Pixar, Nietzsche, and the End of LARP

Onward is a Pixar film about elves and brotherhood, but it is more accurately about the LARPing ‘20s. It manages to suggest the rather involute thesis that ours is the age of Nietzschean hyperreality.

Onward looks backward. The apparent contradiction was immediately flagged by critics upon the film’s release a little more than five years ago. National Review called the animated feature “so reactionary it cries out for a return of the Latin Mass,” while Vulture dismissed the film as a Pixar offering that “even the ‘Make America Great Again’ crowd can embrace.”

Onward is reactionary, sure, but it’s hardly conservative (always an easy conflation), and neither epithet does right by the film’s strange topicality. This suburban fantasy is easily Pixar’s most overtly political film since WALL-E in 2008, and possibly Pixar’s most zeitgeisty film ever. That this is not obvious might be credited to the film’s unfortunate release date of March 6, 2020. Any chances Onward might have had at cultural legacy (and the box office) were summarily torpedoed by COVID-19, which the World Health Organization declared a pandemic exactly five days after its premiere; another five days, and the world was locked down. The show did not go on(ward).

It is only right that Onward’s commercial and cultural fate should be so intertwined with the crisis that inaugurated the current decade, given how totally and uncannily it is a film about the 2020s. Onward clearly comes from and belongs to a world in which the 59-year-old governor of Minnesota and U.S. vice-presidential candidate accuses his political opponent of being “a venture capitalist cosplaying as a cowboy” and slams Donald Trump for “cosplaying” as a McDonald’s worker. This is the language of nerds and the Terminally Online cannibalizing mainstream political culture, and that is one of the major stories of our own roaring ‘20s.

The accusation of cosplay—that is, of “LARPing,” short for “Live-Action Roleplay”—has become a rhetorical staple of online discourse, where users bearing anonymous names “act” in a purely symbolic world of texts and images unlinked from the “real world.” The accusation of LARP gets at the widely-felt sense that online existence is either inherently performative or tends to performance, and is therefore in some deep sense inauthentic (never mind impotent).

The availability of “LARPing” as a term of denigration is proportional to the mass of digital denizens who feel that their performative online selves are in fact realer and truer than the physical bodies they inhabit in “meatspace.” For such users, it is the face they show to “IRL society” which is the mask, the LARP, the inauthentic performance of normalcy. Online, behind their profile pictures of frogs or sculptures or cute anime girls, is where others can finally see them as they see themselves.

Onward is a Pixar film about elves and brotherhood, but it is more accurately about the LARPing ‘20s. In just under 100 minutes, it manages to suggest the rather involute thesis that ours is the age of LARP because it is the age of Nietzschean hyperreality. This is a suggestion made only partially and semi-intentionally, but it is made all the same. Our aim here is to unfurl the semiotic process by which this idea emerges. In doing so, we will discover that LARP, much like Nietzsche’s God, is already dead—we just haven’t realized it yet.

ACT I. “I USED TO BE DANGEROUS AND WILD”

Onward is set in a post-magical world of myth, where centaurs drive cars, sprites ride motorcycles, and elves watch workout videos in their suburban homes. Our protagonist, a timid elf named Ian Lightfoot, sets off into the great unknown with his swashbuckling brother, Barley, to secure the “Phoenix Gem” that would allow them to spend a day with their deceased father, Wilden Lightfoot. In the process, Ian is reborn as an elf who, like his father and brother, is unafraid of traversing paths that don’t yet exist.¹

There is an undeniable anti-modernism to Onward’s story. “Long ago,” we’re told in the prologue, “the world was full of wonder.” It was “adventurous,” it was “exciting,” and “best of all: there was magic.” Only an elect few ever attained the ability to wield it, though, and so society eventually developed a more democratic method of problem-solving: technology. Why struggle with an esoteric spell when you can flick on a light bulb? Technology gradually displaced magic, until practically all had forgotten how to use it. Thus the anachronistic sight of fairies riding airplanes, gnomes snuggling by an electric fireplace, and mermaids sipping soft drinks while relaxing in plastic blow-up pools. This blunt juxtaposition of the extraordinary and the prosaic powers the film’s comedy and underlines its thematic argument. This is Onward’s conceit: depicting the disenchantment of the world through enchanted creatures.

Onward’s premise sets up a fable with an ethical message as simple as it is heavy-handed: abandoning “magic” for technology has won us material convenience at the expense of spiritual greatness. The film conveys this sense of civilizational decay with one of its sharper opening images: a unicorn, that quintessential creature of medieval myth, rummaging through the trash on the front lawn of a nondescript suburban household, its alabaster coat caked in filth. This image foreshadows a moral idea to which the film repeatedly returns: despite its surface advancement, this is a world that has reduced and made a mockery of itself.

“Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche at the start of The Wagner Case, “than the problem of decadence.” For Nietzsche, “decadence” was not merely a synonym for “decline.” Decadence is that which denies life rather than affirms it, enervating individuals and entire cultures alike. Amongst Nietzsche’s most oft-cited decadents were anti-worldly Greeks like Plato, who dismissed material reality and fetishized the “absurdly rational” subjugation of the “lower” bodily appetites. “To have to fight the instincts—this is the formula for decadence,” wrote Nietzsche. Yet the hedonistic pursuit of every pleasureful impulse is also decadent. Any denial of any aspect of life is decadent, and hedonism denies one of life’s most undeniable qualities: suffering. This “longing for bliss” but “dread of pain” sits at the very heart of decadence. “Amor fati”—one should always love one’s fate, no matter its beauty or horror. We overcome decadence only when we greet pleasure and pain with equal enthusiasm.

That Onward’s society is decadent in the Nietzschean sense is indicated by its cultural mediocrity and instinctive hedonism—the former evinced by its loss of history, the latter its unbridled consumerism. The two reinforce and accelerate one another. The city of New Mushroomton retains only a tenuous link to its rich magical past, now seen as the exclusive province of “history buffs” like Barley. Officer Bronco dismisses the ruin at the heart of the city as “an old piece of rubble,” an opinion surely shared by the construction workers who have repeatedly attempted to demolish it. Onwardlinks this historical and cultural impoverishment to the mass consumption that is both the producer and the product of technological convenience. Fast food restaurants like “Fry Fortress” and “Burger Shire” (parodying real-life chains like “White Castle”) trivialize the city’s civilizational heritage by commercializing it, reducing mythological traditions to corporate brands and tawdry products. The Manticore’s Tavern, once a magnet for the adventurous and insane, is now Chuck E. Cheese. Its owner-manager, The Manticore, is a once-mythical beast turned high-strung, high-heels-wearing businesswoman, forced to sell her enchanted sword to get out of tax trouble. The Manticore’s fear of costly litigation, negative online reviews, and angry investors has made her a risk-averse shadow of her former self. Onward suggests, through such pitiful sights as the domesticated Manticore, that capitalist liberalism has devitalized and infantilized modern culture.

