Snacko
Level: Smiter
Rank Points: 448
Registered: 06-08-2006
IP: Logged
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Re: Braid (+2)
First we'll need a working definition of postmodernism, note that I subscribe to the belief that the barriers between modernism and postmodernism are largely artificial and based purely on era.
Distilling things to their most general form, the modernist movement was a movement that mostly consisted of experiments in moving away from a dominant, commercial Victorian style (and one that was not altogether revolutionary, just pick up a Harry Potter book to see what I mean).
Thing really kicked off in the literary world in 1919 when Sherwood Anderson published his novel Winesburg, Ohio serially, but the movement exploded over 10 years later when James Joyce wrote Ulysses, a truly bizarre, almost unreadable and truly brilliant parody of Homer's Odyssey. There is one chapter where one of the protagonists walks to the beach, picks his nose, writes poetry ideas in the sand, sees a dog pee on a rock and then pees on that very rock in the book's second most famous episode. The most famous lasts only for only 8 sentences, but still manages to be some 26-odd pages long.
I'm not sure exactly when historians place the beginning of the postmodern movement, but I know that Catch-22(1955), a parody of both Homer's Iliad and of the typical sterilized approach to the very barbaric concept of war, is classified as Modern while The Crying of Lot 49 (exactly eleven years later in 1966), a parody of more or less everything (as expected of the typically messy Pynchon) is considered Postmodern. I also know that for some reason, no one but Virginia Woolf believed that Virginia Woolf was a Modern writer.
Essentially, the two terms can mean anything, but my decision to classify Braid as Postmodern is due to certain patterns, although patterns perhaps go against the entire idea of the two movements.
Braid is not so much postmodern in theme as much as style. It rejects the idea of a central plot (and goes even farther than the most famous example of this decision, Gravity's Rainbow in that the separate stories don't literally occur in the same timeline) or even any real clarity on the bits and pieces we are afforded.
Every world begins with a row of books. The exact distance between these books indicate how closely related they are. With one notable exception (which I'll get to later), these stories are mostly independent of each other. However, each story involves a protagonist obsessed with finding something called the Princess. If said protagonist is given a name, it is always Tim. Many people take this to mean that they are all the same person, this is not true, if it was Tim would exist both in the Mushroom Kingdom and in 1940's America.
Perhaps he does.
Most of the game is spent inside the essence of these stories, all silhouetted against the archetype of the hero saving a princess from some kind of monster, the main struggle of the text represented through a gameplay element unique to that specific world (the sole exception is World 2, the first one you visit, that power is present in all the other levels). Hence, these completely separate stories are Braided together by this metagame, and one other that I won't spoil on these boards. Send me a PM if you want to know what, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of finding them in the first place.
On the first page are my thoughts on the Epilogue, but be warned that it not only contains massive spoilers, but I grasped at straws in order to satisfy my desire to pin down the story as one concrete, traditional string of events. Don't make that mistake, you and only you should be able to decide what Braid means to you.
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Director of the Department of Orderly Disruptions
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