105. Basic Moves Image

Before we start talking about the basic moves, let’s take a moment to puzzle over the picture that introduces the chapter. What an interesting choice!

What is she doing? Her hands are up, fingers spread, as though she were showing that she’s unarmed. It’s almost as if she’s reacting to someone going aggro, “back[ing] off calmly, hands where you can see,” but her arms are not naturally positioned for that, are they? Her arms are close and elbows in as though she were forced into a small space. But then her head is thrown slightly back and her lips parted with an unreadable expression. Is that pleasure? Longing? Unconsciousness? And her hair: it runs down the front of her face in thick strands like clumps of wet hair. The way the black envelops her, she’s reminiscent of Ophelia half submerged in the inky black river. Her state of dress (or undress) is entirely ambiguous.

Why choose this image for the chapter on basic moves? Is she on the receiving end of someone going aggro? Is she seducing or manipulating someone? Is she digging in to endure fire? Is she in need of help? I know that I would like to read her as a person and the situation in which she has found herself. Perhaps she has opened her brain to the world’s psychic maelstrom, receiving weird visions and communications from that unnatural howling at the edge of our perception. That, I think, is my favorite reading, but there’s nothing textual to support that idea. All we know is that the picture depicts someone who is vulnerable, intimate, and strange, and whose strangeness makes her potentially threatening. How perfectly like Apocalypse World.

That seems to me the point of the image. It’s a reminder that the moves are about interacting with other characters, sometimes intimately, sometimes strangely, but someone is always vulnerable and exposed. It’s easy to focus on the violence implied by acting under fire, going aggro, and suckering someone, but most of the moves are about understanding and engaging with your fellow human beings, whether you’re reading them, seducing or manipulating them, helping them, or seeing traces of them in the psychic maelstrom. Going aggro is about reaching out to another person, even if it is through the threat of physical violence, and the fire under which you act is as likely to be social and personal as it is to be violent and life-threatening. At its most basic level, the game is about negotiating with other characters, other human beings, PCs and NPCs alike, to try to make of this world what you can. The humanity at issue – and the vulnerability of that humanity – is what I think this picture is all about.