For this civilizational sickness, Onward prescribes Nietzsche. The antidote to decadence is the cultivation of our immanent potential, the “magic” latent within. “There’s a mighty warrior inside of you,” Barley tells his brother Ian, our timid protagonist, early in the film. “You just have to let him out.” Nietzsche saw himself as a reviver of pre-Platonic and pre-Christian “warrior ethics,” exalting “courage, greatness, elite excellence” over and against the “pusillanimity” bred by “modern life-affirming humanism,” because the ability to “set life lower than honour and reputation has always been the mark of the warrior, his claim to superiority.”² The Manticore comes close to reiterating this worldview verbatim when she reminisces about the days her tavern was “filled with a motley horde willing to risk life and limb for the mere taste of excitement.”

Just as The Manticore embodies the decadence of her age, so too does she manifest the film’s Nietzschean vision for overcoming it. Pushed into an existential reckoning by Ian, The Manticore decides to reject enfeebled civility for primal vitality. “I used to be dangerous and wild,” she roars, at once recognizing and recovering the ferocity that she has lost. Even as she says this, one of her employees—costumed as a mawkish mascot of her—mimics the genuine article. Like the cartoonish dragon that is the mascot of New Mushroomton High School, it is a saccharine caricature of a legendary beast and a visual shorthand for cultural devolution. The mascot is a funhouse mirror of The Manticore, a castrated version of herself that she literally sets aflame.

The Manticore proceeds to burn down her tavern, purging her soul of its commercial rot. But she isn’t simply destroying her bar-turned-family-center. She cracks the plaster masking the walls of the stonier and grittier tavern of old, stripping the corporate renovations that had, like mold, obnubilated the original structure. This is her “remodeling”—not the construction of a novel space, but the rehabilitation of an abandoned one.

The Manticore, then, emerges anew by returning to her roots. This is the argument at the heart of Onward: we can only move forward—onward—by advancing backwards. Everyone else in the film, too, must recover their better, bolder selves by progressing to their primordial roots. The sprites must re-learn to fly rather than ride motorcycles, the centaurs to run rather than drive cars, and Ian’s mother, Laurel, to prove that she is a “mighty warrior” by fighting an actual dragon rather than merely following a workout routine on television.

This is what “magic” truly signifies in the movie: an entire cultural outlook that trumpets self-reliance, courage, and strength over dependency, cowardice, and weakness. This is why Ian’s father, the reformer who sought to restore magic to his post-magic society, is described above all as “bold,” and why Ian, to successfully revive his father, must also become bold. Magic is boldness. To be magical is to be Nietzschean; to be otherwise is to be modern.

Modern civilization, by frantically shielding us from peril, keeps us in perpetual adolescence, forever immature. “I'm not ready!” Ian screams as he tries to merge into speeding highway traffic. “You’ll never be ready!” Barley shoots back, forcing Ian’s hand, and suddenly he’s navigating a high-speed car chase with nary an error. Similarly, once the sprites lose their motorcycles and are faced with an impending splat against the pavement, they discover that they can, in fact, fly. Only in times of extremes do we realize our potential. “I needed that rope!” Ian shouts at Barley, after crossing over a bottomless pit while bolstered by the false belief that he had a rope around his waist to catch him if he fell. “Oh, but did you?” Barley asks, the smug grin on his face answering the question.

Barley, more than Ian, is the film’s hero because he has neither forgotten his history nor been numbed by modernity’s luxuries. He has somehow escaped society’s programmed preference for convenience—in one especially obvious scene, Barley rejects Ian’s advice to take the speedier expressway in favor of the more taxing “Path of Peril.” Barley is cast as the brave prophet of New Mushroomton, fruitlessly but tirelessly preaching the gospel of magic to a society that has forgotten it. He is unafraid to blaze a path beyond the timorous pieties of modern society, guiding The Last Man (Ian) out of his comfort zone of safe mediocrity.³ Ian’s Last Man-ness is expressed by his refrain whenever faced with the latest mortal danger: “We’re dead, we’re going to die!” He lives petrified of the end, and so he doesn’t really live at all.

Onward, then, appears to straightforwardly celebrate a Nietzschean ethic of “courage, greatness, élite excellence.” This would be the end of our story, were it not for a few niggling wrinkles in the film’s thematic fabric. Attempts to smooth these wrinkles only create more. It doesn’t take much more failed smoothing for Onward’s philosophical tissue to begin showing signs of serious strain.

What if, by Onward’s—and Nietzsche’s—own criteria, Barley the Ubermensch is the most decadent character of all?

ACT II. “BASED ON REAL LIFE”

The Nietzschean idea that we’ve been devitalized by living in a well-ordered, materially abundant, and essentially safe society may go some way to explaining why a subculture of LARP (Live-Action Role-Play) has arisen in recent decades, and almost entirely in well-off countries. LARP gives participants an opportunity to experience a more perilous existence without any of the actual peril. It thus, in a stakes-less manner befitting a civilized people, satisfies the seemingly insatiable human need for fear and terror—an itch that polite society scratches through such diplomatic alternatives as horror films, roller coasters, and bumper cars.

Though LARP has many forms, its first and most popular is that of medieval fantasy. Well-adjusted adults with families and jobs will retreat from civilization for the weekend, donning plastic armor and foam swords to reenact Lord-of-the-Rings-style scenarios of adventure, war, and sacrifice. This style of LARP grew out of the 1970s nerd culture surrounding RPG tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).⁴

Barley bears more than a passing resemblance to the stereotypical LARPer. He spends his days playing a board game called “Quests of Yore,” an obvious knockoff of Dungeons & Dragons; he keeps a warrior costume complete with a helmet, sword, chain mail, and cape; and he’s painted a galloping stallion on the outside of his van, which he calls his “mighty stead” and has christened “Genevieve.” So deeply has Barley committed to his fantasy role-playing that he has little life outside of it. He is, to borrow a British term now universally associated with Japan, a NEET—Not in Education, Employment, or Training.

