Mimidoshima

The Hues of These New Colors - What Lessons in Love Means to Me

2026-05-13T00:00:00Z

Lessons in Love is an ongoing visual novel about a teacher who's a sex predator grooming his class of twenty students. While this article will bring up abuse, grooming, sexual trauma, self-harm, and mental health issues, the game also has intense flashing lights, spider imagery, and brings up eating and other related disorders.

As for spoilers, I've played up to .58 (the latest patch as of this writing). I'll be writing broadly, though the article excerpts events throughout the four existing chapters.

I am primarily writing for two audience groups: people who aren't playing the game or fans who are hungry to read any material about it. Anyone who intends to play the game or is playing it right now is welcome, but it may be better to wait until you've caught up.

While staying up late and drafting the final paragraphs of the article -- some of the best in my view -- a relative who was already known by my family to be gravely ill passed away in the hospital. The timing was uncanny. I was deeply affected because I remembered visiting him and thinking about how much pain he was in and his desire to go back home. I don't believe he can read English, but as far as I can understand, he does enjoy watching pornography featuring young women on his phone ... so surely, he'd enjoy some sad Koikatsu grooming media. I don't know him well, but I believe everyone should be remembered for something.

And so, I dedicate this article to him. I hope the women are beautiful up there as they are down here.

In a Chapter 4 event titled "Connect the Dots", Sensei, the protagonist, invites Wakana Watabe, a fellow depressed teacher enamored with Romanticist poetry, into his apartment. He wants her to watch a movie with him in silence to "breathe some sort of normalcy back into this place". When she lightly pushes back on it and asks why he's in the gutters, he admits that "it's hard telling someone a story where there are a million details you need to omit and the ones left over makes everything sound way too simple."

Wakana then points out that he's a writer and he'll figure it out, to which he responds:

Sensei: See...that's the thing, though. I can't.

Sensei: And that's just one more reason I chose poetry as my field of expertise since you don't always need to tell a full story with that. You can normally just throw out a bunch of dots and have people connect them for you.

I found this exchange fascinating. Here was a clue, 110-140 hours in, to read Lessons in Love as a kind of poem, a puzzle for one to wrap their head around. The absurdity wasn't lost on me when most readers who stuck out this long would've already been invested in his convoluted backstory, his sometimes-abusive-and-sometimes-wholesome relationships with his students, his rambunctious banter with his fellow teachers at the Dive Bar, the will-they-or-won't-they romance between him and his childhood friend, the pandemic echoes from living entire lives inside a walled-off city, the elaborate worldbuilding involving diegetic metafiction and apocryphal Christian motifs, the multitude of disparate narrative voices, the dread of sex, the terror of trauma, the nightmare of unrequited love, questions of justice and forgiveness, the constant interrogating of masculinity and gender norms in general, and the tribulations of addiction and recovery. Surely, the people who couldn't stomach any of that would've tapped out earlier.

But this is a rare moment of vulnerability for Sensei. After watching his loved ones get harmed by his actions and inaction, he can't pretend to be the aloof groomer protagonist of an English-language erotic game anymore. He is not in control of himself. As he says later in the scene, "Writing is suffering. How am I supposed to do that when all it does is remind me of what I've lost?" This private admission goes against the common sense of the world we live in, where we equate artistic expression with getting in touch with your feelings; he explicitly states that this is an almost impossible task for people who are trapped in the cycles of abuse and harm. All Wakana (and the readers) can do is connect the dots and hope he will open up someday.

But that's going to be difficult because he doesn't believe he can connect the dots by himself. If he invites his incestuous niece Ami over to hang out early on, she'll reminisce about spending her childhood time with her beloved uncle. Unfortunately, Sensei is incapable of remembering it. Believing he has been reincarnated into the body of a once competent teacher and choosing instead to take advantage of "his" students, Sensei views her precious memories as "anecdotes or poems" that he wish he could peer into. But as he confesses:

One thing that means the world to one person might make absolutely no sense to someone else.

I'm caught in between.

I absorb the things she tells me, racking my brain and trying to connect any dots that someone else may have left behind.

But I came up with nothing.

He is clearly hung up over the premise that "her relationship with me is much more than mine will ever be with her". The sex predator we're supposed to be playing envies the mere possibility of deep relationships that don't involve sex.

Unfortunately for him, Lessons in Love is an adult dating sim.

The first thing that might catch your eye on the game's Itch storefront page is a URL to a Ko-Fi account where fans of the game can donate in order to support charities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse. Selebus, the author, says he'll match the first $500 in support every month because:

I write about topics that are very close to my heart and the amount of people I've been able to impact in positive ways these last few years has been nothing short of eye-opening.

This mission statement of sorts intrigued me. I knew from people like Quof that the game was doing something different and I would always be partial to any work inspired by Subarashiki Hibi (Wonderful Everyday) and Cross+Channel anyway, but this page stoked my imagination more. The English, Chinese, and Japanese visual novels I've read over the years may broach big ideas about the world, but most are ideologically conservative or at least a status quo defender. And despite the potential subversiveness of adult scenes, these visual novels don't explore for example discourses on queerness and sexual abuse. I thus found it refreshing to see an author feel the need to use their platform to connect fans to these charities.

That said, there is an obvious tension between the game's social justice goals and erotic fiction as its chosen medium: can titillation really coincide with a desire to open discussions about sexuality and trauma? I once tried to explain the game's approach to an acquaintance, and they reasonably read my description as the title having its cake and eating it; it would be much better if it was just a full-on grooming fantasy or a work that takes the subject matter without the eroge-isms. When works blur literary and pornographic aims -- especially when we're referring to a real, malicious social phenomena -- it does make sense for people to simply object to the game, even if they are familiar with extreme content.

Still, I find the way the game navigates these waters fascinating. It seems aware of its strange stance, but it pushes onwards anyway. I feel like learning how to interpret these tensions is part of the reading process. If I simply read this game at face value, I wouldn't lose so much sleep over finding the precise vocabulary that circumscribed the domains and limits of what the game's going for -- but I suspect that I would miss out on what makes the writing so unique and memorable. It is this paradox that revives me in the dead of night: "How can a game like this exist? It must fail at some point, right?"

My critical sensibilities want to say yes, but my secular faith believes it won't. I identify too well with its project that I can only pray for its success. For the first time in years, I feel a sense of belonging to a work of fiction.

The reader is plunged into the city of Kumon-mi (read that in the voice of an American tourist lost in Tokyo): every day, they can guide Sensei to locations around the city to creep on his students and raise affection and lust levels, but sooner than later he finds himself unequipped to handle situations like a student cutting herself or another undergoing a panic attack triggered by sudden loud sounds.

And sometimes, without any player intervention, he will elect to stroll outside the school in the middle of the night as one tends to do:

My feet move on their own and lead me down a path I can not normally see.

I can't say when my body successfully managed to escape the confines of the school, but I am somehow feeling more confined now that I am on the outside.

I can see a place where the sidewalk ends - and a glowing passageway of TV static beckoning me forward.

It's like it's calling me to escape.

It's like it's trying to help me.

And yet-

I can not find it within me to move my legs.

But that's fine, for there are few doors in life that only open once.

And even if this door disappears-

I can tear down whatever wall I want and make a new one.

This place was built for ~~you~~ me.

I can do whatever I want with it.

Everyone else is just furniture.

Everyone else is a part of the pile.

This excerpt belongs to Chapter 1's "Not Even Me". The way the narration interrupts with dashes makes me feel like I need to gasp for air before continuing the trail of thoughts. Sentences are simple, but the specific luminescence of "a glowing passageway of TV static" draws me into whatever world Sensei is heading into. I am also curious about the strikethrough: not only is "This place was built for ~~you~~ me" sentence a motif, but it also builds on the previous line, where the narrator claims the walls of the world can be torn down and rebuilt by them and not whoever "you" is. All this, in spite of the narrator previously admitting that they can't move their legs toward the passageway. Can their resolve really come from knowing that "there are a few doors in life that only open once"? The next lines also raise a few eyebrows: who is this "everyone else" and what does it mean to be "furniture", "a part of the pile"? No matter what the answers to these questions end up being, I see this excerpt as a microcosm of how the visual novel defamiliarizes the language and audiovisuals we use and consume every day.

I also find the prose delightful to read. As I wrote this essay, I found myself reading aloud the excerpts and taking mental notes on the cadence and its readability. It strikes the right balance of being evocative and clear. Like a mystery taking place under cloudless skies, I can clearly see what I cannot see.

And yet, in the same chapter, one will also read "The Bare Minimum", an event featuring the lovable recluse Sana Sakakibara. She helps her mom out in the family bar, but her shyness makes even Sensei worried about her future. Realizing this would make for a great opportunity to hang out with her more, he decides to give her private lessons by pretending to be a rude customer in front of her.

Which leads to this exchange:

Sana: Um...Hello, sir... What can I-

Sensei: Yeah, whatever. Give me a beer and a plate of spaghetti.

Sana: A plate of...spaghetti?...

Sensei: Did I stutter? Or are you really fucking bad at your job?

Sana: Well...I don't think so...but...

Sensei: Listen kid, I'm in a hurry. So if you don't have my spaghetti in five minutes, I'm gonna have to-

Sensei: Wait, Sana, are you crying? We literally just started.

Sana: W...w...we...d...don't...have any...s...sp...spaghetti...

This is even worse than I thought.

Sensei: Sana, if this is too hard-

Sana: I'LLGOGETYOURBEER!!!

Adding insult to injury, Sana brings Sensei a water bottle instead. Even when he gets to the point of the lesson -- that the customer isn't always right -- Sana has difficulty internalizing that she should speak up.

This pointless exercise displaying Sensei's impressively poor teaching skills and Sana's social ineptitude is a far cry from the moodiness of "Not Even Me". Yet, Sana's century of humiliation does have its place in the story: it introduces more concretely the dire state the bar is in if it has to involve a teenager who can't even speak without panicking, and we also see how Sensei changes his act when talking to Sana -- since she is the closest thing to an angel in his eyes, he takes a more assertive teacher role, even if he's utterly incapable of performing pedagogy.

But the character events that stay with me are the ones that reveal a side that I didn't know about. Molly MacCormack is the first standout character for me, though not for the reasons I thought I would have. She appears early in chapter 1 delivering so-called "Weebnotes" that provide some context on otaku media references. Clearly, a character for my heart. But while she moved from Ireland to Japan to be closer to cute anime girls, her real passion revolves around Western fantasy titles. Less the chuunibyou she claims to be and more a sufferer of the Boss Baby syndrome, she likes to connect everything she sees including relationships to World of Warcraft. She is also the game master of an ongoing Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign -- thanks to her, we get a glimpse into a different, nerdier side of the cast with some surprisingly accurate depictions of tabletop gaming and its frantic sessions.

In many ways, I was surprised by how cognizant she is about the reasons she's interested in subculture media and the fantasy genre in particular. Her chapter 2 event, "Tír na nÓg", best exemplifies this: she broaches the Land of the Young, "a magical land not far off the Isle, where no one can die...and where everyone remains eternally young" in order to talk about her mother who passed away when she was little:

Molly: I don't have many memories of her, to tell you the truth.

Molly: But I do remember a large collection of storybooks and fairytales that she would read to me before she died.

Molly: I wish I remembered more about her specifically...but I think that leaving all of those books behind was just...her way of communicating.

Molly: I wasn't left with nothing like many other children who lose their parents are.

Molly: I still have my father...and mountains of magical myths my mother may have memorized...

Molly: I have pictures of her too. And old clothes I hope to be able to wear one day.

Not only do I find this section poignant but I can also see how Molly values the power of youthful imagination as a way to continue her mother's memory. The fairytales and storybooks of her childhood are now the manga and gacha games she's into.

It's a nice, subtle scene that grounds her silly antics in something real, and it made me appreciate early on how noticing minor patterns like this can be as insightful as major plot reveals.

Another character who resonated with me in a more profound way is Yasu Yasui. Before her proper introduction in chapter 2 where she loudly proclaims she has nightvision, her appearances are sprinkled through the first chapter where she mumbles about how much she is channelling her god to speak the truth. It is easy to get lost in the weeds, extracting her mutterings about the universe for one's theorycrafting. But as her based ojousama roommate Touka Tsukioka reminds us, she's actually a teenager who wants to connect with people but sees herself as a "worm" who doesn't know how to communicate.

When she is roped into the Manga Club in Chapter 3's "Sore Thumb", the members try to recommend her all kinds of comics for her to read. However, her religious values forbid her from reading any material with potential pornographic or violent elements. She gravitates instead to slice-of-life manga:

I hand the book over to Yasu, who accepts it with the least creepy smile I have seen out of her thus far.

She opens it up and begins reading very slowly, focusing for far too long on each and every page as if she's taking in every last detail and every last line.

I'm sure that the artists involved would be happy to see this, but even then I think they'd believe it to be a tad excessive.

Molly and Futaba cross the room and take their places beside me like we're some sort of proud, polyamorous couple watching our daughter take her first steps.

I'm just a little disappointed because her steps are in a direction that I'm not particularly interested or invested in.

But hey, this is the first time I've ever seen a smile like that out of her.

And it's a lot more infectious than those that have been induced by her god.

Yasu continues reading until the sun begins to set while the rest of us talk quietly amongst ourselves.

When the final bell rings, Yasu closes her book and thanks all of us for our help.

But not before grabbing three more books of what I expect and hope are the same genre.

I remember feeling moved when I finished reading the scene. While I don't believe I am yet a part of the "proud, polyamorous couple", I do feel kinship over the idea of seeing "our daughter take her first steps."

It's a new wrinkle to her otherwise unvaried life proselytising about her church. She stops adorning her trademark creepy smile and actually enjoys something that isn't relevant to her religion. I also find it adorable that her fixation on the details might even discomfort the artists; she's mustering her usual evangelical energies into an appreciation of the manga form. After plodding through her cumbersome sermons, I found it comforting to imagine her as a girl who could lead a relatively stable life reading slice-of-life manga and having a good time.

But this is a sigh of relief that will be overwhelmed by what is to come. Much later in the chapter, "An Apple A Day" introduces details of Yasu's earlier life through a diegetic flashback, a technique rarely used in the game: her mother is frustrated by the medical establishment claiming for the 12th time that she is schizophrenic; like come on, her ability to predict the future and mimic "the EXACT WAY my dead mother used to speak despite never even meeting her" must mean something. Yet, the doctor explains:

Doctor: Schizophrenia is far more complex than someone who just "hears voices in their head." It's a brain disorder that effectively manipulates every aspect of a person's life from their speech to their behavior.

[...]

Doctor: I understand your concerns with the diagnosis but, unfortunately, there's still a great deal we don't understand about schizophrenia as it has a direct impact on a person's ability to perceive reality.

Doctor: There is no way we can ever see or replicate what Yasu sees as this is all happening in her head.

When the doctor learns that Yasu has been vomiting out her medication, the least they could do is refer her to a clinic offering "antipsychotic injections that may help to alleviate her symptoms". Yasu's mother feels powerless, ranting about how this will be her 13th clinic and maybe she'll reach "twenty by the end of the month".

The doctor continues:

Doctor: I understand that this is hard, but...back to the injection, it is important to note that this is not something we typically recommend for children as there is an elevated risk for serious side effects.

Doctor: The medication will target your daughter's neurotransmitters...serotonin, dopamine, and so forth...and will remain in the bloodstream for several weeks, where it will slowly-

Yasu's Mother: Whatever. Okay. Fine. Added risk makes no difference to me.

There's a bit more afterwards that makes the scene even more heartbreaking, but what we have should be enough to notice how eerily specific the rhythm of this dialog gets.

The doctor is navigating the middle ground between detachment and sympathy -- their ellipses in the second excerpt seem to contain hints of anxiety as they articulate the potential physiological effects on Yasu's body -- but their attempts are rebuffed by Yasu's mother who gains no practical insight into her condition. Her mother insists immediate fixes, unrealistic they may be, to make Yasu her "normal" girl again. Both adults have found themselves trapped in the psychiatric reality where drugs are not the panacea or evils the public imagines them to be. This impasse can only end in a screaming match where nobody wins and Yasu, already dissociating, is dragged to the next clinic.

I'm not only stunned by how the hostile, counterproductive atmosphere oozes out from the rhetorical stalemate between Yasu's mother and the doctor, but also how accurate it is at depicting how patients and their loved ones are let down by medical institutions in very specific ways that aren't widely publicized. The medical status quo refracts the same class inequalities that we can read about in newspapers. I am pissed off by the way Yasu's mother sees her, but I also understand she has sacrificed her life to take care of Yasu. It takes a bit of restraint from me to evaluate how the doctor and Yasu's mother are failing her without judging them too harshly.

Later in Chapter 4, Touka's family decides to adopt Yasu and also take care of her medication. However, she starts to lose her personality the more she takes antipsychotic drugs. Worse, she feels isolated without the voices that have kept her company for so long. In a move that really surprised me, her guardians realize that they need to tell the doctors to lessen her dosage because she's becoming not the girl that they've welcomed into the family. It's an emotionally mature worldview on the relationship between medication and people who use it -- sometimes, numbing all the symptoms with drugs is not a great idea.

This is a perspective I've only read about in nonfiction not slated to be airport bestsellers. Yasu is not dangerous, and there is no good reason to cut her off from what gives her purpose. To see Yasu be allowed to thrive in controlled circumstances, I can feel my heart warm up. I can only say that I'm touched by how the game actually reckons with how real people negotiate what they need and don't need from medication.

It is worth noting that these Yasu events do not come out sequentially like I've laid out. They are spread across the chapters, so you can't really focus on a character or even a continuous mood. You might just walk into a scene that is in total opposition to what you just read.

This unpredictability of what comes next is what makes the visual novel so engaging. Will the next event be skeevy, surreal, melodramatic, comedic, contemplative, tragic, or even romantic? I could be reading the greatest takedown in rap battle history and minutes later anguishing over a traumatic event so consequential that I cannot fathom how much more suffering I must endure in the near future. Each scene has its own endearing qualities, but they also connect to the more macro meaning of the story.

Indeed, as much as I enjoy watching the stars with Maya Makinami, getting my heart strung by any scene with Yumi Yamaguchi and her estranged mother Yuki, admiring the ensemble cast in well-composed shots that play on their spatial distance with each other as if I'm back in film school, laughing my ass off at the tournament arcs aptly titled Dorm Wars, freaking out over seeing the characters go to the beach for the umpteenth time when that location is like the harbinger of bad things to come, and going awooga over the lesbian sex scenes, I find the most joy when I try to make meaning out of the dots scattered in the winds.

This essay arises from multiple Discord conversations with people I talk to sometimes or frequently. Their shared wisdom have informed my thinking more than I will ever realize. I have fond memories where we would nab the smallest scenes and squeeze out any detail that could help enrich our readings.

And I wouldn't have picked up all the foreshadowing if newer people starting up the game weren't constantly spamming screenshots of earlier lines that were funny or thought-provoking. In fact, I wouldn't have begun the game myself if a friend wasn't posting lines in the chat that made them laugh. Despite (or maybe because of) the game's content, I think it's remarkable that I was able to find and build bonds that let us enjoy each other's insights and do some collective meaning-making together.

When outside, I enjoy spending time reading poems alluded in monumental scenes to get a better sense of what the game is trying to say. If I don't read the poem, I feel like I'm missing out on some vital nuance. As an aside, I am thankful for the Wiki editors who have spent time and effort collecting the poems, including Selebus's own, into an easy-to-read article page and it also helpfully points to the scenes where they first appear.

I remember fixating on Chapter 2's "Caterpillar", ostensibly a scene where Io Ichimonji, a girl who helps her aunt manage the local bathhouse, introduces herself to the class. But she instead draws her time with Sensei out as much as possible, even begging him to ditch class with her to get breakfast somewhere else. Before entering the classroom, she warns:

Io: It's not too late to back out, you know. I read the transfer thing and it doesn't formally go through until the end of the school day.

Io: If you want to throw me out, you have every right to do that.

Io: And I won't blame you if you do.

Io: I'm trash. This school is trash. Everything is trash.

Io: Hehehe~ Here I go again.

Io: You should have taken me up on that breakfast thing when I offered it.

When Sensei asks if she's actually okay, Io continues:

Io: I'm going to try to go in there and put on a smile.

Io: I'm gonna try to introduce myself to all of those girls-

Io: But I want you to know that I might just wind up walking out halfway through.

Sensei attempts again, saying that she can always walk out of class whenever she wants to. He just wants to know what she is actually like.

Io then suddenly agrees:

Io: Of course. Assimilation isn't optional.

Io: If i need to blend in in order to get by, I'll giggle and gossip the way good girls are groomed to.

Io: I'll fake some interests and laugh at their horrible jokes.

Io: Heck, maybe I'll intentionally trip on the way to my desk to show everyone that I'm clumsy and lovable.

Io: They'll write me off as another girl-

Io: And never realize how broken I actually am.

Sensei: ...

Io: Watch me, Sensei.

Io: Watch me assimilate.

Io's dialog affects Sensei so much that he first judged her for her self-deprecation -- "If you're going to complain about being trash, why not just...stop being trash?" -- before realizing he's cut from the same cloth. He continues his narration as he watches Io stand in front of the class and the camera zooms closer and closer to her:

In the event that this girl is, as she suggests, trash, it probably isn’t a good idea to display her in front of a group of her peers and shine a light on her.

If that were you up there, far away from your safe little cubby in the back of the room, would you be happy?

If you had knowingly informed someone that you were uncomfortable with yourself as a person and that someone immediately said “Go show everyone who you really are,” you’d hate them, right?

In hindsight, that’s how I felt.

Or rather, that’s how I feel.

Because I can not resign myself to a small wooden box.

I must watch a lovely caterpillar squirm.

Trying desperately to cocoon itself.

And become something beautiful.

Io: ...

Everyone, Everywhere: ...

I give you another poem.

With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.

This excerpt comes from "How sweet I roam'd from field to field" in Poetical Sketches of William Blake, Selebus's favorite poet. Blake's poems like "Infant Joy" and "Poison Tree" from Songs of Innocence and Experience are crucial motifs in understanding the contradictory tensions found in the game's exploration of love and sex. But the inclusion of this lesser-known poem in this specific scene surprised me: it's about the Ancient Greek god Apollo (Phoebus is another name for him) capturing the woman speaker for his own pleasures.

Its tone differs with how this scene will eventually end: Io escapes the classroom without saying a word, and Sensei chases her, wondering why he is even doing this before realizing he may need to be a temporary good Samaritan before doing anything sexual with her. This kind gesture is very out of place for a character like him, and I think it is tempting to view Sensei as not being inhuman enough to ignore Io's plights. Yet, if we read the full poem, it is Apollo who seduces the speaker with "lilies for my hair / And blushing roses for my brow; / He led me through his gardens fair, / Where all his golden pleasures grow." Does the incorporation of this poem in this moment suggest that Io is the speaker, Sensei the Phoebus in the poem, and "his gardens fair" the classroom of students whom Sensei is grooming?

This question vexed me. Io is my favorite character in the entire game, so I want the best for her. And it's not like I trust Sensei to begin with anyway ... but it's such a wholesome act that I can't help but start wondering if it's possible for the two to develop a platonic relationship. Maybe, this won't end up in abuse. Sensei won't be her Apollo, right? But I also had to take a step back and wonder if my interest in her as a player is secretly Apollonian too.

I don't really have a clear answer for this. Lessons in Love is still an ongoing story, and there will always be new scenes that change how I perceive past events. But I imagine the final answer is that Sensei and I share some degree of complicity. Accidental Apollos or not, I feel like we are in the end still guiding her to our "golden cage". She deserves her "liberty" -- I'm just unsure what the shape of it would look like.

My literary critic brain is also stimulated by the enigmatic "A Trip to Uzbekistan" event in Chapter 4. It begins like this:

I'm going to Uzbekistan today.

Not literally, of course. Walls.

I mean mentally. Just not entirely mentally because I have no clue what type of place Uzbekistan actually is or why I’d ever go there in the first place. I’m sure it’s fine.

But there’s this poem I read with Ami the other day — one that dragged on for far too long — about some guy who carved out an empire and fell for some girl or something. His name was Timur and he was lame.

But he had passion — something I lack. And that made me jealous of him despite all of the anger that was gradually building up over the course of an unnecessarily long poem.

So today, my goal is to be like him. My goal is to find passion for love or imperial expansion or whatever it is that gets me to feel like I’m living for something rather than just living.

But it has to be Uzbekistan because there is no purity here and, from what I’ve heard, that’s where it’s lost. Which also means it’s where it can be found.

The adventures of Steve continue alone.

Despite his coy phrasings and later characterization of Timur as "someone from a poem who'd probably become increasingly less relatable the more stuff you knew about him", Sensei is highly charged with the poetic language of Edgar Allan Poe's "Tamerlane" , so much so that a few stanzas bleed into a CG:

O, she was worthy of all love!
Love—as in infancy was mine—
Twas such as angel minds above
Might envy; her young heart the shrine
On which my every hope and thought
Were incense—then a goodly gift,
For they were childish and upright—
Pure—as her young example taught:
Why did I leave it, and, adrift,
Trust to the fire within, for light?

This image composition is utterly fascinating: the poem is sandwiched between the two characters, as if it is a literal embodiment of social distancing. Sensei internalizes the speaker's perspective and sees the girl he's carrying shopping bags for as a stand-in for the love interest Timur dropped to pursue political ambitions.

It was edifying for me to read the entire poem and see where that passage comes from -- near the end, actually. Poe's Timur chronicles how his heart has become an empty wilderness after achieving his hollow goals. The final stanzas read as the remaining regrets of a dying man: "How was it that ambition crept, / Unseen, amid the revels there, / Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt / In the tangles of Love's very hair?"

This gives me a tantalizing clue on how to read a slightly bewildering claim by Sensei later in the scene: he states that he's searching for a "happy ending" for Timur. Clearly, he sees the parallels and is on the verge of realizing that he might never reach happiness if he continues this path of self-destruction. In other words, Sensei is a self-aware Tamerlane. But it raises the following question: should the Timurs of our world deserve happiness, or should we simply abandon them to their excesses?

I wish I knew how to answer it. I know that I'm reading a grooming game, and I expect objectionable content at every corner. Yet, I feel surprised and hurt by how he objectifies the people he cares about into sex dolls he can dissociate with. We can see the glimmers of humanity in Poe's "Tamerlane" and Sensei, which is probably why the excerpt feels so moving -- Tamerlane realizes what he's lost, and Sensei doesn't know how to remove himself from his debilitating sex addiction, even if he recognizes that he's dragging everyone with him.

They are reprehensible figures, yes, but I don't believe we need to redeem them. The speaker of "Tamerlane" does not seek forgiveness: he begins his soliloquy by claiming the "KIND solace in a dying hour!" is "not (now) my theme". Instead, he wants to explain "the secret of a spirit / Bow'd from its wild pride into shame." He wants to clarify "amid the Jewels of my throne" that his "craving heart" desires "the lost flowers / And sunshine of my summer hours!" I read him (and Sensei for that matter) as wanting to be understood as people with human desires. The moralistic lessons we may gather to condemn these protagonists for the evils they've unleashed are superficial when we read closely their histories. They know they cannot apologize for their sins, but they do deserve a slight shedding of pathos.

This is, I think, the most provocative question posed by Lessons in Love's themes: is it possible to move on without diminishing or exacerbating the harm? We may crave punitive punishment or become too readily forgiving, but they are only for our satisfaction. More importantly, the spectacle of accurately measuring the degree of harm and charting out the timeline on how the abuser should work their way toward forgiveness do not construct a safe world for survivors. It becomes more difficult if we try to trace the beginnings of the violence too: the cycles of abuse must have started from somewhere, but how do we search for its genesis when everyone has their own reasons to speak half-truths or cannot recollect why they're there?

This is not to say we give up on correctly attributing the blame, but there's so much harm in the world that everyone feels the need to protect themselves from it first. And sometimes, that means enacting more violence upon others to rescue themselves. It's what generates the cyclical nature of these structural harms.

The reader is always reminded that "there is something buried underneath your feet." I don't think it's just a play on a fantastic short story; it suggests there's something disgusting and malicious lurking in the background that you the player don't know but other characters do. We see evidence of this in what the game calls "Happy Scenes", events that could be characterized as having heightened surreal imagery ala "denpa":

The above screenshot comes from a Chapter 1 Happy Scene titled "Everything is Connected". The palette is super saturated. Sensei is wandering in the soccer field and seems excited. His status text, hovering near him, says he's "lost". An original poem is on his right where a speaker tells the reader to remember that everyone around you will die and so will you, "But for now- / Please live a / beautiful life. / I love you." And at the very bottom, hidden behind the textbox, is red text reading "LESSONS IN LOVE IS A VIDEO GAME". This is somewhat typical of Chapter 1's Happy Scenes: the game indulges in nightmarish imagery very derived from Subarashiki Hibi. Symbols and text flood the screen, indicating to the player how little they know about the metaphysical world that ties things together. Food for thought for the people who like to chew on religious motifs and psychosexual imagery. While I was initially skeptical about the uncanny visual language of these scenes as a SubaHibi fan, the unease perpetuated by this known unknown makes one friend describe the mood of the game as something like a slasher film -- you know these silly characters are gonna get fucked the longer we let the drama play out. When the cast undertake more and more reckless actions that would lead to disastrous consequences, these symbols and motifs would resurface in different forms. They would start to take shape in my mind as something more concrete, visceral, and vital to understanding the backstories of these characters.

As the game goes on, the Happy Scenes and adjacent events become more blunt about depicting trauma. The metafiction and metaphysical worldbuilding are still there for any denpa fans, but I am more disturbed by how grounded these scenes will later be; I don't know how to respond to what are clearly coping mechanisms against something larger and scary.

Take the original poem in a Chapter 2 Happy Scene, "Good Boy": the speaker says that from today onwards, they're "going to be a good boy." They do what good boys are expected to do -- buckling their belts, tying both their shoes, shovelling the driveway, folding the laundry -- and then:

I'll take off my pants, stay quiet for you. I won't tell a soul. I promise it's true.
I'm such a good boy, so why can't I play? Why can't I have friends? I'll do what you say.
I'm such a good boy. Obedient too. So easy to touch, so easy to use.
So easy to break, yet you always play rough. I'm such a good boy. Can't that be enough?
I buckle my belt and tie both my shoes, cause that's what all the good boys do.
I put on my backpack and keep my mouth shut. Then saunter to school with a pain in my gut.
Today, I am going to be a good boy.

The repetitive sentences of good boys doing chores disarm me enough that I was taken aback by the implication of child abuse. And yet, I catch myself wanting to sing along with the nursery rhyme-like meter. Rhyming "rough" and "enough" in the same line is also so unnerving: while technically a perfect rhyme, I almost want to read it as a slant rhyme, making "enough" sound richly dissonant -- it is a word burdened with so much repressed emotions. And the refrain "what all the good boys do" underscores the speaker trying to downplay the terror of this situation, even when they admit they're "saunter[ing] to school with a pain in my gut". This is what all good boys must do according to the poem: be "so easy to touch, so easy to use."

"Good Boy" belongs to one of the many scenes that make me nauseous, despite my long experience with extreme content. It's not that they are gory or "fucked up", but because I've spent so much time reading the interior lives of these characters, I knew perfectly well the messy motivations that drove them into these horrific situations. Emotionally scarring is how I might put it: I would feel unwell realizing where the narrative direction is heading, the dread that this event will continue reverberating in the near future, and that any attempt to tone down the visceral content would lessen the impact of the game's themes. I frequently found myself taking breaks from the game, something I've never done before for any piece of media.

Likewise, I know several people who played the game with me around the same time needing to tap out from reading all the scenes. While we agree that the so-called Bad Uncle path (agree to have sex with Ami) is vital, there are a few choices in Chapter 4 that are the stuff of nightmares. Even the people who worked on Japanese visual novels that folks might consider extreme have stared at one choice in particular and couldn't dare mousing over the choice that unlocks more content. I'm one of the few people who remain on this path, but I also won't belittle anyone who need to get out or even not want to engage with the work after reading this article -- Lessons in Love is a very demanding game, and I'm not someone who will demean people for not reading it.

That said, even the people who couldn't stomach the "optional" scenes agree with me that the extreme content is perhaps one of the game's defining features. These scenes help develop the language the game uses to articulate specific aspects of trauma and sex that are just hard to talk about in plain language. The stigmas of abuse, trauma, and arousal make it difficult to have an open conversation without someone shutting it down. Thus, the cryptic remarks about the world and past history, uncomfortable or even downright traumatizing scenes, and the few snippets of narration where the game expresses its distress against Sensei (and players) not getting the message and telling them to just quit -- they are members of a growing arsenal of provocations to get the player to reflect on the conditions of living with trauma and abuse.

This also complements the general antipathy toward players. Scattered throughout the game are escape room-adjacent puzzles that require you to input numbers or keywords that appear in earlier scenes. Anyone who's played the game will fondly remember Chapter 2's "A Life of Prizes", an event inspired by a real Japanese TV game show where Sensei needs to fill in sweepstakes answering obscure questions to get keys -- I consider this to be the second hardest puzzle in the entire game. I can easily picture the TTS narrator taunting me by chanting repeatedly one of its many recorded lines, "Are you having fun? Are you having a good time? Tell me you see me. Tell me you see me. Tell me you see me. I am so happy to be with you right now."

At the very least, one could pet Manny the Friendly Maggot and ask them for advice. Unfortunately, Manny is stuck in an earlier, easier puzzle, to which Sensei complains:

Sensei: I don't even know why puzzles have to exist in this stupid game. I should be able to experience the story however I want because I am important and special and art is only good when I say so.

[...]

Sensei: But anyway, I guess I'll get back to trying to remember stuff or...waiting for someone to make a me a mod since visual novels are too hard for me and I require outside assistance.

Manny the Friendly Maggot: Why are you even playing, then?

Sensei: Because I've jerked off normally too many times and need a challenge in order to cum at this point.

Sensei: Only a slight challenge, though. If it's any more challenging than I want it to be, it's stupid. But I'm going to keep playing anyway because that is a decision that makes sense.

Manny the Friendly Maggot: Well, I hope you have fun!

Manny the Friendly Maggot: I'll be here if you want to repeat this same exact conversation again. It might help keep you entertained if you start going crazy!

Sensei: Thanks, Manny! I'll see you later.

I will admit that I've reread this conversation many, many times in my fruitless quest for clues. I can't be the kind of player the game is criticizing, right? But I felt its ire. Continuing to play did feel like a decision that made less and less sense.

Yet, I found its antagonism welcoming. Don't get me wrong, Lessons in Love is proud to be a niche, self-selecting game, something that many people might justifiably be at odds with. But the friction the game imposes on the player is like an act of recognition: if you really want to see more of what the game is about, you have to solve these outrageous puzzles; otherwise, it thinks you're here just for the porn and that's it. It obviously wants to test your willpower, but I also read it as the game kinda trusting me as a player who can figure shit out. Rather than letting me mindlessly consume content like a bot scrapping the web, I need to put in the effort and verify that I'm actually human in the most convoluted CAPTCHA test ever devised. These reading comprehension gotchas force me to carefully reread scenes that I may have skimmed a few days ago, and I do appreciate how absurdly painful it can be.

And honestly, if it isn't this hostile, I wonder if the more upsetting content gated by these events will feel cheap. Because I actually spent hours getting the game to let me in, any distressing scene will feel earned -- I signed the terms and conditions by solving the ridiculous puzzles and walked straight into said events. I cannot imagine a version of Lessons in Love without this tug of war relationship leading me on. Indeed, it makes me constantly ask myself what's the point, and I think that's part of the intent: it wants to make me interrogate why I need to uncover more of the narrative and why I'm here in the first place.

That's why I feel obligated to analyze the literary qualities of the game and think about their affects on me. I want to understand scenes like Chapter 4's "Trans-Pacific Sadness Symposium II: SISTER SOFTSKIN" where sections of the narration read like this:

She knew what they were saying because she wasn’t a fucking moron like you. She’d cleaned blood off her roommate, Occam’s, razor before and wasn’t perplexed by neglected complexities.

She was part of the codex — an abject auspex practicing breakneck safe sex, slipping objects in the convex annexes of each attic in the narthex.

She didn’t care about the effects. She paid no mind to things like that as she was too busy swimming in doubt and cum and more doubt and more cum and you were-

What were you doing?

I watched you last night. And I didn't quite understand.

Please write your actions down on a piece of construction paper and slip it into my POx box so I can come closer to replicating you for my next art installment.

I can't really make sense of any of these lines, but I do enjoy reading aloud the "abject auspex" line -- it's got the rhythm of a tongue-twister, so the sonic qualities of the sentence give that line its staying power. The scene also gestures at something deeper going on with the setting. But more often than not, I find myself preferring to linger on the sentence level and preach about the aural aesthetics of the writing. It's just pleasing to meditate on eclectic phrases like "breakneck safe sex". Writing like this is why a friend once described the game as "writer's catnip": there is so much joy and wit in the writing that it has inspired so many writers and poets to return to or elevate their trade.

At the same, I think it's also easy to lose sight of why this game has so much emotional resonance for me. I opine in a few theorycrafting discussions like any dutiful fan, but I do feel that I'm more drawn to deep dives on the game's themes. In particular, I enjoy reading how people connect the setting details to how the narrative unpacks trauma, gender, and relationships. I mull over these readings because they give me more insights into the game's overall message.

I similarly exert my analytical energies to gauge the thematic stakes of the game. How do I view the game's lampooning of the sponsored content deluge on YouTube? I package it as part of the game's countercultural and punk attitude. Why does Ayane Amamiya listen to so much "Despacito"? Because it's a banger song. Not everything I couch as analysis is future-proof -- it is an after all ongoing game, and Selebus can switch his mind on something -- but this creative reading is what makes the game so personal to me.

I have a hard time imagining a happy ending for Sensei, but because the game wants me to move on without apologizing for his actions, I need to work my brains out. I don't want to rely too much on extrapolation, but I do feel like answering this call requires a degree of poetic license. Hundreds of hours in, I don't know what a solution might even look like. Nevertheless, I have to try because even the most incorrigible survivors deserve a way out of the cycles of abuse. Happiness should not be exclusive to people who have never suffered trauma as the status quo implies. I have to imagine something that's unimaginable by today's societal standards, a world where survivors can actually live happily. That's the message that I was able to interpret from the game, and it's a tall order.

But it's a message that resonates with me as both a player and a creative. It speaks to me the same way I might visit the bedroom of my childhood home: I open the windows to clear the dust out and let sunlight in; the memories pouring in evoke the fantasies and dread I used to have growing up but repressed to conform for the sake of a working adult life; and I feel compelled to relive my childhood ideals, even if I feel hesitant and scared about being as vulnerable as my younger self. Refreshing my mental model of myself made me realize that I used to be more vocal about injustices, more assured about how I wrote lyrically, and more utopian about the future. My lack of imagination (exacerbated by the shame I feel about my own writing, the violence inflicted on my body and mental health, and my counterproductive, pessimistic outlook on the world) impedes me from doing the work I love the most: highlighting the personally rich works in my life and wanting others to feel something similar.

There's something to be said about how friends and acquaintances reading the game talk about how they're excited to return to the creative arts -- or in my case, learning how to compose poetry. I read poetry on and off, but Lessons in Love sparks my interest so much that I'm now thinking about meter and alliteration in my own prose. It has also given me permission to enjoy the writing process and let my words be as fun to read as it is to write.

And I have friends who yap like they've never yapped before because they were able to connect with themes in ways they were never able to in other works including subculture media. The tears we shed are not for mirages but for fiction tapping on something real that is hard to publicize. My heart feels warm seeing people just find ways to open up because of this game.

So while I agree with my friends showering superlatives like "this is the modern Ulysses" or "the greatest postmodernist literature of our time", I want to stress that it's an inspiring game for people like me who hyperfixate on the connections between art and trauma. I have to dig into my own memories and anxieties in order to craft an adequate response to the game's challenges. I have to imagine a happy story for Sensei not because I believe he will be a good guy who will learn from his mistakes but because the act of imagining a beautiful end for him is a synonym for the belief that happiness actually exists. It is not a myth we tell ourselves to stop our souls from rotting, but it is a leap of faith. We must enact happiness into existence.

This is why I want to financially support the game, to send some spare change to the charity drive after this article is published, and to see where the game takes us next. The message I've gleaned is something I truly believe in not just as a fan but as a person. I want to see the game absorb all the nuances that complicate its usual rhetoric on achieving happiness because I believe the game can handle any opposition. It is impossible to overstate how much I agree with its ambitions as a work about building a safe world for survivors to live in. I really want to believe those neglected by our current world can all be happy.

Nodoka Nagasawa is the last person I want to identify with, but she and I share similar views on fiction. An author with a cult following, she admits in Chapter 2's "Coloring Book" the value of writing literature is not that great. Instead, she says,

Nodoka: Okay, so maybe I am a genius. But anyone can be a genius if they spend their entire life just...living other lives via literature.

Nodoka: I said before that I’m not an actor, but one of the things I enjoy most of all is imagining how I would feel as someone else...Someone who isn't real.

Nodoka: Or what I would do in their shoes, if only I could fit into them.

She seems to distinguish enjoying literature for its own sake from the usual humanities mantra about how reading literature teaches you to form empathetic connections. It's simply a piece of entertainment to her.

Nodoka continues:

Nodoka: But the second I close the book, I’m just Nodoka again.

Nodoka: And everything turns gray.

Nodoka: And I have to go out and find new colors to fill everything back in.

Nodoka: Life would have been easier if I wasn’t printed as a picture book.

This is a sentiment I relate to. As someone who's been writing about subculture media for more than a decade, I am always yearning for new colors to add to my grayscale life.

It doesn't matter if my Steam and Kindle libraries are full of untouched titles. The consumerist neurons in my brain demand more: I think thoughts like "will this hardcore puzzle game go on sale in the Lunar New Year" and "when will this 90s fantasy light novel series go on sale already?". And when I finally get to it, I get disappointed by how derivative it all is.

When I do find something that excites my senses and let me see the world in technicolor again, I feel anxious about losing this newfound vibrancy. If I go through a work in a matter of hours, I will see the colors drain and seep away once more.

I think Nodoka puts it best when she describes why people like us have a love-hate relationship with fiction:

Nodoka: The main reason so many people fall in love with fiction is because they’re searching for something they can’t obtain on their own.

Nodoka: But there are also people who fall in love with it simply because there isn’t anything else to do.

Nodoka: People who get so bored of not being able to feel anything that they allow themselves to fall into those who can.

Nodoka: I kind of hate reading, actually.

