I am once again losing my mind over Nine Sols
I started a new Nine Sols save over the weekend while we were with family and HNNNRGNGH THIS GAME IS SO FUCKING GOOD STILL
I partially did it to show my parents on the TV screen bc even though they're not gamers, they will absolutely pull a "standing behind the couch getting engrossed anyway" move, and also because a big part of why Nine Sols hooked me bad enough for me to voluntarily play a "Hit This Parry, Nerd" game (i.e. I am very bad at these games and do not tend to enjoy them; I'm still bad at Nine Sols but I enjoy it so much I push through anyway) is because a lot of how they signify the tao part of the taopunk is through language and character trope choices that mirror the wuxia TV serieses I grew up on.
Like, especially now knowing where the game goes, I can see which wuxia types each character falls into (it's part of why I liked voicing this game when I streamed it). So I thought it would be cool to show them to my parents who are part of the reason I like wuxia and scifi in the first place. For example, I was trying to explain to mom how "taopunk" as interpreted in this game is a mix of tao mythology and wuxia tropes (but also futuristic) by describing the term Ruyi uses to refer to themself, and mom immediately identified the matching Vietnamese term that they use in the Viet dubs of those shows.
See, Nine Sols is a good game for all the many reasons it's a good game (that many other people who are much better at writing about video games than me have already covered), but to ME it is also specifically a game that digs deep into some of the core things I grew up loving and got used to never being able to discuss with the people around me, and takes those things and makes them even better in ways I never imagined.
Reading Iron Widow and playing Nine Sols in the same year was. I don't know how to put it. Not life-changing, but maybe life-affirming? idk. The closest parallel I can think of is when I picked up my first Jay Chou CD* in…2002? and realized that the part of me that likes things associated with "here" (the US) and the part of me that likes things that feel like "home" (also the US but specifically my family's shape of the diaspora) don't…have to be separated so much, I guess. That we can take the things that are meaningful to us and make them cool and awesome without having to just copy what others do.
Another thing these 3 experiences have in common though, is that while I do connect deeply to them on levels related to being part of the cultural Sinosphere, not being from a Sinophone society still creates a bit of a divide. This is part of why I wish Nine Sols could have a Vietnamese localization as good as the English one (in terms of capturing the thematic parallels). I'd cobble together a super clumsy one myself, except I think trying to come up with translations for stuff like "rhizomatic columns" might kill me 😅