Tuesday, August 21, 2012

The Amalgam Saga: DJay's review [2/2]

Read the first part of this review here.

For reference, the Amalgam saga is a series of seven blogs written by TheSomnambulist. They have a set order: PrestidigitationUrban MaleficThe World Through These EyeholesCold and Lonely DaysMetaphysical Fiction (plus companion blog Dawghouse)and No Gods No Masters. This post contains the last three.

Metaphysical Fiction
Dawghouse
No Gods No Masters

For convenience purposes, I feel it's best to tackle all three in one single review.

Metaphysical Fiction, at 64 posts, is about a man loosely related to the protagonist of Prestidigitation. This man, Doctor Maless Peyn, is thrusted into a game where he has to defend himself from a majority of Fears. He is able to win, only for The Cold Boy to kill him and then only for The Manufactured Newborn to make him a Thoughtborn, a creature of pure information. He learns how to map his information onto a human brain, thus taking over a body, and he uses his new abilities to help Portnoy (the protagonist of Urban Malefic) avoid the Fears. ..sorta. The plot gets confusing.

Meanwhile, Dawghouse, at 40 posts, is about the Muffin Man from Cold and Lonely Days. He spends the first act of the blog talking about himself and what actually happened in the aforementioned blog, and then he saves his sister and has to go on a series of missions loosely connected to The World Through These Eyeholes. Over the course of these missions, the Muffin Man is introduced to a collection of four eldritch creatures (The Herald, The Envoy, The Emissary, and The End) collectively called The Amalgam. They're a sort of universal.. parasite phenomenon, and they bring with them the end of the world. He is joined by The Dying Man as well as Harold from The World Through These Eyeholes, and as the plot progresses he's joined by Doctor Peyn and Portnoy. Around this point, both these blogs stop and move onto the final one.

Finally, No Gods No Masters, at 27 posts, marks the end of the Amalgam saga. It starts off detailing the Muffin Man's plan to use The Quiet to kill the slender man and weaken the Fears, and then this adapts to become the collective protagonists' new plan to prevent The Amalgam from ending their universe. To put it bluntly, the plan doesn't work (well, it kills the slender man and weakens the Fears, making the situation even worse), and the protagonists run out of ideas only to be confronted by the ambiguous character Jack of All at the last minute who strikes a deal with them. He saves the world, only to then announce he's only saved the world in other timelines; the protagonists are doomed. The saga ends with this.

It's.. a really complicated story. I don't think I can review these blogs without speaking of the Amalgam saga as a whole, so before I do that, let me get a quick complaint out of the way.

Personally, I don't like that these blogs don't stand too well on their own. Dawghouse ends arbitrarily and switches to No Gods No Masters (and hey, let's assume the blog system is meant to be even remotely realistic, how were the first several No Gods posts on Da Dawg's account as early as 2011 when the Da Dawg account was proven, at the start of Dawghouse, to be some random person in 2012?), and there's no reason for Doctor Peyn to stop blogging on Metaphysical Fiction when he does; he's still a part of the story afterward. As individual blogs, these three blogs don't do well. And I don't like that.

Now then! The Amalgam saga is basically a series of blogs about people who are pawns in the Fears' endless games, people who are used as devices in furthering various schemes, people who are played with and tortured for who knows what reasons. Even the people who are able to beat the system and rise above their gods and masters are either pulled back down into the game or, as that ending shows, killed somehow anyway. Everyone dies, nothing matters, life is hell and death is hell. The Amalgam saga, quite simply, is cosmic horror with a witty comedic shell. A sense of "life sucks, so why not enjoy it?"

As for the blogs' appearances, Metaphysical Fiction had a nice white background with a light-blue theme to make it pretty. Dawghouse and No Gods No Masters both shared the same appearance, making me wonder even more what the point of breaking them up into separate blogs was. But all throughout the Amalgam saga, the general consensus on blog appearance seems to be just going with the simplest options. So I don't really feel much to comment on here. There wasn't much to set the blogs apart from every other blog appearance-wise, but I think the stories do that task well enough to compensate.

It's admirably written, for sure. Amusingly complex, affably entertaining, with some really awesome portrayals of Fears. But on the lower side, the blogs suffer from a need for proofreading. Maybe it's just the grammar nazi in me, but reading that much text without all the necessary punctuation starts to give me a headache. And I don't think the blog had enough mileage to match the plot. That is, the pacing was really good for the first few blogs, but around the time of Dawghouse, the plot seemed to move ten times faster than the posts did. Events happened and there wasn't enough pacing to let the reader contemplate the effects of this and feel for the characters. The characters needed more soliloquys, more monologues, more discussion of the plot to break up the constant pace and to make it feel even remotely relatable. Hell, in different ways, the earlier blogs needed more action and less empty posts; the progression from "not enough action" to "more action than one can even focus on" happened much too suddenly.

All in all, TheSomnambulist might want to consider this saga his magnum opus in the Fear Mythos, but I'd love to see him top himself.

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