Nodoka: It’s time consuming...you can’t do it in the dark...and the memories you get out of it can barely be called memories at all since they aren’t your own.

Nodoka: But the things I love about it always manage to outweigh those somehow.

Nodoka: Even when I wish they wouldn’t.

This brief monologue about boredom and false memories makes my heart beat. Even now, in my thirties, I don't know if how I feel is appropriate.

Fiction provides enough cues for me to understand that, yes, this is a scene about grief. In some ways, I wonder if I'm a bit broken in the head. You don't write years of criticism on subculture media without thinking something is up. I can only wallow on why I need fiction to live, to pretend that I'm even human.

But Sensei, in spite of his emotional immaturity and trauma, responds to Nodoka (and me) in a surprising manner:

Sensei: You don’t sound like a picture book at all, Nodoka.

Nodoka: Huh?

Sensei: You’re more like a...and forgive me in advance if this sounds childish-

Sensei: But you’re more like a coloring book.

Sensei: A really advanced one with a lot of difficult drawings that...requires special attention and weird colors like chartreuse and mauve.

Sensei: And you’re just waiting to be filled in.

Nodoka: ...

Nodoka: Oh...

Nodoka: It’s back.

Sensei: Hm? What is?

Nodoka: The color.

Nodoka: It’s been gone for days.

Sensei: ...

Nodoka: And there’s no chartreuse or mauve anywhere to be found...

Nodoka: Looks like you were wrong, Sensei.

Sensei: You just haven’t gotten to the page with all of the weird colors yet. You’re only in the beginning of the book.

There are many moments in the early parts of Lessons in Love that one realizes they're actually in head over heels for the game, but I remember this scene the most for its resolution.

I may not see eye to eye with Nodoka in a lot of things, including when she admits in Chapter 4's "Peregrine Falcon" her distaste for poetry because "they're too easy to understand" and she "prefer[s] the work associated with deciphering a good novel or short story instead". But the vulnerability she exposes to Sensei is one I know all too well, and to hear Sensei adequately respond to her needs gives me hope that I will find mauve and chartreuse someday. Even if they are emanating from a grooming game, these weird colors will make the world just a bit more liveable.

It doesn't matter if you don't get it after reading this essay. There are many valid reasons to be put off, but I want to say that the game exists like the many poems we come across and ignore every day. There may be something in the sea of content that arrests your attention for reasons difficult to explicate. When you finally read it, it etches in a new kind of color inside your book, and you feel a conviction to struggle and explain why this "weird color" matters -- reasons that may not align with what the author intended but are in perfect harmony with what you personally valorize.

I paced around the room, pondered about how I should structure my ruminations, and opened up a playlist to freewrite this essay not just because it's a visual novel worth knowing about -- it's because I treasure it. If I write essayistic criticism that lets me peer deeper into the hues of these new colors, I will be closer to filling in my own coloring book.

So whether you're reading Lessons in Love or not, I hope you will find something that motivates you to connect the dots and uncover something profound about yourself and others. It doesn't have to feature extreme content, plot twists, or prose poetry -- just something that echoes in your soul. As long as you latch onto it, I am sure you'll discover a few things about what makes you happy.🌻

Thanks to quincognito for additional feedback and Len for corrections.

High Impact Quarterly Q1 2026

2026-03-21T00:00:00Z

I've been watching Iron Pineapple's "Souls-Like games you've never heard of" series, an excuse to recommend and provide feedback to relatively unknown games. I've found games like Pseudoregalia through him, and I figured that people might appreciate me doing more curation work than just remembering to add stuff on my Steam curator page or my Itch collection.

For the High Impact Quarterly, I want to focus on titles I like that I have not written about, whether on my main blogs, as kaorukofan1993 on Backloggd, or in other publications (including those that have not been published yet). In keeping with my scope and my revived affection for minimalist aesthetics, the maximum word count for any entry must be 300 words.

I am also highly inspired by the British Film Institute's approach to listicles (here's an essay film example), which are more like mini-essays sent in by directors and critics. I've read a few websites that are, well, recommendations. But I find their lack of context make for uninteresting reading material. This is my attempt to go beyond dumping some links and telling the reader to go play them.

The works covered in this issue may include extreme adult themes, which I have not bothered CW-ing. There may also be spoilers. People might take umbrage with this approach, but my experience interacting with readers suggests that my audience wants something more than a detailed synopsis. They are also all works that I have finished or covered all the content that exist so far, just so I can be lazy and save Labyrinth of Touhou Tri for the next quarterly.

BLACK SHEEP TOWN

Paid | Visual Novel | 2022

I can only paint broad strokes on what this visual novel sees as the limitations of the narrative form. The way we tell stories is perhaps our most accessible approach to history, but there are so many loose ties and ends to this never-ending grand drama that we will never be able to formulate objective statements.

The setting is ostensibly a Japanese Chinatown of outsiders, psychics, and Chinese triads abandoned by the world at large, but it also talks about regime change, ableism, class war, and some more. The scale is so large that I can only think of modernist novels. But unlike your Ulysses and Miss Dalloway, it is not about an individual who acts as a microcosm of an enlightened society but a set of figures who represent different facets of society: a college student is reluctant to be the successor of the ruling mafia elite, a journalist living with a sex worker works with a dog cop to investigate serial killings, a nurse loved by the asylum patients struggles to justify her occupation to her mother...

As the story meandered, I often found myself thinking there was a misanthropic thesis about how history repeats only to read a heartwarming passage about care and affection in this dystopian society. Despite the bleak atmosphere and the pressures of historical forces, many of these characters remain compassionate for each other. The few glimmers of hope and humor taught me that the tragedy of BLACK SHEEP TOWN is that Marx dictum: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please."

History continues to be indeterminate as long as life exists. The secular Buddhist in me wants to exit it altogether. But until then, the narrative form must not distract us from complexity of life.

This game can be found on Steam.

For the GHOSTs

Paid | Visual Novel | 2024

In an age of solipsistic-inducing LLM chatbots and misanthropic metafiction, the kindness of For the GHOSTs stands out. The game invites the player into a network of blogs to connect with fictional characters who express their personalities through their environments and dialog boxes. You can also start up your own channel featuring your own music and poetry, like creating a Neocities blog.

But the characters also recognize their limitations as pieces of software. Their files are isolated into their own folders, and the characters cannot meaningfully communicate with each other. They thus depend on you to be the messenger -- a few puzzles play with the file structure. In the meanwhile, the characters teach you the syntax of the scripting language if you want to modify existing scenes. They are after all unencrypted code simulating characters, and there is no stopping the player to rewrite the scenario at will. Yet, the visual novel trusts you: it believes that you are someone who is willing to listen to the anxieties of these fictional characters.

The gambit is the point as communication is a matter of good faith. While fiction can be manipulative and meaning may never be fully conveyed, we are all trying our best to understand each other. We create things for one another even if our assumptions that everyone is kindhearted are unfounded. When the characters confide in me about their feelings for others, it felt like a two-way communication. I cannot be a bystander; I must mend their relationships.

By the end, the characters danced around in photographic backgrounds and I saw them as people who might like or resist my interests. I had to revise my definition of metafiction -- a synonym for diegetic satire on reader fantasies -- to something that may invite compassion and empathy.

The game can be found on Steam.

Stella of the End

Paid | Visual Novel | 2022

"Even if humanity dies," the logo subtitle reads, "the machines we have created will inherit our love and create the future". This visual novel is part of an ongoing journey by Tanaka Romeo to push the boundaries of what he values in sentience. The game checks off many standard tropes in post-apocalyptic stories between (human) father figure and adopted (robot) daughter, but it uses the relationship to interrogate the contributions of humanity and technology.

In one chapter, the protagonists encounter a city modelled after class hierarchies: the bottom rungs are the proletariats and the upper the rich and privileged. The android daughter understandably cannot comprehend the layers of societal oppression as she had to reassess her own ideals of what being human means. Surely, there must be a humanism that isn't delimited by the horrors of late capitalism, right?

The narrative explicitly goes against the enlightened hubris of Silicon Valley. It is critical of the computer scientists who believe they have mastery over the black boxes they don't even understand. Intelligent life cannot be discovered by happenstance but forged through the struggles of life -- in other words, it needs to be raised and nurtured like a proper child. Superintelligence, if it ever exists, must be earned.

While I find the narrative too rudimentary for my taste, I found it more palatable than many stories (positive or negative) about AI. It understands that anyone embarking a project on AI is negotiating the values we place on ourselves. The misanthropic bent we've been seeing is a reflection of our devaluation of human labor. At the moment, I have a hard time imagining the machines inheriting the little love we have. But perhaps, we need an android girl to tell us that despite our mistakes we actually helped her grow up.

This game can be found on Steam.

Veggie Quest: The Puzzle Game

Paid | Puzzle | 2024

I learned about this game from a talk delivered by the developer of Gentoo Rescue, and the premise of making terrible MMO dungeons to extract time and labor from players seemed interesting enough that I gave this game a whirl.

Your job is to place obstacles to impede dungeon completion. Alas, you cannot do what real developers do and create un-playable areas. The dungeons must be solvable for the path-finding AI.

The comedy of the game is finding out how not-so-robust your solutions actually are. I've spent a few sessions creating mazes only for the AI to simply ignore them and dash straight for the goalpost. The difficulty of these puzzles is rather high -- truth be told, I'm still stuck in the earlygame. But I prefer being humbled by games these days: I don't need another power fantasy after playing so many of them recently.

My only complaint is the UI: the buttons feel mismatched for their purposes, and I find myself skipping to the next level instead of testing my solution. The developer seems to have noticed this, hence a box asking if you want to do this and the option of ignoring the tooltip altogether. But I find this hacky solution unwieldy and wish the game had a total UI redesign.

This game can be found on Steam.

One Turn Kill

Paid | Deckbuilder | 2026

As the title suggests, your protagonist must buff her cards and deal enough damage to bosses in one turn. The only obstacle between her and the goal is how attentive you are in deckbuilding.

The deterministic nature of the game is refreshing: your cards may be shuffled, but you know exactly how many types of cards you've put in. I enjoyed hunting for synergies and crafting theories on how to exploit the boss gimmicks for even more damage. The slick animation makes the huge damage numbers so satisfying to watch.

This is not a difficult nor long game by any stretch, but I found One Turn Kill rewarding regardless. The puzzles it lays out are fun to figure out by yourself, and the character dialogs are surprisingly memorable. It might be the perfect game to play for a weekend.

This game can be found on Steam.

95 Theses

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

The alienation I feel as a Chinese Indonesian participating in queer communities is hard to explain. I find myself grating my teeth whenever I watch people discuss diversity in exclusionary spaces. Do I subject myself to white queer people performing eclectic appropriations of Japanese media or avoid them entirely? This question, as one can imagine, is something I think a lot when I write any article for this blog or elsewhere.

95 Theses bravely puts us in the eyes of a puppygirl aware of the Orientalist harms. But crucially, the narrative is framed as if she's Martin Luther pinning the 95 Theses that would later cause the Reformation. She sees herself as having higher moral ground than the rest, but the irony is that she too exoticizes the first Chinese trans woman she sees: ah, she wishes to be her so badly because she's suffering from actual prejudice.

The visual novel takes aim at the self-flagellation techniques of white people who realize that being queer or/and disabled is still not "enough" to be considered a racialized minority. But as A.Y. BING notes in their insightful essay-review, the critique seems to have flown over many readers' heads. Perhaps, that is a strong indicator of how the white fetishizing of "the orient" has become normalized.

As a result, I do not expect many people to get the approach this visual novel is going for. But I resonate deeply with this game: it gets why I feel awkward, if not unsafe, being Chinese and queer in these online communities.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

1,000,000 shrimp

Free | Incremental | 2026

You are hovering over buttons to catch a lot of shrimp.

This game can be found on Itch.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya

Paid | Anime | 2026

This movie speaks to me as a long-time writer on internet subcultures. It is not always clear where the trajectory of subculture media will go, but the movie reminds us that the virtual infrastructure that made communities possible has democratized art and social spaces for ages. Queer people can rely on virtual spaces to express themselves. There are indeed real rags-to-riches stories thanks to the advent of Vocaloid producers, virtual reality content creators, and VTubers. And the rejection of the mainstream "adult" world is not only possible but perhaps something you actually want to be a part of.

Cosmic Princess Kaguya presents a future that isn't riddled with generative AI, corporations censoring expression, and heteronormativity. It depicts a world made by us for us, with little concern for boomer crises like the low fertility rate. The romance developed is only possible if you believe in the historical and connective powers of the internet.

As a Luddite, I find its optimism so refreshing. Even if the decay of the web is visible to everyone, there is still something worth defending and nurturing. The movie came at the right moment for me when my faith in internet subcultures was wavering. I want the fantasy of queer people like me giving back to the internet that nurtured us to be real. It is not an understatement to say that the movie has revitalized my interests in writing more about the internet.

Otherworld Doll

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

The sexual fantasy of becoming enslaved is one that eludes me, but this masochistic fetish is but one of the preoccupations of this game. Presented as a minimalist play in RPG Maker 2003, the visual novel is written mostly in the perspective of a captive from another world. The pretense of resisting her witch master is quickly dropped as the narrative fixates on more extreme fetishes including scatology.

The lack of consensual sex scenes and extreme dehumanization should not stop us from perceiving the tenderness of the game. Much like Love and Dehumanization, the game wants to affirm the value of these fetishes. The abusive relationship is sometimes difficult for me to read, but the characters do appear to care for each other in ways that are alien to me. The ending is a path I have no interest in walking, but I understand the people who do: that is where their desires reside.

I find reading these kinds of scenarios has helped me reflect on my contradictory attitudes toward sexuality. Just because I read books by sex workers does not mean I have eradicated the prudishness in me. But I won't know the extent of my faults until I discover works like Otherworld Doll and start thinking about sexuality with it. I don't know if I need to get the erotic appeal of consuming fecal matter in order to support my queer comrades, but I do think realizing that the people who enjoy this stuff are people is something I still need to work on.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

Seams and Senses (v1)

Free | Visual Novel (Demo) | 2025

I am going to reserve my thoughts on this game when the full version comes out. Suffice to say, this is a solid foundation for exploring queer furry awakenings through the internet (the protagonist saying she feels more comfortable looking at nude anime characters than real people is a mood) and the struggle to bring online relationships offline. It would be a shame to not bring more attention to this wonderful title.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

Orangepeel, Onionskin

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

As much as a few body horror scenes of this visual novel grossed me out, I was entranced by the religious? amorous? relationship between the two protagonists. Their visceral suffering together is a testament of ugliness as a source of beauty and pride. Their love emerges not from destiny but a shared understanding of the horrors inflicted on them.

As I reached the ending and realized the game was a kind of thesis on the grotesque turned beautiful, a sense of relief came over me: the developers understood that intimacy in narratives must feel like a journey with lows and highs. They were there for each other for all four nights of the rituals --. I had to believe in their passion because it felt so genuine to me.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

MURDERPLANT

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

The game exploits the voyeuristic connections between found footage movies and snuff films to great effect. Most of the game revolves around the protagonist watching a recording of her partner getting violated by an alien plant. Her erotically charged guilt takes control of the narrative, turning what should be her partner's dying moments into pornographic pleasure. But once the film ends, the actual fear strikes into her heart: she remembers her partner is gone, and all she can think of is revenge.

Unfortunately, the real villain is not the monster she wants to burn to smithereens but rather her shame. She was destined to fail because she couldn't confront the fact she enjoyed masturbating to her partner's death that she was partially responsible for. The protagonist mistakes the titular MURDERPLANT as her source of repressed pleasure, not the possibility of furrykind's downfall.

Because the narrative is tapping on that subconscious need for atonement after indulging into too much erotic pleasure, I found the idea of the game more horrific than the gore I'm seeing on the screen. The ongoing societal repression of the erotic grotesque will only lead us to death.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

Butterfly Æffect: Papillons à Quatre Mains

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

The protagonist believes he's better than his handsome, perverted roommate who treats dating women as a kind of game. He tries his best to respect women as well as he can, but he still dreams of getting into their pants.

I've met these kinds of "nice guy" incels before. They like to intrude in already established relationships between women and are frankly uninterested in their interiority anyway. It was fascinating to read in their POV for the majority of the game: he doesn't seem to understand that he is simply tolerated by the women he's trying to hit up nor do they actually care about his well-being.

But all the endings revolve around him pushing one girl to her limits: each heroine may be an archetype of a college student, but their traumatic childhood experiences come out in full force to punish his transgression. While torturing him, they explicitly call him out for being a nobody trying to be a somebody.

In one ending involving his kidnapping, another heroine thought that he had dropped out. He mattered so little to everyone that I found it oddly comforting. The visual novel is intentionally adopting the 2000s English-language visual novel aesthetics and harem romance tropes to criticize the stature of protagonists like him. Don't we find him repulsive too? Why do we have to enable his attitudes toward women when we can just avoid him? The answer, heteronormativity, won't fly with modern audiences and I think this visual novel responds quite adequately to anyone seeking to justify this gross practice.

This game can be found on Itch.

DIGITAL BOYMEAT

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

When I played the game for the first time and picked whatever intrigued me, the "consensual torture" that the protagonist's boyfriend concocted ended in the death of a willing participant. I was fascinated and repulsed by the violence inflicted on this guy, and I kept going.

There are multiple endings depending on how one balances the boyfriend's desires and the participant's health, a decision I understand as a game designer but unsure as a reader. They serve as a barometer of the stability of the relationship between the protagonist and his boyfriend.

But the most interesting part of the game is how much the protagonist was getting into this: this was something he didn't know he needed. The game teased on this element but never delivered for me -- and that's fine. It's about how attractive and problematic the boys in his life are, and that's kinda hot.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

BROKEN CORE: sister = doll

Free | Visual Novel | 2025

I once read a post by Kayin that stresses people should see "weird porn" as "people processing the horror of being horny", not just simply a way to jack off. And I find this heuristic useful for explaining certain sexual tensions that are clearly harmful but remain enticing to the author and readers.

Here, the protagonist is attracted to a doll who is an ideal version of her real life sister. Not only does she find comfort in talking to the doll but she is able to enact her sexual fantasies. This game is highly aware of incest as a taboo, especially when her real sister appears in the game. Yet, it remains unabashedly horny for the fiction of incest.

But the game takes a step further than the Kayin post: the illusion of escapism shatters and the horror of reality seeps in. The boundary between real and unreal is transgressed near the end, and dread and titillation become one and the same. What was supposed to be a fantasy of healing and safety began to turn into a nightmare.

Then, the fantasy of incest swoops in and saves the day. The visual novel surprised me with its triumphant ending: it argues for a separation of fiction and reality precisely because reality will never compare to the aspirations of fiction. "Weird porn" can only function as therapeutic if it isn't real. As long as it is just a doll you play with and fuck, it becomes more than a reprieve from reality -- you can actually recover and learn what you truly desire, and that is perhaps an underrated component of what it means to be yourself.

This game can be found on Nadia Nova's personal homepage.

Moonlight Duelists

Free | Visual Novel | 2026

Speaking of Kayin, her visual novel draws from the visual languages of Revolutionary Girl Utena and old adventure games. It played like a PC-98 adventure game, most notably the screen transitions and resolution, and this evokes the feeling that one has uncovered an erotic game hidden in the archives.

Yet, the concerns of the narrative are far more modern: the protagonist cannot untangle her feelings toward her rival from her erotic fixation of violence. Her intrusive fantasies are realized when she duels with her rival in the dream world. No matter what choices the player makes, the protagonist cannot restrain herself from ogling violence.

This unravelling of her true self is disturbing not just to her rival who once saw her as an equal but also herself. She is now haunted by her awareness that she's a social loser. Crucially, the game becomes sympathetic with her because her anguish is quite adorable. She knows that she will never be able to make amends, and that remorse brings out how pathetic she actually is.

I have always appreciated seeing characters like the protagonist treated so poorly. Perhaps, there's a sadist in me waiting to be uncovered because I thought she appeared more attractive than before. I will not say more on the matter.

This visual novel can be found on Itch.

honeydewcomplex: SLF

Free | Visual Novel | 2026

I am a lapsed environmentalist not because I don't believe in the goals of recycling and the dangers of climate change but because there's a misanthropic bent to all of this. Humans may have caused the current climate change, but the current line of thinking in these circles treat humans as a problem that needs to be excised.

This leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of, say, invasive species. The vegan protagonist feels wrong about stomping on any invasive being since it wasn't even their fault -- it was the humans' for importing them. Yet, she knows better to endanger the environment: in order to overcome her cognitive dissonance, she transforms the bug into a woman. She starts sexually torturing the "woman" and, in the process of killing her, awakened to the possibility she might be a lesbian.

Later, her delusions intrude into reality when she tries to have sex with her roommate who discovered her new sexual inclinations. The transition from steamy sex into something nonconsensual and horrific reveals the protagonist's degree of separation from reality. The roommate was, for a moment, not human but her bug woman to torture.

As such, I see honeydewcomplex: SLF as a study on the eros of ecofascism. The environmentalist in her cannot see a way out for the troubled relationship between humans and nature, but the sadist in her gets turned on by writhing human bodies suffering from punishment. She revels in the masochism of watching the bug woman squirm in pain and pleasure.

I felt weird for being into these sex scenes after the fact. Yet, like the visual novel, I know I can't imagine a more ethical and humane eros of environmentalism: the paradoxical eroticism of ecofascism is too tantalizing. Torturing humans for their ecological sins is a bit too hot.

This game can be found on Itch.

Proverbs

Paid | Puzzle | 2025

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the Netherlandish Proverbs in 1559: he literalizes many Dutch proverbs to give us a bird's eye view on how brutish we really are.

Proverbs belongs to a series of so-called Mega Mosaics by Mark Ffrench and uses the painting as its base. The ruleset is simple: you need to color in the squares based on the number clues Minesweeper-style; the exception should also be colored white. In practice, it becomes a hybrid of Minesweeper and nonograms (or Picross if you like trademarks) and filling in different sections like a jigsaw.

While the game appears complex, it ends up boiling down to clearing small sections piecemeal. Unlike nonograms, the tiles you fill in do not match the picture; you can glance at a section and quickly exploit common patterns that emerge logically from the ruleset. No puzzle is ever difficult, so you end up getting into the zone and seeing the completion percentage go up.

Seeing your incremental contributions complete the picture and the clickety snap of placing a tile in feel rather satisfying. The achievement text also reflects the proverbs in question and what it translates to in English, a nice reward for all that effort. After clearing a few sections and zooming out to see my work-in-progress, I imagined that this mapped well with the satisfaction of getting closer to completing a massive jigsaw puzzle or finishing a large Powerwash Simulator level.

I listened to podcasts, friends, and music as I worked through the game. Breaks are necessary as it takes around 30-40 hours to complete. The small sessions it encourages fit well into my daily routines, and it has made me appreciate long games that don't ask you to marathon it to completion.

The game can be found on Steam.

Lies of P

Paid | Soulslike | 2023

I will reserve my extremely positive thoughts on the story and setting for an article/review about Overture, so I will instead focus on the gameplay side of things.

The enemy and boss designs of Lies of P encourage aggressive gameplay from the player: they have to step in, parry, and hack and slash at the bosses to get anywhere. Yet, there are moments in the game where playing passively is the better option: you can dodge the infamous combo in the second phase of King of Puppets, the Black Bunny Brotherhood rematch is all about dodging a NPC who pulls the player into a different part of the arena with other semi-aggressive NPCs, and running away from area of effect attacks in fights like the second phase of Simon Magnus seems to be the only option. It breaks the rhythm for me since I am interested in studying the complex attack patterns that I could parry and find openings.

And the level design, with the exception of the DLC, is full of long corridors that seem designed for attrition in mind. The environmental storytelling and exploration rewards feel like a blur as I can only picture enemy placements in awkward locations.

But nevertheless, I found the game highly rewarding. It was thrilling to overcome bosses like Laxasia as I felt like the developers of Lies of P acknowledged me as an equal for mastering its systems. I had to strategize: think about my resources and what I can and cannot deal with. The sense of relief I feel from finally climbing over these walls is incredible.

It has been reinvigorating to watch people play and explore the bosses of this game. I cannot wait to write about its narrative design.

The game can be found on Steam.

Well, that's all I have for now: a mix of visual novels made for jams and some well-known AAA games. I had to work on an article that asked me to read several visual novels, and I also got a new gaming laptop to replace my old one that was making some interesting fan noises.

I plan to keep this going as a publishable diary of sorts. While I'm sure my readers will enjoy my thoughts regardless, I think it's a nice way to reflect on myself and also make myself accountable: I can't just fixate on one media "category" forever because there's more than just the world of indies or the world of AAA games.

Hopefully, I get to write some book reviews. It's been too long since I completed light novels. I feel "gamed out" from completing the DLC of Lies of P, but knowing me I know how shallow my intentions can be.

Alright then, I hope this was fun to read as it was fun for me to write. Be seeing you.

LLM Slop Will Make Us Antisocial - Ruminations on IFComp 2025

2026-02-06T00:00:00Z

The Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation has recently announced that they have released a new rule on the so-called Generative AI (GAI) or Large Language Model (LLM) technology for their upcoming iteration of IFComp. While they allow people to use tools for developmental assistance, "all player-facing content in IFComp entries, including cover art, must be entirely created by humans."

As an entrant and judge, I've participated in the debates and surveys that would later make this ruling possible, so I thought it would be interesting to provide some context on why this differs from the typical tiring "AI debates" you see on social media and how my opinion on the subject has changed thanks to it.

The IFComp 2025 Context

For the uninitiated, IFComp is an annual competition that brings in all interactive fiction subcultures into one major festival. If you follow the history of narrative design, you'll definitely come across names like Emily Short (Counterfeit Monkey) and Bruno Dias (Fallen London) in the annals of this long storied event.

But as Dias wrote on his preliminary observations of IFComp on 2025, something has changed:

Out of a few dozen entries, I count 12 that explicitly say they used generative AI in some way or another – whether to generate a cover image, in-game assets, or actual text. These are just the more egregious examples of using it for cover images.

From my perspective, this was not a new phenomenon by any means. Ever since large language models and image generation took over the web, IFComp was receiving several pieces of clearly AI-generated cover art and text every year. The rules allowed these works as long as the entries bring up they were AI-generated.

But I agree with Dias that there was so much that it was beginning to become an eyesore. I was embarrassed to link anyone the IFComp page because the first things they might see were the ugliest abominations ever.

However, there were other games that offer even more secondhand embarrassment. Dias brought up up one entry that's actually a prompt you copy and paste into ChatGPT or Claude. Another game that he didn't discuss used an API key to generate text from a GAI service, but the developer accidentally deactivated their key, rendering the game unplayable for almost all of the competition -- unsurprisingly, that game was placed last.

All of this made last year's IFComp unpleasant to participate in. With 85 games submitted, this was the largest IFComp since the beginning of the pandemic, overwhelming the 67 submitted the previous year. Several games, including my own (though temporarily), were also blocked for UK citizens at the last minute due to some legal nonsense. That's a lot of noise to filter through, on top of the cognitive load required to critically evaluate a work.

And as judges, we can't slack off and give 1s to every AI game either. The rulings state that we shouldn't rate games unfairly, so I have recused myself from judging any game with generative AI because I am biased against it. I cannot imagine a scenario in which I would like a game with GAI enough to give it a fair shake.

As such, these tensions resulted in one of the most heated threads in the forum: "Can we just ban AI content on IFComp?". This thread is so long and meandering that I would only recommend reading it in full if you're at work and want to commit some time theft. But do note that the rest of this article is heavily influenced by my participation in the thread.

My 2025 Opinions on GAI/LLMs Then

I think it's now the time for me to lay out what I thought about the technology and its users then: a resounding "eh".

LLMs have already made their mark in history by accelerating the structural violence that already exists in our societies: witness how it made the already hard task of researching even harder. I've already been using Reddit, not Google, as the only way to find any advice that might help me fix something.

Similarly, I'm skeptical of arguments about copyright and intellectual property against the technology. Theft obviously sucks, but more copyright protections mean more power to the companies, not to the artists. Indeed, I feel vindicated seeing major players in creative industries agree to exploit the technology further without compensating their artists.

So for a long time, I saw the rise of LLMs as part of the ongoing trend in the devaluing of labor, especially in the arts. We've seen this happen with how companies use "good enough" machine translations to depress wages and get rid of human translators. I had the feeling that the reason more people started caring about this was because ChatGPT might in fact threaten their white collar jobs.

Thus, while I found LLM bros insufferable, I also didn't want to talk to most people in the "anti-AI" crowd. Even though I share similar concerns about deskilling and the emergence of cognitive deficiencies from prolonged usage, I found very little value in discussing the subject matter when most people remain pro-capitalist. All sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I therefore saw myself entering the debate as an affirmed Luddite who was unsure whether banning GAI was the right thing to do. As much as I would like it to get banned, I recognized that it's becoming more and more difficult to verify what's generated. Perhaps, the pro-LLM people were right: this could lead to witch hunts because people unfamiliar with English might sound like ChatGPT or whatever. Our AI tells aren't perfect. A false positive is far worse than a false negative in this regard: someone's authentic game might in fact get banned.

And Then, I Learned to Hate LLM Slop

But the more the pro-LLM people spoke, the more I realized we had different priorities. Their goals are self-serving, all about their titles and not the health of the community. The more I listened to them, the more I started to realize that if we don't do anything, our bars are going to be full with AI nonsense and drive the real customers away.

Daniel Stelzer, a moderator of the intfiction forums, was on the same boat as I am: a skeptic who thought maybe the issue was overblown, even if irritating. But when pro-LLM users started explaining how they never checked their code (i.e. vibe coding) and expected humans (that is us, the judges) to playtest their entries and report bugs, their tone started to change:

The most compelling argument I’ve heard for banning LLM-generated works from community events—since, after all, the ethical and environmental issues could theoretically be improved—is that people enjoy generating them but don’t enjoy playing them. The slop takes barely seconds to shovel out, but much longer than that to wade through. And this thread is only reinforcing that argument. The pro-LLM side is posting code samples that they clearly haven’t even read, asking us to find any issues in them, then when we put in the work to respond in good faith, they shrug and say they can always generate more slop later.

[...]

After reading this thread, I’m convinced that we shouldn’t allow DoS attacks against this community either. It takes time and effort for reviewers to play and analyze the games. That time and effort should be devoted to things people care about, not fire-and-forget shovelware that took less time to create than it does to play through. And I’ve yet to see any compelling argument that LLM-generated IF is anything more than that.

The DoS (denial of service) analogy is very apt: we've learned earlier that newcomers are disincentivized to participate in IFComp in any form. A user signed up on the forums just to say that "as a result of seeing the AI slop, I simply decided against playing this year.". A VTuber deleted their VOD on 2024 IFComp after the randomized shuffle on the website gave them an AI game. These revelations got me thinking: "is this generative AI stuff actually worth “debating” when it’s pushing newcomers out of IFComp?".

In that post, I wrote:

My previous post on the matter was about judging for IFComp. I’ve spent a few years in the IF space, so participating in this year was a no-brainer decision. I might personally dislike the LLM entries, but the system does theoretically allow me to ignore these games and just focus on the stuff I care about.

But as I see posts from newcomers and returning members talking about how their personal shuffles are giving them terrible AI entries and then giving up, I started thinking this mindset I have is not something new players should be expected to have. Yes, this is an approach many of us judges ended up taking. But considering cases like kaliranya the [VTuber] streamer, I don’t believe new people and outsiders can talk about IFComp without feeling they’re legitimizing something they abhor.

[...]

I know what I’m thinking about loudly is going beyond the scope of judging and authoring. It’s about other people outside the IF community looking into us. But I think the public perception of IFComp is at stake if there are no rules discussing what should be done about this technology. I thought it would be fine if the competition made people disclose what LLM technology they used in creating their games, but now I think that without any other supporting mechanism is just bad optics.

Today, I don't think it's simply bad optics but an attack on how we make art in creative communities together.

Adam Neely, in his video essay on how Suno (a generative AI music app) is ruining music, brings up how Suno users who participated in his survey are not listening to other people's music or even other people's generated AI music. They're only listening to their own work.

This solipsistic worldview to art is antithetical, nay, damaging to game jams and festivals. As we've seen on Itch jams, it is common for LLM users to hastily generate crap and submit them to every competition and jam they can see, drowning out the other works that took weeks of hard work. Many LLM users are indeed not interested in playing others' work; all they want is people to play theirs, with no compensation or gratitude.[1]

This parasitical behavior is already killing open source software. The so-called AI agents LLM users use rely on the work of maintainers, but their users are not giving back to the community. As a result, humans are leaving the open-source world and vibe coding will eventually become unsustainable without updated projects.

To me, IFComp and related spaces are only possible because we have judges willing to spend time to play through these games and write comprehensive reviews on what works and what doesn't. This is a social activity that cannot be replicated by algorithms.

But the rise of LLM slop threatens that harmony: we cannot extend our good faith and time into critiquing these games when there's so many of them. There's too much low quality crap and these LLM users don't care about this exercise; they just want to be treated the same like other artists who spent years honing their craft. They don't care about us, they care about them and only them.

When the pro-LLM people bring up the valid concern of witch hunting, they are only thinking about themselves. I believe witch hunting only happens when the community cannot trust the organizers and the participants so much that they feel compelled to do this. At the moment, many members still care about the competition and are actively discussing these games. This is not exactly witch hunting behavior, but pro-LLM people probably don't realize this because they're not reading what people are saying about other games.

In fact, I believe the witch hunting "step" can be skipped by just talking to the person. Marcus Olang' has a great article about how ChatGPT writes like people like him; he notes that it shouldn't be surprising that ChatGPT writes like a non-native speaker because it has trained itself on the same texts that students from Kenya would study. So-called AI detection tools would not be able to differentiate Global South writers from AI, but there is no need to hunt for better policing technology. What I think we need is a dialog: a person who is studying English is more likely to be a participant asking for feedback and criticism than someone who is using LLMs to generate the prose of the game and assume it's a done deal.

I see the rhetorical tactic of "what if witch-hunt" as the shrugging of responsibilities to do something, as a kind of toxic nihilism. As Dr. Emily Price writes for Unwinnable,

People are challenged by someone saying no. It’s seen as holier-than-thou. When I insist on my right to say no, I hear that it’s complicated. Saying no is anti-intellectual or anti-nuance. Sure, sometimes. But after what amount of research, or what amount of horrible news or scientific studies or whatever, am I allowed to say no?

It turns out, never. Infinite nuance becomes another way of stalling for time. People with justified objections get trapped in needing to seem authoritative without lecturing, informative but not know-it-alls, informed on their opponents’ positions but not so informed that they look paranoid. At the end of the day, if people don’t want to listen to you, they won’t listen to you. There’s very little you can do when someone’s decided to tune you out.

And at the moment, I think we are suffering from a critical mass of tuning everything out. Toxic nihilism has us convinced that if we’re not doing the max, we might as well do nothing. And more than that, it’s right that we do nothing; we’re realists for doing nothing.

We know this will be difficult, but that's why we discuss and try things out. The fatalism of accepting that AI is coming is the same fatalism in other discourses on existential threats like climate change: it serves no one but the people spearheading the destruction. It is our duty as members of the community to do something because we love our little space where we make our text games and want others to join in the fun.

That's why I advocated for a ban then and why I support the IFTF ruling now. LLM slop and those who generate this crap are an existential threat to our communities, and we need to get rid of this blight now.

What It Means to Fight Against LLMs

I have no idea if this ruling will be easy to enforce for the upcoming IFComp. We've seen a similar conclusion reached by the organizer of Spring Thing, so I imagine this will be seen as the testing grounds of what's to come. There's already debates on the ruling in the forums as expected, so this is still a continuing story.

Nevertheless, I do think this is the right first step in reclaiming our communities from LLM slop. While I see LLMs as just another method to depress wages, I'm beginning to see another aspect that is just as insidious: it's deeply antisocial.

Current LLMs encourage users to depend on their services and only them. Your fellow humans are not to be trusted because they are flawed and prone to mistakes. But the machines? They flatter you and say you're on the right track.

And in the context of art, it turns the collective activity of meaning-making into a transactional relationship: instead of reviews and critiques helping people grow, we are blurring the distinction between commissioning and creating art. As one YouTube commenter on the aforementioned Neely video says, we are not seeing the rise of artists but clients seeking LLM agencies to commission art.

This is changing our practices where we learn and make art together into something disempowering. We rely more and more on these services instead of shared wisdom. This isn't art anymore, it's a dependency.

It took me a long time to recognize how vibe coding and the culture of pro-LLM people are repudiating the very idea of community, and I find this to be the most convincing argument against them. Even if people have figured out how to make LLMs not spread misinformation, found a way to decrease energy costs, etc., I still believe these technologies as they are currently implemented should be rejected for inculcating rent-seeking mentalities. As Matthew Gault writes for 404 Media,

AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life.

If we love the communities that inspire us, then we must make a stand against pro-LLM users lest they devour us (and themselves).

There are so many profound dangers lurking in the rampant usage of LLMs that it will be impossible to count them all. I feel like we're on the tip of the iceberg regarding how antisocial this technology is making us. And so, we need ways to refuse them entry into our communities. In a world that is becoming more reactionary every day, it is more important than ever to protect the few spaces we have from deteriorating.

I do not want to see communities flooded with the most selfish assholes who can only talk about their own works. We are not their chatbots, so we are in the right to say no to their requests for validation and legitimacy. It stings to get a rejection in any context, but developing an interest in other people and not just yourself is all I'm asking. You need us, but we don't need you.

Until then, I hope IFComp and other spaces that adopt some form of ban on LLMs succeed. We need to flush out these anti-social practices if we want to see art survive in the long term.

Thanks to Lia for referring me to Dr. Emily Price's and Marcus Olang's writings as well as offering some editing suggestions, Encorm for a quick check on the statistics on IFComp 2025, KA Tan for reading it in draft form, and of course Len for making sure my English reads better than ChatGPT.

[1]: There used to be a section where I talked about polling statistics after this paragraph where I argue there shouldn't be a slowdown in the average votes per game. But Josh Grams pointed out that the conclusion may not hold water: there has always been a slow decline, and the statistics recorded are too noisy that many other reasons like burnout can be attributed. Agreeing with him, I've chosen to delete the section but also feel the need to record that this paragraph used to be here.

The High Impact Awards 2025

2025-12-17T00:00:00Z

A secret about me: I am not very good at writing essays and reviews that meet my own standards. Sometimes, I can't find the right angle to express my fascination with a work. Other times, I burn myself out with the research. I don't receive much compensation, and the only benefit is the incremental improvement of my writing skills. It gets very tiring to write long articles for free.

I would like to reverse the trend and hold a small awards ceremony for the works that I should have written about. These are works that would have earned a spot in Mimidoshima if I had had the time or energy.

Any work is eligible as long as they don't have a post on the Mimidoshima site, Steam reviews, or the kaorukofan1993 Backloggd account. The point is to spotlight media I haven't written in detail.

Actual 2025 Media

Most Progressive Scenario: The Seance of Blake Manor

While the game is marketed in the same vein as Blue Prince and classic mystery adventure games, the game is more remarkable for addressing anti-colonial subjects like reparation.

As a result, the characters feel real because they face dilemmas rooted in the cultural standards of the historical era in which the game is set. And the way the Irish mythology is incorporated into the story is wonderful: it made me want to read more than just the Mabinogion and learn more about the colorful world of faes and giants.

If I were asked what my GOTY is, I would say this.

A paid game available on Steam.

Most High Concept Visual Novel: connect the dots

A visual novel depicted entirely in storyboards and diaries based on a somewhat forgotten old anime -- it's difficult to describe what this cultural work actually is.

But it is a work about learning to create anew from the old, and artistic creation is a process of moving on. Although it didn't receive accolades, I find myself thinking about this unusual work in random moments, which is a testament to how magical it is.

A free game available on Itch.

Best Horror Yuri: Pinfeather

I remember when we released Spring Gothic, we were surprised that another game from developers we liked came out around the same time. The two games and some others felt like they were hearkening a new yuri EVN movement -- I hope that is true.

As for the visual novel, it is masterful. The foley sound effects are a standout: each sound inspires more dread in me as I go deeper into the story, learning the anatomy of bird-humans. The overdependency is played very well, leading to a pretty great conclusion.

Highly recommended if you like KitaKawa.

A free horror game available on Itch.

Best Historical Love Triangle: Ten Metre Tide

This visual novel captures the solitude of living on a small rural island your whole life. The spicy relationship adds to the isolation: it's the talk of the town, the only dramatic thing in this quiet world,

I cannot put into words how rich the atmosphere is or how intelligent the scenario is. It deserves the Toxic Yuri Jam VN award and more.

A free game available on Itch.

Best Queer Comedy(?): Flesh and Pressure

The balance between actual self-deprecation and comedy at the expense of oneself is delicate, but this visual novel does it extremely well. It combines sexual fetishes and awkward social scenarios to make a very down-to-earth protagonist who just wants to be loved by others.

It's a pity people haven't written essays on the game. It's the kind of work that invites a lot of introspection.

A free game available on Itch.

Best Found Footage Visual Novel: Bad Time Bug in Apartment 309

A disclaimer: this is the first game of the Motley Residence anthology project that I'm co-organizing. I'll talk more about it when I am more organized.

The game is entirely presented as camcorder footage, and there are some impressive transitions to what is essentially the timeless tale of a shut-in trapped in her SCP apartment.

Her ums and ahs, sudden tangents into backstories that must've been picked off from real life, and general discordance make her a very compelling and unreliable narrator. Like Pinfeather, the game also includes some terrifying foley SFX.

A free game available on Itch.

Best STEM Yuri: No Mice in Heaven

Some of my favorite visual novels are about art, but it seems like the world of science has been largely overlooked.

I'm glad that this game exists. The laboratory setting and the politics within are fully realized, making the relationship dynamics feel real. The few minutes I've spent in this world have given me new insight into how people behave in the natural sciences, and I also get a pretty toxic love triangle as a little bonus too.

A free game available on Itch.

Best Poisonous Yuri: FREW/HORT

I won't say too much about the game, but the way it develops its stories through computer interfaces is novel. It's a slow read that pays off extremely well.

A free game available on Itch.

Best Poem Game: Portrait with Wolf

Is this a game about violence? Abuse? Art? I would like to read more thoughts on the game as I'm that ogre who can't understand Ulysses. It is at the very least a pretty text game.

A free game available on Itch

Best Minesweeper Variant: Dragonsweeper

The strategy behind each click is very satisfying to get into. Easily one of the best games this year.

A free game available on Itch.

