The first time I read The Remains of the Night, I was focused purely on the written content, her writing was personal and illustrative, and really allowed me to envision the sights and scenes that she talked about. I have a hard time concentrating when reading at length, so when articles or essays include visual elements, I usually find them distracting, causing my mind to wander onto other topics, yet Route is able to include photographs and media in a way that ADDS to her narrative. I find that a lot of online writing today includes photos or visuals just to expand their media outreach in an ingenuine marketing or aesthetic way. Royte includes photographs of the places she talks about in the same area she writes about it, naturally drawing my eyes to the photo and then back to her writing. It was very easy to concentrate! This also might be because I’m extremely bored of lounging around my house all day and I’m desperate for cognitive stimulation, but truly her visuals don’t seem intrusive. The main photo behind the title and byline sets the scene for the majority of her article. The picture is the main focus, the title is secondary. Route wants to use her photos to show (obviously) where and what she’s talking about and she picked a great header image to do so. She then embeds the image of goutweed to further our image, as readers, of the setting that she’s trying to relay. Similarly, she includes small PSA style visuals with statistics from institutes like International Society for Sexual Medicine, which usually would set me off into a deep-dive of sexual medicine information but her use was completely non-distracting and added an element of formality to the more personal narrative Royte was creating. She placed the information where they made sense to accompany her writing, the only visual I thought was potentially unnecessary and was distracting was the study done by the Journal of Sexual Medicine reporting on the “unique sexual behaviors of gay men” it didn’t really add anything to the topic of sex trash and public sex other than developing a parallel narrative of gay culture and expectations in the gay community surrounding sex and hookups. Her collections of pictures of sex trash and other her and her litter mob’s “finds” really added to the reality of the topic. To show used condoms, lube and makeshift sex toys really forces me as a reader to acknowledge the reality of public sex and the resulting environmental impact. This had never been something I had thought about before other than a laugh here and there while finding used condoms on hikes or at my brother’s baseball games. Overall I would say Royte’s use of Medium’s mechanics allowed her to organize her writing in a way that segmented her narrative into a easy understandable direction and her visual elements added to her writing instead of distracting the reader and creating a visual presence intended only for aesthetic purposes.
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anna hilbert 