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A billions of years-long fusion explosion is ripping through space: Shattering, scorching, bleaching, blasting, boiling, evaporating, annihilating all that it glances upon. Even so, certain special materials, in just the right conditions, and for just a little while, do something other than curl up and die: They catch that hateful radiation; they harness it, even sweep themselves up onto it as a man might upon a horse. Endless beautiful complexities emerge and what's at their pinnacle does indeed verge upon divinity.
I'm excited to show you this chapter. Not because of its form; if anything, it has been a humbling experience to write this as it has embarrassed many of my failings as a thinker and as a writer. It needs work and I'm not kidding when I keep telling you that I want advice. But I think the substance is here, and I'll rest easier tonight knowing that this picture is playing out in many minds beside my own, as I did on the night when I first showed you the Christmas tree.
Join me now; please see the world through my eyes, for a moment, as together we look again upon these peculiar things; these human beings, who dance beneath the killing Sun.
(Chapter one is here.)
0108 - The Mountain
Here is an island. It is shaped much like the sea-mount of the shellfish, or the island of the apes. A very small peak, some lush land in a ring below that, and then worse and worse territory as it broadens and flattens toward the sea. We can divide it up into a few sections; for now let’s call them Peak, Ring, Slopes, and Shoals.
Upon the Peak, as you might expect, sits the grandest palace, and within it a King. This is interesting to me because believe it or not the Peak is high up enough that it’s actually starting to get cold and unpleasant up there. Whoever sits upon that throne has a great deal to worry about, because everyone else wants the position and he must be extraordinarily-talented indeed to hold on to his shiny hat. In fact I think the Peak is such a peculiar place that it’s actually a mistake to make too big a deal of it at this point in our analysis. Put it this way: though it brings with it the highest status and incredible opportunity, it also invites so much trouble that, on balance, occupying the position is often not clearly a reproductive advantage at all. Played correctly it certainly can be, but… overall I think it’s best that on our mental diagrams of the island we should put a little asterisk next to the peak, and regard it more as an epiphenomenal spot which comes and goes, rather than a permanent and vital fixture.
Far, far more comfortable to be situated in the Ring, in which resides the island’s elites, or its nobility. These are generally descendants of the northerners who came and conquered this island. These people have it all. Wealth, security, preferential access to mates, and control of territory which as often as not can even be superior to that which is held by whoever happens to be momentarily perched upon the Peak. The nobles jockey with each other for status, and advantageous marriages, and fight for ever-larger slices of the Ring. But they have children, too, and those tend to divide up their slices, so the whole thing more or less maintains an equilibrium. And when the time is right, yes, nobles have a way of making plays for the Peak, but only if they calculate that this is reproductively advantageous over holding on to their already-lovely positions.
The Peak is the attractor for all the island’s competent men and beautiful women — that is, the Peak is where they are all pointed when attempting to move upslope — but the Ring is where most of the magic happens. Where brilliant and powerful men tend toward ending up, who then claim the most beautiful women for lovers if not necessarily for spouses. And boy do these people ever have babies, which is a problem for the same reason that it was for the shellfish.
Below the Ring we have the Upper Slopes. Here we find something like a professional class. These people are, or are related to, minor children of minor noble families and will not inherit any sort of titles but do still have a fair amount of wealth and connections. Of course, they also tend to have a lot of children, and so there is another level down, and another, until we get to the Lower Slopes.
The Lower Slopes are the last place that families can reasonably expect to be able to hold on more or less indefinitely, provided that in each generation they have at least one son who isn’t substantially less-capable than his father. But of course, the farm is already about as small as it can get while still supporting a household, so additional sons will have to go somewhere, and unless they’re clever enough to pull something else off, that place is…
The Shoals. Life is short, nasty, brutal, and anxious on the Shoals. You may picture vagabonds, wanderers, makeshift encampments outside of town. Recall that this planet is named after the eccentric tidal patterns caused by its many moons. Someone living on the Shoals may get by for quite a while, making a living scrounging in the discards of, and occasionally performing some service for, his betters, but everyone down here knows that at any moment a generational Tide might rise (or even a lesser one) and when it does they’ll be the first to go, whereas someone more highly-placed will be much better-positioned to survive.
There is a saying in Tidus: "One man in ten is as good as his father. One in a hundred is better." Put another way, almost all men can be described as having been cobbled together from the broken pieces of better men, cursed with a wistful sense that they are almost but not quite what they were supposed to be. This feeling is usually accurate. Different is generally worse.
How many of each generation end up on the Shoals? Well, for one, there’s a big difference here between men and women. Women have far more intrinsic worth, as they are capable of making babies for a man who cares enough to support them, and they also tend to be more agreeable and better at social — ahem, let's call them 'games' — so as to secure their place. For a woman to end up on the Shoals she must be some combination of particularly unattractive and unbearable, or at least old, whereas to avoid this fate a man must be able to beat a lot of competitors to secure territory on the Slopes, which is rather a taller order. So let’s say about 15-20% of women end up there.
The specific percentage of men of each generation who end up on the Shoals varies from island to island. On this island, being as it is comparatively prone to monogamy, it’s about 50-60%. If that seems high to you, consider that each spot of viable territory is basically always claimed, and so if the average successful man has two sons, on average at least one will be demoted. And if a man is blessed with several capable sons (by however many women), then they’ll be replacing some other guy’s kids who weren’t as good. Competition is fierce on the Slopes.
War can help for a little while, but the only real major exception is in boom times, which most times are not. Though you and I, Reader, have grown up in the most outrageously-extended boom in history, so our perceptions about such things are liable to be miscalibrated. In fact on some islands the proportion of men which ends up on the Shoals is closer to 94%, or sixteen out of every seventeen. An island like that is more likely to be running a polygynous culture where the best men get almost all the women. Then again, these islands are much more vulnerable to invasion by a society which has sexually enfranchised more of its men, and so harnessed their productivity and marital-martial potential, if you will.
It must be admitted that some individuals, for any number of reasons, seem to prefer life on the Shoals. The Shoals simply suit them. In many ways life there is easier and better-aligned with certain proclivities such as misanthropy, addiction, and laziness. Denizens of the Shoals also tend to be far less visually-attractive for reasons which should by now be obvious. Ugliness correlates with high mutation load, which correlates with degenerated genes, which correlates with broken capacities such as higher-order positive personality traits including self-control, planning for the future, and so on. It might seem improbable that the odds of all these things breaking randomly are quite slim, which is true. But the odds of something important breaking randomly in even one generation are actually plenty high. An optimally-aligned person is fairly difficult to generate; most children aren’t quite as aligned as their parents, and, after all, in the game of musical chairs that is life in Tidus, one must only be ever so slightly quicker than the next guy. Or to put it another way, as with the two hikers and the bear, terminal degeneration only means not quite being able to outpace one’s neighbour with his slightly-fleeter feet.