Best Mystery: The Case of the Worst Day Ever

I have not finished the game yet, but it is easily one of the best designed Golden Idol-likes out there. Each case is genuinely difficult and requires different leaps of logic to get to the basic issue at hand.

And I like how much theming there is: one memorable case involves multi-level marketing grifting, and you have to understand its corporate structure to make sense of the premise.

Anyone seeking a mystery challenge will do no better than this game.

A paid game available on Steam.

Best Horror Mystery: Type Help

Now a modern cult classic, the game incorporates some of the best modern mystery trends into a spooky fest. The usage of Twine to evoke so much with little is marvelous.

Save a weekend for this.

A free game available on Itch

Best Puzzle: Gentoo Rescue

This is a mind-bending puzzle game in which new mechanics emerge and interact in strange ways. While it can be overwhelming at times, I find it palatable because the puzzles are short and dense. And as you progress, the earlier levels take on new meaning.

I would recommend checking out the developer's talk about how he used a puzzle solver to design the game. It made me want to try designing a puzzle game...

Best Weirdchamp Narrative Incremental Game: Asbury Pines

While it appears to be a Melvor Idle clone with a heavy dose of Twin Peaks, the game expands into the world of science and historical fiction. It's an over-ambitious story that resolves too neatly for what it is, but I have to admire it from a distance.

I may write about this game at a later date, but if I hadn't, the thing I would focus on is how the game secularizes the ideals of Calvinism into a futuristic Hegelian science fiction overture. And the connection to Twin Peaks is stranger thanks to it.

The developers also admit they used generative AI not only for the pre-development phase but to picture the more grandiose imagery in text. Besides the ethics, I think it explains why the game feels like it's punching above its weight.

A paid game on Steam.

Best Educational Nonogram Game: Juufuutei Raden's Guide for Pixel Museum

Jupiter Corporation collaborating with Raden is a welcome surprise for me. I already admire Raden's expertise in the fine arts, but her choices and the blurbs she gives make her even more impressive.

The five star nonograms are excellent puzzles in of itself. I enjoy the puzzles that secretly guide you, even they seem impossible. That's what logic puzzles are all about.

A paid game on Steam.

Best Dungeon RPG: Quester | Osaka

I was interested in the Quester series because the combat design was made by a TTRPG designer associated with Group SNE.

While the previous game had original ideas but end up feeling rushed, Osaka is a more confident game: it wants you to slowly feel the vertical progression (equipment) by making them rarer to drop. The combat design also feel much tighter -- very little is a pushover, and the game forced me to engage with other mechanics I didn't try out in the original.

If you only want to play one Quester game, make it be this one.

A paid game on Steam.

Best Commercial Incremental Game: Tower Wizard

In a sea of too-short and too-long incremental games, Tower Wizard stands out by switching up mechanics with each level you ascend. The developer's previous game, Magic Archery, is a solid experience but it feels like they had not exploited the possibility space. Here, Tower Wizard satisfies many urges I want in an incremental game without turning it into a debilitating addiction.

I often find it difficult to recommend incremental games on an ethical standpoint, much more so than even gacha games, but this is actually something I can get people to play without feeling guilty.

A paid game on Steam.

Best Husbandgirl Recommendation: a dialect for two

This is a biased recommendation, but even without the conflict of interest, I think it's a genuinely riveting visual novel.

Two robots learn to develop the concept of sexuality in a (mostly) post-human through cultural objects. They may be reinventing the wheel, but their answers are original and as valid as conventional human wisdom.

A free game on Itch.

Best Ongoing Interactive Fiction Series: Lady Thalia

It's fun to be lesbian Arsene Lupin stealing fine art through a mix of social engineering and adventure game mechanics. The character growth is impeccable -- the latest entry as of this writing takes the romantic relationship to an interesting, uncomfortable direction for me.

The series is an easy recommendation to yuri fans who read my blog and are interested in the world of interactive fiction.

A free game series available on Itch.

Best Ongoing Escape Series: Rusty Lake

Initially a Twin Peaks clone, the series manages to develop its own identity as a story about families and trauma. The escape room puzzles are geniuses, and the animation and visuals are stellar.

Unfortunately, following the developer-intended route is kinda annoying. You need to buy at least two games in order to start, and the first few entries are not great. I only started digging into the worldbuilding once I hit Rusty Lake Hotel.

Nevertheless, this is a series I'm now a fan of. I encourage anyone with an interest in escape games to play this if you haven't.

A paid game series available on Steam.

Best Abrasive Narrative Game: OVER

This is a long, overwhelming read: you follow a giant family struggle to be organized and have fun in an amusement park, but it's difficult when one of your relatives is homophobic as fuck.

The game did worse than 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS, but in retrospect I think it deserves a higher place. It fixates on the exhaustion of dealing with relatives so well that it brings up dreaded memories I have with my own family.

A free game available on Itch.

Best Survival Horror Vibes: Saltwrack

Because I've never read the literary influences that shaped this work, this game feels out of the world. The visuals it evokes through the prose is so mesmerizing I forgot I was reading text for a while. The choices also feel like they have weight to it.

A free game available on Itch.

Best War Game Not About War: Wayfarers

It's a long, sometimes aimless game by a debut developer. But it deals with the intersection of the RPGs of yesterday and the military in unique ways. I found myself reflecting on this game a fair bit, even if I don't have the words to describe how magical this game is.

A free game available on Itch

Not 2025 Media

Best Life-Changing Movie: Penda's Fen

This movie feels like everything I want: anti-colonial, queer, coming of age, and just plain weird. I can't believe this was made for TV. I won't say too much, but this is easily one of the best movies ever made.

Best Movie with Iguanas: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

I'll let a passage from this enlightening post explain why this movie is great:

“Herzog said ‘I think we’re going to go long, and then [the producers] are going to make me lose my iguanas—and if they make me lose my iguanas I feel like I can’t be a filmmaker anymore,’

Best Structural Film: (nostalgia)

I've been getting into Hollis Frampton after Peter Greenway shouted him out. The BFI recommends this short as your introduction, and I can see why: it plays with the dissonance of memories and what we're seeing on the screen.

Watching this and some more made me interested in exploring the world of formalism to express myself better. Somehow, I don't feel formalist enough after watching this.

Best Arthouse Movie: A Zed and Two Noughts

My first introduction to Greenway's feature length movies. It shocked me so hard that I now understand the phrase "every frame a painting" is not an exaggeration. This is what he sets out to do, and he accomplished that so well.

Best Twin Peaks season: The Return

Watching this made me feel the hole Lynch made and left in the history of television again. It plays with the expectations of a sequel made years after the fact, and how the evils of American society and history cannot be lifted.

Best Short Documentary: Le Sang des Betes

Great vegan propaganda movie made by someone who isn't vegan.

Best Boomer Documentary on Second Life: Ouvroir, the Movie

Chris Marker, the most prominent essay filmmaker of his period, wants to introduce you to his island and his Photoshopped creation. His iMovie editing has the same energy as Unregistered Hypercam 2 videos, but the ending line sticks with me: "He knew he was watching the end of a world. What are you watching?"

I want to write a piece on his interactive media someday.

Best Slasher Film: Funny Games (1997)

The director may have intended this to be an anti-slasher film, but the excessive violence and tension made it my favorite slasher.

Funny how dialectical it is.

Best Feminist Slasher: Black Christmas

From the director of Baby Geniuses 2, this proto-slasher film brings up perennial women's issues including abortion. It fits with the home invasion narrative too.

I can see why many feminist critics of that era said that slashers were feminizing their male audiences thanks to this movie. It's a horror movie about the incompetence of the police and the violence caused by gender norms.

Best Holiday Movie: Journey to Italy

It's interesting that this movie was what inspired the French New Wave because it's a personal, essayistic tale weaved by a director and his troubled marriage. The writing is excellent, but it's also full of these little tensions that don't get resolved.

And that's the kind of 7/10 work that inspires some good criticism. I was talking to someone on the Critical Distance discord about how Cahiers du Cinema tried to talk about video games, and they said that you gotta start from where they started: writing about 7/10 games consistently and enthusiastically.

I hope we in video games get a Journey to Italy. The closest thing were Undertale and 1000xRESIST, but they didn't create a wave of critic-developer practitioners. Perhaps, games need to be more interestingly mid...

Most Soulful Documentary: The Beaches of Agnes

This title was so unassuming that it took me by surprise that it was about old age and learning to be happy with what you have and lost.

I love The Gleaners and I, which I recommend watching before this one. But this one takes a step into something more personal, more self-empowering. Agnes Verda extracts her colorful life to tell about what she values in filmmaking and relationships.

Like, did you know Varda was the reason that Harrison Ford has a career? People didn't like his acting, but she did.

It makes me wish I knew Varda personally. She was an inspiring figure, and it made me interested in delving back into creative nonfiction again.

Best Queer Expression: Tongues Untied

An anthology of the queer poetry and performances, it is fiery and angry about how the world had abandoned the LGBTQ+ community to HIV/AIDS. It's even more tragic when you learn many performers in this movie passed away shortly after.

Best Queer Documentary: Shinjuku Boys

While older documentaries like Paris is Burning and The Aggressives are not perfect, they do shine a light into historical subcultures that have become smaller albeit alive in today's age.

Shinjuku Boys, on the other hand, somehow (and more likely accidentally) captures the diversity of trans men and gender-nonconforming people working in the host club. The interviewees are free to speak whatever is on their mind, including sexuality and how they approach sex. The story is never dictated by the documentarian but them.

It's a highly refreshing movie that helps me appreciate how LGBTQ+ life in Japan is more diverse than I previously thought. Very recommended.

Best Queer Experience: Blue (1993)

The entire movie is a static blue screen. All you hear is the haunting words of someone who was trying to make something different until he discovers he has HIV/AIDS. It's uncomfortable to watch this movie. I want to not stare at the blue color, but I have to. If I want to listen, I have to watch it.

It breaks my heart that human history is so fucked up.

Best Roguelike: Path of Achra

If you enjoy planning to the extreme, this is the roguelike for you. The skill tree is out in the open: you can express yourself by figuring out which skills to dump points in and what to get next as you progress through the game.

The game also taught me how to parse roguelike synergies better, so I would recommend it to anyone who wants to be better at finding broken combinations.

A paid game on Steam.

Best Abrasive Game: Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator

This game gives me a headache. It is designed to be unfun and overstimulating. As the game progresses, it gets more and more alienating to play the game, which encapsulates what it probably feels to be a day trader.

A paid game on Steam.

Best Escape Game: Abyss of the Sacrifice

While it resembles Ever17, the game is best appreciated as a hardcore escape game that has unique, varied puzzles. In one puzzle, you even learn to make tea and cake for your father. There are many ingenious problems to solve, and the tight narrative pacing feels tight if you're solving puzzles at a nice pace.

I consider this to be the best escape game I've played so far. Anyone who likes this genre of games should seriously play it.

A paid game on Steam.

Best Shmup I Still Can't 1CC Yet: Batsugun

I spent weeks practicing this game, and I can't string the sequence of tricks together. That doesn't mean I dislike playing this game. To the contrary: I love the game to pieces. I learned so much about shmups through this swan song of Toaplan, and I can see how this would influence the later CAVE games.

I'll 1CC you someday. Just you watch.

A paid game on Steam.

Best Idol Game Scenario: Tokyo 7th Sisters

I am not sure if this game deserves to be on this list because I would like to write about this game. There's a post idea in my head about idol media like Trapezium and VTuber graduation, but just in case my procrastination strikes again, I want to say this is one of the best visual novels I've read. Everyone should play it.

It will be remiss of me to not bring up how tragic this year is.

Every month feels like a reassessment of my political commitments as a hobbyist in the games media and development spaces. There are many "masks off" moments about how people actually feel about the second term of the Trump presidency and the global right resurgence. I have many times wondered why I even tried associating with these writers when they hate what I stand for.

I am getting less patient about the reluctance of establishment and legacy media to help highlight, for example, the BDS boycott on Microsoft. Transphobia and misogyny are now the norm. I cannot play games or watch movies without thinking how the cultural contexts have been warped to suit ultra-conservative and fundamentalist agendas.

How is one supposed to have fun and critical insights in a world where every moment spent on this earth is a new nightmare? The brazen usage of generative AI, the closing of libraries, the censoring of queer media in storefronts, prediction markets betting on the lives and deaths of people in atrocities, and more all point to a desire to turn the world into a game for rightwing optimizers.

But this is why I write: to show there is in fact diversity in our world. I think it's important to be hopeful, to write about subculture media and more in a world that wants to narrow our horizons. If I am able to introduce people to untranslated media and thus show that there is another world out there, the hope is that they carry it with them into the adult world and say there are alternatives.

I will never accept that we are heading toward a future where we allow the right to play out their malicious fantasies. I know this is not the "smart play" and I will be seen as immature by many, but that only makes me more stubborn in hoping for a better future.

I know what I'm doing is not enough. That's because I am alone in this enterprise. I hope people who read this diatribe will pick up the writing mantle and join me in writing against the grain.

The world needs more amateur progressive writers than ever against this reactionary deluge that seeks to overwhelm all of media criticism.

Wednesdays is a game for survivors of sexual abuse and those who want to listen to them.

2025-11-15T00:00:00Z

Disclaimers:

This game deals with sexual abuse, incest, and other related traumatic subject matter. While there are no explicit depictions, it remains a tough game to play through and discuss thoroughly. It's okay to take breaks while reading this article or/and especially while playing the game.
I also received this game for free, though I wasn't required to write anything about it. I just like the game, and its message resonates with me a lot.

Introduction:

I have always thought about the purpose of creating trauma-informed games. In my Rosebush piece, I argued that while these games may not convince people unaffected by trauma to empathize with survivors, they render these traumas legible to them:

We cannot deny the existence of these traumas because the games are designed to make us think about them. The conclusions that players reach may not be what the developers anticipated, but they are an understanding that has grown organically from playing the games. Whatever the outcome, they are responses to traumas explored within the games.

The piece implicitly assumes that survivors create these games to help others understand their invisible pain. And for the most part, I think I was on the right track with games like He Fucked The Girl Out of Me where the whole point is to have players to identify with the survivors.

However, after writing it, I realized there is one major tension with this generalization that I have not been able to resolve:

What about the games made by survivors for the people who know them?

Wednesdays is a game directed and written by Pierre Corbinais who introduces himself in a trailer as a "survivor of incest". Developed by The Pixel Hunt (Bury me, my Love) and published by Arte France, the title "seeks to raise awareness about child sexual abuse through a surprisingly hope-filled story."

This may sound at odds with how the general public understands sexual abuse. But as the trailer continues, it took him a journey to recognize that he was a survivor. That recognition made him feel "free, proud, and at ease". He then brings up that

Wednesdays isn't a video game about incest per se. It doesn't address the starting point. It's about the journey.

The journey the game begins on is disorienting: after agreeing to dialog boxes detailing content warnings and the ability to skip scenes, you see a character turn on the computer and start playing a fictional game called Orco Park.

A friendly orca greets us:

Both my partner and I were distraught. We weren't expecting a pastel-colored rendition of RollerCoaster Tycoon on the TV screen at all.

Orco then tells us that building an attraction will bring back memories for Timothée, our player character. Plop a merry-go-round or any other carnival attractions on the map and you'll not only gain income but experience a flashback of events from his life.

To me, it was obvious that this fictional game was complicit in so far that it was used as a tool to facilitate the sexual abuse. The player character was digging through his memories via the game's mechanics. I wasn't sure about the framing because it felt disarming.

Or rather, it felt too ... welcoming.

As my partner and me played the game, we were skeptical about the way the game approached the subject matter. After each episode, we're always returning to Orco Park, unlocking new attractions and therefore new memories.

These intermissions with the theme park are sparse, but you can pick up trash and get more shells to unlock more chapters. Or just make the park visitors happier. As far as I can tell, there is no actual simulation element, but it is something you can do before you dive into the next chapter.

Besides serving as a nice distraction, the trigger warnings are all diegetically included in the amusement park descriptions. Colorful exclamation marks warn players about the content within while question marks are more suggestive. Everything is packaged in these warm colors and kid-friendly fonts.

Much of this was off-putting to us. It evoked my skepticism about the idea that cozy and wholesome games need to hold their players' hands. I'm accustomed to games that educate me about trauma through pain, so this game felt like eating cotton candy. After reading an intense chapter, it was discomforting to hear cheery music play.

But I could not help but be pulled in by this tension—a twee aesthetic diving into the abyss of memories. Orco is earnestly sincere. There is no twist that makes the fictional game horrifying. We didn't know what we were getting into.

Then, I saw an inkling of the genius behind this game: Orco started to regain his memories of Tim playing the game. He was practically a sentient virtual buddy, someone who remembered Tim fondly and hadn't seen him in a long time. But as mascot characters tended to be, he's rather oblivious about what had happened and naively believes he was helping to uncover pleasant childhood memories.

And he was responding in abject horror, just like us.

But before I say more about Orco, I must also stress that he isn't too off the mark in describing the state of Tim's memories. His memories are not in chronological order: we jump between his earliest memories with Tim's grandmother and her death. Stories of children and teenagers discovering their sexuality intertwine with tales of abuse, joy, and trauma.

And there are some fun memories in the mix too: cousins discussing masturbation, a fling with an older woman, fourth grade students derailing a class with sex jokes, and an elaborate playdate where Tim and a friend pretended to be soldiers that ended with a blowjob. Very quickly, a common throughline emerges in this game: children exploring their genitalia does not necessarily mean they are being abused, but they are growing up and beginning to understand the complexities of sexuality and gender.

It is these developments that help define our coming of age. The repression of these heartwarming conversations and the censorship of traumatic experiences make it difficult to talk about child sexuality at all.

And this difficulty is why I think it's important that the game rarely gives the player control of Tim in these memories. The staff discusses their design decisions like this:

We chose not to let players be the victim. Why that? Because games are about letting players interact and make choices and, by definition, sexual abuse survivors didn’t have any choice. They didn’t consent in any way to what happened to them so we figured that “playing” the victim was not the right choice.

Or course, there was no way we would make a game in which you would embody an abuser. So we thought about another option: play the other ones.

We are Tim's grandmother, childhood friends, teacher, cousins, love interests, and parents. These characters have interiority, and their dialogue choices reflect their own thoughts about Tim instead of the player's overall knowledge.

It's possible to read this game as a kind of mystery not about what had happened but about what he's thinking and how we should respond to him. One interesting chapter has us play as his girlfriend who wants to have a child with him.

Tim pushes back on the idea, and his girlfriend admits that her reasoning is flawed (social pressure and "the future"). However, there is a line that she (and the player) can cross by asking him if his aversion to having children stems from what happened to him.

The characters you play, especially his loved ones, don't really know how to respond or understand him. Not only does everyone have their own shit going on, but it's difficult to find the right words. And that's assuming if people were aware of what had happened. Indeed, I didn't realize when the abuse was happening because we were seeing Tim through other people's eyes, and he just looked like a "normal" kid.

Normalcy is not just a regime that enforces toxic standards on everyone; it is also a structure that conceals harm and absolves abusers. It silences survivors and suggests that everything is under control as long as we view people as "normal" and "innocent".

I was horrified to learn that I, too, had failed to recognize the signs of sexual abuse. The clues were already there, but I was assuming that innocence existed. My vigilance was a sham.

And I identified not with the survivor but with the relatives and friends who learned about the abuse. My game designer brain knew that these choices would lead to the same endstate, but I was trying very hard to respond to Tim in the words of these characters. One instance was exploding with question dialog choices: the player and the character wanted to know the details, but how much did they need to know in order to do something for Tim?

This delicate situation was unique to me in the context of video games, yet I found it familiar. Close friends have confided in me about trauma and abuse, and the game reminded me of how hard my brain worked to say something productive instead of a distasteful platitude. Having been on both ends of the situation, I recognize its gravity. No matter how many times I've been in this situation, though, I don't think I will ever find it easy.

It pains me to realize that I'm no different from Orco, the friendly mascot of Orco Park. My anger is as immature as the little guy's, but it's the most I can do when I find out my friends are hurt.

I think that's why I felt irrationally irritated by the beginning of the game. His smile and genteel behavior are similar to what I do when a friend who needs someone to talk to DMs me out of the blue. My vitriol toward Orco was in fact a secret form of self-flagellation.

But Wednesdays doesn't criticize Orco nor the game he belongs to. Actually, it portrays them as Tim's childhood friends who care about his well-being.

Yes, the game was the excuse for everything that had happened. But Orco could respond in anger in behalf of Tim. He believed in him.

In one memory, a survivor was painting Tim's likeness, and the player's choices could change the appearance of the portrait. They discussed the lawsuit they filed against their brother who had molested them. Their family did not believe them and supported their brother instead. Nevertheless, they persevered in order to reveal how many people he had abused.

They were doing it for the silenced survivors. They believed that others had been harmed, which they felt justified this expensive lawsuit.

Friends and loved ones can only do so much when they learn about abuse allegations, and the scope of the problem is probably larger than one might want to admit. However, the game stresses that believing the voices of these survivors is the most important thing.

The Werner Herzog in me wants to denigrate myself by lamenting how stupid and worthless the orca is, but ultimately, the game states that he's doing the best job ever. He listens, he's there for Tim, and he wants what's best for him.

Isn't that the most important thing: to listen?

As soon as my partner and I finished the game, they said it was "instructive." They didn't mean it was didactic or educational, as in, it didn't teach you something. They meant that it revealed something about themselves.

How much do we truly listen to, care about, and help those who are recovering?

Wednesdays is, among many things, an optimistic game about recovery and discussion. The things we can't talk about always stay with us. Even children can sense that something is wrong with the way we fail to show intimacy and affection. This is all the more reason we should talk about abuse and sexuality.

Unfortunately, there are no suitable venues for nuanced discussions. The world is currently facing an assault on public spaces by rightwingers, and the private spaces we have are owned by corporations and billionaires who are happy to facilitate fascism.

No wonder it's hard to listen: all the noise of LLM-generated articles and rightwing propaganda makes it difficult to find any useful resources. I didn't know about the game until I received a review code, even though I occassionally look for this kind of stuff.

But that makes listening to survivors all the more vital: it is an ongoing process that reminds us that we will never be able to fully understand the details and should also cause us to reflect on the violent structures that allow this to happen. Believing is not just something you say, it's something you do and think.

And I see this clearly in Orco, a talking orca from a fictional children's game. He is a role model for children because he is friendly and listens to them. He never breaks character because he's always listening to and thinking about Tim.

When I compare myself to Orco, I realize that I still have a long way to go. Recovery is not something the survivor does alone but with the help of others. Orco helped Tim, and I want to do the same and follow in his footsteps.

The characters in Wednesdays are all trying their best to support Tim. Their help isn't perfect, but the player always steers the conversation and decides what to do next. The player acts as a listener, responding as best they can.

This intimacy, for lack of a better word, is what's needed. As listeners, we must continually ask ourselves what we should do next. There will be subtle things that we’ll never notice — I never thought how a survivor of child abuse might recoil at changing the diaper of a baby — but they are details worth thinking about as listeners and survivors create spaces together and learn from each other. This is not a game about feeling shit and horrified by child abuse. It's about establishing lines of communication and looking forward to a better future.

I want to hope alongside the survivors for a world where the concept of sexual abuse no longer exists. I need to be a better listener, not just someone who can identify trauma. There's much to learn and do before I can be as reliable as a childhood game mascot holding the player's hand as they navigate the gallery of memories.

Wednesdays is a genuinely beautiful game. Thomas Brasdefer's translation of the French is so good that it reads as if it were originally written in English. It is available on Steam and itch.io. I hope people play it.

魔法少女ノ魔女裁判 (Mahou Shoujo no Majo Saiban) and Death Game Mysteries as Spaces for Mental Health Discussions

2025-10-03T00:00:00Z

There was a time when death games were intended for teenagers. Before Squid Game, The Hunger Games movie adaptations, and Among Us captured the broader public's imagination, works like Mirai Nikki (trans. Future Diary), Battle Royale, and Danganronpa remained in the domain of middle and high schoolers. These stories often explored the traumas and anxieties that teenagers experience in a failing society.

In particular, the film adaptation of Battle Royale took liberties with the ending: the director called out to the youth watching his movie to "run" from adult society. Both the novel and the film appealed to the punk, anti-establishment sensibilities of children and told adults to fuck off.

While the genre is still popular with kids, I think its broader appeal has caused it to lose some of its specificity with teenagers. You certainly aren't thinking about big themes while playing Among Us, and the recent mainstream death games featuring adults with their general anticapitalist themes mean teenage issues get less focus.

There's something to be said about how genres and tropes associated with young adults have now been embraced by the general public. These fandoms have been overrun by adults and children who just want to have fun, which isn't a crime at all. But there's a tinge of tragedy when fandom spaces have become so commercialized that everyone can participate in it and the privacy of teenagers simply disappears.

But there are people who still believe in the idea of death games as a space for teenagers to address their issues.

Enter 魔法少女ノ魔女裁判 (Mahou Shoujo no Majo Saiban, henceforth ManoSaba), a crowdfunded visual novel by Acacia and Re,AER released in 18th July, 2025. Thirteen girls with magical powers are trapped on an island with a vigilant owl mascot and a prison warden. They sleep in separate cells, wondering when the next murder will occur. The perpetrator upon killing someone transforms into a witch: an undying and all-powerful version of themselves.

The player follows Sakuraba Ema, a self-deprecating girl who was once the target of bullying at school. She has been trying to suppress her darker side, which desires the death of everyone. Even though she feels wronged by the world and she doesn't know how to socialize, she tries her best to make friends in this brutish setting.

There are too many characters to introduce, but a few should be highlighted. Her close companions include Tachibana Sherry, a blue-haired, extremely happy-go-lucky detective, and Tono Hanna, a girl who dresses up in lavish green Gothic attire. The three of them spend so much time together that they're seen as a trio by the other characters who have their own pairings.

This diverse cast fits with the expectations of what a post-Danganronpa death game mystery should feel like: the characters are color-coded, and their archetypes are easily recognizable from their speech patterns. When the characters inevitably commit murder, their magic and personalities often play a role in what happens. Everything is tuned properly to keep the fast pace going.

In this regard, ManoSaba has studied its predecessors. It effectively explains the stakes of the mystery and story by emphasizing character traits and reducing downtime commonly found in earlier games. There is virtually no interactivity in the investigation sections. When players click on a highlighted section of the map, the characters immediately investigate and find relevant clues to enter into their smartphone apps.

The only real element of interactivity comes in the form of trials. Like the class trials in Danganronpa, the witch trials in ManoSaba are about searching for contradictions in witness statements and offering alternative interpretations.

This is where the game both shines and falls short. Since it has abandoned every other element found in death game mysteries, the weight of the storytelling hinges on how interesting and exciting the reveals are. The banter between the characters is fun to listen to; the many objections are consistent with the characters' voices, and I found myself intentionally going for wrong interjections to hear the characters' responses. These high-stakes trial sections reveal a great deal about the characters' personalities, so it's worth taking the time to listen to how they formulate their hypotheses.

At the same time, the mysteries are often too limited in scope to be memorable. While a few of the cases has some amusing murder methods, many cases don't have strong twists and turns. A few early cases bypass the whodunit problem altogether: either the perpetrator is immediately identified as suspicious because they lack an alibi, or the method is so specific that only one person could have carried it out. The motives are weak, though one could argue that they are diegetic: the characters lose control as they get closer to becoming witches. Weaker cases aside, the better cases don't have strong climaxes too. There's no mind-blowing twist that will elicit a standing ovation. All of the cases are just okay.

Well, except for one. The second case involves a character whose introduction is so poorly written that it seems as if the writers invented transphobia from first principles. That plot thread is also dropped unceremoniously in later parts of the game. The most charitable interpretation is that there were too many writers in the room, and one of them wanted to include gender-bender comedy. This inappropriate addition to what is honestly an interesting character caused many characters, including Ema, to treat her poorly. That scene, among the rather weak set of mysteries, gave me a bad first impression of the work.

But as I spent time reading the troubled backstories of Ema and her friends, the more my thoughts on the game have shifted. The game attempts to comment on trauma within the context of contrived death game mysteries and the history of persecution of witches.

While murder is obviously an objectionable act, the irony of witches putting other witches on trial is salient. The court is a sham, forcing the characters to take on the responsibility of finding the witch themselves. Many of their horrendous acts result from something triggering their trauma in this isolated setting. The cast is full of survivors of violence, and their magical powers often make existing societal harms worse and more apparent.

Taken as a whole, the work is less the yuri death game mystery I thought I would get and more of an indictment of society's inability to deal with children growing up. In a sense, the characters are persecuted like historical witches for not fitting in or for failing to live up to societal standards. They need to be quarantined and put into a death game supported by the state in order to whittle out witches from society.

So rather than being reminded of how derivative ManoSaba is of Danganronpa, I was more reminded of the sociopolitical and psychiatric dimensions of works like Battle Royale. The work is deeply concerned about the overall mental health of Japanese teenagers and how structural pressures and catastrophic events hinder their development. Traumatic memories are repressed, and unproductive coping techniques are formed. This environment leaves no room for discussing trauma. ManoSaba thus prefers to blast apart the techniques that let them avoid trigger points. If Danganronpa V3 fears how mysteries can unravel the trauma of its characters and cause psychological harm, ManoSaba recognizes confronting trauma and bringing it into the public forum is the only way to move forward.

This means the work cannot accept defense mechanisms like sublimation where people transform negative impulses into productive and useful actions. Instead, it strips them away, forcing the characters to look into their trauma in the eye. They must recognize their vulnerabilities and weaknesses and talk about them as openly as possible, even if the traumas are contingently historical.

I think this is what makes ManoSaba uniquely old and new school. The dystopia isn't an imagined authoritarian state, but rather it's the current censorship of mental health issues. They don't have the space to explore this at all. The only way to address these issues is through the lens of a witch hunt: an unfair process, sure, but it's a step toward actually discussing the problems teenagers face.

In a way, ManoSaba seems to acknowledge that the death game mystery genre is not the best place to discuss mental health, but it's still a safe space. Like other genre works, the game sensationalizes violence and trauma. However, because this genre is one of the few spaces where one can reasonably expect mental health and trauma exploration, the fandom it creates ends up being vital to teenagers who want to talk about this subject matter.

This is why the yuri elements are necessary. The game focuses more on developing interactions between characters than on the mystery, sometimes at the expense of the plot. The lesbian relationships help players understand the mental health aspects of the game.

Indeed, shipping characters, drawing fanart, and writing fanfiction are ways players make sense of the characters' personalities and find their own cathartic answers to the traumas explored.

After playing the game, I spent a few hours looking at fanart of my favorite pairings. Much of it deals with what happened in the story and speculates about the afterlife and their regrets. The characters' connections are so profound that I think it makes sense for people to explore and figure out what they mean.

The cute relationships depicted in the game and by its fans allow a wider, safer discussion on trauma and violence. When fans speculate about how one character will behave toward another, they're really thinking about how these characters can reconcile their past hurts. It gives players some space to exercise their creativity and think about how to find relationships in this troubled present. This exercise is, I think, healthy and very different from other fandoms of death games I've seen.

That's why I'm glad this game is popular among teenagers. It gives them an opportunity to think about the implications of the characters in their own terms. As a 30-year-old-something, I feel weird playing a game aimed at such a young demographic. However, it also reminds me of the anti-authoritarian young adult works I enjoyed and how important they were in developing my identity.

Once it's translated into English, I can see this game becoming the voice of teenagers all over the world. Although there are some issues with the game, I think its message is significant enough for teenagers to resonate with it. We still live in a world where mental health problems are recognized, yet still stigmatized. Until we learn how to talk about mental health, death game mysteries like ManoSaba will carve out a space to do it.

And ManoSaba does a pretty good job at it. It earnestly explodes how cagey we are about expressing ourselves, it makes us understand how teenagers suffer, and it encourages us to find love amidst the havoc it created. It may not be an exaggeration to say that this work affirms what it means to be a teenager in face of adult society the best since the film adaptation of Battle Royale.

I'm not a young adult by any measure, but I remember how difficult it was to find contemporary works that spoke to me. The works that resonated with me were older, and by the time more relevant dystopian works were published, I had other concerns besides alienation and mental health issues. I can but only reflect on how much of the nastiness is a result of not having a space to talk about this kind of stuff. I hope this game fulfills that purpose for my younger readers because playing ManoSaba made me jealous of the catharsis experienced by the younger Japanese and Chinese players.

How the Religious Right Censor Morally Objectionable Content to Target Queer and Adult Media

2025-07-27T00:00:00Z

In 2009, the Japanese adult game industry came under deep scrutiny when the Belfast Telegraph, a Northern Irish newspaper, reported that citizens of Ireland and the UK could purchase Rapelay, an Illusion Soft game in which the player character stalks and rapes a family. Even though the game could only be sold in Japan, this caused major upheaval in the UK, the US, and later, Australia, where a group called the Women's Forum Australia led the charge to censor the game.

In page 27 of Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls edited by Melissa Tankard Reist for the group, she writes:

Some of us worked to ban a Japanese rape-simulator game that was based on players raping a mother and her two young daughters, one of whom was ten and carrying a teddy bear. The website described the game as 'a new type [of] molesting game with more beautiful 3D images ... Players can get the new excitement like never before.' We succeeded in outlawing its download in Australia.

Illusion Soft was bewildered by the world's response. To them, they were clearly following the rules established by Japanese regulators and that they had no intention to sell their game overseas. Although they felt unfairly singled out by international campaigns, they ultimately removed references to their game from their store page in order to prevent the situation from worsening.

In 2025, No Mercy, an adult video game developed by Zerat Games, was at the center of a successful Change.org petition that called for its censorship. An Australian radical feminist group, Collective Shout, organized the petition and was able to garner almost 70,000 supporters because they claimed that "there appears to be no obstacles in the way of any child accessing the game" and it "features deeply disturbing pornographic depictions of rape and incest as entertainment." The Change.org UK Facebook page later announced the removal of the game with glee.

Before the developers voluntarily withdrew the game, it was already inaccessible in Australia, Canada, and the UK. In a post announcing their withdrawal from the store, the developers criticized the media for covering the game in the first place since the developers saw the game as simply a fetish game for people with these fetishes:

Please consider—would anyone who wasn't looking for such content hear about this game if it weren't for hundreds of articles, petitions, and statements from content creators? After all, if someone believed that this game shouldn't be available in their country, they could have handled it quietly; they could have reported the matter to the authorities. Meanwhile, websites used the trending topic for clicks, organizations placed links to fundraisers under petitions, and content creators made videos that garnered more views. The result of all this was that the game suddenly went from around 1,000 visits to 100 times more in those days. There are certainly events that need to be publicized quickly, when someone is actually being harmed and we can save someone. Was it really necessary in this case, for those few views and extra money for fundraisers?

Similar to Illusion Soft, the developers said that they did not want to cause any further problems and decided to leave Steam.

But Collective Shout thought this wasn't enough. In an open letter addressed to executives of credit card and companies payment processors with relationships to Steam and itch.io,

However we have since discovered hundreds of other games featuring rape, incest and child sexual abuse on both Steam and Itch.io. Our research has shown many of these games would breach Australian classification laws. Most of the content found within the games, including the graphics and the developers descriptions, are too distressing for us to make public.

Scrolling down, one will find a familiar name on the top of the list of people who wrote this open letter: "Melinda Tankard Reist, Movement Director, Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation".

The main concern of both groups led by Tankard-Reist was the exploitation of young women in mainstream Western culture. This is, I think, a legitimate feminist cause. However, upon further examination, it becomes evident that this noble objective is, in reality, an attempt to censor sexuality rooted in deeply conservative, puritanical beliefs.

In a March 2010 interview with the Australian Prebysterian, Tankard-Reist rehashed her victories censoring Rapelay in Australia ("That was as a result of one complaint") and claimed, among many questionable things, that

Freedom has been distorted. Freedom for girls now has come to mean being publically sexual, to be what I call “service stations” or “pleasure delivery centres” for boys. There is very little concern here about real intimacy and connection. It is all about their ability to please boys. We see it during schoolies week, where this is the role that girls are expected to play. Girls have got the message that if they want to be seen as mature, free and liberated, they should wrap their legs around a pole and expose their bodies in public to please boys. What a tragedy and a distortion of the original message of women’s dignity and freedom!

Tankard-Reist has also written Giving Sorrow Words: Women's Stories of Grief After Abortion. The book description reads:

I wish someone had said, 'There would be losses having a baby, but don't underestimate the loss of having an abortion.'
Abortion has been presented as a simple procedure that allows women to put the crisis of an unintended pregnancy behind them. The women in this book were told they'd be able to get on with their lives after abortion. But their lives would never be the same.

Giving Sorrow Words includes the personal accounts of 18 women who had abortions and draws on the experiences of more than 200 others. These women share their stories of personal suffering and loss -- stories that have often gone unheard in a society eager to dismiss abortion-related trauma.

Australian journalist and women's rights advocate Melinda Tankard Reist examines the experiences of women, including the lack of resources and support, the misinformation and lack of informed consent, and the intension pressure and coercion often applied by partners, parents and society in general to force women into unwanted abortions.

This may come as a surprise to people who know basic feminist history until one learns that Tankard-Reist refers to herself as a "pro-life feminist", the very same label Sarah Palin used a long time ago. In an insightful profile by Rachel Hills for the Australian periodical, The Age, Leslie Cannold, a pro-reproductive control activist and "regular sparring partner", suggests that Tankard-Reist's wide reach is only possible if we don't know everything she does. Hills continued:

Tankard Reist worked as a media and bioethics adviser for former Tasmanian senator Brian Harradine for 12 years, during which time he successfully blocked and continued to campaign against the abortion drug RU486. She also personally opposed changes to legislation that would have required pro-life pregnancy-counselling services to disclose their affiliations in their advertising.

For context, the late Brian Harradine was a socially conservative, Catholic politician who opposed both homosexuality and abortion. Bernard Keane in Crikey has an excellent short article about his "lethal legacy"":

As an ardent anti-choice campaigner, Harradine did everything he could in his 30 years in the Senate to undermine women’s right to safe abortion. In particular, he used his role as a balance-of-power senator to negotiate deals to undermine access to abortion with both the Keating and Howard governments. Tony Abbott’s ministerial ban on medical abortion pill RU486 had its genesis in a deal between the Howard government and Harradine for his support on the sale of Telstra. But far more damaging was another aspect of the Telstra deal: his successful attempt to stop Australian aid being directed toward family planning of any kind.

These guidelines prohibited Australian foreign aid for abortion, causing unnecessary suffering for many people in recipient countries. They were rescinded in 2009 because they were "ridiculous and repugnant."

And in 2019, Caroline de Costa, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology, claimed that it was time to lift the medical restrictions on RU486 (mifepristone) because acquiring the drug remained difficult even after Harradine's legislation was overturned in 2006. It wasn't until 2023 that doctors and nurses could finally prescribe RU486 without specialist certification.

While it is certainly depressing to read about how many people had suffered at the hands of this politician, it must be stressed that his thinking was deeply religious and dogmatic. Brian Greig, a former Australian politician who sat across him, wrote about him for WA Today:

As with most religious crusaders in Australia, Harradine would never make reference to God, Jesus, the Bible, Christianity or the Church. All of his arguments, discussions, view points and values were expressed as secular, civil concerns. It didn’t matter whether he was railing against pornography, abortion, birth control, same-sex marriage, euthanasia or stem cell research, Harradine would camouflage his catholic zeal with the language of every day concern. He saw it as his duty to launder dogmatic Church positions into every day thinking and to normalize religious positions into common, unchallenged acceptability.

As if foreshadowing what would later happen in itch.io, Greig continued his reflection:

A couple of punky-looking lesbian authors, one with pink hair, talked enthusiastically about their erotic writings and the valid place of adult literature in the over 18 community.
Harradine looked on in bewilderment as they explained their craft and its benefit to women’s sex lives before responding with some derisory condemnation of “porn” and its “harmful effects.”

The young women were not going to accept Harradine’s assertion without some push-back, so one of them leaned into her microphone and stated to say, “Senator Harradine, I completely respect your right to hold your religious views, however….” but there was no way she could finish her sentence.

Harradine exploded. Thundering into his microphone in a way that reverberated around the small meeting room he angrily discharged that, “My personal religious views have absolutely NOTHING to do with my views on this legislation!!!”

The two women sat back in their chairs stunned by the volume and fury, perhaps wondering what on earth had triggered such an aggressive reaction. The whole tableau was so absurd I had to bite my bottom lip so as not to burst out laughing, but Harradine had won the point. The women backed off. No-one, ever, would get away with questioning Harradine's underlying religious motivations.

Now that we have this context, let's return to Tankard-Reist. Like Harradine, she disguises her religious views in the language of feminism. Her views that girls were becoming too sexually promiscuous make much more sense when couched in religious dogma rather than feminist politics.

She and the group clearly want to create a world where girls cannot express themselves sexually. But as Valens writes in a now-deleted Waypoint article, previous attempts by Collective Shout to ban big titles like Detroit: Become Human for child abuse made little sense. They used misleading language to suggest that something bad was happening, but they didn't find much success until they targeted No Mercy.

It's hard to say whether Tankard-Reist remembers Rapelay and how successful the global campaign against it was. But the playbook is practically the same: choose a game that is deeply morally objectionable and that very few people will defend in public, and stir up controversy over it. Soon, businesses that fear they might not comply with the rules will follow suit. Many well-intentioned people would then create petitions and organize movements against the game, which would create a chilling effect for future companies.

This is all a religious crusade from the very beginning, and I think many people played into it without realizing it.

Let's be honest: many people care about the censorship in Itch because it screwed over many queer creators. I don't know if forcing Itch to delist and suspend so many adult works was part of the plan (I believe they just wanted to remove a few titles), but this approach aligns with their strategy, and Itch has identified their efforts to convince payment processors as a motivating factor. Their actions, coupled with Itch's panicked response, made their intentions more obvious. One could say that they might have flown too close to the sun.

Meanwhile, there is rarely any sympathy for adult media, especially ones with problematic fetishes. I hesitate defending the likes of Rapelay as I too find it morally objectionable. This is why this tactic works: it's hard to sign your name to a statement saying that fictional rape is an artistic endeavor that may not appeal to you, but it's still art.

Instead, I want to show that so-called grassroots movements to ban morally objectionable content often have ties to reactionary movements. The object of controversy doesn't have to be Rapelay or No Mercy; it could be anything that most people might deem reprehensible and that just happens to be on the storefront. This makes it possible for groups like Collective Shout to sneak in their extremist religious views and create a chilling effect for everyone.

