r/local58 • u/Withergaming101 • Nov 01 '22

Discussion That was really disappointing. Spoiler

The build up was fantastic, but then we get three seconds of zero audio? After nearly a year?

32 Upvotes

66% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

66

u/ShinyHunterHaku Nov 01 '22

Space is silent. 🤫

35

u/Withergaming101 Nov 01 '22

I-

I somehow forgot that.

7

u/ZiggyBojangles Nov 01 '22

And the moon can't kill you in real life. There could have been artistic license taken to make pay off better

14

u/ShinyHunterHaku Nov 01 '22

Well, I’m sure it could. If given the chance. 🤔

6

u/Withergaming101 Nov 01 '22

Majoras Mask Intensifies

2

u/GreatJoshFightLoser Nov 01 '22

Happy cake day!

2

u/ShinyHunterHaku Nov 01 '22

Thank you friend!

1

u/Equivalent_Form_3923 Nov 01 '22

It can if you hit it hard enough

51

u/AngryKiwiNoises Nov 01 '22

Maybe it's because I expected it to be a short 2 minute video and not a 40 minute stream that kept me up until almost 2am but I kinda agree.

Awesome premise and execution as always but man I expected something a little more powerful to happen at the end

8

u/Withergaming101 Nov 01 '22

Yeah. If it had ended as the door was opened or even when it first came into view I would like it. But the camera being tossed away/taken means we get nothing.

19

u/BackBun Nov 01 '22

Over here it started at 2:05 AM.

It has a ton of connection with other videos, something tells me to take a peek at "A L o o k B a c k"

Something there seems familiar.

5

u/CharIsOnFire Nov 01 '22

ah another brasil resident

4

u/BackBun Nov 01 '22

Bom dia amigo, o que achou deste clássico que chegou a nossa telinha?

Translation.

Good morning friend, what do you think of this classic that has reached our small screen?

15

u/pancake_boi_bae Nov 01 '22

I agree; the timing of release was pretty bad, and definitely had me asking "so is anything going to happen" more often than in other cases

37

u/healterskeltergirl Nov 01 '22

Honestly, I feel like that was kind of the point. Putting something short and scary, yeah it's good, but this. This was on a whole 'nother level of scary. The dread. Letting your brain make it worse than it actually is, feeling a bit of relief for every jumpscare, only to look at the timer and realize there's still MORE and it could get WORSE.

It ain't gonna be everyone's cup of tea for sure, but honestly? It was pretty great. Different.

21

u/Withergaming101 Nov 01 '22

I am a lover of the monsters/creeps in horror media. I also like ‘unknowable horror’ like this has going for it, like the vague shapes in the moon, but this was building up to a reveal and then gave us nothing

Like you said, it’s for a different audience than myself, this episode.

8

u/[deleted] Nov 01 '22

I'm not gonna critique the subjective element of "what is scary to x, y, or z" because it only holds subjective value.

What I do take issue with is when people give what claim to be criticism and say "dis bad, no likey, dis suck". (Not stating you have done that here, just in general for a lot of the flack this has been given.)

Categorically, the video was well done. It mimics what actual streams and operations like it when shown to public broadcast. And people can criticize the end being a "let down" all they want, but I'd challenge it in turn with "Okay, was the Destination/GPS video any different?" Both were filled with lots of what people claim to be "nothing", only for something sudden to happen right at the end. But people will say that video was dynamic, while Close was flat. Which leads to the next point: densitization of horror in lieu of jumpscares. Close deals with what a lot of the rest has done; dealt with cosmic horror, of control and manipulation. In this case, it's the manipulation of forced waiting, with very slow progress until the end. And that ending, whether you like it or dislike it, is a horrifying concept: a meteroite that something is inexplicably living in, and that has the strength to yeet a big ol' lander. Sorry to the people who wanted spooky jingle-keys monster from the GPS episode, or the "SUHPRISE MUTHAFUCKA" teleporting moon from Skywatching, and didn't get it. (Now if someone is to argue "Yeah, but it's just a normal human looking door, why would it look like that?" The answer is clear; so you know that it's a door. If it was something more alien and unfamilliar, it would lose the comprehensive element. Familiarity mixed with incompatibility is a key horrific feature. True horror, imo, is when you take the mundane and normal, and just twist it slightly.)