This character choice should strike us as a little strange. After all, the narrative idolizes Barley. It practically identifies him as his society’s Ubermensch. The Ubermensch, we’d think, cannot be a LARPer. One lives a life of real danger, whereas the other playacts it—and indeed, Barley hardly sports the ideal masculine physique of an ancient Greek warrior, of the sort trumpeted by such prominent online right-wing personalities as Bronze Age Pervert. Why, then, would the film present a LARPer as its revolutionary?

It is this discordant note in the film’s Nietzschean symphony that alerts us to the presence of a second film unfolding alongside the first. The smoking gun is “Quests of Yore,” Barley’s beloved board game and the plot device that betrays Onward’s Janus face. As established in the first act of this drama, Onward identifies Barley as our moral compass because he has supposedly overcome his society’s decadence, neither forgetting his history nor indulging a lifestyle of crippling convenience. Both of those qualities are grounded in “Quests of Yore,” at once Barley’s history teacher and moral instructor.

The problem with Barley assuming the mantle of non-decadence is that his NEET lifestyle is necessarily parasitic on modern decadence. It is otherwise unsustainable, indeed impossible. The centerpiece of Barley’s LARP—“Quests of Yore”—was sold to him by the same consumerist system responsible for New Mushroomton’s descent into decadence. We know this because it has none of the markings of a homemade game. It comes with a laminated card set, action figures, an information manual, and a stylized logo reminiscent of D&D. By all appearances, this is a slick, corporate product designed to profit off the insular interests of a passionate nerd subculture.

Barley, then, fully conforms to the consumerist lifestyle that Onward codes as decadent. Although the film positions Barley as a social heretic, it also confirms that he’s as much a participant in his society’s misguided ways as the people he reprimands. Barley’s exhaustive historical knowledge doesn’t signal his distance from society, only his particular brand of decadent hedonism. His LARPing doesn’t confirm his revolutionary credentials, only his comfortable socioeconomic bubble.

Barley’s tepid “boldness” reflects that of his father, who is eulogized as audacious for wearing “ugly purple socks” every day. This banal act, framed within the film as a deed of heterodox courage, inspires Ian to “boldly” pursue a list of similarly trivial goals, like driving a car and inviting friends to a party. These are terribly limited horizons. Everything that our protagonists think of as “bold” is either just mildly unusual or simply the norm.

The imaginative bankruptcy of the Lightfoots’ vision, and of Onward itself, is reinforced by the film’s concluding montage. It seems to show a “new” New Mushroomton, one which has rediscovered its magical roots: sprites fly, centaurs gallop, and armored waiters serve the new clientele of The Manticore’s Tavern. Ian repeats verbatim the monologue with which his father opened the film. The past has returned. “Long ago” is now. Yet the changes that Onward presents as revolutionary are cosmetic—visual shorthands for, rather than actual demonstrations of, radical change. The suburbs are cleaner and the scavenging unicorns gone, but The Manticore’s restored tavern isn’t “filled with a motley horde willing to risk life and limb,” only the usual parents and children. Barley replaces “Guinevere” with “Guinevere the Second”—the same exact van as the first, only newer and more orange.⁵

Onward’s characters ultimately appear unable to escape the decadence of their society. Barley’s and Ian’s journey into the wilderness, though initially promising to transport them far beyond the territorial and imaginative confines of New Mushroomton, only takes them right back to where they began. They cannot reach a world beyond New Mushroomton’s decadent horizons—and neither can Onward.

What we are left with is a timid film critical of our timidity, an imaginatively mediocre product that mourns our imaginative mediocrity. The film cannot actually commit to the radical politics at which it gestures. Much like its characters, Onward is LARPing Nietzsche.

ACT III. “IF YOU BELIEVE THE BRIDGE IS THERE, IT’S THERE”

So Onward is playing a game—or, more accurately, playing several.

One of those games is called, “Who is the protagonist?” The most obvious candidate is Ian Lightfoot. The less obvious but perhaps more appropriate candidate is his brother Barley or his father Wilden. The answer, at least within this three-act narrative, is none of the above. Our secret protagonist, like all good secret protagonists, has been hiding in plain sight, integral but invisible.

The true protagonist of Onward is Guinevere. Guinevere, as a fictitious “mighty stead” that does actually carry Barley to wherever he needs, crystallizes the tension between reality and make-believe inherent to the act of LARPing. All role-playing transpires in a nebulous space between sincerity and irony, between earnest commitment and knowing detachment. Much like the theatrics of a stage performer or the pretend of a child, “authentic” LARPing demands a degree of doublethink. To convince others, the performer must at once believe and disbelieve his performance. Hence the existential-epistemic anxiety raised by the LARPer. When, or does, play-acting become real? If the entirety of Onward is an elaborate LARP, is there a point at which that LARP ceases being LARP?

Guinevere, more than any other character in the film, forces this question to the foreground, and nowhere more acutely than in her final scene. Cornered by a platoon of police officers on a mountain, Barley decides to evade capture by sacrificing Guinevere. He solemnly plays a cassette tape titled “Rise to Valhalla,” a suitably grandiloquent farewell to his gallant companion.⁶ A rock on the gas pedal and Guinevere is off, racing to oblivion as Barley the Stoic salutes her. The cinematography and sound design leans into Barley’s role-playing fantasy—one of the van’s tires bursts, so that Guinevere literally gallops, clippity-cloppity, to her destiny, even as Barley’s parking tickets burst forth from her windows as wings.⁷ Guinevere dutifully drives off a rock outcropping and flies into the side of the mountain. Just moments before she crashes, midair with sunlight splashing across her spray-painted face, we hear her engine whinny one last time. The ensuing collision causes an avalanche that blocks the pathway of the police vehicles but also buries the mighty stead.

