my piece for the zine was specifically about the dissonance of gordon’s memories of half life

my piece for the zine was specifically about the dissonance of gordon’s memories of half life canon vs the reinterpretation created by hlvrai - and his subtle identity crisis as a result of it. i put so much detail into the mirrors and their symbolism to represent this theme, but a significant chunk of the details are covered up by gordon… so here’s what the mirrors look like without the filters, and without gordon blocking them. with commentary on their meaning:

the first mirror is the reflection of hlvrai’s canon - the unique cast, and their unique experiences… but with a subtle hint of something else, more horrifying bleeding in - the metatext regarding the universe as a video game and how it effects coomer in particular, and the continued dissonance of the canons - represented by father grigori’s dirty sneakers. father grigori being one of the two hl2 characters that had a brief, if almost unnoticeable, cameo in hlvrai.

the second mirror is the reflection of who gordon is… or who he isn’t? after all, gordon never agrees with anyone’s claims of what must be true of reality in hlvrai. his perception of himself and the perception others have of him must be inherently in-congruent as a result - because they are of two completely different minds about their reality. of course, representing that visually is a challenge conceptually? so, i used a mixture of other gordon interpretations in the fractured glass to represent this idea, in addition to the likeness of wayne himself. after all, technically the media res of hlvrai is that wayne is playing half life vr… while also portraying gordon as a character separate from himself. so who is gordon freeman, really?

and the third mirror… for the most part is the reflection of the broken code and original half life universe, and how it’d been jumbled up to create hlvrai as it is recognized - such as t-posing barney being the other hl1/hl2 character that appears completely intact in hlvrai, aside from the uncontrollable t-posing. of course, the rest was actually largely headcanon on my part - various characters and their codes and their models getting switched around and swapped and changing throughout the franchise and within hlvrai specifically; like gina for instance being the basis of coomer, i think, since they are both the tutorial character - and once i ran out of characters i felt actually conveyed this theme well, i decided to utilize the remaining fracture space by drawing g-man’s suit, hlvrai’s pikachu cameo, in addition to alyx from both wayne’s original hl:a stream and the gnome edition stream of hl:a (and how she is connected to hlvrai through those two streams and through wayne’s hl2vr stream which served as the prototype to hlvrai)