It is rare, but not unheard of, to find really good-looking people on the Shoals, except that they are sojourning there for a bit in their youths as some kind of countersignal, a misguided rebellion against their much higher-tier parents, for example. But at the first sign of rising tides these kids will find the way back up held open for them.
On the flip side, the higher up the mountain we look, the more likely we are to find specimens of humanity approaching the local ideal of perfection. They will after all have better access to low-mutation load mates, and (at least their forebears) got where they did by embodying a whole host of positive traits. Especially in martial cultures, which all the ones worth mentioning are, these go hand in hand with combat ability. So we end up with tall, handsome, well-built, competent princes, and gorgeous, slender princesses. These people are angling to be paragons of what nobility, indeed royalty, divinity, ought to be.
The ideal King is the perfect man and must be able to serve as a faultless icon of his People. In fact, on many such islands, no man has historically been allowed to ascend to the peak unless his body is whole, not having lost any limbs or digits, for example. He must be the very Image of the People in their wholeness. And no matter how good a ruler he might be, any physical defects will absolutely be held against him in the popular imagination of his subjects; the topic of critical drinking songs and injurious cartoon depictions, and so on. People resent a crippled king. Believe it or not on many, might we say, more primitive islands there is a custom that the would-be-king must strip naked in front of his nobles for their inspection at the coronation. I found this behaviour endlessly bewildering and colourful when I discovered it as a child, but there is in fact an extremely good reason for it as we shall see later in this chapter.
Regarding the merits of hereditary nobility there are of course many exceptions. Plenty of sons who inherited their father’s position but not his competence, or instead their mother's softness and vacuity; plenty of daughters who take too much after their father and end up built like moustachioed linebackers with jaws over which one might hammer iron. And Dad mostly wasn’t selected for his looks, anyway, so her eyes are too close together too and the brow above them has no part in it. Excessive inbreeding can also cause serious issues in successive generations. But, for the most part, one will find that the people near the top are taller with prettier faces and straighter backs and higher intelligence and lower time-preference and so on. These things are all attracted upward, and seek their level to their degree of admixture with the opposite. On balance, good traits correlate with good traits and bad traits correlate with bad traits, so it is inevitable that those in the upper reaches who do not conform as well to the ideal will find themselves and their progeny more swiftly on the downward trajectory which awaits us all. [I can't do this on the internet or maybe even in print but imagine a literal hole in the page right here, just letter-sized:] ꙮ
Given this we’d expect, on average, beautiful people at the top and progressively-less perfect copies of the nobility on the way down, right? Well, yes, but in fact it's a little more complicated in a way that's worth looking into as we pass by. You see, the strategies required to succeed in a position vary from level to level. A good lawyer or accountant may make for a terrible farmer, and vice versa. And so we see a sort of specialization happen. Suppose a candlemaker’s son has very little potential, whether for social or genetic reasons, to rise a level and attain a higher position. In this case, rather than producing children which emulate the nobility, it is more adaptive if the candlemaker and his wife produce children ideally suited to the level they’re at. He'll be best-able to retain his position in the next round of the game.
This gives rise to terms floating around in our language such as “middle-class values” or “peasant virtues”. Yes, they are passed on culturally, but also genetically. If the candlemaker has two sons and one is content with his place in the world, he will outcompete the brother who instead whiles away the days dreaming of being a knight. Ambition is not an asset unless it also happens to be paired with substantially-higher than average capabilities and a lucky window into social mobility, which it very rarely is. Besides which, the discontented son experiences the world as a chandler, not as a noble. His genetic phenomenology is tuned for that, not governance. Not that he’d do well to be too unconcerned about his level, either, of course, lest he fall. Yes, many such men do end up with misaligned instincts and spend their lives miserably waiting for a chance to ascend. As we shall soon see this is not a bug but a feature. (Incidentally, for reasons I'll get to in the next chapter, I think it was probably a lot fewer than a modern person like you or I would naïvely expect.) The point is that once again we see generations oscillating around an equilibrium, the optimal amount of ambition constantly shifting along with environmental (including social) conditions, and varying from level to level.
Except get this: Both of the children of that candlemaker stand a real chance to outcompete their betters’ fallen offspring who has happened to land at their same level. The disgraced scion will have his head full of all sorts of instincts useless or even injurious at his new rung, and possibly be lacking certain lower-class virtues which would allow him success — though such a man is typically at least charming, provided he can manage to overcome his vanity. So it is that we even see certain facial types developing and persisting on different levels, such that we can sometimes identify a person as lower-class at a glance, or be struck by a man’s inherent nobility. Such occurrences are commonplace also in Tidan fiction, as when an endangered infant prince is spirited away and raised by shepherds, only for the huntsman who comes upon him later to realize at once that this boy is no peasant. Is this on some level propaganda? Yes, most certainly. It also happens to be how almost everyone actually believes the world works because, in Tidus, it does!
With the shellfish, basically any specimen from the peak can descend as low down the slope as he cares to and casually outcompete whomever he finds there. But with people, hanger-on strategies are much more likely to develop below the Ring. A high-class child who finds himself separated and cut off from his family and protection is liable to get absolutely trounced by the rude lower-class boys who know nothing of softness and much of the vulgar law of the jungle. So with the flawed descendants of high-status families who find themselves trying to make a living at lower levels. It is not uncommon that as soon as their inheritances (if any) run dry they are so without the graces needed to succeed at those levels that they rapidly find themselves even lower and floundering even harder.
So different levels of society develop their own idiomatic cultures, from facial features to patterns of speech to forms and styles of art. It's the place of the nobility to develop their aesthetic sensibilities above all other classes, because the nobility will be in charge of making crucial societal decisions without access to nearly enough information to do so in anything like what we might call an informed manner. In such cases, they must rely instead upon deeply-internalized principles and values; they must dig deep in their culture’s myths and doctrine and art. The warrior-king who spends hours practicing calligraphy in his immaculate garden does not do so as a means of escapism, but rather that he might attune himself to his culture’s particularly-evolved graces, such that in the moment of action his heart and mind have been trained to execute the characteristic choice without having to deliberate. It is for a similar reason that certain Northeastern Tidan cultures count the practice of flower arrangement in with the other martial arts — the idea being that the aesthetic pathways forged in the soul of the warrior will unfold themselves on the field of battle in decisive moments when rational analysis is impossible. But that same art may not be suitable for the social inferior, who has his own decisions to make at his own level, and whose phenomenology is at any rate much more likely to have him interested in what is, yes, rightly called 'lower' art.