This entire sequence dramatizes the emotional paradox of LARPing. It is at once an ode and a joke, solemn and snickering. The inherent oddness of the situation—the tragic sacrifice of a beat-up van costumed as a pegasus—forces the scene into an indeterminate space between pathos and bathos. Beneath the operatic melancholia, there is a cloying playfulness, an irreverent wink to the audience—a tacit acknowledgement of the scene’s absurdity. Onward commits enough to the glorious tragedy of it all that one can’t help but take, or want to take, the scene seriously. All the same, there is an undeniable comedy to a van-horse hybrid “flying” and crashing to the tune of faux-epic vocalizations. No other moment in Onward so precisely captures the disorienting psychological ambivalence inherent to LARPing. Are we witnessing a heroic sacrifice, or a parody of one? (Both, of course, in the same way that “Quests of Yore” is at once a game and a map).

When contemplating how to secure the Phoenix Gem that would allow him and Ian to cast the spell that would resurrect their father, Barley immediately rushes to his “Quests of Yore” card set, which he believes has all the information the brothers need. Ian is understandably skeptical, and just a bit incredulous: “Barley, this is from a game.” Barley’s response is key: “Based on real life!” This is Barley’s refrain whenever anyone attempts to denigrate the practical applicability of “Quests of Yore.” The game is, he tells us throughout the film, “historically accurate” and “historically based.”⁸

This is not a film about the absurdity of Barley’s faith in the facticity of his board game; it is a film about how he’s actually totally right. “Quests of Yore” really does guide the brothers to the right places and really does supply Ian with workable magical spells. “Quests of Yore” purports to contain, and in fact does contain, an impeccably accurate record of this society’s history and tradition. In having a board game unerringly predict the dangers that the brothers encounter and successfully prepare them as needed, Onward undermines the “reality” of their hunt for the Phoenix Gem. It likens the brothers’ dangerous, deadly quest to a game that they are playing—because it quite literally is. “My years of training have prepared me for this very moment,” exclaims Barley—that is, his years of LARPing as a warrior have actually equipped him to be one.

Onward thus eschews any meaningful distinction between role-playing and reality—the skills acquired in the former translate directly to the latter. Laurel can transition from watching gym workouts on the TV in her living room to scaling the back of a dragon because both exist on the same plane of reality (as reaffirmed by the soundtrack of her workout program playing as she runs up the back of the dragon with The Manticore’s enchanted sword). Guinevere is a van, and also really a pegasus.

“This is from a game,” says Ian derisively when Barley treats his gaming guide as a literal spell book, and in proving him wrong (the game is actually reality), the narrative also suggests the inverse (reality is actually a game). “Quests of Yore,” it comes to seem, isn’t “based on real life” so much as “real life” is based on it. Onward essentially “gamifies” reality itself. In its account, there is no distinction between essence and performance—and so there is no difference between reality and LARPing. This is literalized as an in-universe ontological principle when Ian and Barley try to cross over a bottomless pit. Ian casts a spell that forms an invisible bridge. The catch: it is actualized only by the power of belief. Ian finds this absurd, but Barley is unfazed. As he confidently tells Ian, “If you believe that the bridge is there, it’s there.” This is a type of logic that Barley would understand, because it is the one that undergirds and enables the act of LARPing.

“If you believe that the bridge is there, it’s there”— this is the thesis statement of the Age of LARP. It is the gospel of manifestation gurus on TikTok teaching loyal acolytes how to realize their dreams with positive thinking and techno-accelerationists waging memetic warfare to hyperstition their way to the Singularity. Neither manifestation nor hyperstition are inherently irrational concepts, insofar as they theorize, in different ways and to varying degrees of sophistication, the very real and uncanny feedback loop between intangible ideas and physical reality. Imagination expands the boundaries of the real, and the real in turn bounds what is imagined. The performance of what is not yet true can make it true—much as we put ourselves to sleep by pretending to sleep. This quirk of human psychobiology is what gives LARP its transformative potential, and maximizing said potential is the explicit goal of those on its experimental edge.

“Nordic LARP,” named after its geographical point of origin and sometimes opposed to more conventionally escapist “American” or “boffer” LARP,⁹ is an attempt to elevate LARP to an artform and “explicitly political project.” It is primarily “interested in character as changed and influenced by the game’s narrative,” and it achieves this goal by having players act out dramatic scenarios that are emotionally exhausting, physically taxing, and morally challenging. Player safety is a recurring subject of concern among participants, given that this is a scene that can yield games called Gang Rape.¹⁰ Unsurprisingly, Nordic LARP has also yielded “tales of real-world relationships destroyed (and created) by the shockwaves from in-game events.” Nordic LARP simply builds on the ancient wisdom of “fake it till you make it.” It is the postmodern successor of everything from Zen to meditation to intention-setting, the latest way to play with the fluidity of the self. The endgame of so much Nordic LARP is precisely this “narrative bleed,” in which the thoughts and feelings induced by the gameplay “bleed” into and change the players’ actual selves and lives.¹¹

C. Thi Nguyen speaks of games as “the art of agency”—rather than tell stories or create worlds, they create selves. Much like fiction is a library of stories, “games are a library where you can try out different ways of being an agent.” We’re so accustomed to thinking about art in terms of beautiful art objects that we are ill-prepared for an art (games) where the object of beauty is the self. The desires that compel us during gameplay are intense—so intense, indeed, that we can be virtually different people while playing—yet we shed those desires easily the moment the game has ended. The point of any given game, from tag to paintball, is not its posited end, which is always arbitrary; the point is the gameplay itself. To paraphrase Nguyen, in life we choose certain means to achieve desired ends; in gameplay, we choose certain ends to achieve desired means. What sticks with us once a game is over is not our victory or defeat, neither of which matter,¹² but rather the novel experience of selfhood created by the gameplay.¹³

Building on Nguyen, we might say that all gameplay is essentially a kind of LARP: an activity where one temporarily becomes an entirely different agent, obsessed with an entirely arbitrary goal hindered by entirely arbitrary obstacles. LARP, Nordic or otherwise (but especially Nordic), makes the implicit end of gameplay (self-creation) unusually clear because its explicit ends are so often unclear, and yet this unclarity hardly diminishes its appeal.

