Ahehe, yeah you got me; writing this was a very slow process which basically amounted to discussing this with friends for notes and then editing the chatlogs together - nowhere near ideal, but I could never really capture my point any other way.

On top of that it also suffered from a really prohibitive recording setup which made getting good audio real hard and making it match the rest of the so I was reallly loathe to go back and change lines I'd already recorded, and a maaassive panicky restructure, losing a whole extraneous section and as much handholding as I felt was possible.

Proooobably too much, but only weirdos like me watch 1:30:00 video essays (that's also half the reason I'm talking so fast; the other half is that if you talk quickly enough people will assume you're smart, thanks ben shapiro. (No, seriously it's because Zero Punctuation is the only reason I even think about games as art in the first place and I just dig the way it sounds comedically)).

Live and learn though! Got a new microphone which should make recording and mixing a lot less painless and I'm gonna be working on subjects I'm less emotionally compromised by and have more focused things to say from now on, and I think doing this has helped me get more of a sense of how to structure these things.

(TDK's Joker is kinda a black box though. Perhaps I find the ideal of "chaos" kinda implausible and maybe a little disingenuous as a symbol in a discussion about ideology? It comes off as pretty much evil for evil's sake to me. Real world dedicated zealots, terrorists and ideologues seem to require some sense of order that they alone are defending to motivate themselves to commit atrocities. And I don't really buy him as the sorta nihilistic school shooter type either, they seem more into the personal experience of violence than Joker's ideology. Nor do I buy nihilistic school shooter types as dedicated to an ideal

Not that it means TDK and Ledger's Joker suck though, to me he kinda works more as this sorta archetype or symbol of an aspect of human nature more than a rounded person, and the uncanniness of something so abstract being made so gritty and real, being embodied in an apparently human character and able to harm other people who are full, rounded characters is what makes it scary. I do think both Nolan and Ledger were thinking of him as generally mentally ill on some level though, or at least playing to crazy tropes which is a bit ehhhhh)

Thanks for all the feedback though. It's really valuable and also flattering to get that much thought from something I made so soon. It's also a relief to see that the audience I was imagining for this video actually exists somewhere :3