You are a negro bunny bound for greatness in the New World, as if the old were simply a mistake. You can’t stop thinking about Sylvia Wynter and something like New World natives; you stall, with everyone else, rather than negotiate a true critique of the present, rather than pause Final Fantasy XIV as ordered by necessity and place your twin boys in the bath.
No, the little fuckers berate each other and bash plastic dinosaurs against wood drawers, the floor, and on too many occasions, each other’s faces; a waterlogged mosasaur with a missing fin lay wrecked beside the tub. You understand that, unlike NPCs, the children will die if left unattended, which you’ve had waking dreams about since the moment they were born, boring ones mostly, for seven years now. Some nights they’re burning up in a windowless room and you simply can’t break in to get them out, your family dog (also already dead from heatstroke, oh how she loved to run with you all summer) crying just outside the door.
Instead, you get bodied in a dungeon called Alzadaal’s Legacy on your way to potential riches, the rewards of narrative forestalled by an octo-jelly hybrid named Ambujam slamming big waves and needling tiny tentacles into the core of your little party. What otherwise forces literary allusion — Octavia Butler’s Oankali, the race-adjacent tyranny of jellies in John Vercher’s Devil Is Fine, that short comic you’d drawn about Tentacool from which your child obsesses, or the diabolical Meduse in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti — all latch on and linger in the part of your brain that understands intertextuality as a prime necessity for living an examined life in the 21st century, and of course, rap music. How many times has the spineless jelly been plopped down at the end of somebody’s cipher for effect?
Fantasies of full immersion glitter on repeat across the pandemic-ravaged synapses of your brain. It is a peculiar sensation, this forked road of desire and responsibility, children or game, both shortcuts away from sociality, or sex, or thought: two radically opposed sets of reality, two modes of impression upon the world, two diffracted futures in which you die anyway. The children laugh at your body, dying like that. The bath is too hot, then too cold. Then they splash murky water all the way from the bathroom onto your carpet and PlayStation controller as you try to explain the situation to your beleaguered team members via in-game party chat. Responses range from, Oh I get it man, to laments about the reproductive class ruining the real world and this one. Time is of the present, and you wonder, is the New World still new if it takes too long to get there? Bedtime is eight o’clock, but you’re aware that bedtime can’t happen if the children catch you doing anything, like breathing, let alone ostensibly enjoying yourself. In Eorzea, you don’t really have to do things like breathe, or take a shit, which is nice.
When you tell friends about returning to Eorzea after a hiatus too long for most of them to stand, they laugh. You thought you could just hop right in like nothing changed? You were, after all, maxed out on Dark Knight, Black Mage, and Reaper last time you checked. That they respond at all feels grand, though, the otherwise silence of each individual’s formal responsibilities all but eradicating forms of play and friendship; here, it’s potential pleasure that pushes everyone out of their day-to-day: the children’s needs; dead and dying lovers and friends; the coy stupidity governing a “civil” discourse around what is or is not the amplification of an ongoing genocide; the prisons, lord the prisons; Friends Hospital off Roosevelt Boulevard, where another friend reminds you “those people are not actually your friends.” To be honest, the breakdown you had at that little Mississippi airport a week ago was a serious low, frustrated about the impulse to conform aesthetically, emotionally, socially, and politically in order to survive or be loved, yupping up tears as the old southern ladies tried to comfort you and writing sad but competent poems on the plane ride home. Complaining to your old adviser and friend that Earth feels horrible, to which she agrees, Yeah, sometimes earth feels v bad.
Reintegration — into Eorzea, not Earth, of course — seems a better deal than ending your own life, a pathetic point on which your analyst, and perhaps your children when they are older, all agree. You think of the story your homegirl told yesterday on her way to a wake, a newlywed from around the way who shot himself in the bathroom while everyone had dinner beyond the locked door. These stories are many, and you’ve seen the aftermath dozens of times — and even worse — how the family is denied even the life insurance money, dignity a foregone conclusion of such fates.
“Daddy, you still playin’ that game?” the children say. “What’s it even about?”
Just then you remember why there are so many portal fantasies, as two seven-year-olds transform into characters in need of aesthetic education, who sponge up the worldbuilding, solving for you a pattern of rote explanation you seek to avoid in everything you’ve ever written. You often fail. You are, after all, a negro bunny, you explain, which is technically a race called Viera, yes, which is one of the playable races in Final Fantasy XIV, a Japanese massively multiplayer online roleplaying game; this part, naturally, they don’t find strange, as Japan’s soft power exportation since the ’60s has been so successful at obscuring the nationalist position that such games, some of the most popular in the world — to say little of their interlocution with manga and animation — appear either textureless or international since at least Super Street Fighter II; “asiatic” Christopher Patterson calls them, inaugurating their own genres, and “no” is what you said to the fellow traveler poet Benjamin Krusling at a comparative literature conference when he asked, after thinking together about Simone White’s writing on black music, if you thought black people had any such soft power.
