series of ‘Intermissions’ that will serve as a history of the Moscow Arts Theatre and the many figures associated with and descended from it.

This is my way of saying that, in the same way I used the Bachelor’s Route to talk about Artaud and Brecht, I’m planning on using the Haruspex Route to talk about Anton Chekhov, Konstantin Stanislavski, and a handful of others. Given the game’s deep roots in Russian theater, I feel I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about this in-depth at some point and this feels like the perfect spot to do so.

All in all though, my current aim is to have the vast majority of the main summary’s script locked down and start posting previews of the individual days by June, July at the very latest. I will likely be continuing my research as those come together since this has become a very involved project, but I’ll be doing my best to set things up in a way that helps me avoid getting lost in my research in the way I did with the EoE video.

As eager as I am to finally get the next Patho video out there though, there is one more project I plan to drop before Haruspex is said and done:


Death of a Wish/Birth of a Dream

While I’m getting pre-production in order for the Haruspex Route, I will also be working with a co-editor to put together a much smaller scale project focusing on both Death of a Wish and Lucah: Born of a Dream. Why? Well, because they're great games that I think you'll love, but also because we got our first sponsor! The team behind the game have been fans of my work for as long as I’ve been a fan of theirs, so we came to an agreement that will hopefully be beneficial for us both. This is very fortunate for three reasons:

1) It allows me to secure some extra funding for the Haruspex Route’s animation budget.

2) While they are absolutely not my babies (creatively speaking), I did do some design work on Death of a Wish that I’m proud of and am keen to share. (I also edited the trailers for both games and did some QA for Lucah, full disclosure)

And 3) I’ve wanted to talk about these games for a while and I’m excited to finally have an excuse.

One thing I want to be really clear about is that the only reason I accepted this is because I believe these are games that you’ll find interesting, especially since this isn’t even the first time I’ve recommended them. For those of you who have been around since the beginning, you might remember that Lucah was actually one of the first games I ever recommended on the channel, and that’s simply because it’s exactly the kind of emotionally sincere and endlessly creative artsy queer nightmare journey that I’ve always loved to share with people. I gave them money on Kickstarter before they ever gave me money for freelance work, and I’ve never regretted supporting them for a second. I believe in their work enough that, when I found out Death of a Wish was happening, I originally offered to edit the trailers for free, purely because I wanted to support the project. (they insisted on compensating me lol)

Add to that that DoaW turned out to be a staggeringly substantial improvement over an already great game and, well. I’ll just say this video was always going to become A Thing at some point, one way or another, because I deeply love these games and think they deserve to be seen by more people.

This will most likely materialize as something comparable to the Signalis video: A discussion of design and mechanics geared towards actually recommending the game(s), a (relatively) brief summary, and the analysis. Applying this to two games might prove a little tricky, but given that I feel the two games are deeply interconnected with one another to such an extent that I view them as two halves of a whole, I do think it’ll be the best way to go about it. Add to that that each game has a relatively short playtime once you’ve learned them, and I don’t expect it to be nearly as mammoth as my most recent videos, hopefully around 1 hour, no longer than 90 minutes. Ya know. Cause that’s short for me. 

Rest assured though, I’m doing my best to make sure scope creep doesn’t get out of hand on this one. It’s part of why I’ll be bringing a co-editor on for this one, which will allow me to stay primarily focused on getting Haruspex's pre-production in order once I get the ball rolling on this. With any luck, the first preview for that should be up by the end of the month, so look forward to that deep dive into religious trauma.

Which brings us at last to our final thing to look forward to:


Podcasts!

Two podcasts, to be precise! The first of which is going to be the revival of the Perfect Parry Podcast with Foxcade and Clark. It’s my hope that this will mostly become the gaming podcast for the channel, a space to talk/fight about trending and recent games, as well as obscure favorites. If you’ve watched any of the old episodes of Perfect Parry, you know the vibe, and we’re largely looking to hold onto that and build on it.