Now, we have up until this point been throwing words like ‘social’ and ‘society’ around fairly casually. It's time to define what they mean. Put simply, in a human context, a society is any group of males which bands together for reproductive advantage; that is, to move up-slope together or maintain a position once they have it. (‘Socii’ literally means ‘allies’.) From time to time you will see a group of men — pretty universally always men — doing something rad like teaming up to build and crew a ship and sail over the horizon to either perish or else find great fortune in some undiscovered country. Or, having already established themselves, invent some sort of guild to collude and fix prices or prevent new competition from arising. (Incidentally, even in later eras where women can also start businesses, it comes to pass that while women start about as many ‘businesses’ as men, these are almost always sole proprietorships ((“I’m a photographer! Buy this makeup!”)) whereas almost every business with more than one employee has been started by a man.)
Men do this because it is inherent in the nature of men that in order to secure the highest-possible value mates for themselves, or often any at all, they must compete against other men. As the apes can tell you, the best way to do that is as a team. There is no comparable dynamic among women, who don’t have much at all to gain by teaming up to somehow attract men and are much more apt to view each other as competition at all times. Women are, after all, rarely motivated to take big risks to secure mates and have even fewer credible opportunities to do so. Any woman who is of the right age and not especially grotesque is likely to have a line of suitors out the door from whom she or her father may take their pick. And if she’s not satisfied by those men’s quality, there is precious little she can do to make herself more attractive to a higher class of men, especially in an era where physical fitness is a given. All she can do is try to sabotage potential competitors.
And so we understand society to be a peculiarly masculine pursuit. To a first approximation women are not peers of their societies; rather they are literally the intended payout of societies. Though once secured, tamed, and aligned with the society, such that both fathers and mothers share an interest in the cultivation of children, women do become social fabric; that core of support which enables the men and their sons to strike out even farther and win yet bigger rewards including, not to put too fine a point on it, more women. So, we may say that women are parts of their societies, but not part of their societies. And we may observe that bands of robbers, pirates, and so on are only nascent societies unless they manage to make the jump to the common defense and maintenance of a flock of women and children. (How 'bout them Sabine girls?)
(Yes, words can have more than one meaning and ‘society’ can also be generalized so far as to include any group of people or, for that matter, animals who gather together to chatter, ostensibly about one or another topic in particular; I consider this to be a degenerate, non-central, and misleading case. And since this book is about nothing if not trying to show you what you've been staring at this whole time, we will not use the word except as I have said, for in this capacity it is a window which reveals much indeed.)
Now, I've been giving a general overview of how societies work, but let me reach way back to chapter one's ancient ocean to illustrate something vital and, I think, amazing. Once upon a time a cell failed to divide completely into two and something really, stupendously spectacular occurred: The cells, which might have competed with each other, instead teamed up to coöperate. Thus was multicellular life born. At first they sort of stuck to each other for mutual advantage, each perhaps ready and even able to split off and go its own way when the time was right, c.f. Siphonophoræ. But over generations some became more sophisticated about it and, here’s the part that really astonishes me, some cells even started leaving it up to other cells to reproduce for them.
Here’s a deal: Instead of reproducing, I want you to give up your gonads and become a hard piece of armour for me, such that things which want to eat me can’t, or at least only eat you instead. But don’t worry! When the time comes, I’ll make one of you in addition to one of me. Trust me. I mean, you won’t have any choice at that point, and I could just not do what I said or fail entirely, but — trust me.
And they bought it. I think we can agree that's pretty impressive sales work! They bought it because it succeeded so well that soon it was everywhere, in incredible profusion, with so many variants it can make your head spin. And it leads to some really cool downstream effects:
We have mostly been speaking of traits as though a person either has them or doesn’t. But genes are much more complex. People always carry traits which do not express in their generation but might be passed on to offspring. Some traits may lie dormant for generations but emerge given certain environmental inputs, e.g. malnutrition or abuse in childhood resulting in shorter time-preference and much higher aggressiveness as an adult. Also, alleles have a property known as ‘penetrance’ — perhaps a certain allele is always passed on preferentially to the young, but only manifests itself in ten percent of individuals who carry it. These can and do combine and express in unexpected places and times, creating a rich array of potential personalities. And so in a sense each Tidan carries within himself an entire library of people, of members of society, there for recombination in future generations — so long as the people around him have a roughly similar genetic makeup to his own. Sort of, but not entirely like, the way the dead skin cells you’re sloughing off also contain the instructions to make your lungs, or even your brain, not quite the same as anyone else's. And this is what we call race.
A man may not reproduce directly; may even give his life for the People, as a soldier or sheriff does, and be pretty sure that someone very much like him will live again; probably even many someones. Of course, this ceases to be the case as soon as his society becomes admixed with others who do not produce individuals such as himself, comparable to a body suddenly adulterated by cells or whole organs containing someone else's DNA — aside from eating or mating, bodies really do not like this and are prone to violent reaction — but that’s not the point here.
The point is that the grand society of the island, from the King right on down to the wretches on the Shoals, may be thought of as one more-or-less unified organism. No, that doesn't seem especially original at first brush and yes there are a thousand caveats. Forget all that. Let me set this up before you insist on knocking it down.
Children generally take after their parents, but can as we all know be so very different, with long-buried and newly-combined traits manifesting seemingly out of left field. The organism does not only produce those people with the best chance of personal reproduction, but also those which may be thought of as sacrifices for the reproductive benefit of the society. Fearless frontline fighters who don’t do well between wars but otherwise lead the charge against the enemy or into the frontier. Total dorks who couldn’t get a date to save their lives, and might not even be interested in girls in the first place, but who hole up in towers and figure out how the planets move. Whores-by-nature who embarrass their highborn families but make a bunch of beautiful, low-mutation-load children with some awesome genes before getting murdered in fits of passion by their rich but ugly jilted husbands. I'm not describing individuals, here, I'm describing archetypes. Social organisms which turn out some percentage like these will outcompete those which do not, just like life in the ancient ocean figured out it’s better for some cells to specialize and serve the whole.
Let’s take it from the top. As I’ve mentioned previously the King is a special case for many reasons and we’ll get to him in due time, over and over again in fact, because much more is going on with that guy than you might think. But for now let’s look again at what the nobility, the people of the Ring, represent in the organism. The Ring is the fruiting body, the gonads, the reproductive organ from which all else springs. If you took a bunch of peasants and put them on a fresh island they might become their own thing but they would not reproduce the nobility, not least because they are more-wholly descended from the conquered original inhabitants of their home island rather than the race of kings. But the opposite is not nearly as true. The Ring generates new people, and these precipitate down the slopes and take their places as obligate members of the Body, specializing into the organs and vessels necessary to support the nobility and keep it reproducing. Such are the people of the Slopes, and even the Shoals, though these latter might instead be conceived of as keratinous hair or (as I'll soon explain) claws.