You’ll keep thinking about Benji’s question for some time as you go on explaining to the children that you play the hero called the Warrior of Light, no matter your race, and yes, races are real differentiations in the game with specific markers, and yes, that one is a lion, or a cat, and some look human and then you have jobs. Why would I want a job? Because, well, I would rather not, but these aren’t like regular jobs. They’re fun jobs. They’re basically sets of abilities you can use, and I know, right, don’t that one look cool? I got that sword from the marketplace. Yes, you can just go to the marketplace and players sell each other goods and stuff. One of the jobs is a dancer because it’s a long-held Final Fantasy thing, which kind of makes sense because dancers are ostensibly in great fighting shape, and what do we do in the game? Well, lots of things. I have a house and bred this red chocobo here, and no, red isn’t my favorite color; it’s purple, why y’all always tryna revise history? You gonna ask your mom? Go ahead ask her. I’m telling you my favorite color is purple. Anyway, you basically join up with your friends to save the world and such or collect cool items. Like what? Like that sword or this armor or decorations for your house and stuff, yeah. Your friends can come to your house. Wait, you think we need a bigger house in case a blind person or my friend Astride in her wheelchair comes over? Yes, it’s true that accommodation is a broader societal problem that is often overlooked, but we can’t afford an elevator for our house and we only have one floor. No, they don’t have elevators in the game, either, not like the regular kind. Well, we’re saving the world from lots of things: ourselves, aliens, evil, and on and on. There’s a larger story, of course, usually about getting stronger together and killing God. Why would you want to kill God? Well, lots of reasons, and it’s a long story either way but what makes this — no, that’s not one of my friends running by. That’s a random person…
Time passes. The explanatory project ends a half hour later (you’re a fast talker) with a brief history of the previous game in this series, fond memories of playing Final Fantasy XI in your friend’s basement all day and night, hunting Notorious Monsters for pelts and necklaces and sometimes selling them for the more limited resource of real money to buy hoagies and cheesesteaks, when, back then, all y’all had was time. And to paraphrase Audre Lorde, the quality of time by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the changes (wages?) we hope to bring about through those lives in Eorzea. When asked if those friends are playing now, you’re forced to be honest, hating people who lie to their children incessantly, and say that you had a falling out with one over race and racism, power, and the apoplexy of male comportment, and another was too sad and you think, based on eyewitness accounts — though you are unsure because you have not spoken directly — is addicted to crack cocaine now.
“Do you want to be friends with them?” the children say.
“Yes,” you say, “but I don’t know if we can anymore.”
Eorzea will not let you move on till you finish with Meteion, the bewinged girl, created by an ancient magic derived from emotion, turned supervillain. You’re tired of talking about affect, explaining the theoretical difference between such a thing and feeling, and so you split the difference with Megan Boler and Elizabeth Davis and think feelings on the move, which is exactly what Meteion is about. You see, Meteion and her sisters were created in order to scour the universe for love and life, to find the polymorphous meanings and variegated reasons for living. They’re essentially hyperempathetic, like Lauren Olamina, which you can’t help but see as terrible, despite an odd celebration of that text and her ability in the pantheon of liberal surface dwelling. This is when the older one walks in, your young girl of 12 with purple locs, whose life at present is split between hoop dreams and acting. Who is Lauren Olamina? Everybody knows her, you say. That’s Octavia Butler’s character from — who is Octavia Butler? Okay, I’m gonna disown y’all in a minute. All her books are on the top row of the living room bookshelf, but anyway, they can literally feel what other people are feeling. Yes, contrary to popular belief, that is bad, and it creates a horrible cycle of amplified violence, recalling the succinctness with which Natalie Diaz referred to it as a “hunting strategy” on Between the Covers, or Namwali Serpell’s “The Banality of Empathy,” or Saidiya Hartman’s question about the paradigm generally in Scenes of Subjection; suffice it to say, it’s not always just good, nor is it a totalizing positivity logic for reading books or whatever. Yes, you can read that last one, too, if you want. It’s on the first and fourth row of the bookshelf behind my desk: I suggest you start with the original edition. That other part will get answered, so hold questions for further explanation.
“Okay,” they all say now, their little bodies wrapped around your body on the bench at the end of your bed.