Nguyen presents us with an implicitly Nietzschean account of play and its aesthetic value. Despite his enduring reputation as an essentially artistic philosopher and philosopher of art, Nietzsche was in fact deeply suspicious of what most people call “art” (paintings, sculptures, and so on). He repeatedly opposed an “art of works of art” to art as a general principle of creativity underlying the will to power.¹⁴ Indeed, he condemns the “art of works of art” as the poisoned fruit of a decadent culture. Truly aesthetic man, artistic man, would have no need for works of art, for life itself would be aesthetic and man himself would be a work of art.¹⁵

“Art” properly understood is not to be found in any given “art object” outside of and available for the disinterested contemplation of the self, but rather is the self itself in the playful process of self-creation. It is through play that the Übermensch, the ultimate player of the game called life, creates new values. Our proper aspiration is to be the “eternal child” of Zarathustra, the man-child for whom play is not some escape from life, but the very point of it.¹⁶ From this standpoint, it is deeply misguided to treat “play” with anything less than the utmost seriousness. “I know of no other manner of dealing with great tasks, than as play,” wrote Nietzsche in his last work, Ecce Homo. “This, as a sign of greatness, is an essential prerequisite.”¹⁷ So esteemed was play in Nietzsche’s sight that he favored it over “work,” which he saw as little more than self-denial. As he insists in Beyond Good and Evil: “Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.”¹⁸

From a Nietzschean standpoint, then, Barley’s unemployment—his NEET lifestyle in general—might be less a signifier of decadent indulgence than an appropriately ethical rejection of work. Is not Barley a fitting avatar of our antiwork moment? Isn’t his contemptuous disregard for the labor demanded by capital the new dream of Gen Z, and the hippies and anarchists before them?¹⁹ Isn’t Barley modeling an alternative, aspirational notion of agency by insisting on the “gamification” of life—on the universal value of “the art of agency”?

“Man is a rope fastened between animal and overman—a rope over an abyss,” writes Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous shuddering and standing still. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is a crossing overand a going under.”²⁰ The game of life is not valuable when it is won; it is valuable when it is played. The bridge is not valuable because by it one reaches a destination; the bridge is valuable because it is a bridge.²¹

Where an unbridgeable gulf emerges between Nguyen and Nietzsche is their perspective on the boundaries of gameplay, or lack thereof. Nietzsche thinks that life itself is play; Nguyen insists that play only obtains within a bounded space carved out of life proper. To say that all of life is a game is to say that football can be played outside of a football field—a nonsense, given that the field, a necessarily circumscribed space, is the premise of the game.

Nguyen is thus always careful to distinguish between games and gamification. Gamification is the extension of the game beyond its organizing limits, and thus its perversion. Gamification is not the intensification of gaming; it is its destruction. Nguyen’s go-to example of gamification is social media, which gamifies (and thereby sabotages) the act of communication by subjecting it to a points system. Other examples abound. On the grimmer end of the spectrum is the 2019 Christchurch mosque shooting, where the perpetrator live-streamed his massacre in the visual style of first-person shooter video games—what has been called the “gamification of terror.” Military drones, which mimic the user interface of Call of Duty, participate in the same phenomenon.²² Nguyen casts gamification as an unmitigated evil—a desecration of the art of gaming in the name of gaming. For Nietzsche, though he never used the term, “gamification” is the truest art and the greatest way of life.

The struggle over “gamification,” personified here in the poles of Nguyen and Nietzsche, stems from an underlying ambiguity about the location of games in reality. Is life a game, a container of games, or a series of games? If the last, is life itself then not simply a game? Erik Davis argues that “the contemporary urge to ‘gamify’ our social and technological interactions is…simply an extension of the existing games of subculture, of folklore, even of belief,” which accords with the “ludic turn” in psychology and anthropology given to reinterpreting social rituals as play and play as culture. Gamification, then, is to some extent hardwired into human existence: “Human reality possesses an inherently fictional or fantastic dimension whose ‘game engine’ can—and will be—organized along variously visionary, banal, and sinister lines.”²³

What the gamification debate reveals is that fiction, gaming, and LARPing are variants of the same psychic practice. All three work in exactly the same way: through a willed doublethink, a voluntary suspension of disbelief, in which artist and audience co-construct and co-inhabit symbolic universes distinct from but tethered to the physical world, between which they slip at will.²⁴ Fiction, then, must not be confused with falsehood, and neither must gaming or LARPing. Fiction is an epistemic category of knowing make-believe, which is meaningfully distinct from either deception (persuading another that something false is true) or delusion (accepting something false as true).

The question is one of limits. We can accept Nordic LARP and games in general as social technologies which achieve their true ends (self-making) via imaginary ends (a made-up prize). However, if indeed LARP is always a performance whose ultimate end is a readjustment or modification of the “true” self of the performer, then is not its telos ultimately an erosion of its own limits? Is not the end of the game we call LARP the end of LARP?²⁵

The true LARPer always understands that he is LARPing, just as the literary aficionado always understands that he is reading fiction—the doublethink is definitional, the suspension of disbelief necessarily willing. In LARP, as with all fiction, we will ourselves to believe that something is true when we know it is not. There is no LARP absent the will to believe; the moment the LARPer no longer wills his (dis)belief, the moment he helplessly and naively buys into his own performance, he is no longer LARPing. He is doing, or more accurately has become, something else.

We misunderstand Barley when we think that his ostracization, his misfittedness, stems from his nerdy roleplaying lifestyle. The real-life LARPer is not a social misfit; he is in fact exceptionally well-socialized. He switches easily between his many masks, because he knows the social lay of the land and adeptly navigates its variegated topographies. There is a reason that LARP (like all games) can only happen once its borders have been firmly demarcated and its participants momentarily withdrawn from “life.” So well-adjusted is the LARPer to his society that he steps in and out of its revolving door of prescribed roles at a whim, from dad to friend to coworker to medieval warrior and back. His social discernment—that is, his immunity to “narrative bleed”—is precisely what licenses his LARP.

When the “bleed” pursued by LARP is complete, such that the circles of self and performance are one, the self-making mechanism of LARP breaks down. The distance between truth and costume, between actor and authenticity, between life and play, is exactly what enables LARP’s alchemy of self. LARP simply cannot work absent this opposition. Its formal structure is necessarily Platonic—LARP operates through the mischievous interplay of the above and below, essence and appearance, reality and representation. Its thrill comes from the reckless suggestion of blurring and even collapsing these two worlds, but this must always remain a suggestion, a seduction, an asymptotic jouissance.