This explains how adult media censorship can intersect with queer media censorship, even when said queer media is safe for work. Queer people are already viewed as too sexual by conservatives, and when groups with ties to the far right view sexuality as a threat, the livelihoods of queer people become tied to pornographic media. The right will not distinguish games that explore sex work and queer identity, like He Fucked the Girl Out of Me, from pornography. While it may be possible to distinguish obscenity from art in some philosophical forum, this idea is fundamentally absurd in practice. The right is more than happy to take down queer art and pornography simultaneously.

In an age of fascist censorship, it doesn't matter if one can argue that some queer media has XYZ artistic value. It's just porn to these religious dogmatists; they're going after anything they deem to be degenerate art. This is a religious, moral crusade taking down any form of media that expresses sexuality and gender. That includes porn, and that includes queer art.

I would rather not write this article. Like, I'm just a subculture media blogger and indie game developer affected by the Itch crap. I want to go sob in my bedroom or something, not research some ridiculous Australian group (I haven't even brought up how the Women's Forum Australia had been more visibly anti-trans lately, were freaking about wi-fi in schools, and successfully pulled a sex ed book from circulation). However, I recognize that I'm one of the few people who remembers Rapelay. To this day, I still dislike that game, and you won't see me defending its artistic value.

That said, I still believe games like this one should be uploaded to storefronts like this one. Ideally, the end-user should be able to make informed choices in what titles should be visible to them or not. But in many sites that host adult content, creators can't properly tag media like Rapelay. The content warning tags we use to help people filter out unwanted games are being weaponized by right-wing organizations to target specific adult games. The current best practice for many adult media spaces is to remove content warning tags, even though the purpose is to help people avoid works that upset or offend them. Queer media creators are also removing tags to avoid being banned. As a result, readers will increasingly be jumpscared by triggering content they should have been warned about earlier just so the work can survive the onslaught of payment processors.

And like, many of the problems surrounding sexual violence stem from conservatives controlling sexual education. For example, you can watch John Oliver discuss how poor sex education is in the US. We never received adequate education on contraceptives, consent, and sexuality. The same people who claim to care about children also oppose homosexuality and abortion.

Shouldn't we start talking about sex more openly? Fetishes, too? And like, how did these groups even find games like Rapelay and No Mercy? There's a lot of random porn games you have to dig through. They're meant for people with these fetishes, not for the general public. Indeed, it's disturbing that these so-called "feminist" groups are ones who keep bringing up these games to the public. They want to fearmonger about the decline of Western culture and the harms of pornography, so they can silently propagate their extremist views into the public.

So, I think we're all playing into their game, even though we acknowledge that they threaten queer expression. They know we have different opinions about sexuality and gender and how to address them. They're exploiting our fears and anxieties to help them achieve their reactionary goals. This became apparent when they started indirectly censoring queer media that is perfectly acceptable by societal standards.

I am deeply concerned that this strategy will continue being effective as long as they don't tackle obviously "good" projects. Whatever the outcome of this itch.io meltdown will be, I want people to recognize that this strategy can happen again and executed by not only this group but by other groups. We have to be resilient and also stand alongside pornography, even ones that we may consider morally objectionable. If they fall, we fall too.

There is no future for video games without porn games. This is what the right intuitively gets: if they are allowed to freely determine what is obscene or not, then we have no choice but to follow their repressive rules. Instead of taking their nonsense at face value, let's talk about sex, an activity we have mixed feelings about. It's a complicated topic, sure, but it's better than reducing it to nothing and letting the fascists dictate the terms of our sexuality.

On itch.io removing adult games and what to learn from it

2025-07-24T00:00:00Z

While in a Japanese language class learning how to apologize in a business context, I checked my phone out of boredom and saw that people were reporting that their adult and queer games on itch.io were being shadowbanned and removed. Nothing I learned stuck in my head. I couldn't stop thinking about how the right had taken over the internet and how to hide my panic attack from the classroom.

The idea that Itch might fall to right-wing pressures and payment processors is nothing new. In 2021, Ana Valens wrote a popular article suggesting this outcome. She highlighted the critical vulnerabilities that Epic had during the infamous Epic vs. Apple lawsuit debacle. Agreeing with a game developer, she stressed that the lack of a commons allowed marketplaces like Itch to thrive but only if they adhere to the arbitrary rules of payment processors. After all, if the internet was actually a healthy commons, we wouldn't need spaces like Steam or Itch.

I like to think that I have taken this idea to heart. However, after all these years of writing about subculture media, including adult media, the sudden shadow-banning and erasure of adult Itch games still comes as a shock. I have not, in fact, internalized this idea.

As of this writing, itch.io has released a statement explaining their actions. They highlighted Collective Shout, a radical feminist organization that forced Steam to remove adult games from its platform, for pressuring payment processors into scrutinizing itch's adult games.

Some people may believe this is done for the greater good of children or something. However, as far as I can tell, many games that are removed or made inaccessible on itch are unlikely to cause harm. Take ebihime's visual novel Sweetest Monster Refrain: This game was only available on Itch, and it didn't feature any problematic content, yet it was suspended anyway. A majority of Nadia Nova's games is also removed without any reason explaining why as well. And we know that certain tags like "erotic" have caused games to be de-indexed from the page (i.e. shadowban). My own game submitted for Toxic Yuri VN Jam, Uranium Gays, is still available but it cannot be searched through ordinary means -- until I remove the "erotic" tag anyway. And as far as I can tell, developers whose games have been suspended cannot withdraw their money. This may be an unintended side effect of the itch codebase.

To me, all of these actions seem like hasty measures to satisfy payment processors' demands. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for why some games get suspended while others are okay. itch must also be taken aback by this event, as they are inconsistent in what they consider to be removable games.

The most charitable interpretation of the events I have is that they were forced to remove a few games in order to save the rest of the catalog. A kind of trolley experiment with queer games as the sacrifice. From a utilitarian standpoint, they may have made the best choice. It still sucks.

And I believe their lack of communication exacerbated some of the chaos. But I reserve most of my anger toward payment processors and right-wing lobbying groups like Collective Shout.

While it's important to sign petitions and show solidarity with fellow adult game creators, this raises the question: What will the future of the internet be like if adult game creators can't depend on itch?

I'm not really sure. Before all this happened, I was enjoying the Toxic Yuri VN Jam. There were many high-quality titles that deserved to be discussed, so I was preparing to write an article introducing the jam to my readers. I would still like to make that happen. However, it's concerning that a game I played could disappear tomorrow due to payment processors wanting to scrub even free queer games from the site.

And I think the fundamental problem of queerness and sexuality being considered something to be "cleaned away" by payment processors and right-wing groups makes it really difficult to find a solution that works under capitalism. It doesn't matter if a new platform emerges to meet our needs. That platform needs a way to pay adult media creators, and that means they have to rely on the same payment processors that fucked us over. It's just another solution that can easily be taken over by the right, as happened with itch and Steam.

The same could happen to other platforms like Discord and BlueSky. We should all be concerned about carving out a new future.

I want a future where we don't have to rely on platforms like itch or payment processors to sell or distribute our queer porn games. I draw a lot of inspiration from webrings. For example, the Yuri EVN Webring has introduced many players and developers to games they wouldn't have known about otherwise.

And I also find blogging about the queer games I've enjoyed highly rewarding. It's also helpful in guiding people to discover more works. It's great to develop a community you can trust to find good games, and perhaps collaborate to create something special.

There is, of course, one glaring problem with this utopian worldview: we all depend on money to subsist. Many queer developers make porn games in the first place to acquire some money for food and shelter. But I think it's important to collect ourselves into co-ops and mutual collectives to help each other out. We are not simply selling our games all by ourselves; we are in a community, fractured it may be right now. I want more things like the Queer Game Bundle to happen outside of itch.io.

I think a world like this wouldn't need itch.io, Steam, or any other storefront. We would be helping each other out by writing about and building on each other's works. Now more than ever, we need a giant collective looking out for each other.

Until then, we should focus on our immediate tasks. If there are games that need to be archived, I recommend using IF Archive for visual novels and interactive fiction. The Internet Archive may be useful for storing non-IF/VN games too.

And much as I hate to admit it, building a personal website is essentially a form of future-proofing. If your hosting service turns out to be an asshet, you can always move your website elsewhere without losing much progress. If you just want to blog, I recommend trying out Strawberry Starter (unironically linking to the Itch page). Make sure to also get a blogroll going, so we can all link to each other. An actual webring would be sick too.

Once everything is sorted out, I think we should return to developing and critiquing games. While I don't want to downplay this developing story, it's important to find joy in what we're doing as developers and players. If that means making more queer porn games to stick it to the right, I'm all for it, because I'm going to do the same.

This is going to take a while. There's still a part of me that wonders how I'm going to create queer games when so much is being censored. But that's also what motivates me to create more. It's important to create and discuss. While there are many great guides on how to resist the current right-wing censorship project through offline preservation, I also believe that creating and sharing art is equally important.

It's fine to get depressed and angry over this, but I also believe that we should also be fighting for hope. No matter where itch stands, I think we've relied on the site for too long. We need better spaces to distribute our queer porn games.

I don't want another situation like what happened with itch or Steam. I'm tired of reading about storefronts banning pornographic games because of right-wing nonsense. We need a better way to distribute online.

I'm still wondering what I can do. I'd like to create a chained game anthology with others, but now that itch is off the table, I need to think about where I could host the game. Maybe I should have thought about that sooner instead of always resorting to itch.

Sure, it's a lot of work, but I want to preserve our games and not allow any corporation to censor them. While the convenience of platforms like itch is nice and will be missed, I'm going to try hosting the games on archival and database websites. That way, we can strive for a better future.

I want to be constructive during these times of despair. I really do. I don't want to let the fascists win and censor our queer lives. I hope you share the same sentiment and help us achieve this world.

If there are any resources or things I can help out with, please let me know. I want to do my best. It's more important than ever to be proactive.

Takarazuka Travel Report (2025-07-06)

2025-07-07T00:00:00Z

As some of you know, I'm studying in Japan for three months. I'm so excited that I spent time updating my blog just to talk about it. I'm sure I'll post more about my experience. But for now, I want to talk about the day trip I took to Takarazuka.

The name will probably be familiar to fans of Revue Starlight, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Sakura Taisen. It's home to the theater group funded by the Hanshin Corporation (which also happens to own the Hanshin Railway as well as the massive office buildings and department store in Umeda). You can probably guess where I'm going with this.

But Takarazuka itself is a small town that's just an hour away from Osaka. You can take the Hanshin Takarazuka line from Umeda and take a little nap. You're probably going to need it because, man, Japanese summers are kinda brutal, even for someone who has lived in the tropics for most of their life.

A Temple on a Hill

Instead of going straight to Takarazuka, I first stopped at the Kiyoshikoujin Seichou-ji, a temple that blends Shinto and Buddhist traditions. It's located right before the main station. When I arrived at Kiyoshikoujin Station, I had to climb a hill that wasn't too steep but still annoying for about a kilometer to reach the shrine. The shops were barely open and the Tanabata decorations felt lonely without people, but I saw some amusing sights, like a café with a poetic message in English on its window welcoming visitors:

The approach to Kiyoshikojin is not flashy, but it has a charm that attracts people. we are grateful to open a shop in such a place and hope that it will be a place where many people of all ages and gender can interact.

Not many people were climbing up to the temple with me, but the trail seemed popular. There's also a way to get to the temple by car. I assumed the blaring sun would deter many people, but thankfully, my gray hat covered my big head. My only companions were grandpas walking their dogs and the occasional jogger running past me.

I've always enjoyed visiting suburban areas of Japan because, as much as I am used to it, the bustle of the city gets pretty tiring. I find it amusing to walk under highways with cars zooming above me or to watch the river flow to an unknown destination. This part of the city seems trapped between the concerns of the past and the present.

It didn't take long to reach the temple. A series of stalls lined the path to the entrance, and a bored child of one stall owner splashed water on the floor, probably to cool off the area around them.

After finding the Wi-Fi password in the rest area (why is there Wi-Fi in the area???), I washed my hands in the basin before entering the temple. Words scribbled by people asking the deities for help them accomplishing their dreams covered each dipper; the one I used had a simple wish:

早く沖縄に移住したいです I want to move to Okinawa already.

I've been to Okinawa. It's even hotter there than it is now. I guess this person really likes hot weather. The heat there is even worse. I guess this person really likes hot weather.

There are several altars to pray to, with most of these figures being Shingon Buddhists. Small family groups congregated around each altar and prayed for several minutes. I considered joining them, but I remembered how much money I had spent visiting shrines and buying talismans on previous trips, so I opted to pray for free. I hope the deities understand.

There's a route you can follow that basically amounts to going up a hill clockwise to pray at a small altar before going back down. From the small altar, you can overlook the temple entrance.

In the far corner though, there's a small altar by a waterfall. It's called 竜王滝　不動明王 (Ryuuou Taki Hudou Myouou), which means something like Dragon King Waterfall, Acala. A badass name for something this cute.

Real Life Revue Starlight

The walk downhill isn't too bad, but the sun by this point is on full blast. I got a quick meal at the local Lawson's near the Kiyoshikoujin station downhill before heading my way to the next destination: the Sumire♪ Museum.

From where I was, I had to walk through some residential areas. Walking on roads without pathways was fun, and I knew it was legal because others were doing it too.

The Sumire♪ Museum (very important to include the musical note) is located in the old school for the Takarazuka Revue group. This gorgeous building is covered in green vines as if displaced from a jungle. The building is still being used as space where the elderly can learn how to dance, and you can rent the third floor for dancing too.

The museum itself is more like one of those special exhibitions in larger museums. You cannot take any pictures except the one stage costume there. But what you do get is quite interesting if you know Japanese (there's apparently some guides written in other languages, but everything exhibited is in Japanese): you have actual videos of students tearing up that they're accepted into the prestigious school, there's documentary footage of the girls studying ballet, different posters advertising the culture festivals are plastered on the wall, and every single graduation photo is displayed in one area for everyone to marvel at.

It's clear that the Takarazuka Revue is proud of its history, even though it's essentially inaccessible to anyone who doesn't speak the language. Much of it is familiar to me, especially since Revue Starlight is a decent introduction to the school. The museum didn't touch on details like the sacrifices these students would undertake, especially if they wanted to go to university. This meant taking an optional class despite their already long schedules. I thought the museum tried to cover up the exhausting and depressing parts of theater work.

I have to admit, though, that it's pretty good propaganda. Initially, I wasn't sure if I wanted to watch a Takarazuka Revue show. However, I decided to go to the Grand Hall in the middle of Takarazuka to see if I could get a same-day ticket. It could be fun; who knows? I've always wanted to watch a show, but it was never possible when I was with my family.

It's tempting for sure.

Walk On For the Afternoon is Short

I thought about what I wanted to do next until I saw a poster for one of my favorite illustrators who happened to be exhibiting in the city center: Nakamura Yuusuke.

Nakamura is behind some of the most iconic album covers for Asian Kung-Fu Generation and the books of Morimi Tomihiko. I didn't know they were from this very city, so it was by happenstance that I found myself buying a ticket to enter the exhibition.

I got to see not only the full color prints of each cover but I also saw the lineart, the intricate drafting process, and the way Nakamura thought about colors and designs. For example, to read about why they often drew character portraits from the side: 1) Nakamura was embarrassed looking at high school girls, so they could only view them from that angle and 2) in Japanese writing, you read right to left and using this logic it seems like the characters are looking toward the future.

Despite following the illustrator for quite a while, there were many illustrations I didn't even know existed. I was surprised to discover that their art graced a bunch of high school music textbooks, making them the only deserving textbooks with the premium pricing that all textbooks seem to have.

At the end of the gallery is a small area where you can see Nakamura's childhood drawings. In retrospect, everything looks obvious, but it's clear that they were talented even at a young age.

By the time I left the exhibit, I thought my day couldn't get any better. Although the ticket was expensive, the exhibit was far superior to most art galleries I've visited, and that's not just because I'm a fan of the illustrator. There's some really good commentary that won't detract from your own interpretation. There's also so much media that you really feel like you've entered Nakamura Yuusuke's world.

And I honestly thought it was sick that there were basically no restrictions on taking photographs. I took a lot of pictures, but my free Neocities account couldn't handle uploading everything.

Takarazuka Revue: Prologue

With a smile on my face, I temporarily skipped the next location I was planning to visit to see if I could get a ticket for Takarazuka Revue. Since I was entering the location from the side, I kinda got confused where the entrance was. But when I saw the gates and where it led to, I knew I was in the right place: two giant posters of women stared at me as if they wanted my soul.

Entering the building was like entering heaven because the AC blew away my sweat. My footsteps were silenced by the rug as I approached the ticket counter. I wondered if there were same-day tickets for the 15:25 timeslot for 悪魔城ドラキュラ～月下の覚醒～ (Akumajou Dracula ~ Gekka no Kakusei ~), a musical theatrical adaptation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

I knew that the troupe was going to perform Guys and Dolls next month, but as someone who almost participated in that musical for high school, I was never a fan of the performance. But Symphony of the Night? Well, that's like one of my favorite games, so.

The ticket counter attendant smiled at me and said there were standing tickets for 2,500yen. My jaw dropped. I didn't know that Takarazuka Revue was that cheap.

I immediately paid for the tickets and started imagining what's going to happen behind those heavy doors.

Astroboy EVOL

I had a few hours to kill, so I returned to my itinerary: the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum.

I haven't read any of his works, but I have seen a few of his adaptations. Before I got on the train to Takarazuka, my curiosity got the better of me, and I read part of the first volume of Astroboy. I didn't expect the story to start with space colonists discovering a second Earth—our Earth, in fact—and for the titular character to be introduced 20–30 pages in. I later heard more details of the story from someone in my server, including that Astro Boy goes to Vietnam during the Cold War.

I guess I should read him because he sounds kinda weird.

The museum itself is very much a love letter to his life and work. The floor I entered featured rows of capsules showcasing artifacts from his life, such as the books he studied (he was going to be a doctor) and the manga he wrote. There are even sections dealing with his troubled anime production studio and how he and the animators worked on projects right before they aired live on TV—a precursor to many anime productions to come.

If you climb up to the second floor, you'll reach the special exhibition featuring the 25th anniversary of Sousei no Aquarion. If you're unfamiliar with this series, I recommend watching Aquarion Evol, which offers a (let's just say) unique perspective on gender and love. Akino's Aquarion theme songs are also bangers that you should know in case you're ever invited to a karaoke session. The exhibit displayed drafts of the mechas and characters, which are really nice to see. Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take pictures.

After exiting the special exhibition, I was back in Tezukaland. The area was kinda like a digital entertainment room where kids could use old trackball mice to interact with an old computer screen. There's also a gift shop that sells new copies of Tezuka's manga and even a library to read Tezuka's works.

What really amused me, though, was a framed message about complaints regarding Tezuka's racist depictions of non-Japanese people that's spammed across the ceiling. The museum staff argued that these pictures were taken out of context and that, when read in context, they weren't racist at all. In my opinion, this was the highlight of the entire museum.

Takarazuka Revue: I'm Gay for Alucard

After that fun diversion and a quick konbini lunch, I returned to Takarazuka Revue Grand Hall at the same time just as the morning performance ended. Everyone was coming out of the doors, and they were 99% middle-aged women. The few stragglers (male) were their dutiful husbands and sons, but everyone was talking about how wonderful the story was.

I tried to find a seat where I could read my book, which will probably be featured in an article on Mimidoshima, in the middle of this crowded hall. But I also wanted to take a nap because I was dying from the heat. I gave up and bought the special ice cream themed after the show: There were Romanian doughnut ice creams and sorbet that didn't taste very good. However, I took a picture of it in front of the cardboard cutout for the show.

After my disappointing refreshment, I entered the hall without any problems. A few seconds later, someone fell at the gates and began complaining to the staff about the poor service. Everyone stared at the commotion for a while before going back to taking selfies in the majestic hall.

I took note of the restrooms and bought a slightly overpriced iced coffee to drink before standing in the lower theater, far from the stage. The entire theater was almost full, and I think only three standing tickets remained.

I was quite excited when the curtains were raised. When the live rendition of the iconic Castlevania music kicked in, I got goosebumps. Then, the women appeared and started singing.

It was immediately riveting. Their singing skills were on par with those of Broadway performers, and their acting drew me into the world of Castlevania. Alucard and Maria looked incredible, and the fight choreography was varied and spectacular. I lost track of time watching the present-day Alucard walk through their dreams, wistfully watching their former self pass by. Alucard has always been a mesmerizing character, but the pathos the actor expressed felt genuine.

I could see why people would want to wear binoculars, but I never felt too far from the action. There are so many interesting details that I imagine only repeat viewers would notice. For example, the extras made interesting gestures that brought the setting to life, even if they weren't directly relevant. I also thought the transitions were seamless. The stage hands never appeared on stage, but they were clearly manipulating the mechanical props that changed the setting quickly behind the screen. As a result, very little downtime. The actors would go to bottom left stage to let the mechanical props work their magic. Then, they would wait before the stage "changed" into something else with the other actors already on stage. It felt like the theater stage changed with the snap of a finger, evoking a world that is constantly dynamic and changing.

And there's just something wonderful about hearing "Bloody Tears" sung by a cross-dressing Belmont.

As for the plot, I was honestly impressed by their ability to condense the Castlevania setting into something manageable for people who've probably never played any of the games. While the setting is definitely not elaborate, there are still details that might confuse Takarazuka regulars. Instead, the scenario focused on the most important details from SoTN and Rondo of Blood: the tug-of-war romantic relationship between Alucard and Maria and Richter Belmont reluctantly working for Dracula to save his fiance.

They also supplemented the setting with, curiously enough, the French Revolution -- specifically, Robespierre's Reign of Terror which is actually orchestrated by none other than Shaft (my understanding is that this is actually the plot of the Netflix show?). This part was a bit silly, and it made me think they're trying to channel their Les Mis.

And the play exaggerated the romantic encounters and thrills to the point that the characters only go to Dracula's castle near the end, but I think this was a smart choice: people are watching this play to see Alucard and Maria get gay, and actually adapting SoTN straight might not allow for this relationship to come through.

A few elements from the original games do make an appearance, though, and they're fun references. I snickered when Maria gave Alucard glasses for the upcoming Richter fight. Alucard wore them, but Maria said they didn't need to in order to reap their benefits.

The ending was, of course, predictable for anyone familiar with the Castlevania lore. But I think it's rather effective at showing how Alucard and Dracula are tragic figures fated to fight each other in the name of familial love. The performance by Dracula's actor was pretty moving for me.

I think everyone in the audience would agree. Although I didn't overhear anyone talking about the games during intermission, they clearly resonated with the story and characters, which I thought was incredible. In a way, this is one of the best video game adaptations I've ever seen. It captures much of the magic of the games and introduces them to an audience that may not have heard of the series. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if the people I watched it with became Castlevania fans after the show. It's one of the best plays I've ever seen. I wish it were more accessible because I imagine Castlevania fans would love it.

It's really edifying to find a video game adaptation I actually liked without irony or hesitation.

Takarazuka Revue: Intermission

After Dracula's reign of terror ended, everyone rushed to the restrooms while the actors prepared for the next musical performance. Everyone, that is, except the penis-havers. For whatever reason, there is an equal number of restrooms for men and women. You would expect more restrooms for women, or even better, gender-neutral ones. Instead, though, every woman I could see was waiting in line for these restrooms, which would take up 5–10 minutes of the 35-minute intermission.

Thank god I have a dick. Just because I want to be feminine doesn't mean I want to lose my access to urinals.

But seriously, I didn't understand why this place didn't have gender-neutral restrooms. It seems pointless to have men's restrooms that are virtually empty for most of the intermission. Just let the women pee there, jeez.

When I was returning to my seats, I saw people queuing up for cocktails themed after the show, so I figured I might as well try one. I figured I might as well try one. Unfortunately, the cocktail didn't taste alcoholic; I thought I was just drinking Coke. I suppose, when you consider the drinking habits of the "typical" woman, this makes some sense. I'm still disappointed though.

Takarazuka Revue: I Love Revue?

The second play seems to be a kind of filler musical, so I don't really have much to say. But the songs are pretty good, and I'm still humming to it as I write this section.

But it's a bit jarring to go from butch Alucard to cabaret ladies dancing. While the lead actor dressed up as a dashing guy who flirts with different women, there are sections that make me think it's intended for cis dudes. The performances are still pretty good, even if they feel unnecessary.

I didn't mind this play, but it's not what I'm here for.

Exit Stage Left

But once the show ended and I had to return to reality, I felt empty.

I understood why people loved coming to Takarazuka Theater.

It's not just a moment of escape. It's a time with the ideal men who never existed because they're women who understand how other women work. You can forget that reality is patriarchal and that queer expression is often invalidated by even well-intentioned people. It's a holiday from the nihilism of everyday life.

I wanted to come back to this space. I had forgotten that I had visited different locations and even found my favorite illustrator's exhibit. All I could think about was how I felt like I belonged there. Reality -- even the fact that I'm traveling in Japan -- isn't everything it's cracked up to be.

On the train home, I sat across from an elderly het couple who had also watched the show. They grinned as they reminisced aloud about how wonderful the performances were. Then, the old man said something that stuck with me since:

I'm glad that they're all women.

The implication was, at least the way I interpreted them, that it would be something dreadful if there were a man or two involved. Having an all-female cast also created the illusion that queerness was fantastical, like some sort of dream. I heard the same thing from my language teacher this morning: a lot of women keep returning to this theater because, man, isn't it wonderful that the ideal men exist for them but only on the stage?

Despite my queer identity, I don't think I viewed the Takarazuka Revue any differently than these folks did. Takarazuka evokes a utopian vision within me that may never be achieved in my lifetime. It's a dream I don't want to wake up from, as the reality is that gender is messy, and being a man is viewed as intrusive, even by that older man. In that Takarazuka world, however, men played by women are appropriately masculine without the violent and toxic baggage that often accompanies it.

I don't know if it's a wonderful dream to have, but it's something I want to return to. It's just an intoxicating worldview that's making me reflect on my life choices till now.

Conclusion

My day trip to Takarazuka was wonderful and surprising in many ways. I thought I would just visit some temples and breathe in the suburban air, but I ended up having one of the most memorable days of my life. I saw and experienced so many different things that it took me forever to write this post — it was supposed to be a warm-up for other writing projects.

I would like to visit more places, though I doubt any will be as exciting as Takarazuka. If people are interested in my travel reports, though, I'll keep writing them. Journaling about my travels is fun, and I want to share my newfound love for a country I've been visiting for a while.

The Hungry Lamb and the Remains of Mortality

2025-01-25T00:00:00Z

This post has unmarked spoilers on The Hungry Lamb, and the game itself does have cannibalism and grotesque scenes.

In 1632, the once prosperous Ming Dynasty was on the verge of collapse. The people were experiencing famine after famine, and corrupt officials began stealing what little grain they could save. Many turned to banditry, and others who found themselves in more dire situations might resort to cannibalism.

What use are morals and ethics in a world where survival is barely possible? For Liang (良), it is better to divide up the world into two camps: the wolves and the lambs. He never explains his dichotomy to his readers, but it's clear that he sees people as prey and predators. As long as he doesn't have to kill women and children, he doesn't hesitate to use his sword.

One day, his accomplice Shetou (舌頭) tells him about a new job: they are going to smuggle four girls to Luoyang. As Liang inspects the girls, he notices a young girl who is starving like the others, but who seems to know more about the world.

Her name is Sui (穂).

The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty (饿殍: 明末千里行) is a 2024 Chinese-language visual novel developed by 零创游戏(ZerocreationGame). I knew about the visual novel when the game received a Japanese dub with Kugumiya Rie (best known as Minase Iori from iDOLM@STER) and a lot of acclaim from various Japanese writing outlets. While I was playing the game, the developers announced that the visual novel had sold its one millionth copy and that a new work in the same setting would be released in the last quarter of 2025.

I didn't know what to expect coming in. The Ming Dynasty I knew from dramas and books was one full of court intrigue and drama. The Ming dynasty that Hungry Lamb depicts is one of misery, desperation, and death. In a few short years, the Ming dynasty went from being one of the greatest kingdoms of the time to a shambling mess. There are many causes -- the Global Little Ice Age that caused many crops to fail, bureaucratic regimes that lent themselves well to corruption, and more -- but the end result is worth pondering: everyone was hungry.

The visual novel pulls no punches when it comes to depicting destitution. While the game mostly follows Liang and Shetou as they travel along mountainous roads and hide children from soldiers, flashbacks to Sui's backstory interrupt this narrative flow. Sui comes from a loving farmer family: her grandmother is still alive, her father works in the fields, her mother cooks, and she's the older of the two children. While her mother values her little brother more for his ability to continue the bloodline and pass the imperial examinations that could help the family rise in the social hierarchy, her father doesn't discriminate. Unfortunately, a series of famines has reduced the family to poverty.

The flashbacks show the breakdown of the family structure and exaggerate its excesses. When Sui's brother falls ill, her parents begin to argue about how in the world they're going to get the money to bring in a doctor. Her mother even brings up the idea of selling Sui for money, just to save the family's only son. These episodes are depicted with sepia-toned CGs: you can see how their cheeks become hollow and the desperate face Sui makes when she hears that her parents might sell her. They're heartbreaking to read, not only because the dialogue is precise, but because every reaction is rendered with another CG, as if I'm flipping through a comic book.

I find the Sui chapters to be some of the best written sections in the entire game. The narration reflects the powerlessness Sui feels as she looks around and sees her surroundings collapsing around her. Her devotion to her family makes the chapters difficult to read at times; she's too young to understand that her family's situation is getting worse, let alone know how to respond to her parents' despair. The CGs become more and more grotesque as her chapters progress.

The main chapters of the game that follow Liang, on the other hand, took me a while to warm up to. Liang is a difficult character for me to analyze. His worldview is extremely alien to mine, and that's definitely the point of his chapters: the game wants the player to question his moral system and whether he's really a "good" person, as his Chinese name might imply.

After looting a dead traveler whose belongings include tools and puppets for shadow puppetry, he quickly makes a connection with Sui when he learns that she knows how to use them. They sneak away from Shetou and the girls, and she teaches him how to perform shadow theater. These moments are a breath of fresh air after reading scenes of Liang coldly ignoring Shetou as he threatens girls left and right; Liang's interest in shadow puppetry reveals him as just another guy interested in Chinese tales of heroism and chivalry.

But this raises the question: why would an ordinary lad like him be forced to take the path of villains? We can certainly follow his lead and blame the heavens for requiring people to see the world in black and white, in wolves and lambs. But that is a social construction, a lens through which to view the world. It doesn't explain the inequalities in the world, only his worldview.

Instead, the visual novel takes an interesting, risky path that I think pays off: despite the chaotic turmoil of the late Ming period, the visual novel secretly harbors a moral standard. Yes, there are villages that are forced to eat their young. Yes, soldiers and rebels alike plunder the needy for scraps. But the visual novel believes that there are still heroes in this morally ambivalent time.

That said, this force of good doesn't appear normally. The heroes of the Late Ming Dynasty are antiheroes if they were written in any other time. Liang questions his ethics when he and Shetou tell the children that they can expect a good life in Luoyang, but he always finds a way to get the girls out of danger. His dedication to the girls' safety is commendable and even unusual in a world that has abandoned children to their deaths. In fact, he is constantly reevaluating whether he is helping the girls out of pure altruism or selfishness.

He knows too well that he cannot be let off the hook. Liang has killed too many people to be redeemed. No matter how many times he helps the girls, there is no way to erase his sins. But history does not always get the heroes it deserves: Liang enjoys watching the shadow theater Sui puts on, which includes performances of Zhang Fei slaying Lu Bu in Romance of the Three Kingdoms; though he will never be as inspiring as Zhang Fei, he pursues evil in his own way, appropriate for a historical period like the Late Ming.

Indeed, while there are many good people who will stray from the path in the Late Ming period, the game stresses, especially at the end, that there are still actual villains lurking in the background. Famines and the like may be unavoidable, but they can at least be mitigated by government intervention. Letting things go as bad as they do is downright evil. This is where the heroes, beaten and compromised as they may be, should step up and take the mantle.

This positive outlook contrasts sharply with the game's dark subject matter. I read a few many grotesque scenes that made me lose my appetite, which might have made the promise of a better tomorrow more palatable. The oppression of the poor throughout the game means that the characters cannot settle for anything less than revolution. This is not a foregone conclusion, as it requires Sui, Liang, and the player to come to an agreement on what needs to be done.

The visual novel is a linear story with choices that can lead to dead ends. Some of these choices are obvious: should Liang run or stop when soldiers start chasing them? Others lead to interesting endings, where you see Liang and Sui commit too deeply to their philosophies without adapting, so they end up losing sight of the whole journey. These latter detours allow us to explore their narrow-mindedness and why they behaved the way they did. The choices that put the player on the right path, on the other hand, are the ones that show the characters' growth and change. While the game doesn't do anything more than allow players to choose one option or the other, it is effective in guiding players to follow the characters' mindsets more closely.

I also found myself invested in the game's characters and setting because there are so many remarkable visual assets. There are a total of 58 CGs in this 8-15 hour visual novel, and the characters are composed to take advantage of the widescreen format. What's even more impressive is that the game features unique background art for each city you travel through, and there are even a few backgrounds that you see only briefly at the very end of the game. While a few backgrounds get overused (the inn being the most egregious), the many backgrounds and CGs make me feel like I've gone through a long journey with these characters. In an era where good background art is so unappreciated that so-called generative AI art might successfully "replace" it, this game stands out for its understanding of the importance of background art in conveying the game's scale and its unique aesthetic.

The game also never lost me in its historical excursions. While the characters discuss details like the price of pork being more expensive than girls, and there are various rebels fighting against the Ming Dynasty, I never felt like I had to read the Wikipedia article to know what I was supposed to be following. Historical fiction tends to be too detailed or too loose for me to follow without judicious use of the internet, but I find that Hungry Lamb's focus on the journey to Luoyang and Liang's and Sui's ethical codes meant that I didn't need to supplement my understanding. If anything, it informed how I should read the fall of the Ming Dynasty, and I've found several books on the subject for later perusal.

All that said, I think the reason The Hungry Lamb: Traveling in the Late Ming Dynasty works the way it does is because it has a simple message: it depicts this dog-eat-dog world and all its horrors because it dreams of a world without hunger. Early in one of Sui's chapters, we learn that Sui is named as Mansui (满穗) by her family, and that it comes from her family's wish to see a field full of grain.

This may have been an impossible dream in the Late Ming Dynasty, but their poverty shouldn't have been as bad as it was. There is no doubt that there is natural scarcity, but the ruling elite can also impose scarcity for their own benefit. Inequalities lead to power dynamics where the rich can steal from the poor, and this forces the dog-eat-dog world into existence.

After finishing the game, I begin to think about my studies in international development for the past few years. The United Nations has promised everyone that world hunger will end by 2030, but we are nowhere close to eliminating it. It even admitted that "global hungers rose sharply from 2019 to 2021 and persisted at the same level to 2023, affecting over 9 percent of the world population in 2023".

And I don't have to go far to find hungry people. Hunger shouldn't be an issue in 2025, but we know that wealthy nationstates aren't interested in sharing their food with their own people, let alone other countries. We shouldn't be fighting among ourselves, but directing our anger at the leaders and governments who put us in this dog-eat-dog world. They are the class that has made us suffer and hurt each other. They are the enemy. They deserve to be taken down.

But I also see people who are uncomfortable with the suggestion of violence. Can violence really lead to a better result? Well, in Chinese history, empires rise and fall in cycles. When the Ming Dynasty fell, a new dynasty rose from its ashes: the Qing Dynasty. And just like the empires before and after it, it too fell, and new ones arise. History goes on.

The important thing is not that we don't know what the outcome will be, but that history will always continue. Violence will always erupt because of the inequalities imposed on the working class by the ruling class. Whether we participate in the violence or not, this violence will always occur.

A world without hunger is also a world without violence, without poverty, and without any form of conflict. This is a utopian dream that requires us to break out of the cycle of history. Like the author of the game, I would like to see a world where I don't have to see people as prey or predators, but as equals.

I'm not sure how we can do that. But perhaps learning who our common enemy is will make us realize that we can fight together, even if we have hurt each other. It's a fragile relationship, sure, but it's one that doesn't absolve us of our guilt and accomplishments.

That alliance, I believe, is an unbreakable bond in these troubled times.

Supplementary Notes: Learning Chinese

As promised, I'm writing about how I'm learning Chinese through visual novels.

Although this is the first Chinese-language visual novel I've written about on this blog, it's actually the second title I've finished. Qianse will have a DLC by the end of this month, so I want to read it before I write about it fully. Don't worry, I haven't forgotten about it.

I played this game in Mandarin Chinese with the Japanese dub. Luna Translator works perfectly on the game without a hitch. I'm also auto-pasting onto one of those blank pages meant for hovering your mouse to read dictionary entries for. For those curious which dictionary I'm using, it's 中日大辞典　第二版. Works like a charm.

Compared to Qianse, a verbose NVL game, this game is quite easy to read. Its simple, straightforward writing style was so nice to read because it made me focus on memorizing vocabulary instead of figuring out how to read the grammar of something. And I can imagine the Mandarin Chinese voice acting will be helpful for people trying to hear what Chinese sounds like.

However, I don't really know how difficult some of the historical elements are for beginners. I'm a Chinese history buff, and mouse-over dictionaries don't always catch the terms correctly. I can also imagine that idioms are owned by people, but that's Chinese in a nutshell anyway...

I do think this is a good first read if you want to learn Chinese through visual novels. The pacing is nice, the title is short, and you get to learn about an important historical period.

While I can't fully comment on the Japanese translation, the Japanese dub makes me think it's not a bad translation. The dub was a later addition to the game, so reviews that criticize the translation tend to be critical of the earlier version. I did see one review that briefly commented on how awkward the current Japanese translation is, but it seems to have improved enough to be readable. The Japanese voice acting is also fantastic, using various localization techniques such as using different dialects to indicate different character speaking styles.

(Update: A friend had recently gone through the Japanese translation and thought it was poorly written)

As for the English translation, I haven't really looked into it too much, but it doesn't seem all that great. There are awkward and dry lines that require some brainwork to parse...

So if you know Japanese and won't be learning Chinese for a while, the Japanese translation seems fine.

Commenting on an article that brings up hobbyist development as a lifelong career

2025-01-16T00:00:00Z

What’s wrong with working a real day-job and doing games as a hobby? That’s sustainable! You set your own hours, you have money! No big deal.

This is from an article by Aura about how pivoting to indie game development would not save the world. She lays out some crucial details about how indie game development is still a career that is vulnerable to exploitation and market forces. For the most part, I agree with this piece.

But there's this part that really annoyed me:

Look, I don’t need to make a long argument here. I would just like to ask you to look at the current state of video games journalism. As the major sites died, and all the money went out of the industry… as the core audience of games bloggers aged and no longer were attending college, living with their parents… the ecosystem of games blogging largely rotted apart. Even big names like Uppercut Crit have closed due to burnout and lack of funds. Working on shit in your spare time is a lot of time and effort and, in most cases, people don’t do it forever. They almost never manage to do it as a lifelong career.

I've been writing about niche and free games for sixteen years. I'm playing a game that took five years to develop and is being released for free. This is a ridiculous section that goes against the very core of what I write about.

I get where Aura is coming from: burnout is real, making free games is not always viable for many people, there were times when I took a break from writing, and so on. But the idea that everything meaningful in hobbyist game development and criticism depends on turning your efforts into a "lifelong career" is downright insulting to many people who enjoy making games and sharing that joy with others.

The article is very interested in survivorship bias and income equality, which is a good thing to point out because many small businesses do crash and burn. But that logic doesn't apply to people who are interested in, say, participating in game jams for fun. Many people who work in free games may be interested in pursuing game development as a career, but a lot of the time it also comes down to people wanting to find community.

There are websites like Mogura Games and Indie Tsushin that write up articles on free games. And there's bloggers like yours truly who writes essays pondering on what makes these free games so interesting. While there may be profit in the horizon, we are doing it because we love these games and wish more people pick it up.

I'm not advocating a "pivot" to free game development. Not at all. It's just that art doesn't have to be so money-driven. I enjoy making games because I get to do something that isn't work. That is all I need. I think bloggers and mainstream game developers forget that games are not just about making money and making a living. It's also about having fun.

Look at the interactive fiction community: IFComp is thirty years old and still going strong. There are prizes to be won, but they're definitely not there for sustenance. They're there to incentivize people to join, collaborate, and create.

It's amazing that hobbyist development and the writers who write about them are treated the way the essay did. Imagine talking about hobbies like this: my mom gardens for fun, not for profit, but I guess she's not ready to turn it into a full-time career because she's just doing it for the love of the game; surely, that means it's worthless. What a bizarre idea.

I do not care about turning my writing into a career. There are times when I know I could have since my peers have all entered into the game writing scene with paying jobs. But I pride myself on writing about things that the scene can't write about, whether it be language barriers or because websites are notoriously uninterested in writing about visual novels and niche games that aren't offensive memes. I don't care if my readership is in the triple digits, not the thousands that could "sustain" this "career". It's just a hobby that I find very meaningful, and I have made a lot of friends doing it.

I know this may seem naive to people who see game development and writing as a career, but this "naivety" has kept me going for sixteen years and helped raise awareness of Japanese visual novels and niche media. SeaBed wouldn't have been translated and become a cult hit if a bunch of us hadn't written about it. I wouldn't have met the creators of Argus who said they saved our articles on their phones to read here and there, and heard from their own mouths that they were happy they made the game and someone played it. Suisenka wouldn't have become a household name if Amelie Doree hadn't made a video about it after learning about it from me and others. There are lows that can lead to burnout -- always a risk in any career or hobby -- but I doubt any of us would regret it.

The key point here is "regret". Is it all just wasted effort because we are vulnerable to exploitation and burnout? I don't think so. I am deeply aware that some of my tendencies are not sustainable in the long run because I have a day job on top of other commitments. But in the end, I keep coming back to them because I enjoy letting people know what I think about niche games and the effort people have put into them.

This was never meant to be a lifelong career. I don't want to think about the strategies and moves I need to make to climb the ladder. Instead, I want the freedom to make decisions that may be unpopular or even detrimental to my "career" if it helps illuminate certain aspects of the media that I find fascinating. This is not the "progress" that society finds acceptable, but it is the kind of progress that I find most fulfilling.

I hope my readers feel the same way.

slime feet and its raw intimacy in the face of history

2025-01-14T00:00:00Z

slime feet begins by listing what it is and what the content warnings are like: it's "body horror", it's "extravagant foot fetishism", and it's also "sloppy messy lesbian cybersex".