So, anyway, to no one’s surprise, what Meteion and her sisters find all across the universe isn’t exactly the kind of happy happy joy joy espoused by your better-bred peers giving the social justice 101 lectures at universities for half a year’s salary under the banner of change or progress or whatever. They found lots of dead worlds, warring worlds, failed empires, societies on the brink of collapse or otherwise ushered into demise by the soft sharing of their own hyperempathy. It’s one of those invention-gone-wrong stories, the premonition of which Samuel Delany once described in the subjunctive mood of “this could happen,” though technically, it’s fantasy and in the past. Those books are on the second shelf from the top by the front door. So yeah, they decide to do the only reasonable thing and end all life in the universe as a form of mercy killing, sort of like Eren from Attack on Titan, but without the history of extreme and intractable subjection and sans the logic of saving your friends.
No, this is not the first time this has happened in a fantasy story, but it’s particularly interesting as a plotline now, as it directly involves something closer to feeling. Meteion and them drain the aether (magic) from the universe, and this transforms many people into monsters, which you slay with brutal efficiency and remorse for the infinitely memorable or easily forgettable NPCs they once were. Well, you don’t mourn, so much as their families and friends mourn after you slaughter the lot of them with greatswords and scythes, black magic and knives in this city called Radz-at-Han, a facsimile of a stereotypical rural Indian village where both humans and humanoid elephants live that is run by an ancient dragon disguised as a small boy. Anyway, to describe the music or accents would be racist in principle.
To assuage your frustration that they do not read enough, the children take to reading the story text and dialogue out loud, unprompted:
Alisaie (read by M-): “We must find a solution that addresses the fundamental cause. Before our strength is exhausted. Before the crisis spirals out of control!”
Y’shtola (read by Leah): “Throughout history, some have deliberately embellished the truth, but I believe many — if not most — deviations are the result of similar linguistic shortcomings, piling one upon the other, until the end result is unrecognizable from its origin.”
She continues, after a beat of reflection: “Which is why I fear that writing an account of my own words would be akin to diluting fine wine with water.”
“Daddy,” a lap baby says, “why you always make everything so complicated?”
Another voice comes through the screen, more familiar.
“Is that Uncle Brandon?!” the children ask. “Uncle Brandon!” They love Uncle Brandon, who, in the pantheon of IRL negro life, is technically not their uncle but your friend’s long-term partner turned family.
Uncle Brandon always has baby Leon in his lap, cooing and being an angry little baby with a large head. Brandon bounces back and forth between Eorzea and Elden Ring, only able to play one for so long before fatigue sets in. He welcomes you back to the land and you trade jabs about this plotline and the next, the tropes of family organization, and for the first time, you discover that yet another new baby is being onboarded to Earth from your friend’s, his partner’s, belly. This makes you sad at first, which is selfish, so you turn congratulatory as recompense. You say the word “vasectomy” half-jokingly. You’d last seen him on Elden Ring months back and ask now whether he plans on helping you through the new dungeon leading up to your battle with Meteion, the sad creation of a shockingly unsick (at the time) society whose explosion of feeling threatens to obliterate the universe. Yes, he will, soon as Tasia gets home, and you hear a familiar voice through the screen.
“Hey, Uncle Jo Jo!” Lily shouts from beyond the screen, beyond the pale, if you will. How the game fixes character and voice the way black folks, as long-term friends, have always fixed each other as family. The way kids always shout, but it’s okay because you miss her. Through her voice, you can only picture her new lanky body and giant hair on a longboard from the last time you saw her, some summer ago, cheesing on a ride down the cul-de-sac hill and draped in long-gone sunlight.
You dap her up virtually, against the limits of the digital, and she asks when’s the next time you’ll all get on Monster Hunter, wherein “all” includes your eldest son and namesake who fled Philadelphia for Fort Lauderdale with his mother, going on a year now. You are at the midway point of grieving this circumstance; his visits over the holidays or in the summer do not make this better. Another character enters the fray, having heard the aforementioned Lily from the television one room over (the yelling).
“Is that Lily!?” Leah yells, pushing the twins off your lap.
“Hey, Leah!” Lily yells.
You and Brandon and the twins fall to the background as the girls argue over skateboarding, anime, Roblox, kids movies, and why Leah isn’t playing the game even though she’s talking so much shit.
“Older” now, she’s in denial about her former (very recent) place in the lap-sitting-while-watching-the-game order because she’s 12. You have to remind her of humble origins on Lego Batman or Lego Star Wars, where, facts, she sat on your lap and forced you into combat with all of her then-fiercest enemies, the Joker and Darth Maul, Darth Vader, and Two Face. Don’t act brand new, you say; she acts brand new anyway.