LARP is a bridge between two worlds or it is nothing, and the difficulty with Nietzsche is that he crusaded to bury dualism in the depthless flux of oneworldness. The entirety of his philosophical project he distilled as “inverted Platonism.”²⁶ To expunge from human thought the Platonic “true world” of Ideas, and with it the world of appearances, such that appearance itself became the true world—this “twisting free” of Platonism is what Heidegger called Nietzsche’s “final step,” before at last “madness befell him.”²⁷

Onward, then, is not actually about LARP at all—it is about the end of LARP. It announces a gamified world no longer capable of LARPing, a world which cannot exercise the sophisticated, childish doublethink necessary to LARP, a world for which LARP ceases to be even a possibility. Onward knows only one world, the world of appearances, where to play is to really do, to pretend is to really be.²⁸ To the extent that Onward LARPs Nietzsche, it is really Nietzschean. There is, finally, nothing but the simulacrum. Barley never has to “grow up,” or realize that he is indeed a “screwup,” or come back down from his fantasies to the “real world” —no, the rest of the world has to come around to his solipsism, for he is after all an Abrahamic misfit. Onward is about what happens when LARP cannibalizes culture, or when culture reduces to LARP; it is about what happens when the end of LARP ends it.

Onward is not about LARPers; it is about madmen. It is a portrait of civilizational insanity. It is a portrait of our insanity.

IV. DENOUMENT: A GOING UNDER

Insanity, to be clear, is eminently rational in conditions of hyperreality. The world of digital technology and financial capitalism is a simulated one powered almost entirely by the power of belief. From speculation on the stock market to the Federal Reserve’s make-a-wish printing of money, this is a world where reality is decided by individual and institutional fiat. If you believe the bridge is there, it’s there.

Jean Baudrillard's presence is always felt whenever and wherever hyperreality is invoked, but his infamous Simulacra and Simulation is really the theoretical consummation of Nietzsche’s madness.²⁹ Plato showed the way out of the cave; Kant sealed its exit; Nietzsche revealed there’s nothing to exit to; and Baudrillard doubled down to expose cave and outside alike as representations-in-themselves. His is a world of copies without origin and images which realize their consumer. In this society of consumption, “daily life ends up being a replica of the model,” whether that model comes from opinion polls, news stories, advertisers, film, television, or, now, the Internet. It is not that we can no longer differentiate truth from falsehood or that the Image has effaced the Real, but that such distinctions are obsolete in a cybernetic age of infinite feedback loops. When speech is “industrialized on the same basis as the production of material goods,”³⁰ as it is by mass media, reality is tautological—spoken into existence and sustained by the repetition of the utterance.

“All it takes, when He wills something, is to say to it, ‘Be,’ and it is!”³¹— here at last is the madness, the hubris, the literal inhumanity, of hyperreal man. The apotheosis of LARP, the completion of bleed, is apotheosis. Hyperreal man, that is to say, Nietzschean man, is not only insane, but desires insanity. He wants to be mad—to be a Young-Girl and schizoposter and fictosexual and otherkin. He wants to kill all normies. If we’re all Nietzscheans now, it is because we finally live in his world. Reality has caught up with Zarathustra. Here, neck-deep in feeds of information and streams of code, the true world has finally become a fable. There is only the free play of signs by free spirits, the world and self nothing but physiology and will. The infonaut cosplays as himself.

Perhaps this is the only way beyond decadence. “Priests and moralists have all wanted to take mankind back, wrench it back, to an earlier standard of virtue,” wrote Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols. “There is nothing for it: you have to go forward—that is to say step by step further and further into decadence….We can hinder this development, and by so doing dam up and accumulate degeneration itself and render it more convulsive, more volcanic: we cannot do more.”³² Here is the proto-accelerationist strategy that has become one of Nietzsche’s great legacies, from the Italian Futurists to Deleuze and Guattari to, yes, Baudrillard.³³ How to exit a system that permits no exit? An excess of system; to push a system so far it collapses under its own systematicity. Hence Nietzsche declared himself “a decadent” and also “the reverse;” the former because he was modern, the latter because it is by his modernity that he resisted modernity.

Perhaps the same can be said of Barley. Again, consider Guinevere. She is, on the one hand, a mass-produced automobile, and therefore yet another symbol of New Mushroomton’s decadent consumerism. On the other hand, she is Barley’s and no one else. Through dedication to his role-playing fantasy, Barley remakes his van in his image. He replaces her radio, headlights, brakes, tires, rim, and air conditioning system. The license plate reads “GWINVER,” while the sides of the van sport a painted image of a glowing pegasus. From this personalization of Guinevere comes the film’s name—taped over the “D” on the van’s dashboard is a paper “O,” for “onward.” Barley overrides the vehicle’s factory settings in favor of his own vision. Unlike his relationship with “Quests of Yore,” then, Barley’s relationship with Guinevere goes beyond one-sided consumption. There is personality in Barley’s engagement with his van. Through Guinevere, Barley becomes what Henry Jenkins calls the “empowered consumer”: a co-creator or even re-creator of an initially mass-produced, commercial product.

But is the “empowered consumer” (and, by extension, the revolutionary accelerationist) anything but an oxymoron? Even here, Barley can only re-signify Guinevere by referencing other mass-circulated signs he has consumed, and no matter how he re-signifies her, he is finally limited by her materiality as a van. That he does not perceive this is, again, because he is not a LARPer. He thinks Guinevere really is a pegasus, the same way that the anti-Trump protestors waving Andorsigns think they really are rebels, and just as protestors invoking The Hunger Games a decade before them did. This collapse of LARP is only possible in that part of the world where the Gulf War did not take place, in the capital of capital.³⁴

But does it matter whether or not Guinevere is “really” a pegasus? Is that not, yet again, the instinctive retreat to a reality principle that misunderstands hyperreality as a synonym for non-reality? Regardless of what Guinevere “is,” what she “does” is all the same: incite a rockslide that blocks the police officers and enables the Lightfoot brothers to complete their quest. As far as the officers and the brothers are concerned, in terms of the evidence of their senses, Guinevere is a pegasus. It is, furthermore, Barley’s faith in her pegasus-ness that convinces him to send her off on her final flight in the first place. “Reality” reciprocated his mental model.

