Dream: Twilight Chateau
by the skullkitty (30th May, 2007 @ 9:34 pm)- fURL: furc://twilightchateau
- Website: http://tc.kozinu.com/
What makes a good dream? It almost seems like an odd question, coming from a self-proclaimed dream reviewer, but maybe that’s the point. So I’m gonna ask it again; what makes a good dream?
I have to admit I was a bit baffled when the request came down to review a dream that was only referred to as ‘TC’. I was originally going to track it down the hard way — by visiting every single upload with the initials ‘TC’ in Furc — until the neonbat once more came to my aid and pointed out that the abbreviation is short for long-time FurN staple, the Twilight Chateau. I mean of course it was; hell, I’d even visited the place, once upon a time. So armed with that knowledge I booted up an alt and threw myself in for a little look-see.
From the moment I walked into the place I knew TC was a dream I really, really should like. And there’s certainly a lot to like here. The ‘weaving is some of the tightest I’ve seen yet, with virtually none of the kinds of clipping errors that plague most dreams. I didn’t see a single room corner sticking into the edge of my map the entire time I was there, which is almost a first for F!W I think. The DS is minimal but smooth, and all transition effects and handled flawlessly. Like I think I’ve mentioned previously, I’m a bit of an aesthetic sucker for dreams that use black-and-accent colours. TC pulls this idea off aggressively, sticking to an almost exclusive palette of grays, blues and foliage green. It’s simple, it’s neat and it works. The whole place is oozing with gardens and water fountains of the kind that would make Frank Lloyd Wright bristle enviously. It’s the kind of thing that I’ve seen fail miserably in other dreams but TC manages to pull it off fairly convincingly.
Like I said, there’s a lot to like about TC. A lot to like except…
Except what makes a good dream?
Sure, TC is technically solid. The patches are far from original but they’re all nevertheless high-quality and carefully selected. I think that’s the thing, though; everything about TC feels excruciatingly carefully selected. From the cutsey local species (a kitten and the kitterwing) to the fluffy pillows to the very dream layout itself. If you remember a couple of reviews ago I was talking about what I call the Big Six Public Dream Rooms; the six places that every single dream in FurN is apparently required, by law, to have.1 Well, I couldn’t find a chapel in TC but I found no less than three bars, two strip clubs, about a zillion private rooms and a pool/sauna… though with all that water flowing about I kinda had to wonder what the point was. I saw at least one emit mentioning an arena, too, though I couldn’t really locate it. Sort of a bit like the tattoo parlour; there was supposedly one ‘near the bar’, but the rabid uniformity of TC’s architecture made it a little hard to locate. If you’re thinking that the place sounds huge from the description then you’d be absolutely right; it’s a rabbit-warren. Not only that, but I get the sneaking suspicion that it actually feels much bigger than it is; the uniformity of the rooms means it’s easy to walk through the same place several times from different directions without realising it (I only noticed when I was collating the screen shots). And this is where I start to run into my real problem with TC.
Yeah, it’s pretty all right. But it’s pretty like Paris Hilton; a vapid, calculated prettiness that hides the complete and utter lack of any kind of substance underneath. Twilight Chateau wants to be popular; the desire oozes from underneath every fluffy pillow and from behind every curtained architrave. It wants to be the next Golden Tether; the place where all the trendy digokids and their fae, hermaphrodite gosurori characters hang out2. The only problem is that scratch away the pretty veneer on TC and you’re left with absolutely nothing; no continuity, no community. There’s not even really any roleplay here; it mostly just feels like a vanity chat-room for someone else’s self-insertion persona-play ‘cuddling’. And I mean, while that’s great for the owner’s immediate circle of friends, Twilight Chateau just doesn’t feel like a private dream. Like the stereotypical fat girl on MySpace, it wants to be popular and it’s going to whore itself out hard to get there.
Digokids, I love you guys, really. I love you and your characters and your identical dreams, and maybe you’ll enjoy soaking up the vapid prettiness of the Twilight Chateau for at least a little while. Maybe. But there’s little here that feels original or even really particularly creative, and overall the whole place is so soulless that I just can’t bring myself to recommend it as anything other than a morbid analogy for everything that’s wrong in online communities.
Overall Assessment
- Pros: Technically solid.
- Cons: It’s totally soulless and if it tried any harder it’d be awarded the Golden Boot.
Popularity: 27% [?]
- If you’re wondering, they are; a bar, a strip club, a chapel, private rooms, a bathroom and an arena. [↩]
- Fair disclosure; I am absolutely one of these people. [↩]