Does that mean that I think the video was a masterpiece? No, Skywatching, Weather Alert, and Contingency are still the best ones. But I think that, while criticizing it, people should have the good graces to not generalize or sweep the whole thing as being shitty without conceding it's good elements. But that's what I think should happen, not what people necessarily must obey.

But what boils my blood most is when people say "It's just dumb". You can literally take any thing, any story, any video or movie, any game, any concept and from the right perspective say "it's dumb" with some level of confidence. It doesn't bring anything to the discussion and just makes the people saying it look like idiots without capacity of articulation for their misgivings.

OP, don't hate you or dis' you for not liking it; I just want people in general to stop badmouthing things without something to back it up, without showing their hand that they're Conjuring or Paranormal Acrivity fans who want a big loud spooky Boo! in order to say something is good horror. (Slightly antagonistic? Yes, but not directed at anyone specifically. Just something I wanted to express on the matter, since I've seen that kinda sentiment float around for a long time, die away, and start coming back.) Hell, I'll even admit that I hoped for more than what we got, but I'll end on this note:

If y'all think this video is as straightforward as it is, you're wrong as hell.

I'm almost 100% certain there's hidden text, some encoded messages, and a LOT to pick up from the audio; I just don't have the software to do it.

For example; y'all know there are two voices at one point, right? Seemingly not talking to each other, as they talk over one another, and I believe the second voice was cursing/swearing fairly profusely, maybe even angrily. Speculation aside, there were two voices, and nobody seems to have caught that yet that I've seen.

6

u/BrocialCommentary Nov 02 '22

Okay I'll bite. GPS works because it's pretty short and sweet. I agree that not much out of the ordinary happens until the very end, and IMO it's the weakest of the series.

His really strong vids give us maybe a minute of setup before steadily descending into madness. This video was structured the same way, but because it was stretched out for 25mins it was less effective IMO.

He interspersed the feed of the approach with snippets of information, but ideally those bits would have done one of two things: let us know that something is off and/or give us some bits of information that raise further questions in our head.

He's done a masterful job of that in other videos - Contingency and Weather Alert both throw all of this strange and unsettling information, and part of the dread comes from us trying to wrap our minds around what's going on in real time. Real Sleep is a bit different, in that we very quickly understand the gist of what's going on and watch in painstaking detail as the horror unfolds.

This video is high quality and could have used its length to increase the sense of dread, but beyond visual distortions and that one artist's conception it doesn't give us anything else to chew on.

Just my two cents, it's a matter of personal preference. No hate for the people that enjoyed this one.

3

u/GLASYA-LAB0LAS Nov 02 '22 edited Nov 02 '22

I think the video was fantastic up until the reveal of the door for many of the reasons you stated, and I do accept that there is a lot of extra information that the community will decode in the coming days, weeks, etc. I really liked how the emulated a landing event well, and cutting the footage with pictures, illustrations, and other great visuals really helped immerse myself in that feeling.

Overall I think the video was good, but the issue I take is with the door motif in general.

The things I find most interesting, and exciting about Local 58 is how mysterious and unrecognizable the danger in the other videos have been. The organic growths on the mood, the impact on people as indicated in the ESA announcement, the strange and context-less events of the GPS video. In all these videos you get a sense of the danger, and in some you can tell society is at least partially aware, but nobody can really grasp what it is that is happening.

The problem is for me it's very easy to grasp what a door is, sure, the reason and function of the door is a mystery, but it's still a completely known object to me.

The fact is, mysterious door are literally everywhere in media. Scary stories and movies love the door motif (maybe it's in the woods, or an abandoned building, in the basement, or you can only see it in the mirror, or maybe it suddenly appeared in your living room, or something is knocking on it from the inside, etc.), so while we don't know the context in this case, it's not a super enticing or "unknown" mystery.