Poe’s Law is the epistemology of hyperreality.³⁵ The performance of extremes is always liable to be mistaken as extremism, and therefore simply be extremism. Our hegemonic systems of surveillance and control are structurally incapable of discerning between the appearance of something wrong and the actual presence of wrongness, because both are translated through the same homogenizing apparatus of perception, and so are made to belong to the same order of Image. Intention is irrelevant. This is another way of saying that LARPing is not possible under conditions of cybernetic governance. Irony is over, and LARPing is inherently ironic. Neither online users nor apparatuses of power can read LARP as LARP. Perhaps the end of LARP as an intentional practice of doublethink is partly a response to the end of LARP as a social hermeneutic.

If all is already symbolic, if performance is always real, then perhaps Nietzschean accelerationism is a viable path onward. But it is only a perhaps. Onward itself dwells in an indeterminate space between commitment to and critique of its own Nietzscheanism, if only inadvertently. Recall, again, that strange final scene, where we meet the New New Mushroomtoon, same as the Old New Mushroomton, except that its people have abandoned their debilitating dependence on technology and embraced their inner magic.³⁶ But that’s precisely what’s so odd, even absurd about it: this societal re-enchantment and collective self-overcoming does not appear to have overturned the forever status quo of postwar American suburbia. All that the return of magic has produced is newer, fancier kinds of consumption and signification—a more “authentic” experience at The Manticore’s Tavern, a prettier paint job for the Guinevere the Second, and so on. Onward seems to give us Nietzschean self-creation as neoliberal individualism: the worst-case outcome for the Zarathustrian project of play-as-revolution. It is a world of madmen, but in a world which has not reciprocated their madness—is it for this, really only this, that we killed the LARPer?

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Notes

1. The “Phoenix Gem” is no doubt so named because the process of seeking it brings about the spiritual death and rebirth of the seeker.

2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 373.

3. By the end of the film, after mastering magic and fighting a dragon, Ian has ostensibly emerged from his cocoon of sniveling cowardice. He has become bold. When Barley tells Ian that their father is “proud of the person that you grew up to be,” Ian says that he owes “an awful lot of that” to Barley. The film’s final scene sees the two of them embarking on yet another (presumably dangerous) adventure.

4. One irony of Onward is that the film’s Tolkienite medieval aesthetic has its roots in a 19^th century German Romantic idealization of the Middle Ages that Nietzsche despised.

5. Decadence is so deeply embedded in the fabric of this universe—really, of this film—that it manages to manifest itself in what should be the film’s climactic destruction of the status quo: the reappearance of a cursed dragon, a mythological beast of the sort that this world has forgotten. Here is the ultimate symbol of what had hitherto been dead: magic, as both a reality-shaping force and character-building ethos. But though this dragon is an echo of the past, it is composed entirely of the present—literally. It builds its body from the ruins of New Mushroomton High School, vending machines included, and wears the schmaltzy face of the high school mascot. The resulting dissonance makes for a great visual gag, but it also subsumes the dragon into the decadent world of the present. The dragon’s disruptive potential is thus neutralized. It cannot upset the status quo, a fact reaffirmed by Laurel defeating it with nothing more than her workout routine.

6. Here the film’s Middle Age aesthetics suddenly clash with Nordic ones, the latter more in line with Nietzsche’s tastes.

7. Genevieve’s parking-violation-wings is a neat visual gag—it wordlessly positions Barley’s disregard for socio-legal norms as the basis of his liberation.

8. There is a (certainly unintended) resonance between Barley’s choice of words and the lingo of the dissident right, where “based” is a term of the highest praise, typically bestowed upon behaviors, actions, and ideals that transgress the emasculating values of modern life.

9. Lizzie Stark, in her article “We Hold These Rules to Be Self-Evident,” argues that traditional LARP, tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons (or World of Warcraft), is a metaphor for the American Dream.

10. This last game, the designer explained, “is not meant to be fun to play,” and is reserved for only the most mentally well.

11. The psychic circuitry so effectively hacked by Nordic LARP is equally vulnerable to other types of make-believe. The Act of Killing (2012) is a documentary that follows a group of Indonesian gangsters as they gleefully re-enact their mass slaughter of alleged communists committed after the military coup in 1965. The head gangster, Anwar Congo, is a cinephile. He modeled his brutal murders on those of American mobster films, and he recalls how, high on Elvis Presley films, feeling like Elvis himself, he would dance out of the cinema to the human slaughterhouse across the street, where he got to work. Congo, then, became an actual gangster, a dyed-in-blood mass murderer, by cosplaying as a Hollywood one. Even more remarkable, however, is how Congo’s reenactment of his murders spurs an unprecedented crisis of conscience. Cosplaying as one of his victims moments before a grisly execution, feigning terror while crusted in fake blood, Congo finds himself comprehending for the first time something of what his real victims must have felt. The encounter with empathy sickens him. Somehow, this game of pretending to be someone else had irrevocably changed his “original” self.

12. This, of course, is not true for professional players, for whom victory carries high material stakes, and accordingly their relationship to games is more straightforwardly the relationship anybody would have with their job.

13. See C. Thi Nyugen, Games: Agency as Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

14. In his more mature works, especially from All Too Human onwards, Nietzsche repeatedly pits “art” against “life.” Rather than the will to power, the artist exercises “the will to hypostasize”; the artist seeks to fix what is unfixable, to impose order and beauty upon the Heraclitan flux of life. The artist is finally a liar, promulgating illusions masquerading as deeper truth, and claiming the same secret knowledge and epistemic authority as the priest and scientist. God, the soul, religion, metaphysics—to the order of these and all other dirty hypostases, Nietzsche consigns art. Flux is the final truth, one that art, like metaphysics and religion, works to conceal. Despite Nietzsche’s unrelenting assault on the Platonic metaphysical idealism which undergirds the German aesthetic tradition, as articulated especially by Schopenhauer and Hegel (art as the sensuous representation of the Absolute Idea), his critique of art cannot help but invoke Plato’s attack on the poets in The Republic. He in many ways reproduces the classical doctrine of mimesis which casts art as an inevitably inferior representation of reality. See Philip Pothen, Nietzsche and the Fate of Art (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2002), 63-65.

15. Pothen, Nietzsche and the Fate of Art, 38-39. As Pothen observes, readings of Nietzsche and art tend to foreground his debut work, The Birth of Tragedy, to a distortive extent. It is hardly representative of Nietzsche’s mature philosophy of art.

