Joker’s Wild

• liargame.oubliette.nu ↠
• Subject — Liar Game
• Medium — Manga
• Release date — 26 August 2012
• Revamp date — 08 September 2016
• Participant in — One Page, One Month: ENCORE Marathon, Shrine Revamp 2016

Keywords

• the human psyche
• selfishness
• trust & doubt
• manipulation
• deceit
• moral ambiguity
• greed
• the challenge to be good
• ideals
• extremes
• debts
• love letter to a female character

Making of

• Memory Wiped :(

  As I’m writing this in 2016 and went on a hiatus of three years after creating this shrine, I have little recollection about my approach to this project. It’s a pity, as it was my shrining debut after all. …I’m just really curious whether I wrote this with notes and an outline or not.

• First Project

  I had always loved character shrines the most when I browsed them in my teens — which doesn’t say much, since the vast majority of shrines were, and still are, character shrines. I’m not sure why I chose a series shrine as my first project, though I assume it’s because the nature of the One Page, One Month Marathon makes for a less intimidating introduction to shrining. Wanting to add to that, I chose a subject where I would neither have to do much research nor summarize a lot (knowing how obsessive I can be when it comes to reexperiencing the series and wanting to capture all the details).
  
  If you’re looking to make your first series shrine and/or your first one page shrine, it may be a good thing to pick something that isn’t plot-heavy, or to not focus on that plot when writing the shrine. A lot of what happens in Liar Game are technical details — strategies and game progression. It’s a series that stands out due to its finesse, but much more so due to its themes. Detailed summaries without much context can be difficult to follow as someone not familiar with the subject, but themes make for an excellent introduction.

• Thematic Approach

  I really enjoy writing about a subject, especially a series, as a whole: What are its motifs? What are recurring elements and symbols? How do individual characters handle those themes, and how do they represent them? Writing analyses and interpretations has always been one of my strengths, but I didn’t know whether I could manage to introduce others to a subject via its themes without spoilers. After all, looking at themes requires looking at everything you know from a top-down perspective. It turned out to be very fun, and I think I managed to strike a good balance.

• Spoiler Warning

  I think it’s also important to keep in mind that you can’t please everyone with the threshold you set for spoilers. Just know that it’s you who knows the subject, not them, so you most likely have a better grasp on the severity of a spoiler. If spoiling light developments is needed in order to show how great a series is, do it.

• Shrine Revamp

  This shrine was revamped on 08 September 2016 and renamed from Prisoner’s Dilemma to Joker’s Wild.

Retrospect

I may not recall much about the creation of this shrine, but it does make me proud that my first shrine was about an obscure series. Many things that I love are as obscure as Liar Game, and I’d always lament the lack of fan dedications to them on the internet. Having stopped writing fanfiction and not particularly capable of nor interested in another craft, I looked on from afar, desperately wanting to create something to honour those near-forgotten things I hold so much love for. If you can’t express your feelings for the things you love in some manner, those feelings will remain forever unborn; as for me, I fear that, given time, those feelings may die within me. And that scares me. I need to express those feelings in some manner, to record them — and for that, I would have to be an artist. But I wasn’t an artist.

But isn’t an artist someone who creates? Someone whose imagination and inner world give birth to something new? My thoughts on their own aren’t art, and they’re all interpretations of another piece of art. But perhaps a shrine could be considered art. So I made this shrine, and in doing so, I could honour a subject that I love — an obscure one, just as I had wanted.

In the Strength of Heart documentation, I mention that I don’t really consider Joker’s Wild my first shrine, mainly because I remember so little of its creation process and because there was a three-year hiatus after this shrine. That, however, doesn’t mean that I am not grateful to this marathon and this shrine. I’m sure that choosing a series as my first subject paved the way for future series shrines. In fact, in the next One Page, One Month Marathon that I participated in, I made Awakening, and — surprise — I looked at Joker’s Wild as reference quite a few times.

Most importantly, I also have this shrine to thank for my return to the hobby and community. Larissa nominated it for Amassment’s Shrine Spotlight in May 2015 and it won. Elysa poked me about it, and… I was so touched and surprised. My first work, which I created thinking I wasn’t good enough, was acknowledged, and well-received by the community. Not only that, Larissa left me some very sweet words in the topic, and mentioned being a fan of the subject too. Of course there are readers of Liar Game out there, even as obscure as it is — but who would have expected that my shrine, in a small community, would reach a fan and make them happy?

I had a look at the shrine and remembered part of the content. I mean, I know what I think of Liar Game. But I didn’t remember having written it — the act of writing. I couldn’t believe I had actually sat down in the past and finished a shrine, that I had been capable of creating something like that. It made me wonder why I had gone on such a long hiatus at all, and what more I could accomplish. I wanted to experience what it was like again, working on something you enjoy, creating something out of your love. So I came back.

And that’s all that there is to it, isn’t it? For your feelings and your love to reach someone, and to keep creating things that you can look back on and be proud of one day. I think those are some of the essential things you need to live.