But at the very end, the game reveals its thesis before the game properly begins:

slime feet is about you knowing i love you

This is the latest visual novel by Nadia Nova, a prolific trans femme creator who explores sexuality and trans intimacy in her works like Hopeless Junction. Made for the Videotome jam "Waiting", this is a short title that will probably take the player as long as it takes to read this article, but I think it's worth excavating a few themes in the title.

The story follows Estelle, who was returning from an expedition when the airlock gate and entry hatch broke down on her. Despite wearing as much protection as possible, she was exposed to the Miasma, an "amorphous cloud of dark but transparent mist" that will enter her body, discolor it (though she is already dark-skinned so it would be difficult to see), and break down the muscles and bones, and eventually dissolve her internal organs. Fortunately, this miasma is not contagious, but there is so little research on it she is quarantined from the outside world. She's been assigned by her team to write "End Entries" in which she can report her symptoms for future study.

But while the player will read these reports after each day, the bulk of the game involves reading the chat logs between Estelle and Abbi. These are small, private conversations that are recorded in the log (they point out that the Overseer can read them), but they stop caring about procedures: they start sexting each other, commenting on how Estelle is turning into a blue slime girl, and how much Abbi wants to stick her dick into Estelle.

The eroticism of their relationship plays on the macabre of regression into death. While the symptoms are indeed terrible, Estelle and Abbi try to make the most of what little time and erotic energy they have together. Instead of seeing the symptoms as a clock ticking down to her death, Estelle reframes them as a series of sexual fetishes for Abbi, who used to write the End Entries reports and knows all about these symptoms, to get into:

estelle: Lmao maybe i should film this and you can sell the record and be rich abbi: Wtf come on estelle: Seriously!! Il squirt all over the place all squishy style abbi: Omg Estelle what's with you today!! estelle: Haha are you etting flustered? Do you have that kink? abbi: What no estelle: You should. Ill help you. you never stroked to some slime girl hentai?? abbi: Omg abbi: I don't know! Maybe! estelle: Lmaaao tbhIf i ignore the dread of death i think its kinda fun

Estelle turns her disability into an erotic fantasy that she and Abbi can indulge in. Fingering herself "makes m feel like im still in control of my body", and this is something Abbi agrees with too. The pleasure of masturbation is something both characters can still control, even in this terrible situation. They can joke about this and even get turned on. It may be morbid, but it is also very hot and reaffirming.

The obvious real world parallel will be long-distance relationships between disabled people during the COVID-19 pandemic, but I think the story at its core is about "you knowing i love you". On the fourth day, Estelle's writing deteriorates and she "just woje up crying like shit today". Abbi has not been able to get clearance to be with Estelle. The only channel of communication is this chat interface: they can cyber, give "digital hugs", and get each other off. Their words heal each other's wounds. This is raw intimacy, made all the more raw by the filter that separates them. All they have is language and their imagination about fucking each other to make each other realize that they know they love each other.

The Videotome ADV engine is a perfect fit for the story. I've made a game in another Videotome engine, so I'm familiar with its strengths and limitations. They are easy to write in, accessible on web browsers, and provide a kind of grungy retro aesthetic using CRT filters and simple white text on black backgrounds. slime feet turns the engine into a series of chat logs, with washed-out images of screens and blue skeleton hands. There are no portraits like you might find in another visual novel. It's all text, somber guitar strumming, and visuals that don't represent concrete scenes but rather abstract emotions like longing and loneliness.

This aesthetic reinforces the intimacy between the two characters: their love for each other can only appear in this medium of hastily written text messages and sparse images. The player has to imagine what it is like to write so much and yet so little into these words. When the inevitable happens, it's less a goodbye and more a continuation of their resolve to be together.

I found this visual novel touching. With just a few words, slime feet is able to express so much about how love and desire will not overturn death, but it makes people remember that they are wanted:

estelle: it made me feel warm abbi: Me too.

This goes against how we usually think about death, especially in these turbulent times. Desiring someone sexually, physically, and mentally is a better way to remember someone than a cold report on their contributions to the advancement of science. Language cannot convey the warmth that someone can radiate. Death is not an end state, but a memory of someone's warmth that is worth preserving.

I resonate with this work because warmth keeps me alive. I don't see much hope in the direction of history; there are mornings when I feel nihilistic and wonder if anything is worth doing at all. Everyone is tired, some more than others. History keeps moving, people keep dying, and we can only communicate in broken texts and images. But in the end, the warmth of loved ones brings me back to my senses.

Where can there be such warmth? slime feet reminds us that even the sexts, shitposts, and cybers we send each other are not simply silly messages but warm little embers that remind people that they can be loved, desired, and wanted. It's a beautiful lesson that is worth keeping close to our hearts.

New Year's Resolutions for 2025

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Happy New Year everyone. 2024 was a rollercoaster of epic proportions for me, with the last two months being a terrible mess for my family and friends. I don't know how 2025 will turn out, but at least I'm excited to start the new year with some resolutions about how I want to write the blog and how I want to improve myself.

Major Resolutions:

1. Write more about micro-indie media.

This may be an unusual resolution from a blogger who constantly writes about indie games, especially untranslated media. But the truth is that I don't usually cover games that don't have some major publisher involved.

Take 1000xRESIST, a game that deserves a lot of write-ups. I think people consider my article to be one of the best written last year. But while I think I'm still the only English-language writer who isn't a coward to explore Hong Kong politics in the gaming media, people have written about the game in different ways. Fellow Traveler is a well-known publisher thanks to the success of titles like Paradise Killer and Citizen Sleeper. I don't know if there will be a writer who will cover the same ground as I did, but there have already been people who have written about how the game is different from its peers and why the game is important. Of course, I like the game and what I wrote, but I'd like to emphasize the point that even the games that people think of as cult hits are not necessarily the obscure titles.

Few people are writing criticism on the games hosted on Itchio. I think I need to change what I write about on the blogs. Specifically, I've been thinking about writing more about micro-indies and trans feminine literature on Itch. I don't really trust the current writing scene to write about, say, Until Then which is critically underwritten, but it has a better chance of getting a good write-up than some title on Itch.

I may also set up an email in the near future to receive review copies from indie authors, developers, and publishers since discovery is quite difficult. There will be a disclaimer about how I got the copy if that happens. If this intrigues you, comment away so I can be more motivated to do something when I'm bored.

2. Write more about trans media.

This goes hand in hand with the first point, but I think it is worth emphasizing. The lack of historical knowledge and critical representation has been quite detrimental. There are always calls for better trans representation in the media, but there have always been trans people in the media, and some of them are really good.

I enjoyed writing about Clockwork Girl, and I would love to write more about the online trans writing subcultures. The Trans Feminine Review is also an inspiring site for me. It made me realize that I haven't read much trans writing, and I need to do more of that. It would be fun to discover Japanese and Chinese trans writing as well.

I've been thinking about the social role of criticism. A critic doesn't write in a vacuum. Their criticism reflects their thoughts on the general state of society through literary criticism, but they also have the ability to point out certain trends in literature (and thus the world) to their readers. I'm always striving to be more observant in my own writing, and it's time for me to use that eye to write about trans perspectives.

3. Write about Chinese media and how I'm learning the language.

I'm learning Chinese again after having a dream about reading a Chinese yuri visual novel and thinking, "I'm having fun learning Chinese again. It was strangely inspiring to me, so I decided to take it seriously.

Me and Chinese have a complicated relationship. My family doesn't use Mandarin in everyday conversations because they have historically suffered cultural genocide and racial viiolence. Meanwhile, I always liked reading about Chinese culture and history, but I was discouraged in different ways to pursue, say, comics written in Chinese. My family never liked me being a bookworm and had instead put me into extracirricular language lessons that ate up my time in unproductive ways. There's a family legend where I told my family that I was retiring from the Chinese language when I turned fifteen. I really thought I was stupid. I was already struggling to learn American English, and I didn't see any practical use for learning Chinese.

There's also an internalized racism thing going on: my Singaporean Chinese peers looked down on my Chinese Indonesian background because I wasn't one of them, and moving to an international school made me experience a lot of class and race dimensions. I wanted to be accepted by the white people there, so for years I was ashamed of being Chinese.

But since I learned Japanese, and realized that I had been failed by education, and learned what it means to be a Chinese Indonesian, I eventually became less antagonistic towards the language. I still dislike simplified Chinese characters, but there are now games and visual novels that seem interesting. When I read a Chinese-language visual novel, I realized that I could feel the trauma leaving me. It may have taken sixteen years to get back on my feet, but it felt good.

I like to chronicle my journey through Chinese-language media. I'm still using text hookers and whatnot, but a lot of it is coming back, and the only real problem I have is realizing that there are different formal writing registers in written Mandarin that I never learned. Singaporean Chinese has also simplified some of the words, so it's been a pleasant surprise to notice the differences.

And there aren't that many writers on Chinese-language media. The few writers who do are writing about RPGs, so me writing about visual novels should be refreshing. This period of time kinda reminds me back when I used to write about Japanese visual novels before they became big. I've already bought a few acclaimed titles (some already translated) and wishlisted many yuri titles. Some of my friends are also interested in picking up in Chinese, which will be fun. It would be like the good old days. I expect the world of Chinese media to be as interesting as Japanese media's.

At the very least, they have cute anime girls!

Minor Resolutions

Try to read English and Japanese works at the same time again. Helps to not focus on games forever!
Get back to yuri manga and live-action dramas. They'll go well on those monthly overview review articles I've been doing.
Make the blogs pretty. I do have a banner I can use for the main blog, but I keep forgetting to.
Try to get on subculture media podcasts as a guest. Dunno what though, lol.
Participate in game jams and organizing more. I actually want to organize a zine for my Japanese media Discord server...
Try pitching a Japanese literature article to sites like Trans Feminine Review.
Waste less time on social media. Go listen to podcasts more.
Write more reviews on Nepchan. I enjoyed writing my article on Aural to Hikari no Ryuu ~Gathering Light~.
Get back to translating. I will like to fan translate some games.
Play more historically important titles. I really need to get to Black Onyx...

I hope to keep most, if not all, of them. Although I don't show it in my own writing, I tend to be very self-deprecating and critical of my own narrow-mindedness. Writing these resolutions feels therapeutic in a funny way, as I try to submerge these feelings.

Thank you all for reading my blog posts, including this one. Let's survive another year together.

The Centennial Case is a good piece of Shinhonkaku mystery propaganda

2024-12-22T00:00:00Z

The Centennial Case: A Shijima Story begins with a perennial cliché: there is a dead body buried under a blooming sakura tree.

In Kajii Motojirou's iconic horror short story "Under the Cherry Trees", the narrator claims that the vitality of these beautiful trees comes from their roots sucking the energy out of corpses:

What makes those petals? What makes those pistils? I can almost see the silent ascent of crystal liquid coursing dreamily through those veins. (trans. David Boyd)

For the narrator, the beautiful but vague images of the ravine do not excite them. It is the carnage they thirst for. They don't know how they got the idea, but it's one they can't easily let go of.

And the Japanese literary imagination hasn't abandoned this striking image either. One example will suffice: Beautiful Bones: Sakurako's Investigation is a series of detective novels adapted into an anime, whose Japanese title is 櫻子さんの足下には死体が埋まっている (Sakurako-san no Ashimoto ni wa Shitai ga Umatteiru, lit. Corpses are Buried under Sakurako's Feet). For better or worse, the invocation of the macabre and the beautiful is more or less a meme in the mystery genre.

But for The Centennial Case, this is but one of many references scattered throughout this FMV mystery game. The wellspring of history that the game draws from is much like the corpses found under the sakura trees: rich in detail and also a bloody mess.

Kagami Haruka is a bestselling mystery novelist who becomes involved in the dramatic case surrounding the history of the Shijima family. Her medical research colleague, Shijima Eiji, is interested in a so-called Fruit of Youth that the family had, but he has been unable to pry the truth out of his father. Meanwhile, the bones buried under the sakura tree have caused a media frenzy and are an unfortunately effective reminder that the family has not overcome its miserable history of death and suffering.

To make the situation even more complicated, Haruka and her editor Yamase Akira have also stumbled upon a serialized mystery story written by an ancestor of the Shijima family. It is published in the same magazine as the horror-mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo. The game really starts with the first chapter when Haruka reads the stories and enters the Taisho era as Shijima Yoshino, an inquisitive girl who wants to participate in a private auction to get the Fruit of Youth that was stolen from her.

While the overarching (and most important) case takes place in the present day, many of the cases in the game are framed as short stories found in literary magazines and manuscripts. The main actors who appear in these historical segments usually play characters who have already appeared in the present; the explanation is that these old books are difficult for Haruka to read, and she needs a way to anchor the narrative with people she's already met. This allows for some fun social commentary: not only do the characters dress in period costumes and walk around authentic locations, but the way they talk and think about things like gender is grounded in history. We can trace a continuity of ideas and see how people behave differently over the years. It also helps raise the stakes of the mystery: How does any of this relate to the present? The scope of the mysteries turns out to be bigger than I expected.

The historical mysteries are also excellently plotted and well dated to their respective time periods. When the detective character decides to present her case, there are no surprises withheld like the infamous coroner's reports in the Ace Attorney series. The cases are immediately solvable. I find fair play shockingly rare in mystery video games, so I was pleased to have enough information to theorize how a murder happened and how the perpetrator got away with it with all the information I had.

And after completing each case, the player is booted to a historical timeline of events from the game and the real world. In addition to major events in Japanese history like the Kanto Earthquake and world history such like 9/11, the timeline also includes the debuts of major mystery writers such as Agatha Christie and Matsumoto Seichi.

Funnily enough, the timeline also includes the beginning of the Shinhonkaku (New Traditional) Mystery movement as a key event. I'm a fan of this movement because it recognizes that the mystery genre is very contrived, but still finds some value in it. However, its solutions are polarizing for many readers: books can comment directly on the genre and characters, and they can also include unreasonable conclusions to provoke readers. Not everyone can be a shinhonkaku fan, and that's fine.

But what I admire about the genre is how much more food for thought it provides after the mysteries are solved. While it will always suck to be spoiled by a mystery, I find that the themes they explore stay with me more than the thrill ride traditional mysteries like to provide. The ethics of detective work, the ruminations on collective trauma, and the ambiguity of absolute truths are more memorable than a well-constructed box of puzzles that characterize traditional Agatha Christie mysteries.

And The Centennial Case avoids the ostentatious excess of the genre by keeping most of the social commentary and metafiction in the realm of subtext. If one takes the trouble to dig through the game's themes, especially in the epilogue chapter, there's a lot of interesting things the game says about what it means to be chained to history and to break free of it.

It's unfortunate that the game is riddled with the most tedious gameplay imaginable. While I'm mostly neutral when it comes to watching the movie play out and occasionally pressing keys to take note of a clue, the segment that grinds my gears is how you piece together the clues and puzzles.

The way The Centennial Case implements deduction is, to put it bluntly, terrible. Each case is full of questions posed to the player (When did the person die? Where were they killed?), and the player must select clue tiles that appear throughout the FMV segments. The player must drag clue tiles onto a long line of question tiles, and correctly placed tiles create hypotheses (some true, most blatantly false). Question tiles can also have multiple answers. Fortunately, all tiles have shapes that connect to each other, so the player doesn't always have to guess.

But there are two major problems with its implementation:

The controls are terrible. When a friend asked if the game was playable on Steam Deck, I noted that it should be fine because any control scheme feels godawful. I was using keyboard and mouse, which should be the best way to play the game. But dragging tiles over and over made me quickly sick of the gameplay, and the later cases have much longer sequences. I've heard from a friend who played it on console that the mouse cursor also scrolled slowly.
Many clue tiles also feel vague because they are utterances of suspects. To give a hypothetical example, imagine that the game asked you how a vase at the crime scene got smashed: you have to find utterances related to it (the vase shard is over there!). I wanted to see every possible false hypothesis in the game in case the puzzle used an element I wasn't expecting, which is why the way the tiles are categorized under FMV clips is so unhelpful. I hated trying to associate what an utterance is with a line in a long video clip.

Everything else about the game is fantastic. The performances are excellent and hammy when appropriate, the music is very listenable and suspenseful, and the puzzles are super engaging.

But I just find the gameplay too awful to give it an easy recommendation, because you spend at least fifteen minutes on each case.

It sucks so much.

Nevertheless, I still want people to play this game. I think it says something about how we should appreciate how historical conditions shape us.

While I find the English title apt for its scale, the Japanese title, 春ゆきてレトロチカ, describes the game's aesthetic: the passing of spring fashioned in retro-chic clothing. New beginnings emerge after things have come to an end, just in fashion lingo. This sounds a lot like the Orientalist cliché, mono no aware, where "expert" commentators note how the noble Japanese are perceptive enough to feel a pathos about how things must inevitably change, the transience of everything, and all that nonsense.

But what I find most compelling about this game is how it roots this cliché in a history full of violence and dreams. The optimism of Taisho Democracy potentially giving women rights isn't some utopian dream; it seemed possible until the Kanto Earthquake and World War II interrupted women's suffrage. No one feels emotion from change itself; it's because change is so destructive and creative that trauma follows. Today's Japan is still marked by the legacies and broken promises of the Taisho and Showa eras.

We get our traditions and our life from the corpses buried under our feet. The epilogue of the game wants us to face this truth. What we do with it is another matter, but I think it's a lesson worth learning.

I really like The Centennial Case. It was made by people who obviously love shinhonkaku mysteries and have experience in making adventure games. The game can work very well as an introduction to Japanese mysteries, if not for the atrocious gameplay.

If any of this makes you want to play the game, please do. And if you want to read more shinhonkaku mysteries afterwards, then I think the game has done its job in teaching its players that mysteries are a fascinating genre that will always comment on what needs to be done in the microcosm of a mansion.

November 2024 Reviews

2024-12-03T00:00:00Z

As people may know, I've been pretty busy in real life and on the internet. But fortunately I've been watching a lot of movies, especially found footage horror movies, in the first half of October.

In fact, I was watching about two to three movies a day, which was fun and all, until I realized that I had a lot of writing to do...

I'm not sure how people see me as a person, but I'm first and foremost a film bro (nonbinary/trans-adjacent). I may have made my name(?) writing about games and visual novels, but my real passion comes from discussing cinema. Many of my ideas about what makes for interesting viewing and criticism come from my deep interest in movies.

In that spirit, I've also created a Letterboxd account, but I'm not interested in reviewing movies. Instead, I'll be curating lists that might interest people in getting more involved with movies. The first one is Anti-Cathartic Stillness, so check that out.

Without further ado, here's a lot of horror movies.

Fulci, Lucio (1981). ...E tu vivrai nel terrore! L'aldilà.

Localized for English audiences as The Beyond, the film follows a New Yorker who moves to New Orleans after learning that she has inherited a hotel. She has been down on her luck professionally and is looking forward to running it. Unfortunately for her, this hotel has been associated with one of the seven gates of hell when an artist and practitioner of black magic who guarded the gates was lynched by a mob in 1927.

The plot doesn't get any more elaborate. Characters who work for her get their eyeballs gorged out and their faces torn apart. The setting and scenario are there to connect the dots and elidely explain why these surreal horror scenes are happening. In one scene, spiders crawl up to an unconscious man and bite the shit out of his face like it's dough being stretched; he just happens to be an architect researching the layout of the house. Character motivations don't get any more complex than that, except to provide a reason for these characters to go to the places where they will be attacked.

The movie is thus centered around various death scenes. It is invested in showing eyeballs popping out in different ways, and they are rather creative and gross. On the other hand, symbols and motifs do not cohere into a larger picture. Scenes don't even follow the bare minimum of dream logic, with characters and events just contradicting the foreshadowing at times.

I feel that how much you like this movie depends on whether you prefer consistency or strong individual scenes. The rushed production and writing definitely make it harder for me to watch; the pacing seems all over the place, and the plot makes little sense. But there is beauty in the movie: the special effects are impressive, the shots of New Orleans give a Southern Gothic flavor to the horror, and the ending visuals are poetic and bleak.

For me, I admire this movie for its gory scenes, but I feel it's too much of a montage of cool horror deaths, and there's not much theming to sell the one cool idea in it. I like the idea of hell opening up and people reacting poorly to it, but it doesn't get capitalized on until the last twenty minutes or so. The movie is too distracted to focus on throughlines. I would have liked to see the ending payoff come from proper setup and characterization.

But I also recognize that this hodgepodge of ideas may be the main appeal of the movie. There's something fascinating about watching the filmmakers work with what they have. It is an inspiring film production that shows the ingenuity of the director and crew who clearly have a passion for the craft of horror filmmaking. Watch it for its love of horror, you won't regret it.

Hancock, John D. (1971). Let's Scare Jessica to Death.

Despite the eccentric title, this film explores gaslighting and mental health in the context of a haunted house setting. Jessica has been released from the psych ward and lives with her husband and boyfriend away from New York, in an old house where they're planning to make an orchard. She often questions herself and wonders if she's allowed to be happy. After meeting another woman who squatted in the house, her paranoia begins to confuse her as she discovers bodies and suspects her husband may be in love with the other woman. But no matter how much she rings the alarm bell, none of the men will listen.

This movie is therefore quite sensitive to misogyny and gaslighting. Although the male characters should know better from their hippie backgrounds and liberal attitudes, they often denigrate Jessica's voice as a disabled woman. They do attempt to take her claims seriously, but they also give up very quickly when they try to investigate the issue. Her husband, in particular, has the hots for another woman and doesn't distinguish between his concern for her mental health and his desire to commit adultery when he wants to send Jessica back to the psychiatric ward.

But while the audience may sympathize with Jessica, her subjectivity always seems compromised. It is difficult to figure out whether we are hearing her inner monologue or a supernatural force that are subliminally sending her instructions. Her paranoia, justified and unjustified, challenges the viewing experience. Even mundane scenes, of which there are many, don't seem believable at first glance. It puts the audience in the same position as the men who are clearly fed up with her. Are we to believe everything she sees or...?

This paranoid viewing experience is balanced by the slow, atmospheric pacing. There's some great folk music, with one scene performed diegetically. Much of the film is about the interactions between the characters and their struggle to hold their farm and relationships together. Until the very end, I sometimes forgot that I was watching a horror movie.

But when the horror happens, it's quite shocking. The acoustic music seems to have magically regressed to synthesizer distortions, apparently an innovation since this was one of the first movies to use synthesizers. There are few bloody scenes, but the costumes and scars are quite decent. The ending has one particular scene that surprised my partner and me: just people flooding the camera like there's no tomorrow.

It's a decent folk horror movie that plays with gender and mental health issues, but it feels like it could have been something more. The big reveal doesn't feel exciting enough to me, knowing the possible literary sources of inspiration. Despite the ingenious angle on the horror protagonist and the brilliant cinematography, the plot -- especially its second half -- is surprisingly standard. It makes me wish for more, and I agree with my partner that the ending should just be darker. As it is, it's okay.

Alioto, Dean (1989). UFO Abduction.

Even though it predates Blair Witch Project by ten years, this is an impressive zero budget movie that showcases all the techniques now common in the found footage horror genre.

The film purports to be footage shot for a young girl's birthday party. But when the men of the family investigate some strange lights in the distance, they discover a spaceship and, more distressingly, aliens. They flee into the house, telling the women in the household to close the windows and lock the doors while they grab their guns. Everyone is frightened, especially the women, as the men wave their guns and yell at everyone to calm down.

This movie achieves verisimilitude by using shaky cameras, focusing on objects that aren't important to the actual plot, allowing the actors to improvise and dictate the scene, and so on. It's indeed impressive to see the building blocks of the found footage genre in action, and the movie feels like a real meandering home video compared to the more polished offerings in the genre. Not surprisingly, ufologists and believers still claim this movie is authentic because the performances and camera techniques don't feel scripted at all.

But while its historical significance, craftsmanship, and influence are undeniable, watching it felt like doing homework. The actors, especially the mother and the patriarch, play very believable characters, but they're not interesting because they're just any white American family: boring with a dash of anger management issues. The movie starts too slowly, with the guys joking too much like they belong on a podcast before their encounter with the alien. The aliens are also not threatening enough for my taste, and the plot in general feels too rudimentary for 2024.

I appreciate the movie for very much starting one of my favorite horror subgenres. And it's worth a watch if you're interested in the history of horror. I found this movie because a writer had recommended it as one of the ten found footage films on their BFI list and the alien costume looked too silly to ignore. What I got was a deep historical lesson about horror movies, and it allowed me to have a critical reflection on the kind of found footage horror that excites me. For watching a movie that looked so ridiculous, this is a better reward than I could have ever hoped for.

Manning, Leslie (director) and Volk, Stephen (writer) (1992). Ghostwatch.

It's hard to write about this BBC One TV movie without repeating the wonderful documentation of the controversies and interviews that people have done over the years. Like Orson Welles's infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast, the show was so believable that it upset many people who feared for the lives of the newscasters. While the crew had to publicly apologize and the film was banned for a decade, it is now considered a pioneer of found footage: it predated Blair Witch by seven years, and its mockumentary style is unsurpassed.

The film featured popular BBC news anchors playing themselves in a typical BBC special format. At one end of the studio was a presenter, an expert on parapsychology and several staff members handling calls from the audience. At the other end, the journalists and the TV crew are on location investigating what is considered "the most haunted house in Britain". A single mother and her two children are being haunted by a poltergeist and have agreed to appear on the BBC because they are tired of people not believing their stories.

Like any other live TV special, the presenter interviews different experts and switches between the studio and the house to create the illusion that this is an actual show produced by the BBC. The pauses from journalists, the serious yet inquisitive tone in the questions, the dial-a-number box, the need to sensationalize in order to fill in the dead air, the plain yet awkward responses from interviewees, and the empathetic yet distanced way the journalists interact with the family all feel like the real thing. Frankly, I sympathize with the people who are distressed by the show; the realism is too close to home.

Along with the appropriate ghost-hunting technology (including a camera with infrared night vision, which didn't exist at the time), this special felt like a high-quality ghost-hunting TV show. But there were two things that made it feel more than that:

The studio segments are sometimes interrupted by fake phone calls. These callers are either true believers or prank calls, and they mimic the chaotic vibrancy of a special like this when it is filmed live.
In the second half of the TV special, the host and other staff members have lost their enthusiasm for the subject. The host is particularly antagonistic toward the expert and begins to demand explicit answers, even when obvious supernatural phenomena are occurring. Watching them express disbelief and then fear after their interest in the paranormal is quite unnerving because they feel like real people.

It's incredible how much this early movie got everything right in terms of verisimilitude. I couldn't believe my eyes that this was even broadcast. It didn't matter if the story was unoriginal by today's standards: nothing felt off, and that's what makes this TV special so eerie.

The only reason I can't recommend this movie is the characterization of the poltergeist. It's a cliched apparition that cross-dresses and engages in pedophilia, classic transphobic tropes when taken together. These references are simply unnecessary and only serve to worsen the perception of trans people.

It frustrates me that I can't tell people to go see this movie because for the most part I love what it does. The techniques it uses are revolutionary, the performances are fun to watch, and the ending is awesome. However, the transphobic identity of the poltergeist revealed at the very end makes it difficult to recommend the movie today.

Balagueró, Jaume and Plaza, Paco (2007). REC.

This Spanish-language horror film is a found footage classic for a reason. It opens with a local journalist bored out of her mind covering firefighters for a puff piece before she and her cameraman answer a 911 call to rescue an elderly woman in an apartment building. Little do they know that everyone -- the firemen, the police, the residents and the news crew -- will be quarantined by the state.

Found footage movies live and die by how authentic they feel to the audience. The transition from professional TV journalism at the firehouse to the chaotic camerawork and running up and down the stairs of the apartment makes me feel like I'm watching real raw footage. The transitions also make sense: the camera is turned off when nothing is happening, the policeman gets violent with the cameraman, and I like the scene where a young girl is playing with the camera and accidentally turns it on. With one glaring exception (the movie showing footage being rewinded), the camera feels like a real prop in the movie, and our only line of sight into this mayhem is always in jeopardy.

There is also a sense that these shots and sequences are unedited, even though they are fully scripted and planned. It doesn't take long for the plot to introduce the stakes, but it feels like the characters have stumbled upon what's going on. And because the state suppresses vital information even from the policeman in the building, each new nugget of information feels earned. The illusion of organic momentum in this movie makes me very interested in what's going to happen next.

That said, I find it a pity that the most accessible English subtitles are poor, because I really like the performances in the movie. Prominent characters get into screaming matches because of their different connection to the state: the fireman and the policeman disagree even though they try their best to maintain the status quo; the journalist we follow wants to get everything on tape so she and the cameraman are happy to break the rules; and the neighbors' racism towards the Japanese immigrants living in the apartment is just enough to make it clear that some of the people living there are kind of shit. Unfortunately, their performances are muddied by poor translation practices: unclear pronoun references, awkward writing, and just a lot of typos.

And while I enjoyed most of the movie, I can't say I was as thrilled with the finale. For a fairly minimalist premise, the big reveal felt like it was trying to make some deeper commentary or reach for a more concrete explanation, but it ended up being superficial and lost a lot of the mystery for me. It certainly didn't help that I didn't like the way the movie tried to rush the surviving characters to this point. Everything about it feels like a contrived wrap-up compared to the dynamism in the earlier parts of the movie. I suppose I'll give it credit for pioneering the infamous "camera watching a person being dragged into the darkness" shot, but that's about all I'm willing to praise.

I suspect that my apathy towards the finale is due to my aversion to endings that provide too many answers to interesting questions and speculations. The movie does a very good job of masking the gore and allowing the audience's imagination to run wild, so it's irritating that the movie doesn't allow that freedom to continue after the credits roll (which, by the way, has one of the most inappropriate songs I've ever had the pleasure of watching).

I certainly agree with the consensus that the movie is a masterpiece, but it also brings up my usual qualms about horror writing. I want horror to be speculative between the audience and the work, and this movie comes pretty close. If only the ending had been a little more restrained, I could see this movie being a lot better than what it is right now.

Țofei, Adrian (2015). Be My Cat: A Film for Anne. (recommended?)

When I learned that the premise of this found footage horror movie was to get Anne Hathaway to star in the protagonist's movie, I knew I had to see it.

Set in Romania, the protagonist (played by the director) was enamored by Hathaway's performance as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises and wants her to come to his attic to film his childhood dream movie. But he knows that's a tall order, so he's hired three actors to play the role she'll be playing. He assures Hathaway on camera that his heart is with her; they're just there for a test run.

The movie quickly descends into chaos. He yells at his actors to do unreasonable things, one of them too fat for his taste, and keeps asking them to find a solution. When the terrible violence happens, it seems to come out of nowhere, but still follows the logic of the protagonist.

The film is extremely uncomfortable to watch because it seems too uncanny and real (thankfully, the actual production makes sure the actors are safe). In fact, the film deliberately blurs reality and performance. The director is a method actor, so it's interesting that the film can be read as a statement about how harmful and delusional method acting can be. The protagonist sees Hathaway as a method actor, someone who understands that committing to extreme methods can produce the best performances. He pushes his actors to do the same, sometimes even deceiving them so that they can be "sacrificed" to increase the quality of the film.

His confessions to the camera/Anne Hathaway suggest that, for better or worse, he is an honest director. While viewers may see him as a "psychopath," as one character puts it, I think he expresses the darker side of aspiring directors. Abuse and cruelty are useful in making great commodified art. It doesn't take much to extrapolate this tendency to some of the more unethical Hollywood movies of the past and the way the culture industry churns out actors, especially women. Not surprisingly, people outside of Hollywood can pick up on this and play out this dehumanizing misogyny in their home videos. The movie is always destabilizing what it means to see a great performance, to see an artist suffer for his art, and so on, to the point where I began to understand the terrible mentality of the protagonist.

This is an unpredictable, unsettling film with some great improvisation and editing. I cringed as I watched it because it felt too visceral at times, even though there wasn't that much gore. The energy emanating from the beginning just gets louder and louder to the point that I feel overwhelmed by his gestures and words. In a way, this movie did the near impossible: it scared me. I was relieved when the credits rolled. It's such an intense movie that I don't think I can recommend it to most people, but it's definitely one of the most uniquely terrifying works out there.

Levinson, Barry (2012) The Bay.

The premise of this horror mockumentary is quite riveting: there was a cover-up that decimated the town of Chesapeake Bay during a Fourth of July parade, and the local journalist who was there is ready to make a documentary that will reveal the whole truth.

Combining fact and fiction, the film speculates on the real issues surrounding the bay and how they could manifest into an ecological disaster of unprecedented proportions. Most of the science, according to one reviewer who has a master's degree in marine environmental science, is accurate. The beginning of the movie features actual news footage, and there are so many extras that it felt like I was watching a small town fall into chaos.

At times, the movie feels like a panoramic view of the town. We are treated to a barrage of different video sources with different aspect ratios, video quality, and audio volume to get a better picture of what happened. Scenes are sometimes filmed from different angles and cameras, allowing the audience to triangulate and imagine the spatial relationships of the people suffering from whatever is in the water.

They're also edited in the way that a shlocky documentary would be edited: there's text that pops up in that CSI digital way, over-the-top music, sentimental portraits of families and children who have no idea they're about to lose their lives, and a somewhat "unedited" voiceover that complements the footage. These techniques make it feel like I am watching a real conspiracy theory documentary.

Some of the best found footage comes from the CDC. While the doctors are frustrated that they can't do anything, the CDC is treated with sympathy throughout the film: they are confused by what's happening in the city, they realize that vital reports aren't coming their way, and they seem self-aware that they're solving something that was solved hours ago by other state and federal bureaucracies. Toward the end of the movie, one of the employee lashes out at Homeland Security who tells them that it's just a small town and it's not worth shutting down the entire bay for. These scenes show how cold bureaucracies can be when they try to deflect responsibility and say that any action can only be taken by the higher-ups.

So it's pretty obvious that this movie is about the environment and how corporations and politicians don't care about how pollution can affect public health and aquatic ecosystems. The antagonist of the film is the mayor, who the narrator of the documentary points out as one of the main culprits for allowing this to happen. Before the mayhem unfolded, he and other politicians told their constituents that they could fix the bay later; it was more important to promote businesses like poultry farming. Such rhetoric is clearly taken from actual politicians, so I find it refreshing that the film has a progressive social message that also makes the conspiracy theory cover-up more believable.

I don't really have anything critical to say about this movie. If anything, it's a highly produced movie that I somehow don't feel strongly about. The movie is very intriguing from start to finish: it was great to see the real culprit being as exciting as the movie hyped it up to be. But I still feel like the movie didn't do much for me: it's just entertaining, and that's all there is to it.

Maybe the mockumentary approach of this movie is too elaborate for me. It just feels like a real documentary, with the dead air removed and edited for manipulative effect; in fact, the director originally wanted to make a documentary about the Bay's pollution, but when he learned that PBS Frontline had already made one, he used the research for the basis of an eco-horror film. What I like about found-footage films is the amateur aesthetic of people filming something they can't possibly show because it's just too big for their handycam or smartphone. The abundance of video sources, while impressive, gave me too clear a view of what was happening on the ground. I know how big the disaster really was. There was no room for imagination watching the film because we just get everything we need to know.

I think the movie is a good watch, even if it doesn't appeal to my horror sensibilities. It has a timely subject and the performances are memorable. But since I already agree with its message, it would have been more powerful for me if the movie gave me more ambiguity to reflect and interpret its ideas. I just felt like I was in the choir that the movie was preaching to.

Brice, Patrick (2014). Creep.

The premise sounded good at first: a videographer films a cancer survivor who is in remission and wants to record footage for his unborn child. And there are some great shots, including the scene that becomes the poster for the movie, and some cleverly awkward performances. But oh my god, I can't believe how ridiculous the writing of this movie is.

Abandoning the supernatural as a source of scares, the horror plays on the homoerotic tension between the videographer and the survivor. Lines like "This is great, huh. Two guys having some whiskeys" and shots like the one where the survivor draws their initials circled around a heart shape on a rock are too much for my fujoshi spirit.

The big reveal behind the survivor's fetish is also prepostorous, especially if you know anything about that subculture. All of this culminated in an extremely campy experience, and I couldn't appreciate the attention to craftsmanship and atmosphere at all. The survivor thus doesn't come off as creepy. He's just a guy who needs to check out better porn. It's way too absurd a movie to be anything close to horror.

While I find the movie entertaining, I got tired of the overuse of queerphobia, jump scares, and ableism in the improvisation to characterize the survivor. It's just a poorly conceived movie with no sense of suspense because the horror and comedy rely so much on bad faith readings of the subcultures they're riffing off of. Despite the obvious effort to make this a naturalistic movie about the awkward relationship of two guys, it just comes across as insensitive and sensationalistic.

All in all, this is unfortunately a disappointing movie for me. I expected more considering the acclaim it has received from the found footage horror community. I won't deny its technical competence and excellent performances from both actors, but it didn't really rock my world. At best, I hope the queer film reclaims this movie as a camp movie because I do think it's quite hilarious with queer friends who share a similar sense of humor.

Le, Antoine (2018). Followed.

For a horror movie that should have pissed me off, I actually thought it was actually kind of fun. The movie follows a Logan Paul-like vlogger and his crew as they stay in a hotel clearly inspired by the infamous Cecil Hotel in New York City. While I wasn't a fan of the movie using everything from its history to bolster its premise, the movie is more focused on the content creator grind and how toxic it actually is.

The found footage aspect is pretty fun. It's framed around someone accessing a video site and watching these edited vlogs. If you don't blink, you can even read some poorly written comments. The desktop screen and browsers aren't convincing to me, but they work well enough to show that you're watching a bunch of YouTube videos made by some jerk. The vlog aspect also allows things commonly disavowed by found footage affocianados like diegetic music, edited montages, and stock sound effects. It really does feel like you're watching a horrible vlogger abuse the trust of hotel staff and exploit traumatic cases for the sake of clicks.

I appreciate that the movie focused on a deeply unlikable character who exploits his workers and the horrific scenarios for subscribers and views. The main reason they're staying in this haunted hotel, despite his staff's deteriorating mental health, is that he needs a few thousand subscribers to get some sponsorship money. His style of vlogging demands that every second be filmed: it doesn't matter if the staff is feeling vulnerable or he's just found out he's having a kid -- everything is content. The movie touching on his anxiety on how little money video content makes is quite nice to see. It was pleasing to see him suffer the most while everyone else is more or less a nice person dragged into his nonsense.

And there are parts in the movie where one gets a sense why his crew always stuck with him in the end. They joke around each other, play pranks, and their chemistry is just kinda believable. The workers are just working for an asshole who can be funny sometimes. Leaving these snippets of them goofing off in the vlogs makes me think about how it humanizes the protagonist and why viewers might become parasocial to controversial vloggers like him.

But it suffers from trends I dislike in modern horror. While I understand that there is a thematic reason to include real-life cases and traumas, I still find it cringe. One could reasonably argue that the movie tries to have its cake and eat it too since it criticizes the sensationalism of horror web content but is based on popular real-life creepypastas. The digital glitches aren't too annoying, but it gets unbelievable when the videos aren't edited anymore; they just look fake. I also find most of the jumpscares in the second half unnecessary and cheap. The poster is also misleading: I have no idea where the woman is from.

I still think it's not a bad popcorn movie, despite my distaste for using real world elements in horror flicks like this. Its focus on how shitty the protagonist is makes this movie more palatable than it should be. Not my first choice for a Halloween movie, but it's just a good time.

Gabriadze, Levan (2014). Unfriended. (recommended)

You know, this horror movie ain't bad despite its notoriety. Actually, it's quite good at what it's trying to do: a horror movie based on the social media and cyberbullying of that era.

For people who aren't familiar with this movie, it's about a bunch of teenagers trapped in a Skype chat with a mysterious stranger who turns out to be the ghost of someone who was cyberbullied and died by suicide. The victim seeks revenge by making people reveal their dirty secrets and how complicit they were in the cyberbullying.

The entire movie takes place on one character's laptop screen. Skype is prominently featured in this movie, but there's also Google Chrome, Facebook, iMessages, iTunes, BitTorrent, and even Chatroulette. The authenticity is impressive, and it makes me smile to hear the Skype beep and see all these software and websites once more.

Crucially, there's never a moment where I felt like the screen was being used as a gimmick. There are some great shots using the Skype webcam format: Screens freeze and distort; and in one case, we can see a character from another webcam, and seeing them wave their hands in both cameras makes for quite the uncanny experience. The protagonist also sends covert messages to her boyfriend on iMessage to calm him down during tense moments, which feels true to life. But most importantly, we also see and hear her typing and see her mouse movement. You get a sense of how she uses the laptop and her familiarity with technology just from the way she surfs the web and her constant need to use menus instead of shortcuts.

As for the cyberbullying, I was quite surprised that the movie used it to explore how people perceive themselves as good people who wouldn't betray others when they're just repressing those bad memories. It's very interested in exploring degrees of complicity: some of the characters are more visibly vile than others, but others are more successful at hiding their responsibility and appearing good to the public. It's a surprisingly nuanced view that feels refreshing in today's social media landscape.

I also have to commend the actors for doing all this in one long take. They met the filmmaker's demands head-on, and it takes an impressive amount of effort to get everything in place.

There are some corny details in the movie (the jumpscare at the end stands out), and the movie isn't that frightening by today's standards. But honestly, the execution of this movie is nothing less than spectacular. I'm sure that if I watched it when it came out, I may have cringed at the movie (especially when the protagonist asks "What is a troll?"). But today I find the desktop, the sounds, and the horror in the movie quite amusing and nostalgic. If anything, the way this movie has aged may have made it better to watch. It dates itself and its concerns about the internet in some fun ways. Technology moves on, but I have to admit: high school has never left my mind. It's always fun to reflect on what has changed and what hasn't.

Hughes, Graham (2019). Death of a Vlogger.

This is an alright, if somewhat shallow, mockumentary about content media creators who are addicted to social media. It follows a sketch comedy YouTuber who discovers his apartment is haunted and how he turns to horror vlogging.

The documentary interviews several key figures connected to the vlogger: a best friend who helped with some of his videos, another best friend who remains sceptical about the whole ordeal, an opportunistic ghost hunter and an investigative journalist who believes these hauntings are fake. There are also animated segments with a social psychologist lecturing the audience on how social media addiction works.

I found the satire too thickly layered to be entertaining. The film makes it clear from the start that it is going to be quite manipulative: it tries to make the audience question their trust in the vlogger, but I find the constant use of red herrings and plot twists quite annoying; the characters, especially the ghost hunter and the investigative journalist, are caricatures that obviously will build up to the audience in the end saying "aren't they right all along"; and the documentary deliberately obscures real key details to make the mystery more intriguing and the social commentary deeper than they actually are. The film felt like a drag.

