[Originally written and posted in September 2020. Reposted in January 2021.]
In my undergraduate thesis I submitted in partial fulfillment for my bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing, I wrote a critical essay dissecting my own nonfiction; my influences, my practice, and my intentions in writing for the genre. Because I was the one who wrote it, I am legally allowed to summarize it for you in one nifty statement: I realized that I write nonfiction to try know reality, to try cut it open and understand it in every way, to rid myself of confusion and lever myself to a position of power where I am the one with the key to the puzzle.
I did this with my nonfiction because it is heavily in line with my personality. I can’t rest until I solve the riddle. I can’t put something down until I’ve figured out how it works. I can’t just shrug and accept that I’ll never know, because I have to know—I need to know. I wrote my thesis and dissected my own writing the same way I used it to investigate the world around me, but this piece isn’t about my thesis—It’s about a piece of media I watched when I was trying to destress from my thesis.
I opened a new tab. I typed in YouTube dot com. I looked at my video recommendations, saw a video of some funky white dude talking about video games, and clicked through.
That funky white dude was Brian David Gilbert and the video series, Polygon’s Unraveled, made me rethink just how I then used nonfiction, how people tend to look at literature, and how I now want to write in the future.
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Polygon is an American video game website owned by Vox Media. They create a wide array of content, ranging from articles to reviews to—what I’ll be focusing on here—videos. Polygon’s YouTube channel churns out many interesting and entertaining videos that go from “definitely about video games” to “vaguely video game adjacent performance art.”
Their range, in topics and execution of those topics, is quite honestly phenomenal. There’s a video where Pat Gill talks about how the monsters from Bloodborne follow the same design principles as the Muppets, a video where Clayton Ashley dissects how video games make organizing stuff fun, there’s a video where Jenna Stoeber constructs an entire new timeline where Digimon won over Pokemon. The video team at Polygon is always putting out inventive videos that enhance the source material into something new that everybody can enjoy.
I enjoy all of Polygon’s video content, but I’m here to talk about one video series in particular: Unraveled.
Unraveled is a video series where Brian David Gilbert, aforementioned funky white dude, talks about video games in ways that almost always lead to his sanity being crushed into a fine dust come the end of his video. On Brian David Gilbert’s website, he describes Unraveled as “a video series I make for Polygon that serves as a cautionary tale against taking video game lore and logic too seriously,” and cautionary tales many of the videos are. In every Unraveled, he goes on a mission to categorize, rank, test, or uncover the hidden meaning within a specific video game media and he always goes astoundingly bonkers doing it.
To make this clearer, let me tell you what happens in the first Unraveled video: “Solving the Zelda Timeline in 15 Minutes.”
In this video, Brian David Gilbert—hereafter referred to as his internet alias acronym, BDG— dressed in a full three piece suit, embarks on a mission to piece together every single scrap of Zelda media into something resembling a coherent timeline. He pins titles of Zelda games to the wall as he slowly becomes more manic, as the lights begin to tint red, as he loses layers of the suit like a crazed mad scientist delivering his final lecture. By the end of the video, he has created a three pronged timeline that converges into one via the use of Zelda Monopoly, of all things. BDG looks into the camera, out of breath and disheveled, and says “Don’t ask me to do this again.”
Spoiler: they ask him to do it again. Two years and 26 episodes of Unraveled later, this video series is one of Polygon’s most popular creations.
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Michel de Montaigne—a French philosopher who popularized the essay as a genre of literature—was the first person to describe the essay as a form as something that calls back to the French etymology of the word. Essay comes from essayer, which means “to try” or “to attempt”. Montaigne described the essay as an attempt to put his thinking and his process of which into a piece. It just so happened that what I “attempted” to do with every essay of mine was to try and make sense of something, specifically reality itself.
That’s exactly what Brian David Gilbert is doing in Unraveled.
Bear with me.
How Unraveled unravels is something that strikes me as essayistic. In every episode, BDG attempts to analyse something and in doing so presents his thought process in the video for our enjoyment. He made sense of Castlevania’s extensive bestiary by ranking them based on hotness. He made sense of Mortal Kombat characters by categorizing them based on what kind of cuddler they’d be. He made sense of the ridiculous amount of Fire Emblem characters by using a form of Italian theatre, the Commedia dell'arte. BDG takes a video game, and finds a system to pin it to, a system that will make the chaos make sense.
