EPTIf you have no idea who I am or what the hell I'm talking about, you can see my older blog posts here. Relevant entries are the ones starting with "Worker Rush" or "Bronze."
Bronze: Ex Oblivione
It had been months since I dared venture into the Bronze league. I think those months had been happier ones for it. The portal remained open, the Battle.net account still active, but I had resisted. Other games, other activities altogether, had proven saner alternatives more suited to my recent tastes and I had, until recently, almost succeeded in putting Bronze out of my mind entirely.
There is something uniquely, indescribably awful about that place which one imagines would not lend itself to repeat visitations. Each trip down seems to irreparably mar the soul with the bizarre occurrences and horrid implications one is forced to endure during his stay. Why then, fully knowing and readily admitting this terrible truth to myself, can I go no longer than the span of a few months before the pangs of some twisted longing to return begin to gnaw at the edges of my consciousness and lead me to where I know full well no man should tread? Why do I suffer myself these repeated anguishes? Any petty treasures I once sought in that abyss are no longer of any importance to me. Any academic points have long since been made. Only the compulsion remains.
New readers of mine may not understand the trepidation with which I broach the borders of this abominable league. Avid readers, or at least those dedicated enough to have also read the replies to my work, will know that one of the most common responses my detractors have to offer is the simple, albeit misguided, refutation, "who cares? They're just newbies. Let them have their fun." These are the retorts of those who do not know. Those knowledgeable few among us, those who have themselves descended into the depths and gazed with their own eyes the hellish void that encompasses this league know better than to proffer such platitudes. Of the few fellow adventurers I have met down in the deep, they have, to a man, corroborated my sentiments. We have all felt the wretchedness, although, admittedly, others seem less susceptible to its effects, for I have witnessed them arrive and depart with an apparent will of which I cannot help but be somewhat envious. Perhaps due to the nature of my initial, prolonged visitation and the analytical, documentary attitude I took therein, I have gone, in some part, mad.
I consider it among my failings that I have still not, in any of these entries, adequately described just why both the journey and the destination are so cryptically loathsome. At times, I feel I have gotten near, but complete clarity in the matter has proven elusive. Extended exposure may have rendered me incapable of such clear thinking on the matter. My perception of the depths has agglomerated into an intangible jumble of uncountable perplexities, only a few of which stand out as depraved enough to merit written accounts. It is not these drastic instances alone that create the awfulness, though, but rather the gestalt of the illimitable psychical bewilderments I have endured.
I suppose I cannot say Bronze is unlike any other place, for I have not been to all other places. For all my knowledge, the world might very well be filled with similarly malign recesses and frightening abysses. Perhaps anything can be delved sufficiently deep in to that a primal horror will make itself known to the digger. However, I can speak only on what I know, and though I wish I did not, I know Bronze. So I shall again attempt to explain the root cause of this eldritch terror before retelling some of the specific instances whence it manifested.
In this Starcraft Tartarus, there exists a hideous dualism that, once understood, serves to permanently scar the mind. This dualism makes itself known when one has both seen the Bronze awfulness that I have exemplified over the course of these blogs and then also realizes that the Bronzies, as I have taken to calling the league's denizens, are, for all other intents and purposes, not altogether dissimilar from ourselves. I imagine that, as anyone else is, they are in possession of all usual human appendages and one functioning human brain with which to direct their course. The madness contained in Bronze cannot be explained through sheer force of idiocy or physical deformity. That is too safe, too tidy a conclusion regardless of how much comfort one would enjoy in taking refuge in it. Mere idiots, on their own, could not create such a vast and unexplainable domain.
As an outsider traversing Bronze, it often feels as though I am wading through a waking nightmare of inescapable proportions. As is commonplace inside such terrifying dreams, its setting is, upon cursory examination, familiar. It does look like Starcraft, after all. But after some time, one begins to perceive a phantasmal taint afflicting this pseudo reality. Just as a nightmare wherein a friendly apparition might metamorphose into an abhorrent monster, so too do the people I encounter in Bronze seem unfixed and transient in nature. One moment amiable, the next hostile. Joyful, then miserable. Sane, then insane. As in the realm of nighttime fantasy wherein one may fly, move through solid objects, or otherwise defy physics, so too do the normal rules of Starcraft seem inapplicable to this singular domain. Bronze defies all rational expectation to the point where it becomes logical to assume the existence of the illogical.
Worse than all this lunacy is the unsettling fact that the native inhabitants seem to be unaware of it. If you were to ask one of the Bronzies how he ended up in such a place, he would respond, with bewilderment, "wat u meen?" For them, this madness is normal. For them, losing to a worker rush is not something to be ashamed of, but instead just… something. For them, it is standard procedure to cease entirely the production of workers after a mere dozen. For them, their possession of an irrational, childlike fear of all things outside their own base is wholly unremarkable. All precepts of generally accepted Starcraft reason are completely foreign and totally unknown in this deep, forgotten, hole.
Perhaps most vexing of all is the ease with which one can wake from this apparent nightmare. Despite the overbearing madness, it has been proven that all it takes to leave this dreamlike netherworld is a few dozen 4 gates before one meets the argent light of the league above. When one simultaneously realizes the ease of escape from and continued existence of this place, the next level of horror reveals itself as those concurrent states open for the thinker a veritable Pandora's box of questions for which there exist no answers acceptable to the rational mind.
Bronze is not a town or district which, due to the persistent nature of reality, will remain permanently on Earth in one form or another, whether peopled or desolate, thriving or ruinous. Bronze is defined by the people within it, not its location. And so the question lingers: Do these people choose to be there? Why do they not leave? Is their madness wanton? Why do they persist in such a state of seeming obliviousness toward any progress the outside world makes? To these base questions I have been able only to scratch upon the surface and reveal the faintest impressions of hints of answers.