And then there’s the second podcast, and this one I’m especially excited for: The Shadow Girl Theater, with SulMatul and Playhead North.

While it will technically be focused on media discussion, we’re hoping to make it into something a little more unique than that: The real goal of this podcast will be that, every episode, one person will bring on something they are absolutely obsessed with (in either a good or a bad way) and try to infect the others with brainworms about it and make us, and you, as obsessed with it as they are. Ya know, Psychic PvP but as a podcast.

Additionally, we’ll be covering a wider range of media. Games and anime will certainly be in the mix, but we are also planning on talking about plays, cartoons, TV, and probably just about anything else you can think of as well. And, of course, Homestuck. We will definitely be talking about Homestuck, because I don’t think I’m going to be able to ever escape it at this point. God help us all.

These will likely take a couple more weeks to fully manifest as we wait for new art assets to be finished and for a couple of the crew’s availability to open up, but the first episode of each of these should hopefully be in order for you guys by the end of the month. After that, we’ll gauge demand and figure out just how frequently we want to put out more episodes.

I’ve been trying for a while now to figure out a form of lighter content I can put out so that I’m not just perpetually vanishing off of people’s radars for months at a time, and something like this feels like a good compromise. The first couple episodes will likely get posted to the main channel, and then in the long run will find a home on a side channel so they don’t clog up people’s main sub box.


Misc.

I have a many more plans broadly sketched out past that, including some of the other projects I’ve mentioned in the past and have made significant progress on such as Heaven Will Be Mine, Shadow Hearts, and the Supergiant video, all of which I am still VERY keen to get to. But for now, I’m doing my best to put basically everything major that isn’t in someway connected to the Haruspex Route on hold until that’s said and done. When I say that’s my top priority, I do mean it, both because I think it’s overdue, and because I am very excited about the possibilities at hand.

As far as what the future of the channel has in store, this covers everything that I’ll be posting updates on for the next couple months.

This brings us to the personal part of all this: There is one thing I do feel I should address before we push too far ahead on all this, and the reason I decided to make this a public post for anyone to see. It's a question that has likely crossed the mind of those of you who have been supporting me for the past year, and one that I feel deserves an unambiguous answer.


Why didn’t the Haruspex Route happen last year?

The short version is that 2022 was a strong contender for the worst year of my life, and 2023 predominantly became a year about healing. That healing, however, very much got in the way of me being able to write the kind of script that I know the Haruspex Route has to be.

I’ll spare you the fine details and simply say that a long term relationship I was in got very, very toxic on their part, for reasons that I know were rooted in transmisogyny. Classic case of a partner who appears supportive of a transition at first, but always found some excuse or another to always make everything around it as difficult as possible and vilify you for it. If you’re trans, you’ve likely and unfortunately heard no shortage of stories like this and I was one such case, because the sad truth is that it can happen to anyone. And we will leave it at that for both my sake and yours.

Suffice to say, things got marginally better once I was able to distance myself from them at the start of 2023, and as a result I got a major burst of creative energy that I was really eager to pour into Haruspex. And I did! For a good couple months, I was writing and researching all the stuff I talked about above, and I was making good progress on paper. But when it came time for me to start getting to the actual meat of the script, the actual substantive, emotionally honest and nuanced stuff, I hit a bit of a wall.

The thing is, for all of their absurd bleakness, it’s very important to me that the Pathologic videos be centralized around messages of hope. That’s always what I’ve pictured this series as, both because I think that’s the actual core point of the game itself, and because that's what I personally want for my own work. But in light of everything that had happened, I simply could not find any hope in me to offer at the time.

I could tell I was going through the motions, coloring in the lines of what I knew the video was ‘supposed’ to be, rather than making something with the earnest positivity and passion it deserved. Bluntly: Despite my better judgment, I went full doomer as a result of everything happening in my personal life, and that would have infected the work in a way that would inevitably have made it both cynical and insincere. At that point and time, I was deeply hopeless, I recognized that in myself, and I knew that’s not what I want for these videos.

