SERIOUS WEAKNESS

its going to get really dark now

DISCLAIMER: Serious Weakness is a horror novel. It contains themes of mutilation, kidnapping, stalking, murder, and sexual assault. I do not describe these particular aspects in detail, but they ARE pretty large parts of the story. Continue at your discretion.

Serious Weakness, a novel by Porpentine Charity Heartscape, came to me in a tumultuous time in my life. First year in college. Spring quarter. I'd just gotten out of a breakup, which probably had more to do with my own issues than anything else. In these days, I wouldn't do much other than lay in my top bunk and collect crust.

I'd been taking four classes at the time, one of them being an introductory game design class. It was the usual entry-level slop, you know. Play a game. Write an essay about its mechanics. Never do much game developing yourself. Despite this all, it was here that I was introduced to the neon-pink world of Porpentine Charity Heartscape.

Imagine this: You're sitting in your college class that you've just woken up at ass-o'clock for-- or, maybe it was at a reasonable time of day, you just can't drag yourself out of bed because you feel like shit. You're watching the lecturer do his thing up on the podium. The games he'd shown us before were just corporate artstyle bullshit. But this one was different. "Howling Dogs." It had this feeling of danger, something so suppressive. This kind of thing doesn't come from the heart, it comes from the stomach, formed from acid and bile.

Upon reading the wiki on the game, I found this statement:

"The game was written within a week, after Porpentine began hormone therapy treatment. They wrote the game while living in their friend's barn. They have stated the game evokes a feeling of someone not being able to take care of themself when they are broke and in a bad living situation. While speaking about the game to The New York Times, they have compared dealing with trauma as similar to being in a dark room."

I did a little more digging and found an expansive body of work. I played through a couple of their text-based games and read some of their writings.

I really like these ones.

It was at this point that I felt that I needed to take on Porpentine's newest novel, Serious Weakness, pink and green in all of its glory.

You could say that the main goal of Serious Weakness is to be jack-off material for a certain type of person, if you wanted to dumb it down. It's kind of like Porn with Gratuitous Plot... but the method at which The Porn is achieved actually has a lot to say about other things.

Serious Weakness is one of the last times I can remember myself being completely absorbed by a piece of art. I'd sit in my bed and read. I'd read in the dining hall. I'd read in the library. I'd read everywhere. I wanted nothing but to devour this book at any chance I got, just to see what'd happen next. It was contradictory. The novel was grotesque. It was violent, bright, and hazard-colored, a bright poison frog. At every impact, every slice down to the subcutaneous, every instance of mental torture, I'd wince and want to look away. But I didn't. I couldn't. And in abject horror, I sat and I read.

Serious Weakness takes place in a setting that feels eerily familiar. Maximalist-contemporary. 90's dirtbag aesthetics, teen angst. Simultaneously, accelerated internet-rotted culture. Goreshit is referenced. The main character's dad is a failed streamer. Outside, the world teeters on collapse, some sort of apocalypse. I can only describe it as irony-poisoned, but achingly genuine at the same time. To me, this kind of prose is awesome to read.

BASED AND LATTEPILLED.

He wants a clean shirt, but not that one. He checks the others.

DRAMA FREE ZONE

BE KIND BE KIND BE KIND BE KIND

AFTER THIS WE’RE GETTING TACOS

This is the kind of womb-crazed consumerist communism that led to the present crisis in Western thought. Stop yelling so loud, Dad. You’re going to blow out your mic.

Serious weakness follows the main character, Trianon, as his life wildly hydroplanes out of the precarious teetering track he'd been on. Trianon works as an art conservator. He meets Insul, first disguised as an artist, who then reveals himself to be a serial murderer and art-defacer.

Insul ends up kidnapping Trianon, exploiting Trianon's muscle disease to keep him weak and pliant. Trianon endures both physical and psychological assault from Insul as the two embark on a near-heist-like journey to deface another art piece.

Trianon is, at his core, a failboy. It doesn't seem like it on the surface, though. He has a beautiful girlfriend and he's recently gotten a sweet new job with her help. Things seem to be looking up for him at the start of the story. However, his pathetic autistic tendencies soon surface through interactions with Insul. In addition to clipped social skills, his muscle condition (myasthenia gravis) makes him much weaker than other boys. It doesn't help that he's faggy and eternally bullied, too. All of these things act to show that Trianon is the perfect victim in a world that is full of sharp edges. He resists this, assuring himself that with his meds, he can act normal and neurotypical, like any other guy, but is that really what he wants?

Insul is the catalyst that exposes that nagging feeling within Trianon. On first read, Insul was an incredibly strange character to me. He's much harder to empathize with than Trianon. The story serves to portray him as something unkillable, an unstoppable force of crazed violence. He's practically immortal compared to something as weak as Trianon, and he lords it over him for sure. However, when you take a step back from the Kidnapped Tunnel Vision, you realize Insul is even worse off than Trianon. He's stunted in ways that Trianon is not-- a school shooter past his expiration date, inexpressive face, shitty at reading people, can't visualize things, brute violence with no purpose or end goal. He has soiled his hands eternally. He will never be able to un-become a murderer. He deals with these things much differently than Trianon. Insul is okay with being nothing, which already gives him the upper hand. He is adaptable, not expecting people to expect anything of him. In comparison to Insul, Trianon reeks of desperation.

