Adventures with Anxiety
The bringing to life to what is normally invisible allows Case to add visual clues and indications of what it means to have anxiety; the key fantastical element of Adventures with Anxiety is what allows this game to better portray such a difficult mental illness. Without this, the fox couldn’t express its own feelings thus conveying the various aspects of Anxiety. Since anxiety is not something everyone experiences, it can be hard to try to explain a feeling to someone who has never felt it. Fantasy isolates the more complex aspects of anxiety into its own being. This allows the writer to break down the facets of anxiety into emotions everyone feels on a regular basis. The image to the left is a perfect example of this. Since anxiety is being represented as a wolf in this situation, it can assimilate itself to a “Big Bad Wolf”, “guard-wolf”, and a “battered shelter dog” which each correlate to aspects of anxiety; although many might believe anxiety is just a “Big Bad Wolf” that has the intention of harming the person or that it is a “guard-wolf” which is trying to aggressively protect the person by barking and scaring them, the truth is that its a combination of all of them. As the wolf says, anxiety is more like a “battered shelter dog” that might come off as aggressive or protective at first but is just in need of compassionate care.
Within this fantasy is referenced another fantasy which is further used to exemplify an accumulation of emotions; the phrase “Big Bad Wolf” referred to in this scene refers to the Big Bad Wolf from The Little Red Riding Hood. The Little Red Riding Hood is another fantasy that personifies feelings of fear and in some cases it personifies death. In Joel Crawford’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the big bad wolf represents death. This impending feeling of dying and the weight of existence coming crashing down, which is personified as Death in the movie, instills a feeling of anxiety in the main character Puss (Crawford). This shows how the mental disorder of anxiety, which can seem like a big bad wolf sometimes, creates the feeling of anxiety just as the wolf says in the image. Furthermore, this summation of different fantasies, how they bring life to something that doesn’t exist, and their interconnected use, is the cornerstone of how we interpret emotions; the fact that a fantastical creature, the wolf from adventures with anxiety, that represents a complex emotion, anxiety, references another fantastical creature, the Big Bad Wolf, that represents a different complex emotion to convey it’s own emotions, proves the importance of fantastical representations. In essence, fantasies creates something imaginable in a world that's not real so that in reality the unimaginable can be understood.
