User:Saltysquid223/Deviant. The Possession of Christian Shaw

Origins and influences
Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw is about an 11 year old girl in Renfrewshire, Scotland (1697), who was supposedly possessed by demons. During her affected state, she accused 8 people of witchcraft, 7 of whom were hanged. The 8th suspect died somehow before the trial, possibly by their own hand to avoid their death sentence. Those who were accused became known as the Paisley witches.

Publication history
In 2004, Donna Leishman published Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw to her website, To Have & To Hold. It survived for a while on Adobe Flash, but the platform was eventually shut down in 2017. The Electronic Literature Organization published the work in The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 in 2006, and it was later given to the Electronic Literature Lab in 2018.

Plot
This work centers around the demonic possession of Christian Shaw, whose actions ultimately instigated the Paisley witch trials in Renfrewshire.

Story structure and navigation
The story is primarily visual, and navigation largely consists of clicking on certain objects in the background for progression. While it does only have one ending, there is no one method for getting there.

Genre
According to the description given by Leishman, Deviant is an animated interactive graphic.

Critiques
"There is very little text in the piece, with most of the interactive and narrative cues occurring visually. These vignettes are pieces of a story, of a puzzle to be realigned, reconfigured by the engaged participant. As such Deviant is not so much a retelling of the Christian Shaw story as an opening-up of the base narrative" (Memmott).

"The author experiments with the different possibilities for her strange behavior ranging from mental illness, loneliness, to having an over-imaginative mind. In the process of navigating the space of the text, the reader is provided with seemingly disjointed glimpses into Shaw's life and experiences" (Choo).

"A rich reading of Donna Leishman’s animated interactive narrative  should lead to an appreciation of how different mouse-clicks and gestures can activate and modify details of the artwork and open portals to other sections of the narrative, and also that those clicks are making the reader complicit in a disturbing historical narrative of victimization" (Rettberg)

See the original work here