16. As with so much of the fantasy genre from which D&D and Onward borrow their aesthetic, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicle of Narnia series displaces the fantastical to an enchanted realm outside of our own, closed to all but the intrepid or lucky few. The ability to access this enchanted realm gradually atrophies with age before disappearing altogether in adulthood. Only children, not yet socialized into the secular myths of modernity, have the sort of naive belief which permits them entry into Faerie. That children and children alone can know the full scope of reality—this is a classic Romantic dogma that arose in reaction to the Industrial Revolution concurrently with the Edwardian invention of childhood, a Romantic dogma to which Nietzsche was not at all immune.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche trans. Anthony Ludovici, Ecce Homo (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1911), 53.

18. Friedrich Nietzsche eds. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 62.

19. Enlightened man, aesthetic man, the Overman, is he who returns to childhood as an adult, and another sign that we are all Nietzscheans now is that ours is the age of the man-child. Onward, roleplay, antiwork, gamification, “kidults”—all symptoms of what Matt Alt calls the “Great Regression,” which he first glimpsed during the economic recession of 1990s Japan and which we now observe in 2020s America. Against the “unalloyed contempt” with which Western societies have historically treated infantilization, Alt champions the virtues of our cultural “second childhood.” His arguments will by now sound familiar: regression offers a kind of “experimentation and creative play” that “can pave the way for new ways of thinking and living” which “become essential tools for navigating the strange new frontiers of modern life.” Perhaps, rather than denying reality, the reemergence of the adult’s inner child “pave[s] the way to an entirely new one.” We’re still with Nietzsche and the Nordic LARPers.

20. Friedrich Nietzsche eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert Pippin, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7.

21. Ari-Pekka Lappi goes so far as to argue that Thus Spoke Zarathustra itself should be played as a game: “I’m not arguing that Nietzsche intended to write a game. The concept of game was too narrow then and it is too narrow still. I’m saying that Nietzsche wrote a game without being fully aware of writing a game. If Nietzsche had said that Thus Spoke Zarathustra was a game, he would have devalued it as philosophy and political commentary. Get rid of [the] phrase ‘this is only a game’ and replace it with ‘this is also a game.’ After that, seeing one’s life also as a game – as Thus Spoke Zarathustra seems to suggest – is not a big step at all.” See Ari-Pekka Lappi, “Playing ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Player as a Bridge Between Animal and Overman,” from States of Play: Nordic Larp Around the World ed. Juhanna Pettersson (2012), 71-76.

22. Already in 1985, Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novel Ender’s Game built its entire plot around the gamification of modern warfare. At the novel’s climax, Andrew “Ender” Wiggins, a child prodigy in military training, leads humanity to a decisive victory in its war against an alien species, destroying the aliens’ home planet in the process. Only after the battle does Ender learn that what he believed was only a simulation, nothing more than a practice session and pixels on a screen, was in fact reality.

23. Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, Mysticism in the Age of Information (North Atlantic Books, 2015), 375.

24. Furthermore, fiction exists in a tight feedback loop with reality, such that they can never be cleanly severed. Reality will always be a bit fictional, and vice versa.

25. That the success of LARP brings about its own demise, that at its highest point it supersedes itself, renders it’s a quintessentially Nietzschean enterprise. Nietzsche (and Baudrillard after him) was all about self-overcoming. LARP is greatest when it overcomes itself, just as man is greatest when he overcomes himself (to bring about the Overman). We might say that, for Nietzsche, “LARPification” would be desirable as the self-overcoming of LARP, just as gamification is the self-overcoming of gaming. The teloi of LARP, gameplay, and art is their termination.

26. The other major distillation of Nietzsche’s thought arguably restates this in a moral rather than metaphysical register: “Dionysus versus the Crucified.”

27. Martin Heidegger trans. David Farrell Krell, Nietzsche: Volumes I and II (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 201.

28. Narnia, Middle Earth, and New Mushroomton—one of them is not like the other. Narnia is on the other side of the wardrobe; Middle Earth is our distant past, now beyond reach; but New Mushroomton is an enchanted realm that is also American suburbia. The world of fantasy is not spatialized or temporalized away, it is conflated with the here and now.

29. “Perhaps one only ever studies one philosopher seriously, just as one has only one godfather, as one has only one idea in one’s life,” said Baudrillard in one interview. “Nietzsche is, then, the author beneath whose broad shadow I moved, though involuntarily and without really knowing what I was doing.” Among the continuities between Baudrillard’s and Nietzsche’s thought are a shared critique of objective meaning, the idea of an autonomous rational subject, and the notion of historical progress. See Vanessa Freerks, Baudrillard with Nietzsche and Heidegger: A Contrastive Analysis (ibidem Press, 2021).

30. Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: SAGE Publications, 1998), 127-128.

31. Qur’an 36:82.

32. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, Or: How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1911) 101.

33. Nietzsche loomed large in the philosophy of the Italian Futurists, founded in the years before the First World War, and he looms equally large in the heirs of the Futurists today—the so-called effective accelerationists and techno-optimists. Onward shares the elitism of Nietzschean accelerationists like Marc Andreessen, insofar as it opening monologue uncritically promotes the idea that the existence of a magic-possessing elite (a stand-in for a ruling class of Overmen, or in Andreessen’s case, a ruling class of Techno-Overmen) would inevitably benefit the masses through the trickling down of their magic. Nietzsche himself did not take that position.

34. Palestine, as always, is the litmus test. Palestinians are infonauts too, versed in the arts of marketing and self-promotion and hyperstition, and they ceaselessly scream into the ether of social media because they understand that how they are consumed abroad will determine how they die at home. But never could they forget the distance, however infinitesimal and delicate, between perception and reality. The Gaza Genocide did take place.

35. Poe’s Law is the law of the world after the end of LARP—and how (impossibly) ironic, that LARP should enter the popular lexicon at precisely the moment it has ceased, and that it should be most vigorously invoked in the realm (the hyper-hyperreal online) where its literal meaning (live-action role-play) is most incomprehensible. This is LARP as a simulacrum of itself; this is, paradoxically, LARP as LARP.

36. One can’t help but note the irony of Onward articulating its Nietzscheanism in terms of an anti-technological screed, when it is in online spaces where nostalgic Nietzschean vitalism is most aggressively trumpeted by right-wing poasters.