We can see this in our language. When we speak of the 'flower' of a nation falling at a battlefield, it is understood that we're referring to the newly-unfurled generation of the elite. We called the system a Christmas tree for its conical and illuminative properties, but this tree does actually bear fruit, and here is where the best of it lies. Generation upon generation, cascading. Trees and apples and orchards. Male and female.
And the nobility does reproduce the organism. Not just locally, but also carrying it to new islands. When the nobility of one island goes to war with that of another, they don’t for the most part directly replace the people of its Slopes, but they do replace the people of its Ring. Their second sons and cadet branches take over the estates and responsibilities of the vanquished, and over time the societal genes, both literal and figurative, trickle down and replace those which had been below. Once some socio-genetic vertical integration has cemented itself, men of the Shoals tend to be on board with joining in such ventures, since this will give them opportunity to make a place for themselves (by force) on some other soil, with some other women, but not only because of that! Even if they do not come out of this with a farm and a wife, it is still, by a subtle and circuitous route, their best chance of reproduction — for if the Ring of their society installs itself on a new island, men such as themselves will trickle down and live again.
A society not so organized is easily consumed by one which is, and so we find all sorts of fascinating and opaque behaviors of our ancestors suddenly making perfect sense.
The general terror behind class relations is that of one’s children not having a path to the next level up, such that they must surely perish in a few more time-steps, and this feels worse and worse the farther genetically removed are one’s superiors. People really do not like it when foreigners show up and occupy positions of high status in their society, because this is only distinct from losing a war in that actual lives and infrastructure have not been destroyed. But even those lives and infrastructure are only truly concerning in the short term. In the long run, unless you can organize to get the upper hand before you’re replaced, it’s curtains for you and yours. Your children’s children will be kindling pathetic twig-fires down on the Shoals while aliens cavort and caper about the Ring of the island which used to belong to your people.
The primary mechanism by which the elite coöpt the base is by assuring them (cynically or otherwise) that, if submission is tendered, the little people’s children will have the opportunity to advance up slope, or at least maintain their current position. It parallels the multicellular organism’s promise that when the time comes we will all be resurrected together. This hope is less likely to be extended by foreign invaders, and if it is, even less likely than that to be believed, which can make for real trouble.
Great emperors and generals have been said to have what is called the ‘common touch’. This is the specific capacity to assure those beneath that each is of the same kind, the same organism. “I am like you, we are the same thing, and though you may well die in my service, in my triumph you shall also live again.” And men will drop what they’re doing, maybe even leave their farms and families behind, to line up and take this bargain. They’ll do this even if they’ve only heard rumours that the leader is that way and never seen him in person. Because this turns out to be one of the highest male imperatives of all, and a better bet than standing by and letting one’s elite be replaced by foreigners, one’s sons deposited haplessly on the Shoals, one’s daughters made belly slaves for men whose manner and appearance occur to one as bizarre bordering on monstrous. In this phase of history the good men of Tidus' slopes are only too glad to serve, and even die for, their betters, giving rise to blossoms of loyalty, chivalry, and gallantry.
For a while now, in service of greater integration and enfranchisement, the fire-worshiping religion of the Nobles has been dying out and becoming replaced by a more generally-accessible civic religion. Shared gods of the city, of the island, of everyday life, worshiped by all for the benefit of the organism. (Anyone who does not share in this collective worship is naturally viewed with great suspicion and being charged with 'atheism' is no laughing matter.)
Humans hunger to be allowed to thrive at their appropriate level — that is, to be part of a body. A man is happy inasmuch as he understands himself to be a representative member of an organism, that is, a society, which has solid reproductive potential. He does not even have to reproduce himself, personally, to participate in this; in which case any number of societal honours will typically be awarded. But inasmuch as a man does not have this sense of belonging he must be unhappy. An otherwise-sterile cell may be quite content executing its cellular function in the body of an aligned organism which will reproduce it, but not in the stomach of an alien.
Here we come to the much-sneered-at propensity of the lower classes to engage in celebrity-fixation. The little guy is often completely at the mercy of those above him to determine his society’s direction and whether the whole enterprise sinks or swims. It’s a terrifying prospect and he understandably wants to know exactly how on board he should be. So he watches the highly placed with keenly-developed eyes. He wants to know every little thing about them. What sort of men they are; what sort of virtues they embody. Because he knows that as they go, so goes the future of the People.
Are the leaders good men, worthy of support? Will they generate good people like me? Or are they wicked and corrupt and consorting with foreigners, intent on replacing people like us with much less-deserving inferior versions? Exactly how much skin do we have in the game, here?
In this respect no figure can so capture the popular imagination as the King. In the grand scheme of things he may not actually be nearly as important as, say, the top two or three nobles, but our psyches do not get hammered for aeons into caring more about someone the higher up they are without becoming especially fixated on the guy at the top. This is why we have the term ‘figurehead’. Regardless of how much power the monarch might actually wield, it is vital that the people have a King to whom they can look and breathe a sigh of relief that, yes, here at least is a man I can get behind, a true-blood heir of the heroic founders of our society.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way. People want their leaders to be virtuous at every level, and will even serve evil men if those higher still seem good enough, but only to a point. And when men lose faith in their ostensible betters, the rules are simple: Those lower on the slope will band together and take up arms to try to muscle their way higher. The men above will resist this to the death. Those higher-up have the high-ground advantage in terms of better equipment and resources. For example, despite being outnumbered they can usually pay other slope-dwellers, perhaps from neighbouring islands, to fight and die for them.
These higher-up men also ought to be smarter, stronger, more capable, better organized, and so on, and often spend an unseemly amount of time reassuring each other that they are, but if there’s pressure from below it’s typically because rot has set in and the guys higher up have been getting fat, lazy, drunk, and generally abdicated their responsibilities. That is, they've gone temperate. In such cases they can actually collapse faster than anyone would have believed beforehand, and are swiftly replaced by the more-deserving men from below, who after all carry any amount of noble genetics which have trickled down over time even as they're still under selection pressures less often experienced by gentlemen.