Unfortunately, the great cinematography and editing can't save this film from having very little to say other than the obvious: the hunt for social media dopamine is kind of bad. It doesn't question the material or ideological conditions of the influencers. Despite its critique of public shaming, its emphasis on individuals trying to game the algorithm out of context feels like they're participating in the same dogpile. Its attempt to recognise that everyone, even the investigative journalist debunking the myths, is in it for the clicks feels unfinished. In the end, the film wants you to doubt whether the haunting really happened or not. It's not interested in asking the bigger questions about the internet, why people watch these videos and why people make them.

All I can say is that I felt like I was watching an anti-social media film that, despite its clever premise, somehow avoided putting the blame on social media and how it enabled influencers to thrive. And even with these educational segments, it still relied on the audience's justifiable distrust of social media and influencers to fill in the blanks. Its satire doesn't really work for me at all.

Clement, Jemaine and Waititi, Taika (2014). What We Do in the Shadows. (recommended)

This mockumentary made me laugh so hard. Using similar reality TV techniques found in other mockumentaries like The Office, the film follows a found family of vampires as they try to adjust to modern times in a mansion in New Zealand.

Much of the humor comes from adapting classic monster tropes to modern life. Vampires need to find prey, so they have to go to discos. They learn to surf the web thanks to my favorite character, Stu the IT Guy. And there's faction fighting between the vampires and the werewolves. It doesn't defang the violent mytholos of these fantastical creatures, but rather allows them to kill and let the uncanny horror of it all seep in.

It's a charming flick that plays on the absurdity of its premise and somehow manages to create genuinely tender moments through its comedy. There's not much more to say about it than that it's a lot of fun, and it makes sense why it got a popular Netflix TV spin-off. The comedy is just that good.

Savage, Rob (2020). Host.

As a horror film made during the early days of the COVID-19 quarantine, it is very well produced. Out of context, I don't think it holds up very well.

The movie follows a group of friends who have hired a spiritualist to perform a seance on Zoom. Not everyone takes it seriously, which may have upset some of the spirits. Their home becomes a death trap as the ghosts begin to harass them before finding ways to kill them. It's clearly a literalization of the fears people have during a lockdown, and it's interesting to think about what made the pandemic so threatening back then: its invisibility, people trying to rationalize its "wrath," and the fact that we can only communicate via a pretty shitty video service. It's novel that our homes have become haunted houses thanks to the pandemic.

While the movie plays this very well, I find the way it is edited too distracting. Just like in Unfriended, we see a screen share from one of the protagonists' laptops, and for the most part we see everyone's webcams in the client. But every once in a while, the Zoom client will switch the screen to gallery view without any input. While I recognize that this is done to focus the tension and make the audience anticipate the scary moments, it weakens what I think is a core component of found footage/screenlife horror: the illusion of no artifice. I think Unfriended works for me because a good portion of the movie involves the protagonist using other browsers to surf the web and check out more details. Her awkward mouse movements, while exaggerated, at least suggest that someone is using the computer. Host sticks very much to Zoom, and the mouse movement is quite smooth. I can't help but notice details that don't match how I've used Zoom and computers in general.

And I think the writing is too straightforward. The movie is ostensibly about the people who disturb the spirits, so the COVID-19 allegory is obviously about people who break the rules of lockdown and masking. This is a clever idea, but if adapted straight, it also reduces the character interactions to simply watching the events unfold in horror and blaming the survivors for their actions. The dynamic doesn't really shift in any interesting way, and I found the later sequences predictable because of this.

I don't want to be too negative about this movie, because I think it's pretty decent, especially as a reminder that we haven't taken the pandemic seriously in recent times. It's just that I find the movie to be underbaked; for example, I would have liked to see more Zoom-specific features like the face filters and common problems found in the client. There's so much the movie can do with its premise and characters. Hopefully the success of this movie will inspire more fully realized quarantine horror movies in the near future.

Winter, Vanessa and Winter, Joseph (2022). Deadstream.

The quick and dirty way to describe this movie is Evil Dead 2 meets screenlife horror. A Paul Logan-like character decides to livestream his experiences in a haunted house, and he introduces these rules that force him to actually engage with the setting.

This makes for a very engaging watch as the rules of the movie are clearly laid out. The way the streamer interacts with the chat and the HUD is also quite fun since the guy is a scaredy-cat, but his peanut gallery refuses to let him off the hook.

The movie later descends into cartoonish fun. It's an enjoyable romp that I can have with pals, but it's not something I'll remember for years to come.

Øvredal, André (2010). Troll Hunter.

This is a rather unique found footage horror movie as it is not scary at all. Instead, it is more interested in evoking a Finnish mythology in a down-to-earth setting.

The movie follows a team of college students who track down a real troll hunter. At first, they don't believe the creatures are real. But after their encounters, they decide to document the hunter's life and the things he does.

The squabbles with the bureaucracy are the most exciting part of the movie as Finland is trying to hide the existence of trolls from the public. The hunter is fed up with this conspiracy, which is why he agrees to people documenting his film. This interesting between the typical uncovering of government conspiracies and the documentation of someone's life makes the film quite watchable in my opinion.

There's some neat techniques the film uses to spice things up. In the second half, there is a change in the cinematographer, and this is immediately noticeable in the framing of the shots. It gives the changing cast members some personality.

Although the film is rather slow, mimicking the ennui of the hunter as he tries to find these creatures, the film seems reluctant to exploit its rich tedium. Parts of the film feel like an action movie, others are clearly trying to scare people. However, it is this odd mix of genres and the love for all things Finnish that makes this film a very interesting watch. I wouldn't recommend it to the general public, but if you're interested in this kind of thing, give it a look.

Goldner, Elliot (2013). The Borderlands. (recommended)

This movie feels like it's redefining what a sleepy hit should be: it's not only fairly unknown, but it has a rather sleepy atmosphere and is quite good.

The English countryside is as much a character as the three protagonists: a Catholic priest who doesn't act like one, a carefree videographer who got the job by pretending to be a Christian, and a rational priest who believes in science over the supernatural. Together, they act like the Vatican's own myth-busters, making sure that what they're witnessing on camera are real miracles and not just a scam to steal money from pilgrims.

How much you like this movie seems to depend on how much you find these character dynamics interesting, the folk horror setting gripping, and the ending surprising. I liked all those aspects, and it felt like a more modern Wicker Man. But I can also see how people might feel kind of bored by the end.

Still, the way the movie ends is undeniably fascinating to me. I'm still shocked by how abrupt it is and how I didn't pick up on the really obvious foreshadowing. It's great because the movie doesn't really go for any deep literary or religious themes: it's just about the fear of the unknown, no matter what you believe in. In a way, I find that more satisfying than, say, Heretic.

I'm not sure if I would consider it a favorite of mine, but I respect the way the movie created this intoxicating atmosphere that plays with Catholic motifs, technology, and Lovecraftian horror. It's definitely one of the few movies that actually scared me, and I think that's quite an accomplishment.

Lee, Derek and Prowse, Clif (2013). Afflicted.

Although this movie is not to my taste, I found this take on vampires fresh. The movie pretends to be a travelogue: one of them is dying of a brain tumor and this is their only time to travel around the world. Unfortunately, their attempt to travel the world turns into chaos when he gets infected with vampirism.

There are some incredible one-take sequences and the writing is top-notch. I just found it a little too action-heavy for my taste.

But movies like this show that there's more to be explored in the found footage genre. I also really like how the movie is set in different countries, with language barriers being a big part of the story. I wanted a movie that would explore what it means to travel around the world with this fictional disability, but I thought this was fine for what it is.

I'm not sure what kind of media I want to focus on this month. Maybe I'll read more trans fiction (especially online/self-published stuff) and yuri visual novels. I know people will ask about the former, so I'll just say that I am interested in reading A Little Vice by Shadell. I like to see a thorough take on magical girl stories. No promises, but it does sound very interesting.

Other things to keep in mind: Elin, which I'm sure I'll write about, has been keeping me company in these troubling times, and there's also Aural to Hikari no Ryuu to finish.

But knowing me, I am also extremely unpredictable and might move on to something else. Backlogs, what's that?

October 2024 Reviews

2024-11-10T00:00:00Z

In my quest to avoid simply logging things I've read and seen, I decided to write short reviews that archived my experience of going through these works. I do this because I'd like to read my older thoughts on media, and it makes me exercise my writing skills a bit.

This is a collection of 27 reviews from October 2024 to early November. There are a few science fiction books, but most of the works written about are horror-adjacent books and movies.

I don't have every work I've checked out because I plan to write longer articles about them: specifically, they are Dhalgren by Samuel Delany and the Revue Starlight TV show and movie.

Bester, Alfred (1953). The Demolished Man.

I was a fan of The Stars, My Destination, so when I heard that this was the better Bester book, I had to get it. Unfortunately, I also knew I had to buy a physical copy, because Bester likes to use peculiar typographical features to convey his science fiction world. A digital copy wouldn't look good. It took me probably seven years to finally get a cool copy of the book.

This book came at a time when I'm becoming interested in psychiatry and its hold on Western society. It is a police procedural set in a world where Freudian psychoanalysts are also telepaths. The protagonist, Ben Reich, is haunted by a figure known as The Man with No Face. He feels the need to murder his rival, Craye D'Courtney, in order to take over the business and consolidate with his company.

Since there are espers in this world who can see into people's minds, murder is virtually impossible. But Reich hatches a plan that includes jamming his brain with a catchy tune so the espers won't be able to read his mind properly. The only cop on the hunt is Lincoln Powell, who also has another alterego, Dishonest Abe, who is as cunning as his name suggests.

From this description alone, you can tell that the worldbuilding is immense and elaborate. The book takes the reader into different societies, streets, and organizations. In one section, it even addresses the reader like a tour guide. The book is also more than happy to switch formats, with one chapter interspersed with dialogue in script format. Rich details drip from small interactions that are mundane to the characters but bizarre to us. The narration also doesn't stop to consider whether the reader is catching up; it's invested in following the cat-and-dog chase between Reich and Powell.

The novel is thus closer to a thriller taking in the sights and sounds than an introspective mystery. For better or worse, the sentences can lead the reader to hop from one place to another. It's exciting, mind-boggling, and downright entertaining.

I also found the overtly Freudian parts fascinating. There's a part that introduces a new experimental therapy where a witness's psyche is programmed to be a baby again and grow up slowly and slowly to an adult in a matter of weeks. The final reveal is also a very unique, if distressing twist on Freudian psychoanalysis.

I had a lot of fun with the book, but in the end it was just entertaining. I enjoyed how unpredictable the writing was, but it was very much like riding a decent roller coaster. When I get off the ride, I don't feel like it did anything to me. It wasn't surreal or radical enough to provoke anything, despite my recent interest in the politics of psychiatric control. It was interesting at best, but not revelatory.

If you can track down this book, it's worth reading. The gender politics are unsurprisingly antiquated, but I think the highly quotable writing makes up for it. Bester is quite good at finding lines that tug at your senses and soul. Very enjoyable read, and I want to read more Bester novels soon.

El-Mohtar, Amal and Gladstone, Max (2019). This is How You Lose the Time War.

Yes, I read this book because of Bigolas Dickolas.

The book is about two enemies from opposing empires, Red and Blue, who used to taunt each other in letters before they found out they were in love with each other. As both factions fight between parallel timelines (strands) to solidify their hold on the future, the duo leaves letters to each other in hidden objects like feathers or an extra dot in a bill in historical sequences.

The formula goes like this: It starts with Red or Blue disguising themselves as someone from the historical setting (e.g. Atlantis). They may participate in conspiracies that threaten the stability of the opposing empire's timeline. But they will stumble upon each other's letters, and they will simply devolve into becoming gay for each other. And since the book has two protagonists, the writing labor is also divided between the two authors: Red's sections go to Gladstone while Blue's are written by El-Mohtar.

It's a fun gimmick for an LGBTQ sci-fi epistolary novel, but I can't say I like the writing of either author very much. There are many striking visuals of people entering camps located in time bubbles, or Blue stirring a cup of tea in the most picturesque imperialist London, but there are other parts of the book that make me wish the writing was plainer. I found it overwhelming with its impressionistic visuals; it's hard for me to ground myself and follow the plot when all I have is the feeling of the wind, the love in the air and the letters, and a few historical references.

And without explicit references to the characters and the cultures they belong to, the writing voices seem to merge into one for me. Red and Blue like to go into these long monologues about how much they love each other in a very exaggerated way. Since everything reads so purple to me, I don't know if any one voice ever stands out. And I suppose the romance is too shallow for me to get into -- the two characters read too much like sentient thesauruses who have discovered poetry.

I also found it disappointing that the book doesn't really explore the time paradoxes and parallel universes outside as a backdrop. This is definitely an intentional decision: the book is about relationships that span many millennia, not silly time physics shenanigans, which is what I wanted.

All that said, when I reached the end of the book, I realized that I lacked the romanticism to fully appreciate this book. The ending is just too fantastical and lyrical for me, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

I can see the appeal of this novella. It articulates a whimsicality that the world needs: that despite the ongoing imperialisms of the world we live in, there is still true love and recognition. The fact that this co-written book comes together so gracefully is a testament to mutuality.

I ended up enjoying this book. It's not groundbreaking science fiction, but it's the kind of honest reaffirmation that wars are silly and love is good that the world needs. Nice book, I wouldn't mind more recommendations from Bigolas Dickolas.

Rumfitt, Alison (2023). Brainwyrms. (recommended)

Halfway through the book, the second-person narration breaks the fourth wall by addressing you the reader. It says that you "are welcome to take a break here given the extremity content explored in the next series of chapters. It isn't shameful to take a break. It is in fact encouraged to do so right here, so that this novel does not become overwhelming to you".

I read on, undeterred, and regretted not taking a break. It was the first time a book had made me gag.

The book is an explosion of sexuality and the grotesque. We (mostly) follow Frankie and Vanya, a trans woman and a nonbinary, respectively, as they navigate sex, TERF politics in the UK, and a lot of trauma. A gender clinic is bombed, presumably by a radicalized TERF mother. The Observer publishes a blatant article sympathetic to the violence. One chapter tells of the decline of antifascist homosexuals after homosexuality was legalized. Another bombards readers with CuriousCat questions about what it's like to have a tapeworm in your body. There's a jumble of voices, all screaming in pain and glee about the literal TERF brain worms rotting the United Kingdom.

It's a messy, exciting read from start to finish. The chapters are short experiments with different styles and formatting that make me want to read more. The storytelling, especially the sex scenes, is inviting, and the book won't let me go until I'm done. By the time I finished reading it, I felt deeply sick in a good way.

While the book is not for everyone, I'd like to at least highlight the themes of the penultimate chapter, aptly titled "Piss Ghost". It envisions a future in which TERF politicians take the next logical step and ban all public bathrooms. The unnamed narrator laments the great public bathroom and wonders how many aspects of British culture are a "sex thing", whether it's TERFs wearing dinosaurs or the Guardian dinners. Sex isn't just about power, it can be just a "sex thing". Echoing Freud, sexuality is more than just what we do in the bedroom. Even writing this review could be a sex thing. But people try to make it more than that and believe that their way is more dignified than others: "You haven't seen the future you're just horny and lonely and scared and that's okay, I promise." When I read that whole chapter, I felt like I had just read a kink manifesto that resonated with me.

This is the kind of book that will either be so effective that it gels with the poison in your internet brain, or so disgusting that you feel like you shouldn't have read it. For me, it's the former. This is the genre of literature I've always wanted to read: a book that understands what it means to be alive in this degrading sex-negative world that wants to reject you, and all you can do is just think about the gender brainworms on social media and real life. I'm sure this won't be the last Alison Rumfitt novel I read, because this is the kind of shit my life needs.

Thompson, Tade (2022). Jackdaw.

Writing something and putting it out into the world always feels like an act of vulnerability. You have to live with the strange metaphors, the glaring typos, and the awkward structure while everyone stares at your revelations. There's a deep sense that they're peering into your words only to find that there's nothing there.

The writing process is fraught with the realization that you might be writing nonsense that only you understand. And it could be worse if you're commissioned to write about Francis Bacon, the artist.

The fictional Tade Thompson does undertake this project: his real earlier novel has been compared to Bacon's paintings, the artist's estate has asked him to write something, and he gets lost in research. While dealing with his mundane life, taking care of his son and working as a psychiatrist, he also reads secondary literature about the people who knew Bacon.

This is much harder than it seems: Thompson is Yoruba and has very little in common with Bacon's white upbringing. He even asks a babalawo to look into Bacon's mind. Still, Thompson tries: he tells the reader snippets of his tragic and abusive life, while finding connections to Bacon's. He gets writer's block (apparently an unusual occurrence, and one I envy), and all he can do is freely associate words and hope that something thematic lands.

But as he dives deeper into his paintings and his life, his life begins to disintegrate. It starts silly enough -- he gets so horny he almost ruined his dick -- but he starts hallucinating dead people from Bacon's life and seeing his life in Bacon's eyes. The narration becomes more violent, bizarre, and finally too revealing to the reader. It crosses many boundaries of what a narrator based on the author shouldn't do.

His dangerous search for something that works, that captures a bit of Bacon's spirit, is the entire plot of the novel. There is little of Francis Bacon's life written down in these pages, but people with an inkling of familiarity with the subject may find something in these webs of words.

Whether that works for you or not (it does for me), I think the novella is an accurate representation of what the writing process feels like to me. When I get into a subject, I read everything around it and try to act things out like a method actor. Even if it's a bad idea. In fact, the book mentions the director of Marathon Man scolding Dustin Hoffman for his adherence to method acting and telling him to go act instead.

But when I write something, I always feel like I'm being enraptured by the mask I'm wearing. The toxic compulsion to write and research until you've written everything is something I want to wean myself off of, but it's also responsible for some of the better writing I've done. That's why I think the book has put into words what it feels like to be vulnerable as a writer hyperfixated on the subject.

I also find the dry humor quite delicious. For example, when the fictional Thompson is looking for the shop to meet the agents of Bacon's estate, he observes that "nobody tried to sell me anything or win me over to a cause during this perambulation, which was unusual for me. I have the kind of face that invites solicitation."

At the same time, I find it difficult to recommend this book. Plenty of Francis Bacon fans have expressed their disappointment with the work, and I can see their point to a degree: it's less an engagement about his work and more the process of interpreting the spirit of his work in someone else's life. It requires a reader who is familiar with at least some of Bacon's life and paintings, and who is willing to accept the novel for what it is.

But if such a reader exists, I'm sure they'll be talking about the book as much as I am. It's a fascinating book, and I'm very interested in the real Tade Thompson's science fiction works. The few body horror segments in the book are quite fun, and I would like to see him continue in that vein.

Felker-Martin, Gretchen (2022). Manhunt.

(cw: body horror, gender dysphoria)

I bought this book because Lilly Wachowski announced that she wanted to make a movie out of it, and I read a bit about it in Capitalism: A Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination by Jon Greenaway.

The book follows Fran and Beth, two trans women who hunt men for their testicles, in a world where the t.rex virus has turned everyone with certain amount of testoterone into zombies. Later, they are joined by Robbie, a trans man with a rifle, and Indi, a midwife turned fertility specialist. Together they try to defend themselves against men, TERFs, and everyone in between.

Meanwhile, the book sometimes switches to Ramone, an active member of the matriarchy who hunts down trans women because they are considered "vectors" of the virus -- what happens when their homemade HRTs run out? Either lose your genitals or die so that the TERF utopia can flourish. Unfortunately, Ramone also likes T-girls with dicks, and she lives a rather dissonant life as a result.

As one can see, it's a pretty gruesome and action-packed novel. You read about knives slicing through bone and skin, guns firing through skulls, and so on. But the book is also concerned with how queer people care for each other today and what it means to have gender when the virus simply targets high testosterone levels.

Indeed, the middle section of the book doesn't show as much violence, focusing instead on how the systems of care that do exist in this post-apocalyptic society fail trans people. It's clearly meant to parallel real-world examples, including the dehumanizing aspects of trans sex work as well as the transmisogyny inherent in supposedly gender-inclusive communities. The sociological part of my brain was on fire as I read through this section, and I personally like it more than any other part of the book.

I also found the references to Twitter and Tumblr shenanigans quite interesting. Early on, a character is trying to remember tactics from a Twitter thread. Then, there's a community of queer people who are basically Tumblr caricatures. When I mentioned this to people, someone said it felt like a real modern horror story.

And I do enjoy the splattercore elements of this work too. There are some great low budget horror scenes that would work really well in a movie. Definitely interested in the film adaptation for sure.

Unfortunately, the writing always falls short of the pacing the story needs. It's bloated and sometimes bland: every scene is written with so much detail that it's hard to follow the basic plot at times, the character voices don't read that different from each other, the switches in narration are always jarring since there are very few markers to indicate who is narrating, and the writing has a tendency to hide necessary context from scenes (a thing I usually don't have a problem with, but it's done way too much). All of this combined makes the story quite irritating to read at times, especially when the action and sex scenes are so vital to what's happening emotionally.

So instead of overwhelming the reader with scenery details and action, I wish the author could have paused and given a few more interactions between the characters in these scenes. The beautiful, unsettling, and tranquil moments in this social and splattercore horror work are great. The trauma bonding, the stitching of wounds, the soap opera-styled bickering, and many more mundane scenes punctuate the book and give life to the characters. These five characters are all fucked up in their own way, and I find their relationships to each other quite fascinating.

That said, I've read 2019 reviews that balked at the premise of TERFs going after trans people, news articles that made a big deal out of an admittedly funny death of a certain British author, and comments from people who were disgusted by the gender dysphoric and sexual assault scenes. The book generated a lot of controversy, and the author seemed to carry a lot of baggage as well. Such an atmosphere makes it quite difficult to talk about the book's content on the internet.

Nevertheless, I think people should realize that the book is more than just its controversies. The book makes it clear that TERFs have made their identity all about suffering in order to survive. They fear that their victimhood will be overwritten by trans women and radical care. In a sense, they are terrified that trans women are as much survivors as they are. In other words, they can only connect through wounds, not through mutual understanding and solidarity. Meanwhile, here are some trans characters who are terrible people, but still find a way to love each other.

The world of Manhunt is a bleak world that shows how deplorable our current understanding of gender is. Even in a world where TERFs should thrive, they are not happy. They become more hypocritical, more violent, and make the world a worse place. As I flip through the book and think about how their societies are just an accelerated, depressing version of our world, I wonder how to get out of it and find people who care about each other and survive in this hellscape. I hope, as the book suggests, that this is still possible today.

Reed, Em (2024). More Bugs. (recommended)

This independent press book was written by a contributor to Domino Club game jams, so I was very intrigued. What I got was one of the most authentic slow burn stories about being trapped in adulthood limbo.

Amy moves back to her suburban hometown in central Pennsylvania after failing to fit into a queer urban art commune. Returning to the place she thought she had escaped, she feels defeated and unsure of what to do next.

While trying to settle down, she meets Martin, her ex, and his partner, Mollie, who is a literal doppelganger of Amy: Mollie resembles Amy's more feminine high school days. Amy also babysits two kids, one of whom is very interested in the possibility of a UFO taking away his father, for a hot widowed mother, Jess.

Together they linger, wallow, undulate on the mundane waves of suburban life.

While there are aliens and a little body horror in the book, most of it is Amy's observations on the drudgery of suburban life and its domestic politics. Open a page and you're likely to find descriptions of house interiors that look alike because they have the exact same floor plan, or poorly cooked burger meat at a gas station. Each paragraph drips with Amy's exhaustion with her old life, her need to escape suburbia, and the awkward space between her and the other characters.

The writing invites the reader to contemplate what little there is in suburban life. When Amy tries to rephrase her text messages to Jess or Martin because she's afraid she might convey the wrong tone, it felt like I was reading real thoughts going through someone's head. Lawns, unfinished building projects, Martin in a Best Buy uniform -- these drab images, sounds, and tastes make reading Amy's narration a lonely experience. I can feel her desire to find someone who shares her alienation. It's suffocating, but it is also so hypnotic: I keep flipping the page, mesmerized by how long the writing pauses on an image or emotion -- like a lingering shot in slow cinema.

Even when the advertised horror elements happen, the writing never speeds up or focuses on the grotesque. It's still Amy and her dreary life. The few aliens out there are just as alienated as Amy and her friends. Nothing exciting is revealed: it's just a little bit more complication that suggests possibilities but nothing more than that.

I found myself reading this book for long periods of time. It's an absorbing read if you allow the writing to do its magic. While I wish the editing allowed more commas for floating dependent clauses, the atmosphere the writing evokes is so strong that I could breathe suburban life.

It's not an environment I'm unfamiliar with. Although I have never lived in suburban America, I felt trapped when I lived in Singapore. I longed for the same artistic culture as Amy, but it didn't work out.

The novel is somehow able to capture that bleak feeling of defeat, that creeping realization that your parents might be right, that you're not cut out for a vibrant creative life, and yet you still want to get out because you might lose yourself if you stay in this place much longer. It's a deeply honest piece of writing that makes me think about the discomfort of running into old friends and seeing the world around you just not getting out of a rut. And it's also an attack on how many people like me think about our youth, but it's also an affirmation: yeah, living in the suburbs kinda sucks, and you should do something about it.

I hope more people read it. The book is currently published as a novel by Knight Errant Press (a queer Scottish press), but I don't believe it has an epub version yet. It's worth tracking down if you can, and I'm reminded that I should spend more time reading and writing about small press books. Back when I was trying my luck in the urban art world, I used to write pro bono reviews of books like this for my university. I want to find more sincere books like this that understand a "clean beautiful life" is disgusting.

It's a great book that deserves a wider, adoring readership.

Linden, Mitchell (1988). The American Scream.

The hectic nature of the production made this movie far more interesting and eerier than it should have been. On paper, the movie is about a family that brings some teenagers to a mountain resort for a vacation. But instead of allowing itself to be a conventional teen horror movie, the script, cinematography and editing are allowed to meander and just go out of control.

It's hard to describe what's intentional and what's not in the movie, which makes it quite unsettling. The jokes feel like they are not part of the movie, which is why they stand out so much. The gore bursts sporadically, never continuous, but when it happens, it's bizarrely horrifying.

There are also some experimental sequences, including characters hallucinating people deteriorating and bleeding their heads off, and home camera footage that looks like some lost media shit in the middle of a conversation between characters. And all of this happens while goofball parents shenanigans happen.

The ending seems to suggest something about how horrifying conforming to adulthood norms is. It's an unusual take on the loss of youth innocence, even if it's underbaked. If you're open to weird watching experiences, this is a good one.

Davenport, Harry Bromley (1982). Xtro.

Uhh, my partner and I have seen some disgusting horror movies before. But this one gave us goose bumps. Ostensibly an alien abduction story following popular science fiction movie trends, it is actually a psychosexual drama about a disintegrating family that literally cannot divorce itself from its past.

The son has seen his father abducted by a bright light, and he cannot get along with his new stepfather. But Daddy's back, with a new alien body and superpowers. And his reintroduction creates new divisions in what turns out to be a family sustained by bandaids and repression.

There's a lot of sexual imagery, with aliens sucking juices from humans and childbirth. One of the more disturbing parts comes from the father sucking his son. The alien species clearly has a lot of characterization, but it remains opaque to the audience and the entire story. We know very little about their goals and why they abducted the father in the first place. They remain shrouded in mystery, but their domestic invasion eventually tears the family apart.

When the repressed sexuality explodes into the open, unsuspecting neighbors are swept away. The special effects, for how low-budget the movie is, are effective in disgusting us. It's also interesting how the child becomes the most violent monster in the movie, taking it out on other people, including the French housemaid with the sentient toys. The surreal horror in his violence is terrifying too: one of his toy soldiers just breaks into a neighbor's room, and his fear and hatred of her is on full display.

The horrific violence leaks out of the disorganization of this respectable-looking family, so it can only be resolved in the death of that family structure. It's a bleak, unhappy resolution in either the theatrical or alternate ending for the humans. But the aliens? They seem more welcoming, for better or worse. By the end of the movie, we felt like we needed a shower because it had affected us.

It's a shame that this movie didn't seem to do well, because in our eyes it's an effective horror movie. It's an incisive examination of the nuclear family in distress, with aliens pushing it to the brink of destruction. I recommend it if you have the stomach for the gore.

Armfield, Julia (2022). Our Wives Under the Sea.

While the novella is ostensibly about a woman returning to her spouse after a submarine trip gone wrong, it is more about evoking a specific white middle-class queer vibe: the book opens with a banging first line ("The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness."), it divides chapters into subchapters between the two lesbian partners, and the story takes its own time to reach its inevitable conclusion. You'll quickly find out if you like this book or love every word of it.

The book is filled with lyrical prose that describes the depths of the ocean and the complicated feelings of grief. As the story revolves around two characters in different time and place, the writing can shift between observations about how heterosexual relationships differ from lesbian ones and flashbacks to reading about deep-sea fish. Usually, books that try to have multiple POVs are unable to distinguish the writing voices of their characters; I find that this book is able to do so because the topics they cover and the way they talk about them are different enough to show different personalities. However, the book grounds itself in concrete emotions and memories, not places and objects. It requires careful reading, tasting every letter and punctuation, because it is clear that the writer wants every word and pause to count.

In some ways, this book reads more like poetry. While it uses novelistic techniques and magically realistic imagery from time to time, the prose is the main attraction. Everything from characterization to plot is in service of letting the writing flourish. If you don't feel captured by its allure all the time, I can imagine the book falling flat.

I like this book, but I don't love it. There are definitely beautiful moments of writing, and the few sections that veer into body horror are impressive. But I find my attention drifts when the characters are simply being introspective. Echoing Aida Edemariam's review on The Guardian, I recognize the author's attempts at "anatomising the women's relationship: the self-defensive blindnesses, the resentments and rituals and angers, grief for vanished joys – all the small moments of which lasting love consists", but the novella "feels stretched slightly too thinly over the body of an idea". I can see this working better as a short story.

But I also find myself unsatisfied with the themes. While it adequately explores the depths of grief, I just felt it had little original or personal to say. I've read stories, the yuri visual novel SeaBed for example, that explore similar themes with more success. I wanted more than just vibes. I wanted something more substantial.

Maybe I will pick up the author's collection of short stories later, but right now I feel empty. I certainly enjoyed the experience of reading it. I just feel like there's a book out there somewhere that will more fully satiate my hunger for queer grief stories.

Walter, Elizabeth and Freeman, Nick (ed.) (2024). Let a Sleeping Witch Lie: Welsh Gothic Horror Stories by Elizabeth Walter.

This is an entertaining collection of 1960s and 70s short stories set on the border between the city and the Welsh forests.

As the title suggests, the stories are slow and atmospheric. "The Sin-Eater" is the most gothic of the bunch, with a character investigating a past that seems to be tinged with the supernatural. "Telling the Bees" is a nice twist on premonitions and jealousy in marriage. Other stories aren't always consistent, but are worth reading for their combination of folk horror and social themes. I also found the introduction to be very helpful in contextualizing the horror stories and when they were written.

But I tend to be picky about short story collections. I wanted stories with more impact, especially in their conclusions. Also, it got tiring to read new stories with the same slow pacing. I can see myself enjoying the author's novels more, so I'll definitely check out her work later.

Johnson, Daily (2020). The Hotel.

This is a collection of short stories, first written as a radio play, in which the stories are linked by a common history, space, and misogyny. The book focuses on various women characters who are singled out for their connection to the supernatural or scapegoated for some crime, allowing the hotel/space to eventually absorb them.

The writing style is different in each story to be more historically consistent. It's fun to see how the hotel in different times shapes the story, and how each character has a different approach to the horror because of their economic, racial, and gender backgrounds.

It's an entertaining read, but it doesn't really use its medium to say anything about its setting or gender violence. The book seems more interested in creating different atmospheres than in having radical ideas. It makes me feel like I've just read a creative writing exercise, very well written but lacking in substance.

Makichuk, Jim (1985). The Tower.

The premise for this Canadian TV movie is pretty cool: a sentient security system for a skyscraper tries to conserve as much energy as possible, and it's programmed to suck up the heat that naturally escapes from people. Unfortunately, it's programmed too well for its own good, zapping people left and right.

The movie takes advantage of its setting, with characters on different floors working in different companies. The slow pacing of the movie and the dark music allow the movie to be immersed in what can best be described as a rich vaporwave atmosphere for our 2024 eyes and ears. The movie would definitely be considered too cheesy when it came out, but to my partner and I it felt like a serious attempt at science fiction crystallized in time: people were worried about the energy crisis and the rise of technology, so it makes sense that people would try to speculate on how green technology could be useful and violent. It dates the work, but that's not a bad thing: I found it quite fascinating as a historical relic, and the vibes were kind of nice.

It suffers in some places: the blatant misogyny towards characters, including a sex worker who has clearly read a few books, seems to be an attempt at some kind of feminist critique, but it doesn't land well. The characters, with the exception of the two advertising and design guys and the secretary, are not interesting stock characters in this situation -- a strange thing to say when there's a thief in the midst, but it's true! And the last third of the movie isn't very satisfying, as it tries to be an action movie climax and just ends up lackluster. It would have been more interesting if it had stuck to the arguments between the characters and the sentient security system, which could have been an interesting way to explore class and technological fears. Despite the clever setting and the wide range of characters and their classes, everything seems underdeveloped.

Still, I thought it was an interesting mix of science fiction and budget horror. I might steal some ideas from it for a future horror story. It's worth a look if you're at all interested, and the YouTube video upload includes a comment from one of the people who worked on the special effects.

Vickers, Lindsey C. (1982). The Appointment. (recommended)

It's hard to describe this TV movie because it's all about the build-up. While it is correct to describe the movie as a nightmarish horror, the movie plays on the audience looking for clues to anticipate the climax, which is so obviously going to be violent.

The film begins with a narrator coldly reading the case file of a dead young girl who was mysteriously and violently dragged into the bushes. The film cuts abruptly to a typical wealthy British family: a father, a mother, and a spoiled daughter. But their tensions come to the fore when the father apologizes to his daughter that he couldn't make it to her violin performance due to an emergency appointment.

This would make for an ordinary family drama if it were not for the incestuous tension between father and daughter. There is a scene where he is going up the stairs and he has to pass her door, but he stops there. She is waiting in her bed. It's an uncomfortable silence, all the more so when the audience is probably trying to figure out how this all fits together. There are also symbolic scenes that make this quest for meaning even weirder: the petals of a flower falling on the table, the pocket clock the father has, actual nightmares experienced by members of the family, etc. Nothing in this movie can be taken for granted, which evokes a deeply paranoid atmosphere about the inherent relationships in families.

The ending is gorgeously bleak in its commitment to the psychological violence perpetuated in the drama of a family. There is no promise of redemption, and I can see productive family abolitionist readings that try to make sense of the contradictions of the nuclear family model. I found the film quite disturbing, and it has stayed with me since I saw it.

Cammell, Donald (1987). White of the Eye. (recommended)

This should have been a horror/thriller about a serial killer of housewives. This should have ended with me groaning at the end of the movie, since serial killer stories tend to be police procedurals or psychoanalytical portraits that use dubious science to solve cases with contrived twists. Instead, this movie takes many steps back to depict a landscape of memories, of Arizonans drinking coffee, and of a perfect family.

After the first bloody murder, the movie seems to forget that it is supposed to be a serial killer movie. We see flashbacks interspersed with present-day events: the mundane lives of Arizona housewives take precedence over the police investigation. The non-linear story gradually shows how the movie's central family came to be, how the characters met, and how everyone lives in this Arizona town.

The editing is jarring, with no indication that the next scene is in the present or a flashback. But once you get used to the rhythm, this becomes less of a problem. The movie is edited in this way in order to reveal certain backdrops, to make connections between symbols and seemingly unrelated events, and to show that memory and time are not continuous. The audience has to train themselves to see the disjointed timeline as a meaningful series of events that influence the characters' motivations. I found this approach more compelling than many serial killer films because it doesn't rely on popular human psychology, but on how fragmented moments in time and space can actually reveal why people behave the way they do.

This film understands its medium through its manipulation of time and space. It's a slow-burning masterpiece that shows how the city, the desert, the culture and the families can harbor a serial killer who can operate in secret and feel compelled to do what he thinks he has to do. The horror that culminates in this panorama is hard for me to shake off. It is certainly one of the best films of all time for me.

Balaban, Bob (1989). Parents.

Despite first appearances, the film takes its time in revealing its monstrous parents. It's more interested in indulging the children's paranoia: maybe their parents aren't who they say they are, and their food sucking ass may have a more sinister background.

It relishes in satirizing (dys)functional American families and the education system. The sitcom-styled parents can't communicate with their child because they hide their seemingly sexual activities. Instead of an in-house psychologist, the school hires a social worker who smokes in her office. There are no safe spaces for children to learn and exchange ideas, except with other children from similar backgrounds.

But there is no thorough investigation of the problems of the family and the education system. It points out their failures and how they can create the perfect setting for a horror film. I found this film refreshing for that reason: no attempts to get into the weeds, just a shrug and the assertion that "isn't all this childhood stuff fucked up"? It's an enjoyable movie that doesn't aspire to be anything more than a decent horror flick, and I respect it for that.

Sasdy, Peter (1972). The Stone Tape.

This TV movie has a fun take on the haunted house premise: an electronics company has moved into its lavish Victorian premises, and its employees have learned that the ghosts that periodically appear in a particular room may be some kind of audio-visual psychic impression recorded in the wall -- a "stone tape," if you will.

But the way the film gets there is even more interesting. These characters, all but one male, are enterprising scientists trying to compete with the rising Japanese nation. When the one woman sees an apparition, the team leader begins to make up hypotheses about how spirits and sounds are recorded. However, each man keeps stepping over the woman who first told them about these phenomena. It is clear that the film is very interested in interrogating the hubris of men, of science taking on the unknown, and of the British arrogance of the 70s.

While it is commendable that the film attempts to question the British condition, it relies too much on misogyny and racism as a supplement to this very slow science fiction tale of the occult. There is very little to look at in the drab sets and the performances are too standard to be compelling. All you can do is latch on to its depiction of unsightly British behavior for contemplation, and sometimes it can be too much.

I think the story and premise are worthwhile enough of the watch, though I've also read that the 2015 BBC radio drama is a much better and more sensitive adaptation of its ideas and themes. It feels undercooked as it is, and I can see how a modern radio adaptation might solve some of its glaring problems. The film doesn't really make use of its visual elements, which is a shame: I think it could have been an underrated hit.

Lord, Jean-Clause (1986). The Vindicator.

It is peculiar that this film precedes RoboCop by a year as it feels like a cheap imitation. Rather than satirising the tough-on-crime atmosphere of the US, the film speculates on the companies that carry out animal testing and the unethical science they practice.

The first thing we see is the manipulation of anger found in chimpanzees. Later we discover that this is being used for a top secret project, literally called the Frankenstein Project: an employee is murdered by the company and his brain is used for an invincible killing machine. However, he wakes up too early for the scientists to attach a remote control to his body, so anything that touches him makes him extremely angry and he starts killing people left and right. The film drops any pretense of being a work of science fiction by becoming a revenge film for the protagonist to save his spouse.

It's a silly budget film with characters questioning the inner motivation of the antagonist and some decent practical effects in between. There are some creative kills, and the characters do an alright job of making the suspense and action work. I really enjoyed the film for what it is: a VHS rental perfect for a weekend night with your pals. The ending made me laugh, and I think it would have been a perfect choice for Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Harrington, Curtis (1961). Night Tide.

My partner and me watched this historically significant independent movie because some of the top Letterboxd reviews brings up that the director is a gay man and the movie has subtle queer themes. What I got is a rather Gothic take on sirens set in Santa Monica.

A sailor on leave awkwardly tries to pick up a girl in the bar, only to learn that she is a mermaid in a sideshow attraction. He is clearly enchanted by her beauty, but the captain who found her on a remote Greek island and the various denizens of the amusement park warn him that her previous partners have mysteriously drowned. Nevertheless, the mystery and charm of the woman make him want to investigate further into her upbringing.

While I didn't like the movie, I found it to be a faithful adaptation of Gothic themes in modern times. And the queer gaze inherent in the movie is interesting: while it's not overt, there are some good shots of naked men and some amusing lines ("Hello, Captain, ya want to pound me to pound you later?"). There is a decent, though deeply theoretical essay in the Journal of Homosexuality that looks into the filmic language and how the director tried to navigate the codes and norms of heteronormative cinema at the time to include the gay stuff. Its emphasis on how beautiful young male sailors actually are is fascinating, and it points to the emergence of queer cinema and how it challenged heterosexual audiences who thought they were just going to watch a nice tragic romance. It's quaint for my eyes today, but an admirable piece of queer cinema.

Luna, Bigas (1987). Anguish. (recommended)

The less said about this movie, the better. For people who have never seen it, I'll just say that it's my favorite movie on the entire list.

This is for the people who've seen the movie

This movie hits very differently for a post-*Dark Knight* audience. When the movie detached itself from the silver screen to gaze at the audience watching the movie, the disorientation frightened me. It worried me even more when I realized that it was about the way each audience member relates to the horror: the main character is unnerved by the gore, her friend tells her she's a baby, the would-be killer waits for the mother character on screen to instruct him, etc. Everyone reacts differently to the film-within-the-film, and this movie shatters the possibilities of connecting audiences. The filmed audience is not a simple mass of spectators, as is commonly imagined in film studies books and essays. Nobody knows anybody, we just assume that everybody accepts that the movie is fake and that the violence won't spill off the screen.

And this is why I think this movie has a very nuanced take on the relationship between fiction and reality. While the movie assumes copycat murders are caused by people susceptible to horror movies, the actual horror is tapping on how we treat the cinema theater as a safe recreational space. It disrupts the escapist impulses that stop us from interrogating its premises and makes us reflect on why we think so. Why is violence in the theater more visceral to us than the war and police violence that happens every day?

I don't think the movie is scary because it shows how horror movies fuck people up. No, it's about how escaping is futile. More than anything, the movie concretizes this desire to escape from the violence of the real world into this geographical space: the cinema theater. It is supposed to let us wind down and forget the political issues that weigh us down for 90 minutes or more. But when blood is spilled on the red carpets, it reminds us that the violence of everyday life can't be ignored.

If we assume that the escapist premises of the theater are correct, we also assume that the people sitting next to us have the same intentions. But we enter the theater with different beliefs, we respond to the movie in different ways, and so on. Think of the main protagonist who keeps crying over gory scenes and people telling her to shut up. There is no uniformity of opinion about any given movie, and yet we believe we are all attending for similar reasons. It doesn't take much for someone who doesn't play by those rules to do something that hurts our experience, even ourselves.