“That was like seven years ago,” she says. “I could barely hold the controller.”
“And now you can. You’re welcome,” you say.
She’s off to make ramen that will be “better than yours!” but doesn’t respond when you ask who taught her to make the ramen. You don’t technically have to eat in Eorzea, but you can if it suits you. Brandon’s avatar approaches in new gear. He’s a samurai with “traditional” garb and a long, glowing katana; he does flips and fight stances like in real life, showing off.
“Oh my gosh, Uncle Brandon’s character is so cool,” the lap babies say, dickeatin. “Daddy, can you dress like that?”
To be aesthetically pleasing in-game is more important than food but requires immense labor; cool gear is a wearable distillation of said labor, and fashion is king. This is the moment you decide to stay up all night if you must, dealing with Meteion and missing deadlines, ignoring a sext, and knowing how difficult the morning will be because, first and foremost, you must improve your fashion sense in Eorzea.
You’re queued up for another run at this midtier dungeon when the growling commences. The lap children make animal noises and moan in such a way that you know what’s coming next. You exit the party queue with the swiftness and hit the kitchen, dispensing Chobani Greek yogurt cups to quell the whining. You like the anticipation of needs and the simultaneous quashing of said needs as they nonetheless yell.
“Daddyyyyy, I’m hungry!” and “Yeah, Daddy can we have some casadillas?!”
You are too pleased with the fact that you need say nothing but dispense the goods. You’ve beaten them at their own game, their salty little faces having received the things they’re screaming for prior to the end note of the scream. Shut they little asses right on up. You heat the casadillas — good lord, quesadillas — you had already prepped and chilled earlier and deliver the order to smiling faces who say things like “Thank you, Daddy” or “We love you, Daddy” and proceed to play with, rather than eat, the food. Eventually, they will fight and spill water on their plates, the table, the floor, hit a dog for nibbling the food they teased it with, and cry, before demanding zero-calorie Gatorade.
On cue, they say, “Can we at least have a Gatorade?!”
Here you make jokes about exercising, which they’ve consistently refused to do, save a few jumping jacks or stuffed animal curls, mocking push-ups and fake moonwalks, but what you really want is a return to Eorzea, and of all the options available to you, dispensing the Gatorade is the quickest route of reentry. You give them your least favorite flavor, orange, which they gulp in seconds like the insane babies they are, before standing at the threshold of your door once again.
“Daddy! Can we watch you play the game?”
They return to your lap on the eve of bedtime, while hardly across the hall in the other room, door half-open, your 12-year-old boots up her PS5. You feel both proud and ashamed of the shift in permissibility, recalling all the old arguments to infinity and beyond with your ex about what children should be able to do, eat, or drink, and when; you’ve acquiesced to almost everything, and you fear the infiltration of acquiescence from, and toward, that terribly beautiful thing called the world. You wonder if they will be able to live examined lives or slip into the comforting tendrils of normative power relations and drown. Too much of everything, too many rules, too much fear that your children need a source of formal discipline while understanding the long and indefensible reach of discipline in the world; all old questions regarding the scope of punishment for negro children to survive percolate through your brain: pride taken in the visual economy of beatings that everybody swears up and down would improve your children’s dispositions, if only you would just do it, the agonizing literatures through which a transition from slavery to Jim Crow to the present is described as absolutely continuous with said beatings, a failed reclamation of “The Family” as an autonomous sphere within which black people have never been given any real choice whatsoever. This is what you love quite dearly about N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season novels, another example of the “End of World” type in which “The End” was always already happening, both at the level of intimate relations and the structure of being. You consider how much sense Jemisin’s love of anime makes in such a context, the only place where children are taken seriously, her advocating for Fullmetal Alchemist on her blog and essentially writing a spate of novels that reimagines that very narrative in broad, black strokes. What’s not to love about such things, not at all meant for you and your children, but whose structure of feeling is so rich and in kind with your own that you might have otherwise died without them, suffocating under the shallow representation of some Cosby Show or whatever. The infinite web of bad options in the collective sphere of choice crisscrosses through your skull and hurts and gets stuck in your gut at the reminder that you have fed those people but not eaten yourself.
Your analyst is, often enough, concerned about your time and blood pressure, how blood pressure has circumscribed in one way or another, the time of everyone you know who was not murdered outright. She thinks that you refuse to organize your life in a way that might garner more pleasure than distress. You refuse to listen to your body. You tell her that doing this would mandate unreasonable degrees of abandonment; she says that someone else can take on more responsibility, because what if you die? You say that people die all the time, as it’s one of the major risks of being alive, and besides, it’s not like you know anyone who can take on more responsibility or how you’d be able to pay them any more money than you already do, even if you did trust other people like that with your kids.