The higher classes know this. On the one hand, their children will have enough competition from each other without letting lower-class kids get a leg up, and they’ll generally most fiercely guard the access to elite status, such as political offices and admittance to prestigious educational institutions. On the other hand, it is healthiest for the society, and often even for the elite themselves, to give such ambitious up-and-comers a path to climb and so benefit all rather than blowing a gasket. A relief valve, if you will. Societies which have such mechanisms built in tend to outlast those which do not.
Such systems arise naturally anyway because the thing about being military aristocracy is that war is hazardous! And so, in situations where demand for nobility exceeds recently-diminished supply, the finest men of the Upper Slopes, who as we have already noted are quite naturally heavily-laced with noble genetics, may find themselves swept up into the peerage. (In the next chapter we'll see what happens to a society when this phenomenon occurs at an even larger scale.)
As for the King himself, it is obviously a rare man who can marshal such powerful and haughty peers as the nobles to follow him in the first place. This may be compared to the most successful of CEOs. In the company of such men, one must be built just right to rise to the top, and it is unlikely that the sons of this man will happen to be so fortunate, though often they are at least good-enough to hold on to the reins of the societal beast their forebear has saddled. They do carry much of his genetic code, even if not necessarily expressed, and will at any rate be mating with the best of the noble daughters. So, the genetic character of a Founding King will shortly be lost in the interbreeding with his noble peers, but those traits will generally accumulate among the Ring, which will in turn produce such men ever more often and raise its own contenders when the sitting King grows soft.
The Ring glows brighter and brighter, the whole mountain pointed toward some hypothetical perfect man, and a succession of societally-collaboratively-generated images of that man takes its place upon the stage of the Peak.
The general mechanism of keeping a societal organism fit is the war of King against King, or at least Ring against Ring. The best fight it out amongst themselves and reap the greatest rewards, while all else sloughs away over generations. The lower classes are generally sort of dregs and less competent, and must be organized by their betters in the war of betters against betters. But lower individuals retain glimmers of value; shards of quality. A superior culture shapes these people to maximize these things. A lower-tier man may still be virtuous! Due to the particulars of his social stratum he may even be under pressure to evolve virtues which are not yet present in his betters, but which may rise to the top as such things are wont to do, at least in societies built to allow this to happen. And then these rain back down over everyone else, resulting in ever-better people living in an ever-better society.
Such a society has every incentive to think in the long term because war is the ultimate adversarial test of societal fitness. The sort of People which is the type to have figured out that it should plant trees now because it’ll need masts for warships in three generations will generally triumph over the sort which is not.
Therefore it is not good for the organism to grow too fat, nor too unpressured by armed conflict. But on this island, and in the rest of its greater island chain, society eventually becomes so incredibly amazing at what it does, and the people of its Slopes so unprecedentedly virtuous, that this is precisely what happens. Even more troubling, the way in which they pull it off leaves them in such a position that they're mostly-unable to make sense of what has gone wrong — or the very real danger in which they today find themselves. (In the grass there lies a tiger. Some can see the colour orange; others, like the deer that they are, cannot.) This will be the topic of the next chapter.
That was a long one! Here's a short chaser.
The above was pretty entirely about men, even if for entirely-justifiable reasons. So I'd like to give a brief treatment to women.
We talked about what causes a man to be happy or unhappy with his society. Women work differently, but not so differently. A woman is basically content if she feels that she is in the care of a strong society which will protect her from indignities and in which she can expect her children to have a solid chance. If the women feel that their keepers are undeserving they will become usurpatious in a thousand and one plausibly-deniable ways in the hopes that some more-competent group of men comes along and takes over. The main difference with men is that we tend to be more direct about it.
Another substantial difference which jumps out at me is the differing intentions and methods of male versus female bullying.
For boys the goal of bullying is to polarize potential socii, allies, into either manning up and becoming reliable team members or else dropping out of the group (fatally if necessary) so as not to hold everyone else back. It can, actually, be a loving and constructive activity, even if arguably necessarily cruel, since male coalitions tend to succeed or perish as a unit. But the preferred outcome is generally a capable new friend and ally. A strong man is secure in his strength; he wishes to make those around him strong so that they can work together.
With girls, on the other hand, the two goals of bullying are to, 1), so fully destroy a potential competitor’s self-confidence that she makes no attempt to compete for the bully’s desired mate, and 2) establish the bully as the alpha-female such that others know better than to cross her for the attentions of her intended without any further effort being necessary. Better, after all, to prevent such attempts rather than trying to stop them once they're already underway.
One word; two very different phenomena. Though males can engage in bullying for feminine purposes as well and this will generally be recognized as ugly and womanish — not the sign of a real man.
Next week: Chapter 09: Beautiful Lie
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Click here for your mood music for this review.
This is a recommendation for some low-stress, feel-good, nostalgic history to play in the background of your next weekend(s) chores or driving. Consider it your invitation to live vicariously through the heights of excellence that can only be achieved in children’s video games.
TL;DR: If you like your video game nostalgia and have time during a drive or when doing chores, play Summoning Salt videos like you would have a sports channel playing in the background. Mostly to listen to, sometimes to pay attention to for hype moments, and mostly pleasant ambience.
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Part 1: What Is This Post About?
This post is unapologetic nerd-out culture of video game speed runs.
I doubt anyone here is unfamiliar with video games. They may not be your thing, but you know of them, in the same way that someone who is not a sports fan can know something about football. You may even have seen or passed by a tournament playing out, where players face off in competitive games in a typical elimination format. You may even know a bit of e-sports, the professionalized gaming leagues typically done for team-vs-team shooters or real time strategy games.
Video game speed running is to e-sports what time trial sprints are to team sports. It is a fundamentally individual endeavor, with no outside interference. It is something one can solely do on their own. However, it is also extremely competitive. You may not be fighting with or interfered by a rival, but you are both in direct competition with not only others, but yourself, for beating the best record.
On an individual level, speed runs can loosely broken into four general phases. You select the game you intend to race. You select the rules you run within- rules such as allowing various types of glitches, or requiring only core story or 100% completion, and so on. You run the game, aiming to be as quick as you can. And then you track and record the effort, creating the timing and the proof which can be compared with others.
But collectively, speed running communities band together to do a lot more than that. What starts to make the community a community rather than a bunch of individuals is the degrees of collaboration and feedback that goes into planning a run. Fans will strategize and theory craft the best way to approach a run, such as identifying the critical requirements and in order to not waste time in unnecessary distractions. Forums of players will share the results of mechanics sleuthing, trying to figure out why an interaction in a game works some way and to see if a nuance can be turned into a few seconds advantage. And finally, of course, is the community tracking and cheering, trying to identify who is the best and getting the internet accolades when you do well.
