ENA Thoughts: an alternate reading of “job”

The ena series loves nothing if not to obfuscate its writing with ambiguous and/or obtuse terminology; i think in dream bbq the clearest example of this is with the term “boss”- using it to play in the space between  “person who is in charge of subordinates” and “videogame bad guy you need to kill”.

“Job’’, of course, is another one that comes up a lot; most frequently it's still in a literal and direct way as in “tasks to be done”- such as coral’s finding someone to inaugurate the horse door genie- and there a plenty of similar uses where it just means a general sort of "employment", but i think hoarder alex’s use of it here gives some really interesting insights on the other sorts of things it can imply

By any real-world convention, being a hoarder is certainly not a “job”. had he wanted to seem like he was doing something productive and worthwhile, he might have called himself a "collector" or something of that nature. my first read of this line was something like it being a cheeky nod in the vein of how many videogames treat things like “thief” as a “career” you can invest your character into,  but after sitting on it a bit, i think it can be applied in a broader abstract sense of "assigned role in this universe". The Job Of Being A Hoarder, Or Specifically Hoarder Alex, as it were. I wouldn’t say this is necessarily the "correct" read to take, i just think it creates some very very interesting narrative angles if you look at each usage of the term and swap out the meanings to see how it affects the surrounding context.

"Job" as ‘a narrative role to play’ is most notable i feel in that it’s like completely irrelevant whatever ena’s “job” or “work” actually is, and is more that her being "employed" is just a simple fact of her character.

Which is why this line from taski is also very interesting

Like most things in this series, there’s several ways to read her surprise here, though most of them I would think stem from enas not being, er, particularly well-regarded. On one hand i can see it as something like being scandalized; a "what do you MEAN they hired an ena???” or “how did YOU, as an ENA, land a job???”, but using the alt definition of job i described it’s more of a “what do you MEAN you have an actual narrative role here???”

which like. again, given how much people seem to dislike enas in general [and most especially THIS ena it seems??],it makes sense that they’d think it a bit uncouth for one to have actual significance & enact change in the world [i mean, compared to s1 ena at least who’s definitely chronically unemployed in every sense i’m talking about here].

it’s just interesting, trying to figure out which is more of an outlier between them. the taski line certainly implies to me it’s worker; as if enas are not usually supposed to be Important, as if they’re not usually supposed to be able to Affect things the way worker ena clearly is...

It also. has very. very interesting implications for when ena says she hates her job. both as the protagonist and in terms of her actual “employment”, she hates the work she has to do, understandably, i mean we see how thoroughly she went the fuck through it just in chapter 1.  But i think it’s also 1000% applicable to how much she hates herself, because, yknow,

That’s her role. that's just who and what she is. There isn’t actually any difference between her job as employment and her job as her role to play because being a ‘worker’ IS her designation. there a good handful of other [admittedly mostly-as-of-yet-unused] lines [they're in a file dump of the game's text so we're just gonna have to #trust] where she readily asserts that her "job" isn't actually about "employment" and is more generally just how things are and/or have to be for her

**note: i think we'll probably be seeing these interactions for real once chapter 2 rolls around; given how the dialogue is organized they seem to pretty clearly be just "interactions for the hub npc's once you get back there after chapter 1"; these here are for suspicious man, froggy, and kane respectively.

there's also this guy who's especially troubling in hindsight

like. it almost feels like a recursive thing.  ena’s role in the narrative is to… have a role in the narrative. her "job" is being the protagonist. the job necessitates she has to do a bunch of work bc she's completely at the whims of whatever the narrative--the job, the boss, anyone else- needs her to do, and the actions taken under the guise of her “employment” are directly intertwined with the events that drive the story. she is, in some senses, almost synonymous with her job and the work she has to do; and she is, much to her own dismay, not really anything else outside of that

** i'm pretty sure this bit is for a scrapped purge npc that they briefly mention in the backer dlc; there's a vague implication they may bring back the npc but i don't know how this specific interaction/dialogue would work in any other context so. very unclear if these will ever get used for real

anyway. obviously this is all a more abstracted reading on things, but i do think it's interesting how it winds up in basically the same place as dbbq's more straightforward themes and commentary about depersonalization and loss of the sense of self/degradation of the mind and body and as a result of too much impersonal labor. and of course i do think it's worth chasing abstraction a little given what the ena series is like on the whole :p

it's funny she uses "doomed" there specifically because it is.... truly kind of the keyword of all time for ena's character i think. ironically i wouldn't even say she's the classic "doomed by the narrative" though; it's quite the opposite in my view: the narrative is doomed because of her. like. i have possibly never seen a character more quantum fucking Doomed than worker ena. she is doomed by a past that will no doubt catch up with her, she is doomed at every moment in the present by the fundamental laws of how she exists in the world, and she is doomed for the future bc as far as we've seen there kind of just isn't anything else out there for her. there is just no story that can be told About or With this character, or that hinges on her influence, that can go well i think. joel & the team are crazy so i wouldn't be surprised if they somehow Can swing a cohesive ending where things turn out ok, but looking at things as they are now….man. i dont know. i just dont know. but i am so so so fascinated to see it through any way it may go.