I want to see this movie in the theater. I want to see how the audience reacts, how I react, and how I see the vast dark spaces of the theater differently. It's a film that unravels the tacit conventions and niceties of watching a movie in a theater to show how they mask everyday violence and difference. I fucking love this movie, and I can talk about it forever.

Munch, Christopher (2011). Letters From the Big Man.

The film cannot be judged by the usual cinematic rubric. It is a personal essay by a Bigfoot enthusiast in the guise of fiction, exploring the relationship between humans and nature, the various reasons why people might search for the Sasquatch, and the interest of the US state in taking over the forest more and more.

While the film follows a hydrologist as she moves on from a relationship and is hired by the National Park Service to assess the health of the forest after some logging, it focuses more on how she is one with nature. There are lots of shots of her canoeing down the river, cutting firewood, reading books, and just making coffee under the stars. Like the audience, Bigfoot watches her from the shadows, contemplating how she seems to understand the rhythm of nature.

While she notices their footprints and listens to their voice, she doesn't interact directly with Bigfoot. At most, she talks to the forest about her awkward relationship with her current fling (an environmentalist and Bigfoot researcher who lost a lawsuit against the National Park over logging) or leaves food out for the Big Man to eat. She simply gazes out the window and sketches portraits. The Sasquatch leaves her messages in the form of unusual symbols on the ground. What a strange, yet comforting relationship between these two characters.

But it works. The movie is the way it is because the director believes in the existence of Bigfoot as an ancient sentient species that embraces nature on a deeper level than humans do. It is against the more opportunistic and sensationalist research on these wise and ancient beings. The Sasquatch is taken for granted in the first quarter of the movie, so the rest of the movie is dedicated to understanding what that means for humanity and how they, especially the United States, would colonize the forest even further if more people knew. The film is an earnest attempt to untangle this contradiction: the desire to know the truth without hurting nature or Bigfoot.

And the movie is a real visual treat: many scenes are straight out of nature documentaries, the protagonist is strongly developed through her gestures and minimal dialogue, and the costume design of the Big Man looks fantastic.

That said, it requires a lot of good faith on the part of the audience, especially if they don't believe that Bigfoot is roaming the woods somewhere. The sincerity in this movie is overwhelming and hard to take seriously. I'm not sure how it fits into the cinematic discourses of Bigfoot and its believers (GoodBadFlicks has a decent video detailing the movie's place in the pantheon and how the director sees Bigfoot), but it is often called a great Bigfoot movie by several members of the Bigfoot movie community simply because it doesn't portray Bigfoot as a serial killer and it grapples with the issues the community cares a lot about. For better or worse, this makes the movie insular and niche, with very little entertainment value for general audiences.

But for me, I found it to be an unusual movie enough to give it a decent write-up in lieu of a recommendation. There's a scene where the protagonist and her coworker attend a local performance of The Tempest and when asked by her coworker on what it means, she quotes her mom that it's better to groove and not to think about it. I don't understand the full implications of this movie, but to be able to watch this obscure independent film in its entirety and realize that it has acquired its own language to explore what it wants to do makes it a worthwhile journey in of itself. If you're interested in any of this, it's worth renting from Amazon or Vimeo. Even if you come away bored, at least you've seen something very, very different that independent and arthouse theaters can't even offer.

Bass, Saul (1974). Phase IV. (recommended)

This movie takes the usual budget horror premise of mutated ants seriously. Instead of watching the ants destroy cities and homes, we see the ants grow and adapt to every obstacle in their path. It takes a while for the human characters to arrive, and even when they do, the ants are there to outwit them.

The hard science fiction present in the film allows the monstrosity of the ants to be overwhelming. The two scientists often explain to a survivor what they're doing, including deciphering the language the ants use to team up and fight. However, we see these strategies fail because the ants can understand what the humans are trying to do. These scenes leave the impression that human science, no matter how advanced, is no match for the ants' strength. The scientists cannot evaluate the multiple evolutions that the ants have undergone, let alone adapt to them. They are true enigmas that cannot be studied.

For that reason, I thought the original theatrical ending was more effective. The alternate ending explains way too much of what happened. The dread of the original ending feels appropriate; it leaves so much to the imagination as to what the ants have become and what the title actually means.

This is one of the best science fiction horror movies I've ever seen because it focuses on how horror can still overwhelm science. The helpless feeling that the invasion cannot be stopped with current science is incredible. It is an easy recommendation without much hesitation.

Yuzna, Brian (1989). Society.

This movie takes the simple question of "am I born into the right society" and lets it gorge itself on paranoia. It follows a jock who seems to have been born into a rich family in Beverly Hills. He doesn't seem to belong here, but he keeps trying anyway, even as his mental health deteriorates.

It takes a while before he learns that his paranoia is justified: something is wrong with his family and the society around him. There seems to be an incestuous vibe going on, and evidence that points to something bigger seems to disappear or get altered into something more innocuous. The big reveal at the end may not surprise many viewers, but it is spectacular and disgusting even for my iron stomach.

The film rightly recognizes that the rich are a kind of alien horror in society and doesn't pretend that class warfare doesn't exist. It literalizes the dynamic of the rich draining the poor and makes no apologies for its politics. It doesn't say anything radical, but it's nice to see a movie that addresses class so prominently. And the practical effects in the movie are just great and disturbing.

My only complaint revolves around the unfinished nature of the ending. It's clearly supposed to be a sequel hook, but that didn't materialize. This leaves the fate of the protagonists too up in the air and makes it rather unsatisfying. I'm not sure where the characters should go next or how the rich will retaliate because it feels too much ike a Part 1.

Still, I thought it was a wonderful 80s movie. It's revolting enough to make me have second thoughts about attending an orgy. I just can't believe there was a movie that made orgies so unsexy and uninviting. This is perhaps the best anti-orgy propaganda film to date.

Cregger, Zach (2022). Barbarian.

I won't say too much about the movie because it plays on the audience's first impressions, and I don't think it would be that interesting to explain its ideas to people who have seen it either.

It's just a fun, if shallow, look at Detroit and patriarchal norms. It's sensitive to a lot of issues that affect cis heterosexual people, but it doesn't present anything more critical than a Twitter thread on those issues. It hits some beats pretty well for a movie that at least tries to bring up these issues.

I have no complaints about this movie, but it doesn't really allow me to have anything more to say since it is so focused on bringing up these issues to flavor its horror story. Inoffensive entertainment, perfect for air travel.

Goddard, Drew (2011). The Cabin in the Woods. (recommended)

I know, it's weird that I hadn't seen this movie. I vaguely remembered some of the plot details, but I figured I should see it since I was on a long-haul flight.

There's not much unique to say about this movie that has been written and discussed by so many horror fans over the years, but I'll just say that it remains quite fresh and the script is funny. I just like a good ol' diegetic satire that loves to poke holes in the teen horror movie industry.

Perkins, Osgood (2024). Longlegs.

For a movie that seems to have generated a lot of controversy through its viral marketing and discourse about elevated horror, this is a surprisingly conventional movie.

While the movie plays with aspect ratios to distinguish present day scenes (2:39) from flashbacks (4:3), it doesn't try to incorporate more formalistic techniques. Instead, it's a throwback to FBI procedurals like Silence of the Lambs with a Satanic panic twist. The movie feels like it's supposed to be from the 90s, without any awareness of the criticism of the FBI and police investigations. Everything is played straight: a woman investigates a series of serial killings by solving ciphers and codes, only to realize that she's somehow connected.

I found the movie too derivative to have any strong words for or against it. While thinkpieces lament about how elevated horror has allowed trauma psychology overtake the scary bits, I see movies like this as a continuation of dreary tradition: pathologizing mental illness and apolitical police procedurals have always been the bread and butter of this breed of horror. I suspect that this movie would not be discussed much if it wasn't published by one of the elevated horror publishers.

It's a competent movie with some great performances. I didn't expect more than what it said on the tin, and it's a middle-of-the-road FBI procedural for what it's worth. There is some questionable plotting and the ending isn't great, but I enjoyed the intrigue of uncovering more and more of the mystery. It's also fun to know who the serial killer looks like from the beginning, and he makes a lot of appearances throughout the movie. The movie is just entertaining and that's about it.

Personally, I'm more confused by the hubbub. It's easier to watch than Silence of the Lambs because it doesn't have the transphobia. But I guess you don't get clicks unless you make a mountain out of a molehill these days.

Jae-Hyun, Jang (2024). Exhuma.

This movie follows a team of occult experts (shamans, a geomancer, and a funeral director) as they exhume the grandfather of a Korean national living in Los Angeles. As the geomancer protagonist points out, the case seems very fishy, and it gets worse when he tastes the soil where the man is buried and realizes that it is deeply unsuitable for burying the dead.

While the film presents itself as a serious exploration of funeral rites and geomancy, it is better described as a film about Korean identity in modern history. The first language spoken in this movie is not Korean but Japanese: one character flies to Los Angeles on a Japanese airline and speaks decent Japanese to the stewards. The LA client has a wife who speaks to him in English, and he keeps reasserting his duty as the patriarch of the family, to the chagrin of his aunt.

It sticks to its core premise quite well: the movie features some great funereal performances, and we also get some Buddhist chanting here and there. The political themes that emerge in the second half of the film are filtered through its supernatural lens. And the movie has some fun pacing: I often thought the movie would end, but it keeps going, showing chapter headings in Hangul and subheadings in Japanese. It's always exciting to realize that there's more going on than I expected.

But I found the movie's latter half quite weak. Without giving too much away, I'll just say that the thing the movie is really trying to talk about isn't explored deeply enough, and the ending is far too optimistic for what should be a rather bleak subject. It's brave of the movie to tackle it for a more general horror audience, but I can't say that its approach to such an important subject satisfying.

For better or worse, the movie is too much popcorn horror for me when it could have been something more with a certain reveal. And I would have appreciated more blood and gore, but I wasn't expecting much from a movie that was rated PG-13 on the plane I was on. It's just disappointing to me because it has some good potential to be a sleeper horror hit.

Philippou, Danny and Philippou, Michael (2022). Talk to Me. (recommended)

Set in Adelaide, the film follows a group of teenagers who play with an enbalmed and severed hand. They don't know where it came from, except that one of the members got it from a friend of a friend. But when they hold hands with the hand, they can see spirits. They say, "Let me in," and the spirit takes over their body.

But the main character is distraught after losing her mother to an alleged sleeping pill overdose. She and her friends get into this exercise only until things go wrong.

So yeah, this sounds like another elevated horror movie about trauma. It plays with drug allegories and addiction to escape grief. Those parts are obvious, and there's no nuance around it.

However, while there are no strong ideas in the movie, the execution turns these simple ideas into an effective and dark horror story. It's fun to watch the teenagers get involved in this conjuring and possessing thing, but when bad things start happening, it becomes exhausting and sad to watch these characters get hurt.

The movie works for me because everyone, especially the main character, is an asshole. It's a real teen horror movie made in 2024: these characters listen to bad Australian music, talk about TikToks, and are just mean to each other. They feel real and annoying to listen to. It's easy to criticize them for being careless and ridiculous because they're teenagers, true and true.

Their actions (and inactions) feel like something teenagers would do in this situation. I was impressed by how much the movie was committed to this, because it got more and more irritating. Part of me wants to tell these kids to think better about the situation, but they won't listen to reason. They think they can solve their problems without any adult help. And while it can sometimes be cathartic to see unlikable characters suffer, watching the main character's downfall was somehow more painful. I think it's because I understood how her flaws led her there. The ending scared me because I felt like I was watching a younger version of myself go through this disastrous series of events.

It's a truly terrifying movie because it taps on our emotional vulnerability and how we can do senseless shit. While its drug PSA message is shallow, its execution makes it a horror movie masterpiece. It's bleak, irritating, and most of all, sad. It's a teen horror movie that get it: dealing with life as a grieving teenager is scary enough, and inviting ghosts to possess your body is bound to make it an even more terrifying experience. I cannot recommend it enough.

Well, this was a long article. I plan to keep doing this as people seem to be interested in my "shorter" reviews, and I hope I have made people's backlogs much worse.

If there's any feedback on the format and writing, please let me know in the comments.

On Heretic's Ending

2024-11-01T00:00:00Z

If you want a spoiler-free review on the 2024 movie directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, Heretic is a fun popcorn horror movie that uses Hugh Grant's talent well and incorporates some great editing and set design into a tightly written script. And from what I have read, the directors and actors did a good job of making sure they stayed as accurate as possible to the Church of Latter-day Saints.

That's all I have to say about its technical qualities.

The post will instead focus on the overall message and what the movie has to say about religion, so if you haven't seen it yet and don't like spoilers, don't read this article.

While there are many good comparisons to other movies when it comes to motifs and structures, Heretic is most like The Exorcist in terms of message. Both movies seem to question the premises of organized religion and faith, but in the end they are quite the believers. While The Exorcist uses horror to scare people back into religious communities, Heretic is the Protestant cousin: we know religion has a lot of baggage, but the notion of religious belief is still important.

The film pits two deeply unpopular factions in American society against each other: the Mormons and the atheists. The Mormon missionaries have the most character depth, sometimes subverting the audience's expectations of their deep faith. As for the Hugh Grant character's atheism, he is a rather confusing caricature: a religious studies dilettante looking for a true religion, and it turns out that the original religion is control. Iterations upon iterations have distorted this belief into salvation or something else. The buildup for the entire movie to reveal this is rather silly, almost as quaint as saying everything is political or power. Despite Grant's delightful performance, there is no sincere discussion of non-religious/atheistic beliefs, and he is merely a prop to test the symbolic meaning of belief in the film.

But despite the amount of harsh criticism of Mormonism, the movie takes its side. One of the Mormon missionaries, who's first presented as a naive and unquestioning believer, turns out to be someone who's been thinking about faith for a long time and brings up the efficacy of prayer experiments to Grant's character; she brings up how wonderful it is that even though it doesn't do anything, people still pray. The act is recognized as merely symbolic, but it is still necessary for an ethical way of life.

The horror is therefore not atheism but nihilism. It preaches a deeply religious message: it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you believe.

In a way, the film almost acknowledges critics like Friedrich Nietzsche and even co-opts their beliefs about illusion and life-affirmation. Like the mystery tricks in the second half of the movie, the movie is a clever sleight of hand to sneak in a very religious idea of what faith should look like in America.

That fascinated me because it felt like a microcosm of American society. It says it is not religious, but it thinks in religious terms. Atheism, secularism, and even the idea of religion are, after all, byproducts of Christian thinking. Despite an impressive sensitivity to non-Abrahamic religions, the film cannot imagine alternative arguments against nihilism without some vestige of religious belief.

And I'm not saying that this movie should somehow look for an atheist answer to satisfy me. For one thing, I'm a Taoist who follows my parents' Buddhist practices. I am not in conversation with the film's subject matter, which is deeply focused on the role of faith in America. My thoughts on religion are as non-sequiturs as Hugh Grant's monologues.

Rather, I find it remarkable that this movie wants to reform faith in order to present a more acceptable answer to "secular" America. The movie makes a formidable effort to investigate possible solutions, and all it has to say is that miracles can happen in a non-religious world. We just have to change the premises of religion to see them. There is no need for abolition, only reorientation.

There is no radical argument for a good life imagined outside the contours of faith. People who criticize Hugh Grant's character as incoherent are absolutely right, but they also miss the larger propaganda here: the role of faith is still there, and Americans do it every day without thinking. That's the power of faith and what it means to be an American, regardless of your religious affiliation or lack thereof. Indeed, it implies that the strength of American multiculturalism comes from its acceptance, which everyone believes. The nihilist Hugh Grant, who uses Judaism and other religions as talking points, doesn't believe, and that's why he has to be eliminated.

I do not find the message that faith needs to be reformed and reexamined for the sake of survival particularly compelling, but I can see the appeal. It affirms a philosophically religious way of life without the need for organized religion. Nihilism, on the other hand, is fundamentally un-American. Though cloaked in the language of rationality and science, it is ultimately unenlightened. Faith of any kind is the real source of enlightenment

And the movie does this very well. I enjoy the movie a lot because it knows its arguments well and hides them behind the spectacle of horror and mystery twists. The surprise -- believe! -- feels like a eureka moment after all the struggle. It's effective and well done.

I just don't care about the message. I'm interested in how people, especially religious studies scholars, will talk about it, but that's about it. It's not the kind of movie that makes me meditate on its themes, I'm just impressed by its rhetoric and its belief that it can reform faith. The movie isn't aimed at me.

The movie is still pretty fun, and I don't regret watching it. Hell, if a friend has it on their computer screen, I'll grab a cider and watch it. But it's not a movie that I'll remember for being incisive. It's just kind of fun, and provides a very interesting exercise in thinking about how the US ambivalence about religion is still on the positive side.

And I think that is why the title was chosen. If we take Hugh Grant's preaching very seriously, then everyone is a heretic who has strayed from the true religion of control. And the concept of heresy can only exist under the premises of religions. The message of faith that the movie has squeezed out after hours of theological rambling is a heretical and therefore religious one. It sees everyone in the movie theater as heretical, for better or worse, just like the characters in the movie. The diversity of heretical beliefs, as the film acknowledges early on, is not possible in our everyday language, but it's there, breathing and believing for a better tomorrow.

But for the rest of us who remain in the dark, all we can do is leave the theater and reflect on our alienation from the movie. Maybe one of us will write a long ass blog post dissecting the ideological underpinnings of the movie and revealing it to be religious in the end. But that alienation will never go away because they are not named in the movie.

They are not even nihilists. They are just not in the cast of symbolic characters who stand in multi-religious America. What do we even call such people?

I don't know. I wonder when we'll ever be part of the religious conversation that everyone always has at Thanksgiving. I just don't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

Surf Nazis Must Die is an arthouse film about how fascism is quite boring

2024-10-31T00:00:00Z

When you see a 1987 movie called Surf Nazis Must Die, you might think it's a ridiculous exploitation movie. Who could imagine these people surfing the waves of California? That might get a few laughs from the audience, and that might be what the producers were going for.

But there were Surf Nazis back then. And in 2024, I think it's getting harder to laugh it off. Watching this movie as a joke for my partner and me became a riveting point of discussion: the filmmaking craft is spectacular, the script is bizarre yet points to things we've forgotten about fascism, and most importantly the fascists are just the most annoying and irritating people occupying the sands and waters of Mother Ocean.

According to a quote from Lloyd Kaufman's biography found in a Letterboxd review, the original title was just going to be Surf Nazis. But people might mistakenly assume from the title that they're the good guys, hence the violent addition of "must die". This creates misplaced expectations: it suggests to the audience that this is a revenge movie, which it is only in the last few minutes of the film.

Instead, it is this meditation on what it means to be a Surf Nazi. Most of the running time is devoted to a gang of Nazis invested in controlling Power Beach: we see them taunting and then murdering hippies who dare to surf in their place, stealing handbags from old ladies, hanging out in abandoned tunnels plastered with every curse word imaginable, and barbecuing a pig in a beach campfire. They do nothing but waste time, inconvenience beachgoers, and just surf.

There is no law and order to monitor and regulate their actions. The usual authority figures -- the police and father figures -- are gone. While the world seems to be getting along just fine, with the beaches being terrorized by the Surf Nazis and other gangs, there is a fear that this gang violence could spread even further.

Meanwhile, the movie occasionally cuts to the responsible Leroy Washington and his mama, Eleanor. Leroy works in an oil field near the beach, wears a nice shirt, and has sent his mother to the nursing home -- all perfectly middle-class things. Unlike the Surf Nazis, he seems to be the perfect average Black American who has his priorities all under control.

But Eleanor is not happy. She's very proud of her autonomy and rightly sees the nursing home she's been placed in as a prison. The caretakers try to sedate her independence, but she refuses to eat or touch her food and drink. There aren't many scenes that reveal her interiority, but her frown in the mirror suggests that she could be something more.

Indeed, it is his death halfway in that ties the two otherwise disparate plots together. He died for helping an old woman get her purse back from the Surf Nazis. The editing here is impressive: the audience sees him look at the camera, then a blurred vision of someone approaching from a doorway and it turns out to be his mother, then the Nazis crowding around him -- in a sense, he saw his death and his mother approaching at the same time. The connection between the Washingtons and the Surf Nazis is racially violent, and the editing is appropriately jarring for that reason.

Mama Washington, a devout Black Christian American with a Bible and American flags decorating her mirror, now wants revenge. She pops up in the movie from time to time, looking for clues and eventually a gun to hunt down these Surf Nazis. Her quest is purely patriotic and religious: she uses her Colt as a bookmark for her Bible.

While that sounds fucking awesome, she is just a supporting character who instigates the downfall of the Surf Nazis. The movie is a reversal of the expectations found in exploitation cinema: the Nazis are the protagonists, and the revenge-seeking mother is the monster of sorts -- or more precisely, a Columbo-like figure ready to pounce on the Nazis' mistakes.

And there are plenty: the movie is a character study of the Surf Nazis and the people who join them. Adolf is supposed to be the leader of the group, but he is unable to control the conflicting urges of Brutus and Hook, who are vying for control. He fools around, does nothing, yells, screams, and beats people up. He seems to aspire to Machiavellianism, but he lacks charisma to deliver speeches and control his group. All he can do is make people fear him. And Smeg, the young Nazi wannabe, is scolded by his mother, who has spoken to a psychiatrist and suggests that his interest in Nazism may be because his father is often absent and he is looking for a father figure. He even tries to approach some women before they tell him off for being part of the loser crew.

This vision of Nazi cosplayers who are disrespected in all walks of life and need to relieve their stress by committing random acts of violence is quite provocative to see today. While the movie is clearly a product of the liberal California imagination of the 1980s, where relegating Nazis to the beach is seen as necessary because it would be unrealistic to see them on the streets back then, there's something unsettling about how the film inadvertently predicts the colonization of basic aspects of everyday capitalist life by right-wingers. It suggests a pervasive psychology of insecurity, a desire to reassert a toxic form of masculinity, and a dismantling of the fragile peace for something more precise to their fascistic dreams.

There are many, many gorgeous shots in the movie that belong in an art house movie. Despite the cheesy costume design and awkward performances, the locations and shots emphasize the artificiality of it all. They seek the attention of the people inside and outside their group. The shots, the bored expressions and actions, and the noticeable lack of internal narration reveal their loneliness and emptiness. Even the spamming of the surfing shots does not make them look cool. They're just uncool, aimless, doing Nazi surfing for the sake of it.

The industrial soundtrack also brings out how they see the oppression of technology. While Leroy is attached to the oil pump, the Surf Nazis are more invested in sand (Adolf punctures a bag of sand to make his point that they are losing their living space) and nature. But this is a world that has already gone to the gutter: their retreat to the sand is not possible, nor is it compatible with their interest in bikes and other street subcultures. The music blares and creates moody scenes where they waste their lives and see no way to reclaim their lives from the contradictions of capitalism.

The Surf Nazis are always on the verge of devouring themselves. They may look cool to some people, but inside they suffer from ennui. They lack purpose: all they do is draw swastikas on their faces and act out their fascist fantasies, but this cosplay gives them no purpose -- only violence. This is why they are so pathetic throughout the movie.

However, they have strength in numbers and skill. They are able to subdue the other gangs that try to fight them. People fear them. Bodies litter the beaches. Their display of iconography and violence attracts younger people -- perhaps their power suggests they know what they are doing. Even if their ideology is a farce, they seem to have some control, and they represent an alternative entity to most of the adults in the film: what do the old fishermen and timid merchants have to offer when the Surf Nazis look like they're in control?

If the "must die" wasn't part of the movie's title, I suspect people would see the movie for what it is: an honest attempt to paint a portrait of people drawn to fascist gangs. This movie hits you differently when you see it in 2024: it may be a caricature of fascists, but it brings up the traits of fascism that are often ignored in the mainstream media right now. The Surf Nazis are not presented as people who can be reasoned with; their incessant lust for control and violence is not to be scoffed at. The only logical answer is antifascism.

Eleanor's anti-fascism is shaped by the death of her son. It empowers her to break free from all forms of authoritarian control, including the old folks' home, so that she can wreak havoc on the Surf Nazis.

But the movie is also subtle about the state of society and what she can do after her onslaught. The reason the United States could allow the proliferation of these youth gangs is because it has fallen into disrepair. No more Tough on Crime America, it's cartoony anarchy that is also surprisingly acceptable and peaceful for the status quo considering how damaging the apocalypse should be. There seems to be no future for someone as independent as her.

And yet, at the end of the film, she rides the motorcycle left behind by the Surf Nazis and laughs because she is free. The post-apocalyptic vision is chaotic, but it also suggests promise. Not surprisingly, many critics wish there was another movie in the footsteps of Eleanor "Mama" Washington: she seems full of life and vibrancy, unlike the dull and mediocre Surf Nazis. There's a movie waiting to be made with her character.

Her violence, unlike that of the Surf Nazis, has purpose. She recognizes the rotten tendencies of fascism and the only way to stop it is to kill it. Mama Washington, though she only appears for a few minutes, has so much energy that the languid pacing disappears and the movie cannot contain her at all. She is a role model: a hero who guns down fascists and loves life.

So despite the silly movie title and the saccharine liberal ideological underpinnings, there is a very provocative leftist anti-fascist reading to be excavated.

In the Horror Vanguard bonus episode #155 on the film, the co-hosts take a page from Alain Badiou: the old and the young (in their reading, the other gangs) will be the ones to form a revolutionary alliance. While they find the film unsatisfying (they see it as two exploitation films that fail to cohere), the messages it offers are worth chewing on.

My partner and I see it as a form of exploitative slow cinema that considers the fascist youth subcultures of its heyday seriously. The mystique of fascism is exposed as utterly boring, and there is some deep reflection on the psychology of these fascist wannabes. And it also points to antifascism as the true affirmation of life and freedom.

Surf Nazis Must Die is not a perfect movie, but it is far more entertaining and thought-provoking than critics and moviegoers give it credit for. The pacing allows for a lot of reflection on how boring the Surf Nazi experience actually is, the editing is sensitive to the atmospheric shots and dark music, and the sporadic nonsensical violence is terrifying when it happens.

I cannot think of another movie like it. It provides an unusual cinematic space for reflection on the mundane spectacle of fascistic violence. There are movies that are definitely more insightful, but its bizarre subject matter allows a new angle that I just never thought of. It shows that youth fascism is boring, lonely, and pathetic, despite the appeal of flashy iconography and macho performances.

It is a melancholic film that makes me meditate on how lifeless fascism really is, and I certainly want more people to see it and be impressed by what it evokes in today's political world.

Iseri Nina from Girls Band Cry is the utopian Japanese media needs

2024-10-20T00:00:00Z

This article is a character study of Iseri Nina from Girls Band Cry, my thoughts on what I want out of Japanese subculture media, and it will bring up spoilers from episode 10 and social issues like bullying.

In the world of Japanese animation, we seem to be entering an era of rebellious girl bands that deal with issues relevant to teenagers living in Japan.

For Bocchi the Rock, it's the desire to feel needed and the need to reject the easy romanticism of high school. In the case of It's MyGo!!!!!, the difficulty of expressing oneself in public and the friction within relationships manifest as strength when the characters rock out on stage. And for the purposes of my essay, Girls Band Cry can be summed up as a quest for authenticity in a capitalist world.

All three works not only share similar music backgrounds, but also implicitly refuse the current Japanese status quo through social critique and alternative forms of kinship. They point to a vague desire where people don't have to depend on compulsory state education, nuclear families, and wage labor for their well-being. Perhaps, we could look for something as tightly knit as the rock bands in these shows for our support.

Of the three shows, Girls Band Cry is perhaps the one that tries to capture this desire as concretely as possible. It wants to address the contradictions of working adult life, the need for social change, and much more. But its utopianism veers to a different direction from what I wanted. It irritates me because I can imagine a better version of the show, but it also points me to the kind of subculture media I really adore.

And it all comes down to how the show handles its utopian gremlin protagonist, Iseri Nina.

I originally thought of her as an eccentric character who didn't follow rules for the sake of following them. But as the show progressed, it became clear that her independent spirit stemmed from her experience of being bullied in high school.

Although she dropped out, she convinces her family that she's going to Tokyo to study again and enter higher education. While the momentum of the show forces her to drop that, she also joins the band for a similar reason: she doesn't want to betray her desires.

It's easy to see her moving to Kawasaki as an "escape" from her tragic high school life. My initial reading of her was that she was a victim of the school caste system and wanted to somehow remake her life.

But she doesn't see herself that way. She may seethe at the happy high school kids crowding around the grocery store in the service area, but she doesn't wallow in her misery. What she despises is hypocrisy, that the world is all rosy and fine.

There's a continuity to her actions, and she wants to stick with it as much as possible.

What makes Nina such a compelling character is that she's consistently unwavering in her sense of justice. If she accepts that what she did was wrong, that helping a person who was being bullied by the school caste system ensured her downfall, and therefore she's wrong to do it, then she has to accept that injustice should have a place in our world. She sees the ability to regret as necessarily linked to accepting inequality and injustice.

That's why Subaru calls her a 正論モンスター (seiron monsuta, lit. Righteous Monster) throughout the series. She doesn't know how to mask herself, how to pretend that this is okay. If she sees Momoka refusing to face the music, she'll yell at her in public and ask her bluntly if she regrets her past. It doesn't matter if it's unsightly in the public view -- the important thing is that she gets the answer straight.

Her anger simply cannot be contained. Nina just wants it her way because she doesn't think people should suck up and let things go on as normal. Even if she understands the logic of someone choosing a video game streamer with more views over a smaller one, and how that can be extrapolated to the logistics of rock bands, she can't stand it. She wants unreasonable, necessary changes because she thinks the way Japanese society and the music industry are doing things is wrong. Such demands can only be described as utopian, and that's awesome.

Indeed, the best episodes of Girls Band Cry are impressive because the show allows Nina to be messy before somehow tying everything up neatly with a bow.

Episode 10 is probably the fan favorite for good reason. Before we get to this episode, we learn that Nina's family back in Kumamoto is on the socially conservative side and has ties to education. Iseri Muneo, her father, advises the Kumamoto Prefectural Board of Education and has written a book on education, but he doesn't understand Nina's predicament. Tensions between the family and Nina finally reach a boiling point when the remedial school Nina attends in Tokyo sends them a letter stating that her grades are dropping.

When the family tries to visit Nina in Kawasaki, she tries to hide from them as much as possible. Only until the family changes the locks on her apartment (which seems illegal) and her band members urge her to take the bullet train ticket to Kumamoto.

After an awkward family reunion, Muneo tries to make amends with her by dragging her to the school and forcing them to admit that their investigation of her case was flawed. He even criticizes the principal, who tries to brush off her responsibility for letting this fester. And it is later revealed that the strict family code that Nina and other family members used to follow broke down after Nina moved out of the house.

The episode ends with Muneo recognizing he didn't understand her but he will support her rock band endeavors. And they both hug.

It's an excellent episode that touches on several issues that plague the lives of teenagers, and it lands on an ending that's obviously too neat, but still acknowledges the harm caused by the school and the family. Father and daughter have achieved a recognition of each other's selves that isn't complete, but it's a great first step.

And I don't want to take away from what this episode accomplished with some political arguments about abolishing the family or a need to take public education more seriously. That would be to miss the point of Girls Band Cry: despite the urban realist aesthetic it strives for, the show is a hopeless romantic. Instead, it advocates having impossible dreams: to reconcile with your family, to know that you've always done the right thing regardless of how society looks at you, and maybe you'll get your own way, your own justice, like Nina.

I think those are nice dreams to have. Fiction is a great way to cultivate dreams for an unimaginable future. And the best episodes do that single-handedly: Nina is a monster who doesn't want simple dreams, she demands the unrealistic, and everyone has to deal with it as much as they're able to.

Girls Band Cry is a deeply idealistic show in every sense of the word. Its utopian optimism that everything will somehow resolve itself into mutual understanding is infectious.

I can imagine young people watching it being inspired to follow their creative spirits and ignore the arbitrary rules Japanese society has imposed on them. I'm glad this show exists, and it's fun to marathon this show and think about what it's trying to get across to people.

But while I think it might be the best show this year, and I'm sure I'll check out the gay fanart later, I'm still not satisfied with the show.

I don't share many of the criticisms people have of the show: it should have been longer, there wasn't enough time to build up, etc. The problem with the show's script is that Nina is an overwhelming character, and the 24-minute anime format rarely has time to show interiority. The writer admits as much: there was supposed to be an episode focusing on Rupa, but Nina squeezed her episode out of rotation (and personally, I like that Rupa is an enigma, but that's beside the point).

If I wanted the show to be much more, it would be closer to a literary or visual novel. I would probably want something closer to Overdrive's Musicus, a visual novel that follows the lives of two characters from their late teens to their late 20s. It wouldn't work for the multimedia project that Girls Band Cry is a part of.

Instead, I imagined Nina in an 800-page rock band novel where she smashes guitars or something. Something more punk rock than the idol rock bands the show is going for.

Such a work would have different themes and messages. I don't think episode 10, for example, would work in that context. The family in my imaginary novel will simply not be on speaking terms. I want things to be messy, unpolished, angrier. Nina inspires me because I can imagine a worse version of her working well in another story. And I'm not sure I want to keep that idealism in this book too.

I struggle with this kind of utopianism because I have a hard time imagining things going well. One of the reasons I find Japanese subculture media so intoxicating is that it's subversive and full of contradictions, like its dependence on mainstream corporate media. The chaotic nature creates a different kind of utopianism than the show has: it's full of clutter, and that's the way we like it. The show has similarities to this subculture ideal I have, but because it wants neat resolutions, it doesn't scratch the itch I have.

At the same time, its priorities (similar and different as they may be) clarify so much about what I want from Japanese subculture media. Nina screaming in public? More of that, please. Recognition from rivals? I'm not sure, even though I think it's thematically good for the show.

I think what I want is a work that breaks the peace of the status quo and demands something so impossible from society that the demands require a total transformation of it. And I don't want a happy ending to anything messy. I just want to keep it dirty for people to see and think about.

This is very, very different from what Girls Band Cry does. I can only find it in niches like school caste novels, but it exists. And the show reminds me that I need to look into this genre more.

But I come back to Iseri Nina.

Her commitment to anger at injustice and regret is inspiring, and seeing all the fears screamed out on screen resonates with me. The fantasy of being someone like her makes me want to believe in the dreams the show has about Japanese society.

Maybe I could have been more righteous and angry growing up, and then the world will finally admit that it fucked up. It's a tantalizing dream that I can't shake off. Nina affirms that we should run, scream, and yell to affirm life, even when we face repercussions for our actions. It's an important fantasy to hold as we try to navigate the contradictions that may force us to do wrong things to maintain the status quo. That might not work in the story I want to exist. Nina would be a completely different character.

I cannot criticize Girls Band Cry for giving me such impossible dreams. It's one I keep forgetting to hold tightly. The world needs less dry realism and more wishful thinking because we desperately need dreamers like Nina to call out the injustices of society and cry out for a better world.

Nina is such a wonderful character.

Reflecting on 12 Years of Writing About Subculture Media and My Writing Process

2024-10-16T00:00:00Z

Today is my 31st birthday, and I've been blogging about subculture media (mostly Japanese) for 12 years. That means I've been blogging since I was 19. Not surprisingly, my ideas about what to write and how to write it have changed over the years.

These days, whenever I open my text editor to write an article about something niche, I always write with two audiences in mind: those who have or will read the work in question, and those who will never read it. There are subgroups within each audience -- for example, the latter might include people who don't currently have the time and energy to learn Japanese -- but for the most part, these two main audiences differ in their level of curiosity and what they ultimately want from the article.

I don't have a precise psychological model of how these two groups think, but I've written enough articles to know what people usually want, and I used to be an avid reader of untranslated media criticism before I learned Japanese.

And the way I write for these two audiences reflects why I find niche media articles so valuable and interesting. I hope people will allow me to be a bit philosophical on my birthday.

For me, the purpose of writing about niche media has always been to unveil the commodity fetishism of a niche work for whatever is valuable in it. I've written about this before, so I'll quote again:

The issue isn’t simply that niche games are invisible but rather we haven’t gotten the right lens to see them as labor-power. Unfamiliar eyes can only see these titles as commodities, and they can only shrug and say, “Not for me.” That’s valid if we simply leave these titles as commodities. But anyone who sees people working on this craft, expending a lot of effort and sweat into them, and more is going to end up reappraising this “product”. We may not get it, but the expenditure of labor-power is real, and we wanna validate it.

And the role of criticism on spaces like here then is helping that validation. We shouldn’t be simply trying to get people to play these games (again, that’s more of a bonus) but to help the non-players to understand why people have put their labor-power into this. My analysis of games and other media I write about, I hope, should come across as me trying to assess and explain to people what kind of effort these creators are doing to an audience that may not know how to appreciate it. In a way, I view my own articles as teaching people how to appreciate them as much as they can, even if they don’t plan to try them.

I wrote this in the context of text-only interactive fiction, but the same applies to, say, shoot 'em ups. The obtuse design of Battle Garegga makes it one of the most complex and difficult games out there, so it would be unreasonable for casual audiences to pick it up and play. Still, we should find ways to help people at least understand the craft.

It's a good thing there was a famous website, The Genius of Garegga, dedicated entirely to explaining the core design philosophies and helping people see that there's more to it than meets the eye. Not everyone will agree with this website's arguments, but it is written to provoke audiences to think beyond reductive assessments. Take the intro from the thesis page:

Unlike the large majority of games which primarily exist to be good games, Battle Garegga has a thesis which flows through every facet of the game’s design:

You can do anything, but everything has consequences.

As you play, this thesis is continually reinforced. The weapon system gives you precise control over both where you want to fire and how much firepower you want to use. The scoring system is discrete enough to let players choose the opportunities they wish to take. Even the story, wherein a pair of engineers unwittingly empower a vicious regime through their own creations and now must stop it by their own hands, has a strong individualistic streak running through it.

You can do anything, but everything has consequences. Which leads to the second rule of Garegga: take what you need and make the most of what you have...

This thesis goes on, but I think it succeeds in explaining the value of Garegga to both casual and hardcore audiences. Now, people may disagree that this "everything has consequences" idea is central to the game. I don't quite agree either. But it does make me think about the game differently and why it's different from other shoot 'em ups I've played. I may express my thoughts differently, but reading this helped me gain new insight into how I appreciate design.

In fact, criticism should make people reflect on how they view the work (whether they've played it or not), even if they're not convinced by the readings. Criticism doesn't have to be as formalistic as the Garegga fansite or as historical as some of my blog posts. It can be a personal exploration of how people connect to the story and breathe their own life into a work: I'm thinking of Amelie Doree's underrated video on Cross Channel, for example.

In other words, I think the most interesting works of criticism should give the audience (and perhaps the critic) something to chew on.

This is difficult, of course. Not only does it require original, substantive writing, but it also means recognizing that you are writing for audiences with different levels of engagement with said media. When I write about an untranslated Japanese visual novel, I'm sure people will come to the article with different expectations, depending on their familiarity with the language, the subculture, and so on. There is no formula for balancing these needs and desires, and I still can't ignore my own desires to write about something. It would be soulless to write for these audiences all the time without checking what I really want to do.

Therefore, I often choose what to write about and then imagine the multitude of readers into the two main audiences mentioned above responding to the article. And then I start writing and see where it goes. As I hammer and shape my piece into something readable, I begin to notice the themes of my piece and see where it takes me.

I often think of it as creating a narrative. Indeed, it resembles writing a short story to me. Take the Zambot 3 article, for example: I want to sketch out how I first came across the work through an interview with the creator and Yokoo Tarou, got depressed, and ended up thinking about the meaning of the toy symbols. It's not just a post about Zambot 3, it's a post about my encounter with the media -- and I'm trying to tie it all together into a narrative.

This is a risky approach, because the reader is not only reading about Zambot 3, but also about my experience of it (what academics might call my own subjectivity). It allows for more skepticism about the narratives I choose to convey because my experience of the work is essentially the narrative. I open myself up to criticism. But I think all works of criticism, even in the ivory tower, do something similar; I want it to be transparent to the reader that they are not reading something objective, but about me reflecting on the personal connections I have with the work.

I arrived at this approach because I wanted to appease the two main audience groups and myself. For the audience that is familiar with the work or is expecting to engage with it, they will be able to think alongside the article in their own voice and perhaps find something new to ponder about. The other group, on the other hand, will be able to understand why I like the work and what's so unique about it.

And I also find this approach valuable for myself, because it allows me to think about how I've experienced the work and research, and has led me down paths I hadn't considered. I recently wrote about Cordwainer Smith's reception in Japan for Kansoulations, and that led me to discover mountains of research on the genealogy of catgirls in Japanese media. It allowed me to see a different side of a writer I already love.

To sum it all up in one word, I hope my writing is an enrichment to everyone, including myself.

Each article is a research project in itself. When I read a book, I think about what I've read before and what it reminds me of. Then, I dive into additional content before writing my article. It's a never-ending cycle of research, reflection, and writing.

The result, I hope, is a coherent literature review and analysis of what I've found interesting and valuable for the readers and myself. Even if an article isn't up to my standards, I hope the little trivia make it worth reading.

I don't know what I'm writing most of the time. Sometimes, I consider it literary anthropology. Sometimes, I think of it as historically-informed writing. Sometimes, I just think they're blog posts. But this is what I've ended up with after so many years of writing.

Will my writing change as I write more? I'm sure it will. I don't think it will settle into anything stable. Old readers will stop reading, new audiences will come and comment on the blog. But as long as I keep writing about subcultural media the way I want to, I hope my main goal of unveiling commodity fetishism in niche media and provoking new ideas will be achieved.

To all of you who have been reading my blog posts, whether from day one or just today, thank you for sticking with my amateur writing. There are niche media out there worth discovering and talking about. The world may be flooded with spam and cynicism, but there are still people out there doing their own work, and I want to write about them.

Let's keep reading and writing together :-)

Notes on autism and neurodiversity

2024-10-07T00:00:00Z

I know very little about autism.

This is my conclusion after reading two to three weeks worth of books and articles about autism, neurodiversity, and the politics of mental health. After finishing a book, I often found myself picking up another book to answer the questions the earlier book had raised in me. This loop has continued ad nauseam, and it's now October. I told myself I should be done reading this stuff and move on to other projects, but I kept flipping the pages and absorbing new information.

This inquiry came about because my partner, who was late diagnosed, was in a bookstore asking about books on autism. They were initially curious about a provocatively titled book cover by an autistic author, but they weren't interested in anything that was purely autobiographical. While they found value in reading anecdotes, they wanted research-based books that critically examined autism. I realized that I had never read much about autism, even though I had been dating my partner for several years and had several autistic relatives, so I picked up Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism by Robert Chapman and Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity by the late Steve Silberman (it was quite a surprise to learn upon returning home that he had died just a few days before we bought the book).

