wl jam jon jim jam jamboree
part 2 of 3
this is a story about not fitting in.
wl jam jon jim jam jamboree
part 2 of 3
this is a story about not fitting in.
I've made a mistake in my judgement of the first one, I definitely just didn't understand it. This was great, I loved the meaning behind it, even being able to translate the wingdings myself added a bit of interaction you don't usually get. +1
I like the ideas and themes underlying this, but the execution feels pretty blunt, and I think if the prose was a bit less direct in how it described things it could make the emotions a lot more evocative.
Seriously? I don't think the coloured text does anything justice here. It feels like you want it to carry an entire weight of meaning by itself but the text has not earned that weight yet. As a result it just feels like an incredibly immature take on a tired trope, which is a darn shame.
I'm more interested in what the alien trope can bring other than incomprehensibility. I want to see more daring uses of the speculative space afforded by this site. There are so many intersections of difference you can bring into the metaphor here — neuro-, gender-, physiological, etc. — but instead this piece seems to couch itself behind the formatting gimmicks, refusing to go further. What does it mean to be alien on more ways than the linguistic? How might that interact with the alien metaphor (and its cultural trappings: the UFO, the abduction, the bodily examinations, greys), especially when you're writing a piece that can afford to make the metaphor as real as it likes? What can being alien tell us about the future?
Edit: what if being alien could be something liberatory?
I have to agree with the person above me. For me, the story just feels a bit… pretentious, maybe? The colored text didn't help, it felt weird in my head while reading it (if that makes any sense) and thrown me off rythm. I get what you were trying to showcase here, but as someone with the capacity to relate to that, somehow I didn't, and it seemed a bit shallow. As minmin said — the formatting is like putting nice frosting on an underbaked cake.
Same thing here. I think that if this text was written without all of those emojis, green text to highlight the word "alien" and the random rainbow colors at the end, it would be a lot stronger, you know? I think these little gimmicks made the impact of the message here hit more softly, and that doomed the article for me. If it was a simple and direct narrative, I'm sure it would be very good, but as it is I will have to downvote it, unfortunately. Good luck with future articles, I am sure you will be able to do something amazing with the general concept of your texts!
I think that if this text was written without all of those emojis, green text to highlight the word "alien" and the random rainbow colors at the end, it would be a lot stronger, you know?
If I may: Those aren't just emojis. That weird text is Wingdings. It's used to represent the character speaking in their native Spanish — comprehensible to them, but unintelligible to everyone of their classmates. If you take that text and run it through a translator (EDIT: specifically, a decoder), you will find that it does actually say something.
I never said it didn't mean something, and honestly, I would rather if it didn't mean something than having to visit a decoding site for it. All of this takes away the immersion and the impact of the message, for me at least. And I don't know why you thought I didn't understand what it represents. That was my point, the impact of what the text represents could be delivered better if it was straight to the point, in my opinion.
Edit: Another thing I wanted to mention, if the text is comprehensible to the character that speaks Spanish, who is also the narrator, then wouldn't make more sense to write it normally? If the problem is the reader, it also wouldn't make much sense for me personally, as I do speak Spanish. Actually, thinking about it right now, if the text was written simply in Spanish maybe readers who don't know the language could actually relate to the character. Look, it's just that all this stuff in the text makes it feel less serious or impactful than it should be. That's all.
Disagreeing with the above idea that the last text is random. I assume it's saying the narrator is LGTBQ+, and therefore still alien?
It makes the green alien text make sense, since that sets up the trope.
Edit: especially if the title is a nod to Kushner.
The alien part referred to the fact that the character was from another country. Also, you said you "assume" the character is LGBTQ+, and why would that be? Because that information is only presented in that last sentence. If it was one the main struggles of the character, I think it should have been presented from the beggining, or maybe developed a little bit more. I read the whole series of these, I like the concept of them a lot, but the only one I considered interesting and well structured was the last. Maybe I am just a boring guy who don't like colored text, yeah, but I think this stuff takes away the seriousness of the issue the character is facing.
While the formatting gimmicks were understandably controversial, I think they actually did a very good job in properly communicating the disparity between different languages. The way each language is presented in a completely different way (Wingdings vs. blurring) actually shows the confusion in a natural and distinct way. The ending was also a nice bit of foreshadowing that really helps drive in these feelings of alienation, and also ensure the reader that there is more to overcome.
Smells like success.