Initially I wasn’t too worried about it. I’ve had slumps like that before, so I decided to do what I typically do in such headspaces: Briefly step away and focus on another project that better matches my current mood for a couple days, and then come back. This is where the End of Evangelion video started, just something quick on the side to help me emotionally reset while letting me talk about something I was passionate about. I bounced back and forth between the two for a couple months, but once I found that cut live action scene, my attention fixed on EoE much more than I ever meant it to. I’m proud of the final product, but I will also freely admit that it got entirely out of hand, and I definitely got lost in the work and research of it all. Most of all though, looking back at everything, I realize that I failed to communicate how or why my plans had changed, and for that I apologize, and promise it won’t happen again. Given the circumstances around everything though, I hope you can understand why it was hard for me to explain at the time.


So what will be different this time?

Things are actually, genuinely, comically better now. Like, to an absurd degree. If there’s any silver lining from the mess that was last year, it’s that I've discovered that I truly do have an incredible support network of kindhearted people around me. A lot of people came together to make sure I landed on my feet, and that paid off in a big way. It’s been a night and day difference from where I was, physically and emotionally, during this time last year.

I moved into a new place at the beginning of the year, and since then everything in my life has improved. I have a community of incredible friends and loved ones around me who love and accept me for who I am, a great home life with a private workspace, and I’m more creatively energized than I have been in a long time. Most of all though, I just simply feel better. I can safely say that this is currently the happiest I’ve been… shit, maybe ever.

Also, it must be said, I do think that End of Eva was a much better outlet for all of those negative feelings than Haruspex would have been. Getting that EoE video out of my systems did in fact end up doing wonders for me, if only because it just so utterly purged all my desire to wallow in cynicism. Looking at something as bleak as EoE for as long as I did has left me really excited to engage in anything that wasn't crafted out of pure bitter disdain for people. I recognize that it’s weird to say that I’m excited to return to Pathologic for the levity of it, but having just replayed it, I am way more excited to be looking at that cheeky dev trolling every day for a while instead of Third Impact. Love that movie, holy fuck is it spiritually draining.

Point is though that things can, in fact, get better. And I’m very excited to bring that energy into the Haruspex’s route, and beyond.

Anything else we should know?

There is one more thing I should mention: Later today, I will be unlisting the Grand Guignol video. There are a handful of smaller reasons why I’m planning to unlist it, including some factual errors I let slip through which I’m not comfortable with, but the biggest reason is simply that I am no long on good terms with the person who I collaborated on it with. Consequently, I do not feel comfortable making any kind of profit (no matter how slight) off of their work, and seeing it on the channel honestly kind of upsets me at this point on a personal level.

I’ve done my best to leave all my old content up, even if it’s content I’m embarrassed by, but this will be the one time I make the exception because it runs a lot deeper than me simply not being proud of it. It will only be unlisted so if you’ll still be able to watch it if you like, and I will be hiding it at the bottom of the Codex Entry playlist for the next couple weeks for those of you who want to get a chance to save the link yourself, but I hope you can understand why I feel the need to take it down. Maybe once Haruspex is in the can, I’ll take a look at giving the script another pass and revisiting the subject or find some other avenue to talk about the theater. Still love the subject, but am not comfortable leaving that specific video up.

The TL;DR

- Haruspex soon
- Death of a Wish/Born of a Dream video sooner
- Podcasts.
- Grand Guignol vid is getting unlisted
- Life’s hard and people can be fucked up but better things are possible.

As always, thank you again for your support. It has made a world of difference though all of this and continues to make all my future plans possible. The next time you see me here, I should have a couple things to share with y’all and I couldn’t be more excited for it.

The future looks bright y’all~

Love ya all
Peace,
Ruby <33