Video game speed runs are old enough as a format to have started going through the orders of media coverage. Media coverage in this context isn’t in the sense of ‘mainstream media,’ but rather the degrees of separation from the act and how it is discussed.
A first-order speed run media is a recording of the speed run. It is not the act, but the presentation of the act without further discussion.
For example, Super Mario 64, a game that some readers may have spent dozens of hours on as a kid, can be beaten in about 6 minutes. This speedrun video is first-order speed run media.
A second-order media is media that discusses the recording. Given the nature of the medium, and how modern monetization model typically work in the Twitch.tv format where people can watch the runners make their attempts live, sometimes speed runners comment on efforts during the run itself. However, since speed runs often entail heavy focus, second-order media is often commenting on a recording.
For example, the Zelda game speed runner bewildebeest has videos where he inserts commentary over the video itself, sometimes elaborating and sometimes joking. This sort of media can provide insights in the difference between, say, a Majora’s Mask 1 hour speed run, and the considerable differences for a 6-hour 100% speedrun of the same game. The difference between these two speed runs is the rule set implications between ‘just get to the ending credits’ and ‘get to the ending credits getting all the unlockables,’ which creates 5 hours worth of playtime- and commentary- difference. It is the commentary that is second-order media.
A third-order media is media that discusses the discussion of the record. In other words, meta-discussion. This can be done seriously, such as critiquing someone’s critique of a speed.
(Well, maybe not so seriously. That specific clip is part of the memorable ‘Alpharad vs. Pchal Saga’, in which a youtube internet funny man went as far as an entire pokemon nuzlockee villain arc after one too many reaction videos by another youtuber, PokemonChallenges, a dedicated nuzluck reaction channel. Unironically good comedy if you’ve got time.)
But back to orders of speed run media, third-order media really does lean towards parody. Parodies don’t have to literally discuss other people’s commentary, but parody is, by its nature, a commentary on the coverage.
For example, the sub-culture of Nintendo speed runners was influenced in 2009 by youtuber ScottFalco’s animated parody, A TOTALLY LEGIT Wind Waker Speedrun Cartoon (WORLD RECORD). It is a silly cartoon parody of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, a game notable for its cell-shaded art style that allowed (and was used for) cartoonish comedic effect. The TOTALLY LEGIT speedrun cartoon is filled with the sort of animated absurdities and pop-culture references that passes for your totally not my humor. Even the name itself is poking fun at the then (and still) common speedrun trope of people posting speed runs with titles in ALL CAPS and insisting on legitimacy because, well, take your guess.
ScottFalco’s parody is just a silly little cartoon, until you realize that the parody actually does allude to real mechanics that look just as absurd when side by side. If you’ve ever wondered why someone would want to motorboat Link, and you’re not a degenerate, third-order media can explain why. Scott isn’t the only speedrunner animated parody either. Around the same time, youtuber TerminalMontage released the animated Something About Super Mario 64 ANIMATED SPEEDRUN. It is only 2 minutes, but when you compare it to the 6-minute real speedrun from earlier… well, it rings true.
(Disclaimer: TerminalMontage was my gateway to speedrunning communities during the COVID lockdowns. He has a host of animated speedrun parodies, to the degree that Speedrunner Mario and Speedrunner Link are reoccurring characters with their own mythos. If you need a way to waste some time, or amuse small children…)
Enter Fourth Order Media
Back (again) to orders of media, and the nominal subject of this post.
Summoning Salt is a fourth-order speedrun media creator. He creates media that discusses the media that discusses the media of the record. Or, discusses the discussion of the meta.
Or- to put it in yet other words- he’s a historian of sorts. He organizes, by topic and chronology, the history of speed runs. He makes his living not by doing the act of speed running (1st order), or commenting on speed runs (2nd order), or making silly parodies (3rd order). Hiss full-time job now entails researching, organizing, and presenting records of the records of video gaming.
Summoning Salt is not the first fourth-order video game commentator. One of the earlier examples was Andrew Growen, who wrote the Empires of Eve by Andrew Growen history series of the EVE Online MMO.
Which, tangent, is really interesting in its own right. For a MMO set around anarcho-capitalism IN SPACE, there is drama, intrigue, and interstellar wars for market share. There are international alliances between gooners and Russians against an authoritarian hyper-centralized centrally-planned economy ran by an American militarist as all compete for control over the keys to power. Which honestly sounds way more interesting than what I’m talking about here. If you want the short version, here’s the 50 minute public talk at EVE Fanfest 2016.
Which I realize may seem more exciting than something about speedruns. But I promised you some nostalgic feel-goodisms, and Summoning Salt provides.
But who is the youtuber who I’ve spent a 1000-word essay and a half not describing yet?
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Part 2: Summoning Salt History
Summoning Salt himself is a nobody to somebody YouTube success story.
Summoning Salt’s start on YouTube in 2016 was as a speed runner for the old Mike Tyson Punch-Out game. This was an incredibly niche and minor channel, with only a couple hundred subscribers. He wasn’t bad at the game by any means, but there’s only so much audience for a game older than the N64, which was the formative gaming experience for the first main YouTube generation. Given how the YouTube economics work, he was making nothing, and it was a strictly hobby experience.
Now, however, Summoning Salt is a 2-million subscriber youtuber whose videos reliably draw in millions of views within a year. This sort of scale is nothing compared to the titans of the platform, but it’s also enough for it to be his full-time job… which it is.
Summoning Salt’s breakout started with his first speed run history video, in January 2017. World Record Progression: Mike Tyson was the transition point where his videos went dozens or hundreds of views to thousands. At this time of writing, nearly a decade later, it marks a transition point between older videos that now have the fame-boosted level of sub-30k views, and the video game histories that routinely break 1 million views, now often getting a million within a year.
Summoning Salt has talked about his channel growth since, notably in his 1 Million Subscriber video back in 2021. He is open that he was inspired by another Mike Tyson speedrunner, Sinister1 (who had 4k subscribers to Salt’s 1 Million at the time), discussing the evolution for a specific character strategy during a stream. Sinister1’s video was just a face cam recording of a two hour stream, verbally relaying the history of records since the 80s. However, it lacked the video editing Summoning would use to condense two hours to twenty minutes.
Summoning Salt received internet kudos on forums and social media, which convinced him to keep trying. From 2017 on, the channel focused on what was initially called the World Record Progression series, focusing on classic games like Super Metroid, Mario Kart 64, and other games. This teething stage was undoubtably a bit of algorithm chasing, going for speed of more and shorter uploads, often with less quality and polish than more recent efforts.
