The A-Unicornist

Last night I finished my playthrough of Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, a journey which took me about eight hours. As I watched the epilogue, I was so captivated that when I snapped back into self-awareness, I realized I was sitting with my jaw wide open, hand covering my mouth, and eyes dry from being so fixed on the screen yet watering from the heart-wrenching sadness unfolding before me. I've never played a game that engrossed me in such a tragic and powerful story. Hellblade is a rare kind of video game, one that elevates the entire medium to true art. Its authentic performances, created with stunning motion-capture, moved me as much as any great Oscar-winning film I've ever seen. I spent hours afterwards contemplating what I had experienced and was eager to discuss it with others who've finished the game. It's also centered on a topic that has long been considered taboo in many artistic mediums: mental illness.


Major spoilers for Hellblade follow

Hellblade tells t…

Earlier tonight, I was reading comments from conservatives on a Facebook post about Trump's planned dissolution of the DACA. If you're not familiar, the DACA was enacted by Obama to give children and young people brought into the US illegally by their parents or guardians more time to apply for citizenship. Since in many cases these people (referred to as "dreamers") were brought to the US very young, our soil is all they've ever known and deporting them is essentially sending them to a country that is totally foreign to them. The conservative commentators almost always referred to them as "illegals", blamed them for being a drain on the economy (which is objectively false), and cried, "no sympathy for dreamers!"

It's one of those moments where I recalled the Huffpo op-ed from Kayla Chadwick entitled, "I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People." The disagreement here isn't just political. If …