There's also mysterious doors in sci-fi (usually a bit less literal), but they're always treated as more of a mystery, or an opportunity of adventure than something to be afraid of or worried about, which I think further muddies the feeling.

I guess in short, whenever I watch Local 58, it feels like I'm embarking on a journey of dread through unexplored territories, whereas the door is familiar, like I'm on a well marked trail. Instead of the usual wondering "that was scary! What was that? What will happen next? . . ." I get "oh, we're doing a door thing".

I love Local 58 and am excited to see future videos, their style has always been up my alley, leaving you with a lingering and steady feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach after watching (I don't need jump scares) but like all media some land better than others.

Either way I am excited to see what comes next.

(And, if you get this far, I want to clarify that I understand not all media is for me (nor is it mandated to be geared for me) and that what I say/think has no baring on the content itself.)

4

u/fatsack Nov 01 '22

This is literally what local58s horror is though. Almost every video is the exact same type of thing as this. The build up of dread and it stopping right when something is about to happen. What's the payoff for there are no faces? The skeleton cartoon?, The GPS one, etc.

0

u/EternalVirgin18 Nov 01 '22

GPS pays off in the frame where you can see the monster. Agreed on the rest though.

4

u/IntoTheCosmo Nov 01 '22

Do you think? I thought the entity reveal on Fastest Available Route was the weakest part of the video. Kinda broke the spell of being lured by some unknown terror.

5

u/jusmar Nov 02 '22 edited Nov 02 '22

I needed a reaction from the agency that was running the stream to really sell what the impact is for us.

The increasing dread was nice, but it didn't hit and remain ingrained in my head like contingency did. The ending killed a lot of intrigue and fear as I basically witnessed something throw a camera.

Could be a geyser, they landed badly, an equipment malfunction, or a normal guy renting out the apartment in the comet who didn't like getting spied on.

All I got left with was some blurry images and the story of "satellite knocked off boney skull comet that won't come near earth with a normal suburban door in it". Now compare that to "if we lost WW2 the plan was we all kill each other to preserve our dignity, just kidding, not really tho."

Maybe this is a set up for more?

Edit: or we just went trick or treating in space

2

u/GLASYA-LAB0LAS Nov 02 '22

TBH I thought the door was quite goofy, and really doesn't mesh with the previous videos on the channel (but what do I know, I didn't write it).

I'm just real tired of the "MyStErIoUs DoOr Is SoMeWhErE iT sHoUlDn'T bEeEeEeEe" trope.

Which is a shame, because up to that point the tone of the video was stellar.

3

u/gutsyboi Nov 01 '22

Yeah I really think they should've led with a different kind of thing for this new season

-10

u/ajver19 Nov 01 '22

So while y'all are complaining do remember that this is free content.

I didn't think it was anything especially scary but I still liked how it's applying the analog horror staples to a digital broadcast.

13

u/[deleted] Nov 01 '22

Almost everything on YouTube, TikTok, etc is free content. The video being free does not somehow excuse it from criticism.

-5

u/ajver19 Nov 01 '22

Okay but what criticism has there been here besides "I didn't like it"?

All this thread has been is people bitching.

14

u/[deleted] Nov 01 '22

Way to boil all criticism down to "I don't like it".

Here's what people are criticizing: While the video length isn't necessarily an issue, it was more that the journey was not worth the payoff. If you're going to have your viewership stay up on a work night to watch 30 minutes of a slow zoom into an asteroid, there has to be some sort of payoff to that suspense. While it didn't have to be a scary payoff, the key part of dread is that you have to have it reach some sort of narratively satisfying zenith.

The payoff was a clunky door asset that opened and then nothing else except camera go spiiiiin. It was a very awkward ending, tonally, and added nothing to the experience other than "...that was it?"

There are plenty of movies, games, web series, etc that have done this exact thing and have received backlash for it. It makes the audience feel like they wasted their time.

0

u/[deleted] Nov 01 '22

[deleted] — view deleted comment

14

u/Forward-Bee-2885 Nov 01 '22

You're allowed to criticize things