But does everything have to make sense?
One thing that had always miffed me my entire life was people reading literature and coming out of it with the first questions on their minds being “what did that mean?”, “what was the message?”, or, god forbid, “what was the moral of the story?”
It felt cheap, for one thing, to see people go through well crafted literature and have their immediate desire be the supposed “answer” that "unlocks" the entire work. Literature is more than a puzzle to be solved, it is something to be experienced, to be enjoyed, to be immersed in. Billy Collins’ “Introduction to Poetry” lays out the issue pretty well:
“I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.”
Our obsession with meaning, solution, and answers makes us blind to what we can enjoy along the way, but this obsession exists for a reason. Having the meaning of a text puts us in a position of power. It places us in front of something we want to understand, the object of our curiosity tied to a chair with rope while we dissect it. Knowledge is power, and it’s no surprise that many people want to have power over literature; it’s dense, it’s pretentious, it’s scary. All of that is intimidating, so we work to try and put literature below us by solving it.
Seeing people do this annoyed me, but isn’t this what I was doing with reality as well? Is this not what I do with my essays, using nonfiction as a way to put reality below me by uncovering what reality means?
A double standard. Why is my search for meaning valid, but others’ search for meaning is not?
The answer—no, maybe not answer, maybe possibility is the better word—I found in Unraveled.
BDG dissects video game lore and media and tries to make sense of it, but as BDG describes, the entire show is a cautionary tale. In every Unraveled, BDG either completely loses his sanity trying to make things make sense or he has to devise a system that is unorthodox and kooky for things to work out. If it’s the former, the cautionary tale is complete; trying to make sense of everything will result in one’s downfall. If it’s the latter, the message is more nuanced; one can try to make sense of things, but sometimes that “sense” is so elusive that one has to go on a hell of a journey to get there. In both cases, meaning is sought, but not necessarily acquired in a straightforward or linear way. BDG searches for meaning and fails, or BDG searches for meaning and learns that, maybe, meaning isn’t always the thing we should actually be looking for.
The Unraveled episode investigating Kirby’s existence illustrates this point most clearly.
In this episode, BDG tries and fails multiple times to try to make sense of how Kirby is simultaneously “everything” and “nothing”. He tries to make Kirby a metaphor for capitalism, a metaphor for nature, before realizing time and time again that his explanations do not make any sense.
Towards the end of the video, BDG stands at a beach, disheveled and tired, looking out into the horizon. He says:
“I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things to mean something, but Kirby didn't need an explanation. I did. There is no bullet point or fan wiki entry. Kirby is not nature or a metaphor. Kirby doesn’t need a dark backstory or a logical rationale. Kirby is just Kirby. As I stand here watching the waves lap against the sand, miles away from civilization, I realize I'm not simply standing on the edge of the ocean, but the edge of the world. A world I've accepted without knowing its hidden meaning. Perhaps there is no hidden meaning. Perhaps it's better that way. Perhaps it's time for me to go home.”
The desire for an answer is not indicative of all the things in the world having one; it’s merely indicative of the human desire for it—the desire for the power inherent in knowledge. While we’re not wrong for having that desire, we must also understand that we cannot begrudge the world for not having an answer. If we continue to treat everything in the world as a puzzle that needs to be solved, we will see the lack of a solution as a failure. This is not the case. It can’t be. I can’t speak for everybody, but I cannot let it be.
Unraveled made me realize that my tendency to use the essay as a means of knowing is not wrong, but at the same time that it is unsustainable in the long run. I will encounter topics I will not be able to make sense of. This is nobody’s fault, not mine, not reality’s. It’s just how things are in this complicated world of ours. I want to write in a way that makes space for these complex topics, a way that doesn’t see the lack of a solution, a key, an answer, as a bad thing.
Perhaps there’s an answer, and it’s okay to look for it. But perhaps it’s enough to stand at the beach, to watch the waves come ashore, to look at the horizon and accept it in the way it is.
BDG is right. Perhaps it’s time to go home.