In 2018, ‘modern’ Summoning Salt started. This was when Summoning started using the song ‘Home – We’re Finally Landing’, the song recommended at the start of this post, as his distinctive leitmotif. The opening chords, which are retro and thus appeal to those earliest days of video games, are sometimes called the speedrunner’ s anthem due to its association with him.
It wasn’t just the music that evolved. The naming scheme of videos gradually shifted from ‘World Record Progression’ to variants of ‘The History of [Subject] Records.’ Videos gradually became consistently longer, going from less than 30 minutes to over, reflecting more research. Editing likewise improved, even as the pace of updates slowed.
By this point, however, Summoning Salt had built momentum in the YouTube economy and in gamer pop culture, consistently growing. He hit 1 million subscribers around 2021, is in the 2 million tier in 2025.
At this time, Summoning Salt has published over 50 video-documentaries. While older ones are in the 20-minute range, more recent ones are easily in the 1-2 hour range. This makes Summoning Salt Videos very much something to listen to in the background, more as a podcast with visuals for when you want to see clips he’s discussing. Or as a sports channel you have on the TV.
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Part 3: What Helps Summoning Salt Succeed?
Rather than go in depth into any one video, I want to highlight five elements that might make Summoning Salt videos more interesting to the Motte Audience. These are more meta-context and mechanics of approach, if you like that sort of thing.
Element One: Combining History and Technical Sophistication
On a purely mechanical level, Summoning Salt does an impressive job in filtering large amounts of repetitive data into an enjoyable format.
On the history side, this is a necessity. You have to in order to distil decades of material into tens of minutes, but it is still commendable. As a communicator you have to draw the line between relevant and irrelevant history, and as a story teller you have to choose the entertaining stuff that is still accurate enough to give context. This also means knowing when to share information now, and when to withhold it for later.
What makes Summoning Salt more impressive than a mere historian is that he also has to convey a large amount of technical information as well. High level video game speed runs often entail identifying and applying incredibly niche game mechanical interactions for marginal advantages. We’re talking things like exploiting the angle of plane and movement interactions to shave fractions of a second on a run, or leveraging how a game internally tracks race progression in order to exploit reset conditions. A significant part of the world record progressions come from speed runners figuring out how to overcome some technical obstacle, or finally achieving a theorized mechanical opportunity before anyone else.
Summoning Salt successfully balances the needs of historical context and technical depth, and uses them to power the narrative for a constant sense of progression. While his videos are long, they are exceptionally well paced due to how he packages and presents the information for you.
Element Two: Research and History
Summoning Salt is making history in a most literal sense, in that he is making a historical record of things that would otherwise be lost to time.
Since his transition to video game historian, Summoning Salts has consistently improved in his thoroughness when conducting research in topics. This is partly prompted by his earlier algorithm-chasing history videos, where he made some embarrassing mistakes / misinformation in games he personally had no experience in. As his channel matured, he has spent more time looking for recording, conducting interviews with speed runners and building archives of screen shots, video clips, and graphics that he uses in his videos.
This is, unironically, Research in the sense of academic research, using the sort of techniques that graduate students might in a thesis or paper. It doesn’t have the style of ivory tower academia, and it isn’t bound to the same rigor per see, but this is absolutely a deliberate, purposeful, and structured pursuit of knowledge.
It is also a real contribution to the historical record. An irrelevant history, perhaps, but preserving irreplaceable things before they are lost. Many of the games that Summoning Salt publishes on are games where the oldest parts of the speed running community have been lost to time. Old players moved on, old internet archives degraded, videos lost for whatever reason. When these things are lost, they are lost for good.
This means that Summoning Salt’s videos may be the most enduring history of these speed running shenanigans when the primary sources fade with time. His videos, and the fact they are so popular relative to others (and sparked a similar genre), may be the primary (secondary) sources used in the future for anyone interested in this topic. Summoning Salt isn’t just writing about history, but preserving things- irrelevant as they may be- for the future.
Element Three: Music and Editing, and We’re Finally Landing
Summoning Salt found and popularized the perfect song for nostalgic video gamers.
As a video essay maker, Summoning Salt has gotten consistently better over time. In the history section, he referenced that his first history video was inspired by a streamer who gave in depth history during a live stream. That streamer never used any real editing techniques. Summoning does, and over time has gotten better.
Editing isn’t just about smoothing the delivery, but it can also be a part of a story telling medium. Summoning ‘gets this’ in a way many people don’t, for the same reason he’s able to parse overwhelming data on history and technical specifics to deliver a narrative. When you listen to a history of video as a pod cast, this means using the right kind of music for the right time of tone, managing the word tempo for cadence, and transitioning between graphics. But it can also mean making your editing go for the narrative pitch at a visual level, such as selective zoom-ins, strategic blur-outs to maintain a mystery from being revealed too early, and so on.
I won’t claim the video editing is out of this war, but Summoning Salt’s leitmotif, We’re Finally Landing, might as well be. I’m not a musically inclined person, so the best I can do is say that the use of synthesizer cord, rhythm, and artificial tinniness is what strikes me as ‘retro gaming.’ It’s the sort of thing you might associated with a 80’s era arcade, video gaming before modern 3D gaming kicked off with the N64, and so appeals to a retro-history before the history of many of the games he's talking about. We’re Finally Landing is pure nostalgia bait for people who enjoyed older games, and even for the people who don’t it gives the audio-thematic vibes of video game history that works so well in the story telling format. Its chords match what I’d associate with optimistic, successful, but also a bit tired- whether that’s because of age or of hard-won success.
And it is also distinct enough as a leitmotif that it has come to be associated with Summoning Salt’s speedrunning series. Which is a good parallel with the rest- it’s not that no other video game 4th-order video game writer uses video editing or even music, but few pair them as well.
Element Four: The Unapologetic Sports Narrative
I raised at the start a metaphor linking speed running to sports. This was not an accident, but a key part of why Summoning Salt’s narratives work. He is absolutely cribbing from the well-worn genre of sports documentaries.
Summoning Salts’ history isn’t delivering a mess of facts. It is organized to tell a story, and that story is of people competing to be the best. He uses many- though hardly all- the tropes of genre. He has challenger narratives, underdog stories of protagonists no one thinks has a chance, defending champions trying to hold their titles against the next generation. He shows people responding in real time to winning world records, the excitement and break between pure focus and celebration.
This, in turn, lets him use the rhetorical tricks and techniques to build audience investment. He will not lie, but he’s not beyond obfuscating some facts or framing to imply a level of emotional investment that the protagonist may not have felt, like a loser’s congratulatory message being a show of bitter-sweet good sportsmanship. He’s a particular fan of a sort of progression chart which is used to track speed run progression, and then zooming in make small gains seem huge. The horse racing of who’s ahead at the moment is central to, well, racing, and speed runs are a race of sorts.