“You keep defending yourself with this rational, superior voice, but you were on the outside like me. You just did a better job pretending.” Insul slides closer.

“I’m not pretending.”

“Either way. You’re wasting your time. They’ll project whatever they want on you anyway... You tried so hard to look like them. But you never felt like them. That’s why they beat you up. You were just a shitty copy of them.”

Trianon’s eyelids flutter against the pull of his muscular disease. “I had a real life. Then you show up and beat the shit out of me and use me to break into the museum where I thought I was going to be the youngest art conservator in forever and have a real job and friends and be a normal fucking person and now I’m chained up covered in blood eating pizza off the floor.”

Oenene is Trianon's girlfriend. She is hot, blonde, rich, and smart. It's a wonder how Trianon even bagged her in the first place. Despite her being in between the two main "male" leads, I find her character super interesting. She's the one who got Trianon the job at the museum, pushing Trianon to be a real member of society. She is proud of him for these small victories. Trianon is happy to be someone of worth, and her power and attention push him in the direction of a good samaritan. However good of an influence Oenene is on Trianon, there is a glaring fact: Trianon would hate for Oenene to see his weakness. Oenene, though masking her words with sweet affections, does not like to see Trianon waste himself, so there was no choice for him but to hide those parts of him away. Trianon describes Oenene's influence as a "soft power..." just soft enough to feel like love. Oenene is the perfect opposing force to Insul. She represents the perma-neurotypical voice of reason. She is everything that we strive to be, she is someone that we admire outstretching her hand. She is excruciatingly well-meaning.

But, well, in Greek mythology, Oenene was the first wife of Paris of Troy, who was abandoned for Helen, so we know how the story goes.

“I spent my whole life obsessed with trying not to annoy other people. But the second I fucked up, the second I was too cringe or talked a little too long, people shat on me. Once you’re weak, people don’t let you stop being weak. And you’re so nice to me, Oenone, most of the time, but I live in constant fear of you getting that look in your eyes, like you know I used to be a burnout, a weird shut-in, or just a look, the one people keep giving me and I never know what it means, it’s always them eyeballing me, I’m never the one who decides what’s normal, I’m always the one who has to walk the fucking line.”

Interesting motifs I noticed throughout my readings of this book:

The most beautiful part about Serious Weakness, to me, is its commentary on just... feeling like a fuck-up. It's about being a pushover. It's about the intricate social pyramid, who's above someone, who's below the next, what their power entails, what they choose to do with it. It's about influence, molding someone else's soft cranium. Trianon is desperate to be the man, get the hot girl and live his life how he envisioned, conquering any weakness he had, or more aptly, suppressing it. Over the course of their relationship, lines keep being drawn between Trianon and Insul. The torment Trianon undergoes begins to affect him, begins to make him yearn for the Insul's double edged affection, With him, he can be whatever he wants, as weak as he wants. In being weak, subservient to an aggressor, he gets a taste of the strongest power of all -- protection, adoration, self-actualization. Becoming.

It was like staring down a dark hallway. Although I paddle as hard as I can to stay afloat, although I train myself in a certain way to succeed in traditional ways, at my core, there is always something that is keeping me from being up there with all the rest of them. For them, it's effortless, it's part of them. For me, it's a race. There is a fantasy world where I am cared for -- brutally, at the cost of others, -- and loved for being my most pathetic and disgusting. Perhaps, at the time I was reading this, it spoke to my desire for a fictitious love where we understood each other to be equally life-cucked and desperately held onto each other more for that reason. I think, for anyone, it is horrible to be adored for someone you're not, when all of it is a facade, a performance of normality. We are all striving to be so competent. There must be someone out there who would give you the mercy of loving what makes you weak and bad.

I am older now than I was then, but Serious Weakness still sticks with me. On re-reads and annotations, Serious Weakness is not "good," in the traditional sense. It does not write about good, morally-correct things. It reeks of emo teenage boy angst and myspace slur slinging. It is cocaine for the chronically online. It is 600+ pages of vomit, piss, blood, and cum. You do not leave feeling that "justice was served," that Trianon righteously triumphs over the villain. Honestly, I was surprised when Insul, the do-bad-er this whole time, was not brutally punished at the end, as he would have been in so many other books. I think this is the first book of this kind that I've read that has ever handled its characters so tenderly. Perhaps that's the message that Porpentine was attempting to serve. The narrative does not seek to punish people who do bad things, does not seek to teach a lesson about what will happen to you if you do bad things. I think it is almost refreshing to see someone who would so easily be killable by the end of the story prosper longer than their allotted lifespan, and everything that it entails. Because it's realistic. People will do bad things to other people, and nevertheless, everyone has no choice but to keep living with the consequences.

This book made me think about harm, hierarchies, love, and becoming. I think any book that makes me think is, for me, one worth reading. Food for thought.

You’re a terrible person now. I know you don’t deserve this. But I don’t have to make things line up. Balance out. Calculate to the last decimal place.

Because the truth is. Not everyone can do better.

And I’m one of those people.

We’re both missing something. We marked each other. This link is bad but it’s not broken. To be close, even terribly, is something I can’t give up so easily, in this world without connection.

I needed someone for me. Someone who didn’t have family, friends, culture, ideals, anything more important than me. Even though he hurt me so badly, he was the only one in that room on my side, irrationally, insanely, completely.

Here are songs I associate with the book:

Serious Weakness Serious Weakness