In Eorzea, there are consequences to death that sink mostly to the level of annoyance, unlike Final Fantasy XI, where you might never recover from such a loss, having experience itself ripped from your body. Here, losing the durability of your gear and a little bit of cash is a fine price to pay for starting over.
But you are still a negro bunny bound for the New World in which all forms of discourse blend into a puree of fatigue: PlayStation voice chat, Instagram Messenger texts, missed calls, student emails, wailing babies, brooding preteens who copy your playlist and blast it on speakerphone after bedtime in some form of unclear protest against, what, rest? Or attention perhaps? Though you consider the fact that you did play ball with her on a torn ligament earlier that day as requested after getting trashed by her in NBA 2K5 a few times, needy parents who can’t cook but eat all your food and demand money, whining doggies and the little black cat with the UTI, all swirl around the demand to attend or ignore the stretch of imposition both feasting upon and forcing the continuation of your spirit, none of which you can integrate at this particular moment. In Eorzea, you turn off the local chat field to minimize distractions and raise an arm around one of the lap babies to better position yourself with the limp anatomy of sleepy children. You can never remove yourself from this plot, sitting on the bench at the foot of your bed, most often used for, well, other things, though now enrobed in immovable lap babies.
“Daddy go there!” they say. “No over there!”
“Oh my gosh, what’s that monster called?!”
“Daddy can you change jobs?!”
You receive a text alert from Tasia saying she’s bout to get on the game and help your “punk ass” succeed against a spate of punk ass monsters that don’t even rise to the level of remembrance for her, alongside an invitation to a gender reveal party for the next baby. You write back asking whether you need to bring an incredibly heterosexual cisgendered baby toy for entry, first into the game chat because you’re confused about which one you’re using, and then to her cellphone once you get it together. She says, no, it’s really just a cookout, like last time. She says you are the only friend she invited, and you’re always happy to be invited to any cookout where you are not the one cooking or the only one watching kids. You don’t have babies in Eorzea, or states to garnish wages for a child whom you take sole responsibility for, which is refreshing. You are just a negro bunny walking by every night, talking sweet and looking fly, and anything hectic inside can be manageably excised through axes, spears, spells, and the unevenly warmed-up fried chicken drumstick you clutch in your left hand.
Tasia and Brandon both join and you mix up jobs, deciding that, much like with lovers, you’ll be whatever you need to be for this to work out. Together, you enter the dungeon and discover that this battle was not nearly as difficult as you recalled hours earlier with a group of strangers and then NPCs. Were you asleep at the wheel? Is it the power of friendship? Or is it simply that you and Tasia and Brandon have very little time and turned the level cap off in order to sweep through with just a party of three? Tasia’s Red Mage dies once, and your Reaper drops half a dozen times, though she revives you, each time hocking a new low-grade insult. Brandon is apparently invincible. The pattern of enemy attacks all seem simple now, and perhaps it was you who’d rather have made it hard.
You sidebar about children’s grades and aging bodies no longer capable of hooping for seven hours a day as you pile up enemies and knock them down, pile them up and knock them down. The 12-year-old walks into your room for her goodnight hug and kiss, shaking her head at the half-sleep babies desperate to maintain attention to the sekai kei plot of Eorzea, where the end of the world comes in seasons or modes of attention. Brandon returns her gesture from the dungeon, a goodnight without missing the beat of a single combo. In Eorzea, multitasking is possible, if only for the fact that it is necessary. Only then do you recognize the added weight of the lap babies, nodding off still glued to your chest and legs. Their way-past-bedtime bodies whimper as you carry them two rooms away, for they can’t wake up and walk or part from you for anything other than the plushie dinosaur pillows they call their babies, dressed in diapers and pajamas on each of their bunk beds. They only wake up slightly as you lay them down, addressing the matter of hugs and kisses directly and ensuring you don’t forget the cracked door, and the breakfast options, and the calling mommy tomorrow, and the plans to have a good day at school, and the final gesture tucked underneath all of it after the hugs and kisses and “I love yous,” the question that emerges like a non sequitur dependent clause but isn’t: “but can we watch you play the game tomorrow?” They’re both worried about Meteion, because she’s sad, and to be honest, so are you.
Y’shtola again (1:13AM and nary a second after the children have gone to sleep): “An event is described as ‘sad.’ A summation which fails to express the emotional complexity. Yet the word on the page is what endures. A pale shadow of reality.”