One element of sports genre that Summoning Salts does not employ is toxic rivalries. Arguably the least realistic part of the narrative, but there are no villain stock characters in these stories. There are not sabotage campaigns or whisper narratives to disqualify legitimate winners. It’s all in good fun, the flame wars are glossed over in favor of compromise, and the speed running community is presented as a wholesome community, not a toxic one.
Is it totally unvarnished realism? No. But it’s not trying to be either, any more than it’s trying to deconstruct the characters. The embrace of the sports narrative is what it is trying to be, and that includes the sort of trite cliches and warm-and-fuzzies of inspirational quotes that make it a cheesy feel-good experience.
Which leads to the final merit-
Element Five: Unapologetic Celebration of Excellence
Summoning Salt’s videos are unreservedly positive about the people who contribute to the speed running community, and that above all else is why I think his channel took off. It is optimism in the face of difficulty, and overcoming adversity on one's own merits.
Speed running is obviously a contest of excellence on the part of the player. This is where it is most like the excellence of sports. There is excellence of control on the part of the player, the sort of minute motor control and timing that allow the player to control the avatar into feats of acrobatics or maneuvering. It is the excellence of the player’s ability to strategize, to recognize optimizations. It is also the excellence of managing or leveraging RNG, with world records often hinging on player RNG and the world-record holders maximizing the odds and minimizing risks that could ruin a world-beating run. This requires grit of its own sort, to sit down and keep trying after hundreds or even thousands of failures in order to get that best RNG.
But speed running is also a genre of collaborative excellence, in ways where it is a multidisciplinary activity in ways most sports aren’t. A football player doesn’t need to understand the theory of physics to learn to handle the ball, but world-winning speed runs often have to engage in exceptional code sleuthing to understand why mechanics work the way they do and how to leverage it. The player at the controls and the players theory-building, code-diving, and developing proof of concepts often aren’t the same people. In fact, sometimes the brute force approach of many people playing the same game uncovers things that the ‘elite athlete’ speed runners don’t know, but then adopt wholesale.
To get what I mean, there is a memorable sequence in the opening of ‘The Quest to Beat abnew317’, a Mario Kart 64 speed runner, in which a top tier speed runner is dominating the leader board. This is two decades after the game’s release, and so the speed run optimization is pretty much a solved problem that can only be marginal improved through player performance and RNG. Then, one day, a random no-name nobody had heard of sends a message claiming to have a new shortcut and asking how to send proof.
This is probably futile, the sort of claim made countless times and variously false or outdated and wouldn’t help… except this one is true. The provider is a tool-assisted-speedrun expert (someone who programs a computer to play the game with a precision humans can’t) wanting to share their find. The documentary shows the twitch stream of the speed runner’s expression change from skepticism, to confusion, to realization as a technique for a new world record pace is realized.
And then it happens again, the very next day, because someone watching the stream had discovered the same general technique twenty years prior when playing with their friends. They’d just never brought it up because they thought the speed running community knew about it already but had reasons not to do it. In a competitive context where world records can change hands by margins of a third of a second, a random casual contributed a shortcut worth 30 seconds.
Summoning Salts delights in searching for and sharing these sorts of contributions, commending all involved. Part of this is the sports narrative framing, part of this is his own past as a speed run passion player, but there’s a clear sense of joy that’s rare in [current year].
Summoning Salt videos are unapologetically happy about video games, and the people who play them, and the people who engage with people who play them. There are no snide jobs fat gamers, people without real jobs, or the childishness of playing or watching others play games from one’s children. There are no efforts to deconstruct the premise, to vilify or tear down people on a personal level, or engage Serious Issues.
There is, in other words, no culture war.
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Part Four: The Influence of Summoning Salts on the Genre
It turns out, a moderately successful niche youtuber and inspire emulators and copy cats. Who’d have thought?
Once you go down the speed running rabbit hole, you start to look at games differently. And once you start looking into fourth-degree media influencers, you start to see how they influence the community and shape the environment around them. As people become aware of media like Summoning Salts’ documentaries, it changes how they behave in the sort of things that might be in a speed run documentary.
In the speed running community itself, it’s hard to quantify the impact Summoning Salt has had. There are no good metrics I’ve seen to suggest he has had an industry-level shift in viewer engagements or what have you. There are anecdotal examples of people who claim to have entered speed running after seeing his videos, including allegedly at least one record holder, but there’s no real data and unlikely ever to be such. At best, Summoning Salts has raised exposure of the community more broadly, raising it from incredibly niche to merely still very niche.
What is more visible is the niche of video game World Record Documentary genre. In the last either years since Summoning Salt started taking off, but especially in the last four when he was already past the 1 Million metric, a host of other, smaller youtubers have tried to follow suit with similarly structured video essays. There is a World Record Progression playlist of such YouTube videos, and of various quality.
There have also been branching media from speed runs to less speedy challenge runs, where instead of racing for time, there are special conditions. Perhaps the most infamous is the five and a half hour documentary on the Mario 64 ‘A Button Challenge’, i.e. how little jumping it takes to beat Super Mario 64, a platformer game designed around jumping a lot. This is the challenge which has made memes of speedrunner Mario entering parallel universes, cloning, and possibly cosmic rays a part of the subculture lexicon. There has quite possibly been more graduate-level research and analysis put into how to pick apart this one challenge than went into creating the first 3D platformer of the N64.
Most broadly, Summoning Salt has helped normalize a sort of video game nostalgia / retrospective genre that certainly pre-dated him, but certainly has adopted elements of his exhaustive analysis since him. Whether it’s the 2CPhoenix Kingdom Hearts Breakdown that reviews levels in exhaustive detail at up to an hour a stage, retrospectives on The HALO Trilogy that include not just the game but corporate contexts behind games, there is a clear market- niche but there- for people interested in long-form essays on the sort of childhood games they no longer play, to a level of detail that goes beyond lore videos or so on.
But most recently, there’s been this endorsement to you.
If you’re still reading this… congratulations! You may be the sort of stickler for nerdiness and overly exhaustive detail that could enjoy a history of video game challenges. You might not even have known that about yourself, if you only started reading because of where this was posted or who pointed you to it.
If so, consider this your endorsement to start with Summoning Salt.
It’s free, there’s no cost besides opportunity costs of not watching something else, and let’s be honest- you weren’t going to be setting any world records on your games anyway. But that’s no reason you can’t enjoy other people’s triumphs from a good story teller, and this would make fine background audio on your drives or during your chores.
It’s not like you should be working right now anyway… right?
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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