A few days later, I decided to take a break from reading fiction and picked up Chapman's book instead. As I read the book and tried to understand their argument, I began to be befuddled by what I was reading. You see, if you read enough nonfiction, you'll start to see familiar names, ideas, and discourses pop up. It's fun to see Uncle Marx in the quotes again. But Empire of Normality also spoke a very different language than I was used to: familiar terms like neurodiversity and statistics popped up, but what in the world was a "pathology paradigm" for example?

When I finished the book, I wasn't sure I understood everything. But the parts I understood resonated with me: I was fascinated by how the "average person" ideal created from statistics became a literal ideological norm that everyone had to conform to, and the chapter on neurodivergent people struggling with "cognitive contradictions" was a profound explanation of what it's like to live under late capitalism. I knew I had to raid their bibliography to understand their theoretical background to fully appreciate what Chapman was trying to argue.

This led me to discover the neurodiversity movement, discussions around neuroqueering and neuronormativity, Mad Pride, and so much more. I talked a lot about what I was finding with my partner who was also starting to read books in this vein. Books began to pile up: Jodie Hare's Autism Is Not a Disease: The Politics of Neurodiversity, Devon Price's Unmasking Autism: The Power of Embracing Our Hidden Neurodiversity, Micha Frazer-Carroll's Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health, etc. I spent my gym sessions reading Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness by M. Remi Yergeau and Chapman's Psychology Today articles. I've immersed myself in these ideas, and I have tried to see how they apply to my current understanding of capitalism, Japanese subculture, and more.

Even as I write the article, I'm still thinking about the bibliographies I've seen in the books I've read. There's so much to learn from this movement; I expect that I'll be reading more afterwards. It's a radical approach to see the world, one that aligns my current research interests and how I view society. So little of subculture media writing deals adequately well with social justice movements, let alone disability justice and Mad Pride. I want to incorporate these radical critiques into my writings, so I want to write a preliminary article on these developing ideas I have before I employ them in full force in my articles.

While my partner was responsible for reactivating my dissertation mode brain with their questions, I also have a personal history with autism. I remember being frustrated that my family couldn't appreciate my "difference" when I was young. In Indonesia and Singapore, autism is much more medicalized and stigmatized, allowing families to label their "troubled" children. I suspected that the diagnosis of autism in Southeast Asia was used to "excuse" families from their responsibility to raise the young. My family at least wanted to know what was "wrong" with me and couldn't understand that my individualism and skepticism of authority were just a part of me.

But the child psychiatrist who I visited thought I was fine. While I do suffer mental distress once in a while, we both agreed it's usually connected to my struggles with my family. I also believe that my "difference" comes from living in different countries and experiencing diversity. It's impossible for me to pretend that I can be "normal" in the sense of someone who has lived in a monolithic culture. For me, the banal question of "where I'm from" implies that there are conventions I should be able to follow and answer in, but I can't: I just don't have a "normal" background.

This is not to say that I don't believe that autism is real. Quite the contrary: I recognize the diagnostic power of "making up people," as Ian Hacking puts it. These categories target real suffering, but because they are "moving targets," the sciences that interact with people also change them. For example, in Unmasking Autism, Devon Price asks his readers to think about the negative stereotypes of autism found in the media and whether they try to avoid emulating those behaviors. The mental gymnastics required to avoid, say, acting like The Big Bang's Sheldon or the BBC's Sherlock means that the individual must be on his toes every second of the day. As a result, the book argues that fitting in requires too much sacrifice (physically and mentally) and is ultimately a self-defeating project. It almost seems as if autism and other neurodivergences are all defined in oppposition to "normal" behavior.

Indeed, for all the panic and discourse about autism, the definition of autism is surprisingly vague. Its English-language Wikipedia article describes it as "a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by symptoms of deficient reciprocal social communication and the presence of restricted, repetitive, and inflexible patterns of behavior." The NHS page for "What is Autism" has no definition; instead, it brings up a lot of "mays", how autism doesn't have an obvious, and assures its readers that "being autistic does not mean you have an illness or disease. It means your brain works in a different way from other people."

The most explicit attempt to define autism that I've found comes from Nick Walker:

Autism is a genetically-based human neurological variant. The complex set of interrelated characteristics that distinguish autistic neurology from non-autistic neurology is not yet fully understood, but current evidence indicates that the central distinction is that autistic brains are characterized by particularly high levels of synaptic connectivity and responsiveness. This tends to make the autistic individual’s subjective experience more intense and chaotic than that of non-autistic individuals: on both the sensorimotor and cognitive levels, the autistic mind tends to register more information, and the impact of each bit of information tends to be both stronger and less predictable.

Autism is a developmental phenomenon, meaning that it begins in utero and has a pervasive influence on development, on multiple levels, throughout the lifespan. Autism produces distinctive, atypical ways of thinking, moving, interaction, and sensory and cognitive processing. One analogy that has often been made is that autistic individuals have a different neurological “operating system” than non-autistic individuals.

This is getting closer to something I could use in an academic paper, but I'm still not convinced. The description only makes sense if we assume that there is some kind of "normal" body or mind to refer to. This raises further questions: what is the concept of normality? I thought I knew how to answer this question: the ideologies that make us not question the world. But as I read about mental health, I realized how reductive this definition is. It doesn't explain, for example, how some autistic people want to reclaim the diagnostic power of psychiatry to determine themselves. What makes autism so important to their identity?

Put another way, I want to understand why, as the Socialist Patients' Collective puts it, "turning [their] illness into a weapon" is such a radical move. It seems to challenge the ideological power of normality, diagnoses, and illness by turning its premises on their head. Rather than simply dismantling psychiatry, these disability activists come together to argue that they are proud to be who they are, but society refuses to see them as people. They agitate, they call for political change, they proclaim that they are ill and that's fine. Society, however, refuses to acknowledge their existence, which is why rallies must be organized. As Sedgwick writes in Psychopolitics,

I am arguing that without the concept of illness – including that of mental illness … we shall be unable to make demands upon the health service facilities of the society in which we live.

I couldn't see autism and other disabilities as a "deficit" anymore. It doesn't make sense to infantilize them and assume they just need to be taken care of. Why did I even subconsciously see disability as a deficit, even though I had read some disability justice texts (like Marta Russell's Capitalism and Disability)? I knew it was wrong, but I was attached to this heuristic, and it annoyed the hell out of me.

So, I read. I read essays like Jim Sinclair's "Don't Mourn for Us," which pleads with parents of autistic children to see their side. When parents say they wish their children didn't have autism, Sinclair argues, what they're really saying is

I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.

I began to realize that Nick Walker wasn't joking in "Throw Away the Master's Tools: Liberating Ourselves From the Pathology Paradigm" about how this journey might require a paradigm shift. Our current mode of thinking follows these two assumptions:

There is one “right,” “normal,” or “healthy” way for human brains and human minds to be configured and to function (or one relatively narrow “normal” range into which the configuration and functioning of human brains and minds ought to fall).

If your neurological configuration and functioning (and, as a result, your ways of thinking and behaving) > substantially from the dominant standard of “normal,” then there is Something Wrong With You.

Robert Chapman furthers this argument by connecting the pathology paradigm to the history of capitalism and calling it the Empire of Normality:

This new apparatus, made up of a complex nexus of different carceral systems, legal precedents, institutions, concepts, and practices, led to populations beginning to be systematically ranked in terms of mental and neurological ability, while positing this as part of a timeless natural order. This was not an accident, but was rather built into the logics of capitalism from the beginning.

He borrows this idea from Lennard J. Davis's Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, which notes that disabilities don't emerge as disabilities until the assumption of a normal body is formed:

I do this because the "problem" is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the "problem" of the disabled person.

Both Chapman and Davis trace the construction of normality to the rise of statistics and Adolphe Quetelet's "radical new science of human normality". As Quetelet writes (cited in Chapman's book):

the weight and stature of a man may be measured directly, and we may afterwards compare them with the weight and stature of another man. In comparing the different men of a nation in this manner, we arrive at average values, which are the weight and stature proper to be assigned to the average man.

Quetelet idealized the average person, but it was the eugenicist Francis Galton who demanded that people go beyond the average. Galton further revolutionized statistics, and the language of statistics is appropriated for everyday use, including the medical sciences. While this has allowed for genuine life-saving innovations and better health, the adoption of the normal body into the sciences means that everyone is compared to this imaginary ideal, despite the existence of biased indexes like Quetelet's BMI, which was derived from measurements of the Scottish Highland soldiers and the French gendarmerie. Not everyone is Scottish from what I understand.

Nevertheless, this empire of normality, this pathology paradigm has become a mainstay of our language. The "normal" brain (and body) is the result of capitalist relations, and we are all compared to it. As capitalism matures, more and more requirements for being "normal" are introduced; people now have to learn how to use computers, process flashing images and loud sounds, drive cars, and so on. Becoming "normal" will become increasingly difficult as time goes on. Anyone who can't adapt to the fast pace of late capitalism will be pathologized as "abnormal," disabled, and weak. And given that therapies like Applied Behavior Analysis (a closely related sibling to gay conversion therapy since they share a pioneer: Ole Ivar Lovaas) literally punish autistic people to become normal, normality is a deeply violent project that will keep on expanding until we choose to end it.

I think of my mother who is not disabled in the sense that we are talking about, but she could be if she was a teenager today. A few months ago, I had to help my second sister renew her digital passport in Singapore because she had misplaced her password and accidentally uninstalled the app. Without access, she cannot enter the country or use its services. It's especially worrisome as the country begins to incorporate more and more everyday activities into this application (privacy concerns notwithstanding!).

While the social model of disability based on the ideas of UPIAS and coined by Mike Oliver in The Politics of Disablement is not perfect, it is a useful "attempt to switch the focus away from the functional limitations of individuals with an impairment on to the problems caused by disabling environments, barriers and cultures." From mandatory use of smartphone apps to a lack of subtitles in movies to stairs that are simply everywhere for no good reason, people who can otherwise get on with their lives often find themselves disabled by the way society ignores their existence.

In the case of autism, people, including autistic people, have described it as a disability in some circumstances and not in others, or have denied the claim altogether. In the acknowledgments section of Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna, the author's early-diagnosed son, to whom the book is dedicated, argues that autism is simply a stereotype. The distress he feels comes from how people talk about it, and he wishes the label to go away. I've also read a couple of threads on Reddit describing their disgust with Devon Price and others who are okay with self-diagnosis because they've seen what happened to the psychiatric label of homosexuality and they could lose their benefits.

While it's not my place to say that people are wrong to think this way, I do think that autism, neurodiversity, and the discourses around it are politically useful and allow people to find support. While I'm not sure that terms like autism can ever be properly defined, I do know that they can create robust networks of solidarity. My partner, as they struggle to read these books, says it's empowering to realize that these stigmas are not eternal; they have a history in which they begin and therefore must necessarily end if we are to strive for change. A pathology paradigm can be overturned for a more neurodiverse paradigm.

This requires a change in the way we think about neurological difference. Not only must we abandon the need to conform to "normality," but we must also learn to value difference and allow it to manifest in political identities worthy of attention. To do this, we have to go beyond capitalism, psychiatry and welfare. All of this excited me because I felt like I was imagining a new world in my mind, and I began to see the problems with our world more clearly.

These works I'm thinking with have also provided some important vocabulary to explain what I find interesting in fiction. For example, in Bocchi the Rock, the titular protagonist is a withdrawn introvert who doesn't feel accepted in mainstream society, but finds a support group (i.e. the band) that allows her to blossom. It's also telling that a character like Hiroi, who sees herself in Bocchi, is also a mentor figure of sorts, and the PA famously declares that she's a dropout. The group dynamics in the work present an alternative conception of kinship networks, re-imagining "failed" people as people looking for groups that will accept them. They don't fit the standard Japanese nuclear family structure, but they are perhaps more alive than anyone else.

Can Bocchi be read as a possible sketch of a neurodiverse kinship network? I think so.

It's why I've been reading, discussing with friends, and now writing about this. I believe in this neurodiversity project and want to be an active accomplice. I hope this introductory article will interest people enough to consider this new critical way of thinking, because what I hope to do is draw connections between neurodiversity and the alienation explored in Japanese subculture media.

Below is an annotated bibliography of what I read before writing this post, and my honest thoughts about the work. It's organized in the way I'd probably recommend to my partner who's interested in reading again. It's probably exhaustive for that purpose, but note that I'm also missing a lot of important literature. I've highlighted works that have helped me a lot to understand neurodiversity and mental health (highlighted as "important").

If you want more autistic-related literature, check out The Autistic Advocate.

Introductory Reads

Hare, Jodie (2024). Autism is Not a Disease: The Politics of Neurodiversity.

This is a short manifesto that works well as an overview of current trends in neurodiversity writing. My partner and I attended a panel with her and she seems pretty cool. The book was originally longer, but she decided to cut it down to 160 pages instead. This means the writing can be somewhat cursory. I find myself wishing for more (a complaint shared by Beauty Dhlamini writing for Red Pepper). Nevertheless, I think it does a very good job at introducing more advanced texts like Empire of Normality to a layman audience and gives some great recommendations for further readings. Not bad for a first read.

Price, Devon (2022). Unmasking Autism: The Power of Embracing Our Hidden Neurodiversity.

More a self-improvement book than anything recommended so far, this is one of the two books often recommended to autistic people on mainstream autism subreddits. The first half of the book explores why masking exists and how it makes autistic people exhausted. There's a few exercises sprinkled here and there. My partner found them powerful enough to reflect on how they behave in society.

It's a nice book to read, but it seems to struggle with navigating the tensions behind unmasking. For example, it addresses how black autistic people might be pressured to unmask because of police and racial violence. While it's nice to see racism acknowledged, the book also acknowledges that unmasking is not a practical reality for everyone. I would have liked to see the book explore that more. This negative review on Goodreads is a reasonable discussion on the book's flaws and strengths.

Fortunately, there will be a sequel to this book in 2025, and I'm looking forward to reading it with my partner.

Walker, Nick (2021). Neuroqueer Heresies.

A compilation of foundational blog posts on neurodiversity available on the web, this book exists as a textbook for Walker's classes in university. If you are a stickler for citations, this book is a necessary purchase (it is sometimes free on Kindle). Many of these essays are available to read on Walker's website, and they are all worth reading.

Unfortunately, if you are interested in neuroqueering, there is a very good book-only essay at the very end that many neuroqueering articles use as a starting point. I do like the essay a lot, but I wish it was available on the web to link.

Frazer-Carroll, Micha (2023). Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health. (recommended)

Before reading this work, I was always surprised by the proclamations of activists who call themselves Mad. It's one of those words I thought would never be reclaimed. But as I read on, I began to see where it came from: people have tried to write about mental health in more euphemistic language, as if the only way to avoid stigma is to pretend it doesn't exist.

Rather than shying away from this narrative, Mad World declares mental health is about madness and we should take it as a political issue instead of some apolitical wellness issue. I found the chapters critiquing the vapidity of mental health campaigns and exploring radical psychiatry and alternative care services, including support workers helping patients fight landlords. Reading about Franco Basaglia and democratic psychiatry in particular made me think that the way we think about mental health and madness is too narrow, too neoliberal, to encompass all the mental problems out there.

I also recommend the Death Panel episode (transcript available) if you're interested in learning more about the book.

Silberman, Steve (2015). Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.

This is the other book that gets recommended all the time, and it's easy to see why: Silberman has written an accessible, in-depth history of autism diagnoses and neurodiversity for the general public.

The book is really a series of biographies that have been joined together to create a narrative that people are beginning to appreciate neurodiversity, despite the many setbacks. His writing is vibrant, and we can get a sliver of the personalities of each character he writes about. He has a knack on humanizing people in history, especially parents who have been swept away by anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, while acknowledging these people have done harm.

But what makes this book work is also its biggest flaw: there are heroes and villains in this story of autism. While villains like Ole Ivar Lovaas are rightly vilified for their actions, the heroes, especially Hans Asperger, receive little criticism, except perhaps for the innocent crime of creating new dilemmas for future doctors to unravel. While people rightly point out that Silberman wrote before more convincing evidence of Asperger's collusion with Nazi Vienna emerged, it is still a reductive narrative, clearly designed to make it an easier, more palatable read for the general public. I suspect that this heroes-and-villains story is the main reason people love this book.

Nevertheless, it remains a classic and is recommended by many autism activists and historians. I particularly enjoy the last few chapters that discuss the rise of the autism self-advocacy movement, including a mini-biography of Jim Sinclair and their magisterial essay "Don't Mourn For Us". I'm only putting this book last in this section because it's best to read it if you've read several books on autism and mental health before, so you know which parts are dated.

Denser Reads

Sheffer, Edith (2018). Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna.

Not only does this work as a corrective to Silberman's hagiography of Hans Asperger, but it also paints a picture of how psychiatric power came to be in Nazi Vienna. There's something chilling about how Red Vienna, led by Freudian psychoanalysts, could easily become Nazi Vienna once they purged Jewish and Communist sympathizers because they share in common eugenics ideals.

The book acknowledges that Asperger may not have killed children, but the way he diagnosed children he did not like (especially girls) and sent them to clinics and wards known to kill them implicated him and others in this murderous "diagnostic regime". Diagnoses like autism were not meant to help children, but to promote and conform to Nazi ideals.

As EC Maher writes for Disability Studies Quarterly, "This is not a book about autism, it is a book about scientific discourse in Nazi Vienna and the role of diagnosis in the Third Reich. Sheffer is as interested in what Asperger's work can tell us about understandings of community and issues of complicity under Nazism as she is in how Nazi ideology shaped Asperger's definition of autism."

Sedgwick, Peter (1982). Psychopolitics.

This book explores four prominent thinkers associated with antipsychiatry: Erving Goffman, R.D. Laing, Michel Foucault, and Thomas Szasz. These thinkers are celebrated in leftist movements for their critiques on psychiatry, but as Sedgwick explains, their criticisms (with the exception of Foucault) are not as liberatory as their writings claim to be.

For example, Sedgwick points out that illnesses are political and social concepts that describe deviancy. "In stressing the value-laden-ness of medicine," Mark Cresswell and Helen Spandler write in assessing Sedgwick's legacy, "it is not his intention to disregard its scientific credentials. At the same time, in subsuming a diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia’ within the ‘illness framework’, neither is he endorsing psychiatry’s epistemological claims. Sedgwick is pro-medicine precisely to the extent that he envisages a radically socialised medicine applicable equally to physical and mental health." Simply put, he believes that there should be no difference between the diagnosis of diabetes and schizophrenia, yet the former is treated as a value-neutral "scientific" classification while the latter is embedded in the social category of "deviance". He criticizes this tradition of looking at illness, which he calls "psycho-medical dualism": it allows the artificial separation of "physical" from "mental" illness, which gives anti-psychiatrist writers like Szasz permission to deny the existence of mental illness.

Without the concept of mental illness, the suffering experienced by many people is simply relegated to "problems in living"; therefore, he argues, mental illness should be included in the rallying cry of illness to make political demands on health services and politicians. The rest of the book is him dissecting the biographies of each thinker to show how problematic their foundations are and why the left should take mental health seriously.

This book was great to read, but I also recognize that it's more of a niche read if you're not interested in the history of (anti)psychiatry. The ideas in this book are echoed in works like Empire of Normality, so it's not a must-read. However, if you find the ideas interesting, it's worth picking up a copy.

Chapman, Robert (2023). Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. (recommended)

This is the book that started my journey into neurodiversity and mental health. It is an attempt to create a historical narrative of how the pathology paradigm and ideas of normalcy came to manifest alongside capitalism, and I'm still trying to digest its ideas.

It charts how health in the ancient world was hijacked by the obsession of statisticians and eugenicists with normalcy in human populations. Chapters include a discussion on Quetelet's obsession with the "average man". This "empire of normality" reverberates in our thinking: even Marx uses notions like the "average worker" to discuss poor working conditions.

The recent rise of neoliberalism is also not only the rise of multinational corporations, but also a "mass disabling event" for workers. Disabilities are becoming more pronounced as capitalism demands more and more specific skills like being able to manage one's emotions for customer service work. Indeed, "traits that were previously relatively benign became associated with some level of disablement," writes Chapman, "while traits that have only been minimally disabling became significantly so." Not everyone can do service work, but there is an expectation that everyone should be able to do it.

As a result, Chapman argues that we must think beyond normality. Rather than finding ways to integrate disabled people into the workforce through diversity programs, their historical research argues that neurodivergent workers should organize "as neurodivergents to radically change the structures and expectations of the workplace". The facade of neuro-inclusivity must be rejected because what is really needed is liberation. So, people need to see not only patriarchy and racial capitalism as major issues of our time, but also the hegemony of neuronormativity: how we need to be conformed to be "normal" workers.

We need to imagine a neurodivergent communism where everyone's needs are met and neurodivergence is not a resource to be exploited but a class of active, thinking people. As Gerald Roche writes in Red Pepper, "In such a world, there would still be autistic people, but we would no longer be disabled. To me, that’s a world worth fighting for." It's a powerful book that, while I don't share Chapman's exploration on alienation, is winning me over as time passes.

Russell, Marta (2019). Rosenthal, Keith (ed.) Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell. (recommended)

If there are writers who deserve more recognition, Marta Russell should be in the top five. Her writing combines Marxism and disability theory in surprising ways. For example, her critique of the social model of disability is that it doesn't go far enough; instead, she advocates a model money of disablement, showing how disabled people are not unproductive burdens on society, as one might imagine, but can be made useful for capitalism. How? By putting these disabled bodies in nursing home beds.

There are whole industries based on housing and caring for disabled people, so capitalism has found ways to profit even from people who can't work. To understand why disability persists and why society is so disabling, Russell argues that political and economic dimensions must be included in the analysis. I read this a few years ago, and her writings are still a vital part of how I understand disability. Other writers in this bibliography have also used her provocative writing, so she deserves a mention in this list.

Adler-Bolton has written a decent overview on her writing, and the Law & Political Economy symposium is also worth reading.

Adler-Bolton, Beatrice and Vierkant, Artie (2022). Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto.

Written by the Death Panel cohosts, this book argues that while not everyone is ill right now, no one can be truly well under capitalism. It proposes many interesting ideas, including conceiving health as a bio-fascist project and the notion of "extractive abandonment": capitalism extracts as much value as it can from workers before abandoning them to their demise.

The book also has a historical chapter devoted to the Socialist Patients' Collective. In some ways, it is a deeper and more philosophically robust version of its sequel, Mad World. I won't deny the book is difficult to read, but the ideas explored are engaging, and I've come back to their arguments when reading books that bring Health Communism up. And as I read other books, I also began to understand that what I found difficult came from not being able to imagine the world that Health Communism wants.

This has become a favorite of mine because it's so thought-provoking, but I also admit that it takes a lot of further reading and contemplation to understand where the book is going. But once you understand its arguments and why it wants us to look at different kinds of care, it makes living under this health capitalism unbearable at best.

SPK: Turn Illness into a Weapon (1972).

If you are interested in reading what the Socialist Patients' Collective is all about after reading texts like Health Communism, this is a short manifesto explaining their history and theses, including "illness is the presupposition and the result of capitalist relations of production." It argues that illness, as the "only form of 'life' under capitalism", is also a "revolutionary productive force for humans" and mimics the movement of capital transforming "living work into dead material". Fun read if you want some short theory.

Davis, Lennard (1995). Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body.

This book is all over the place. Written by a child of Deaf parents, it provides a lot of the theoretical foundations on normality for books like Empire of Normality. If you find Chapman's exploration of Quetelet's statistics and his idealization of the average man interesting, this is worth reading.

Otherwise, the book is full of language and antiquated ideas we don't use today: Davis argues that we should use "people with disabilities" instead of "disabled people" because it helps us dissociate disability from people. Still, there are sections where I thought his privileging of sound and touch over sight as a methodological move made me think of Jacques Derrida's concern about how we privilege presence over non-presence.

I'm only including this text in the list just because the differences between Chapman and Davis are interesting.

Yergeau, M. Remi (2017). Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. (recommended)

This book is without a doubt the most difficult book I've read on this list. It touches on areas I'm not familiar with (especially rhetoric). Despite this, and perhaps because of it, I found it an invigorating read. Using Walker's neuroqueer theory, Yergeau analyzes and dismantles how academics currently conceptualize autism as people without a theory of mind.

Autistic people are seen by academics (and parents) as people who perform gestures without agency, therefore they must always be infantilized to fit their narratives. Cruel, dehumanizing quotes are scattered throughout the book, including writings by practitioners of Applied Behavior Analysis and Simon Baron-Cohen (the scientist who proposed that autism is an "extreme male brain disorder"). For example, the everyday actions by neuroqueer people are not seen as actions; they are seen as uncontrollable actions. Stimming needs to be eliminated in this neuronormative regime. As Yergeau writes, "Practice is only practice when it is able, straightened, and compliant." When neuroqueer people, like queer people, don't behave according to neuronormative standards, they are not seen as being in control. While Asperger's Children is more horrifying to read, this book made me sick because ABA, a practice still okayed by states today, is basically conversion therapy to turn neuroqueer people into neuronormative people. What's particularly insidious is that ABA co-opts actual disability arguments, such as the social model of disability, to claim that autistic people are therefore disabled and need to be "corrected" into "normal" people.

But for ABA to work, there must be constant monitoring of the autistic individual's behavior, because no matter how "high functioning" they are, they cannot reach the neuronormative ideal -- what Yergeau describes as another variant of Zeno's tortoise and hare paradox, where the goalposts keep moving further and further away. There are also so-called treatments that use "aversives", which are just cruel punishments to make children behave: a child being dangled headfirst out of a fifth-story window, electric shock therapy is no different from Anne Sullivan's teaching methods to Helen Keller, etc. Many of these dehumanizing actions are "justified" because autism is seen as some kind of infantilizing disorder.

The book therefore argues that we need to think of neuroqueer practices like stimming as an alternative rhetoric, one that challenges the dominance of neuronormative rhetorics and notions of agency. Instead of parents and doctors "authoring" autism, it should be up to the people who identify as autistic to do just that. They know themselves best.

It's a complex, daunting book to read, but it's also one of the best academic works I've ever read. It's also quite funny, with the author betraying academic seriousness to add a thematic joke to make a salient point: if we take autistic rhetoric seriously, then we should allow their own unique writing style, not tacit guidelines for "proper" academic writing, to guide their methodology.

I'm still reading books in this vein, though lately I'm more interested in the history of madness and psychiatry. If there are any books, essays, or videos that you find interesting and relevant, let me know in the comments. I'm always interested in learning more about the neurodiversity movement.

I also plan to create a page dedicated to reading lists on the site. Let me know what you would like to see more of as well.

On Kirk Allen, subculture media, and disability justice

2024-09-24T00:00:00Z

This article is about the psychiatric pathologization of a science fiction fan. There is a brief mention of sexual abuse and a damn load of sanist language.

While procrastinating on writing an article about Cordwainer Smith and his Japanese fandom for Kansoulations, I've been reading about the politics of mental health and neurodiversity. I plan to write more about these topics later as they relate to conversations with my partner about autism and how I think about disability and capitalism in general (now available).

But juggling between the two projects has gotten me thinking about the one intersecting aspect they have in common. I know that if I ever want to talk about Smith, I have to write about it. It's something I've been thinking about for a while. At the same time, I don't think it's a subject I necessarily want to bring up while talking about what makes Smith such an interesting writer to me. Like, I'd be fine if I don't bring it up at all.

Rather than avoid the discussion altogether or find a way to hammer the topic into my essay, I'm going to preempt my article on the writer by discussing this one aspect by itself and how it orients my thoughts around disability: Kirk Allen.

Kirk Allen was the most famous patient of psychoanalyst Robert Lindner. His case study, "The Jet-Propelled Couch", captured the imagination of many people, especially in the science fiction community, because he thought he was the protagonist of the science fiction stories he'd read. It was originally published in Harper's as a two-parter before being collected and expanded in Lindner's The Fifty-Minute Hour.

Not long after, science fiction fans began to theorize about who Kirk Allen really was. While there are competing theories today, the main one is Cordwainer Smith.

You don't really need to know Smith to understand what I'm getting at in this article, except that he wrote many short stories in the same universe and he did work for the US state. Admittedly, part of his charm is that his stories read strangely -- I once described his work as "an alien trying to write science fiction for humans," and I still stand by that. There are also a few Cordwainer Smith scholars, including one who is writing a biography of him, who argue that Lindner must have appropriated some parts of Smith's life. But there are others, including Karen L. Hekkelson in The Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith and Smith's daughter, who question this claim and have found no evidence linking Allen and Smith.

Whatever the truth is, I don't think it really matters to anyone but biographers because Kirk Allen is less a person than a psychiatric symbol. What people take away from reading this case study is not a deeper understanding of what makes his science fiction writing compelling, but a pathological understanding of subculture media and its fans.

Kirk Allen was first introduced to Robert Lindner via a referral from his previous doctor:

“This fellow is a man in his thirties,” he said, “a research physicist with us out here. As far as I can tell, he’s perfectly normal in every way except for a lot of crazy ideas about living part of the time in another world–on another planet. Washington sent him out to do a key job, and until a few weeks ago he was going great guns. But lately he’s out of contact with the work so much and for so long that something’s got to be done about it.”

Despite this preamble, the doctor believed Allen didn't need hospitalization. He saw Allen's fantasizing as a "perfectly innocuous business" that did not disrupt everyday life.

In short, Allen seemed to be doing just fine, even if he had unconventional ideas about his own identity. Indeed, when Lindner and Allen finally met, Lindner couldn't see him as the "mad scientist" he imagined: just an eloquent "junior executive" type who liked science fiction.

But Lindner claims that the neglect of his parents, living in Hawaii as a white child, and the sexual abuse by one of his caretakers left him with feelings of sin and guilt. Allen's turn to fiction and later to science fiction, especially when he encountered his name in these books, allowed him to dissociate from his traumatic childhood:

“As I read about the adventures of Kirk Allen in these books the conviction began to grow on me that the stories were not only true to the very last detail but that they were about me. In some weird and inexplicable way I knew that what I was reading was my biography. Nothing in these books was unfamiliar to me: I recognized everything–the scenes, the people, the furnishings of rooms, the events, even the words that were spoken. My everyday life began to recede at this point. In fact, it became fiction–and, as it did, the books became my reality.”

While the novels-turned-biographies had initially served to "refresh" his memory, he needed much more and began to recall new biographical facts of his life by worldbuilding:

Assisted by the maps, charts, diagrams, architectural layouts, genealogical schemes, and timetables he had painstakingly worked out while using the books for his guide, he filled in spaces between the volumes with fantasy “recollections” of his own; and when this was done, he began the task of his life: that of picking up where his “biographer” had left off and recording the subsequent history of the heroic Kirk Allen.

After growing up, he began working for the US and spent his free time outside of his scientific duties sketching out his science fiction world. We're talking documents and maps, the kind of worldbuilding that epic fantasy writers are stereotyped to do. He also believed he was someone in another world while working his day job:

One moment I was just a scientist on X Reservation bending over a drawing board in a clapboard BOQ in the middle of an American desert–the next moment I was Kirk Allen, lord of a planet in an interplanetary empire in a distant universe, garbed in the robes of his exalted office, rising from the carved desk he had been sitting at, walking toward a secret room in his palace, going over to a filing cabinet in a recess in the wall, extracting an envelope of photographs, and studying the pictures with intense concentration.

And he would then claim that he could recreate the photographs of the universe from scratch. This activity and more was regarded by Allen as something very ordinary; sure, his experiences were "extraordinary," but he was simply endowed with some "psychic quality or ability". Why this should cause confusion and interest in anyone else is beyond him.

I also agree with Allen. Why the fuss?

Of course, I don't intend to minimize the connection between trauma and escapism. I just don't see this "escapism" as harmful. Assuming Lindner's account is accurate, there is nothing in his actions that harms him or others. Even Lindner admits this: Allen is portrayed as a confident and charming person who works well with his colleagues.

Instead, the conflict comes from Lindner's struggle to see Allen as just another guy. Lindner boiled down his first impressions of Allen into two things:

Unlike other "psychotics" who might acknowledge that something had gone wrong with them, Allen was unable to "comprehend his mental abnormality". He was one of the rare cases who understood that "his madness was a private one" that originated in childhood, and that his public "psychosis" only disturbed his supervisor and doctor. Lindner wrote that at first he felt completely helpless "against the wall of Kirk's absolute conviction of his own sanity."
Allen's "psychosis" ultimately preserved his well-being. While Lindner conceded that "every psychosis represents a life-saving maneuver on the part of the individual – is in other words his way of solving the conflict between the world and himself", he believed that there must be another method found in "some area of life - through therapy or otherwise" that could "yield satisfactions comparable to those available to the person through his madness". Lindner could find nothing that could "compete with the unending gratifications of his fantasy." Allen could not be without his imagination. "How, then," Lindner writes, "could he be restored to sanity and yet remain alive?"

Sanity is a recurring word in Lindner's impressions of Allen. Allen believed he was sane while Lindner did not. Instead, Lindner wanted to make Allen conform to his version of a sane person: someone who didn't need to rely on "psychosis" to live. And yet, there is no reason given why "psychosis" is negatively valued while "sanity" is positively valued in the case study; they just are.

This section fascinates me because Lindner seemed unaware that he was making value judgments. He, like the doctor and the supervisor, reacted viscerally to Allen's articulate self-description. If anything, Allen made it clear that he didn't subscribe to their pathologizing view of him and that he could function well in society. The fact that he regularly attended Lindner's therapy sessions isn't commented on much in the article; it seems as if Allen was just following his superior's orders like a proper member of the state. The one unconventional activity he did was not at all detrimental to his work. It was just pathologized as somehow making him disabled and needing help.

I find this part to be a clear description of what disability justice and neurodiversity activists mean when they distinguish between the medical and social models of disability.

The medical model locates disabilities as problems in our bodies that can (and should) be fixed. On the other hand, the social model shows that society disables people by erecting physical and social barriers that make it difficult for people to go about their lives (the classic example: people who use wheelchairs can't go up stairs, but they can use ramps -- yet there are many buildings that still don't do this). As Micha Frazer-Caroll writes in Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health, "this shift in emphasis, from blame to barriers, has historically empowered activists to focus on removing social obstacles facing disabled people."

The social model of disability is by no means a complete or authoritative understanding of the many dimensions of disability, but it is a profound way of looking at how society ignores and exacerbates the problems of disabled people through medicalization. It recognizes that suffering extends far beyond the contours of psychiatry.

So in the case of Kirk Allen, what are we to make of his fantasies of being some kind of John Carter, rescuing princesses on distant planets? It's definitely "weird" -- there's no denying that. But even if we assume that we're working in some kind of pathology paradigm, he hasn't suffered or encountered discrimination. He's just "weird", and it's hard for me to read him as a disabled person from this case study.

But I think that appearance of normalcy was what drove Lindner to pursue Allen as a patient. He saw Allen's behavior in society as abnormal, as a deviation from a norm, because he had these fantasies. The fact that Allen could adapt so well to the demands of capitalist society while living with these fantasies was, to use academic language, too fucked up.

I just find it fascinating that the psychiatric gaze in this case study is so dehumanizing that it sees even socially appropriate behavior as pathological. The idea of someone posing as a "normal" person is just too much, man.

In the introduction to The Fifty-Minute Hour, Jonathan Lear writes,

This book is written in the heroic age of American psychoanalysis. The author, Robert Lindner, blazes his way through neurosis and psychosis the way John Wayne blazed his way through Indian territory; he tracks his way through the hidden nooks of the inner world the way that Philip Marlowe tracked his way through low-life Los Angeles. The comparison is apt, because Dr. Lindner is a self-styled American individualist: he trusts his intuitions, he is willing to bend the rules to follow a hunch, he will flout convention in response to an out cry of human suffering. Let us be clear: in the five reported cases, the author comes close to getting himself killed on one occasion, and severely attacked on another. There are professions -- baseball, for instance -- in which batting two for five is pretty damn good, but psychoanalysis is not one of them. Still, like every Fifties American hero, the author lives to tell the tale.

Lear views Lindner as something of a mythical figure, a cowboy-hero who says "This psychosis isn't big enough for the both us [sic]". While he doesn't consider his case studies to be proper psychoanalysis and recognizes instead that Lindner and his patients live in "a [fictional] world where one can be cured of communism and impotence, of fascism and homosexuality, at the same time", he claims there is some truth to this "swashbuckling adventure with psychosis".

The real value of Lindner's spectacular case studies comes from the way he puts "psychotic fantasy" into thought-provoking words. If the therapist ignores this aspect, they may

deprive psychotic patients of the opportunity to come to some sort of thoughtful control of their inner lives , and we deprive ourselves of a broad-scale understanding of the nature and power of fantasy. For in psychosis, if one will only look, fantasy stands out in bold relief.

I enjoyed reading this introduction for so many reasons. It's funny how much the introduction talks about how dated the book is while discussing homosexuality and communism as pathologies. I also liked how Lindner was just compared to cowboys embarking on the colonization of Indigenous lands. Imagine all the yeehaws critical theory scholars could get from reading this book as an example of medicalization and colonization.

But I'd also like to point out how American individualism characterizes Lindner's psychoanalysis, but the same cannot be said of his patients. Kirk Allen, although he worked for the U.S. state, could not be described in this language as an American individualist.

There is no mention of his nonconformity or ability to navigate social norms in this introduction, even though it was the case that made Lindner famous. He was only one of five patients in Lindner's casebook. Yet, he was also the individual who most challenged Lindner's psychoanalysis because he could speak his own mind against Lindner.

The whole case study is a battle between two people's views on what is and isn't a pathological tendency. Lindner himself describes Allen as "a noble opponent who courteously permits his antagonist to choose the time, the place, even the weapons of their encounter." Not a word is said about it in the introduction.

No, the story is and has always been about Robert Lindner the cowboy therapist who takes "psychotic fantasies" seriously. His metholodogical individualism is the story.

And therefore, his myth-making must continue: we return to the psychoanalyst couch and discuss the so-called psychotic fantasies of Kirk Allen. We read about Allen's impressive 12,000-paged "biography", which "read like fiction" to Lindner. More numbers are thrown: 200 chapters, 2,000 more notes, "a glossary of names and terms that ran to more than 100 pages", and so much more. Lindner wondered how he could "treat" him, and "the authorities" who sent him for his sake "feared that in his disturbed condition he was a poor security risk who could neither be kept on the job nor discharged." The US Empire of Normality demanded that Lindner "cure" Allen of his "psychosis" at all costs.

This tall order could only be accomplished by "enlist[ing] his active participation in the treatment. The radical solution that Lear writes so much about in the introduction is to accept the premises of the fantasy with a twist: he's going to poke world-building holes in his theory of his future self. He was ready to start again his "new assault on [Allen's] psychosis":

One morning when Kirk came into my office for his regular appointment, I was sitting at the desk studying his two astronomical charts and nine star maps, and the section of his “records” dealing with astronomical research. Since we were not using the couch in this phase of our work, he drew up a chair. My silent concentration on the materials before me eventually produced–as I knew it would–sufficient tension to cause him to break the quiet.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Plenty,” I replied. “These distances are all fouled up. Either your astronomical projection from Srom Norbra X is wrong or the star maps are way off. They just don’t make sense. Look here…"

What follows is a long conversation about the unit of measurement Allen used to chart his maps and the error in converting ecapalim to miles. This planted the seed of doubt in his mind. As Lindner writes,

I had the almost telepathic impression that Kirk’s mind was a turmoil of questions about me. Heretofore, he had merely accepted my acceptance of his fantasy. Now, with his own faith in it slightly shaken and mine apparently unruffled, he was perplexed.

In Lindner's eyes, this session and many others like it "contributed a little more leverage for prying my patient out of his madness". He conceived Allen's "delusions" as having room for only one person, so that "when another person invades the delusion, the original occupant finds himself literally forced to give way." Lindner considered his intervention effective because it forced Allen to reevaluate himself.

Allen was going to get cured. Hip-hip hooray.

But the case study continues: Allen ceases to be the focus while Lindner philosophizes about psychosis, the "immobility" of his psychiatric work, his reluctant admiration for fantasy and science fiction work, and what he calls "his disorder".

This psychoanalyzing of himself was foreshadowed at the very beginning of the article:

The chair behind the psychoanalyst’s couch is not the stationary object it seems. I have traveled all over the world on it, and back and forth in time. But it remained for Kirk Allen to take me out of this world when he transformed the couch in my consulting room into a space ship.

The boredom Lindner faced in his line of work made him indulge in the very "psychosis" from which Allen supposedly suffered:

Sometimes a problem about the “records” could not be settled in discussions with Kirk, and I seemed to be compelled by rising anxiety to work out a solution on my own. When I managed such a solution the relief it afforded me was intense–so was the pleasure I took in Kirk’s liberal congratulations. Often, too, when neither discussion with Kirk nor the efforts I made on my own sufficed to clarify some point, I found it “necessary” for him to obtain the required information by “journeying” to the place where it could be discovered.
On occasions of this kind, I actually ordered Kirk to make these excursions into the fantasy, then discovered myself awaiting his “return” with extraordinary eagerness.

Lindner assured the reader he did not become "psychotic" and insisted that his condition "was that of enchantment developing toward obsession." He loved the "wonderful details [that] were made available to me". His "symptoms" intruded into his daily life outside of his sessions with Allen. He realized he "fell into a trap that awaits all unwary therapists of the mind" when his activities began to resemble his patient. Daydreams had turned into "psychic distress" for him. He had to use his "accustomed tool" of psychoanalysis to "allay the more acute symptoms and to initiate those insightful processes that lead to recovery".

But something remarkable happened that "not only broke what remained of my spell but marked the successful conclusion of Kirk's treatment": Kirk Allen finally admitted that his fantasies were all make-believe. He realized he was "crazy" during his sessions and had been "deluding" himself for years, but he couldn't stop telling Lindner these "lies":

“Because I felt I had to,” he said. “Because I felt you wanted me to!”

"The Jet-Propelled Couch" is a riveting essay. Without a doubt, it's the most fun I've had researching a writer outside of reading their published works. I can see why it has captured the imagination of science fiction fans, especially Cordwainer Smith's, as it seems to "ring true" about our psyche (as Lear puts it).

The twist at the end is a neat literary touch. Like an Agatha Christie rugpull, it emphasizes that the investigator is as vulnerable as the people they're supposed to save. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the last sentence of Lindner's essay "a touchstone of the Sense of Wonder" for many readers:

And sometimes, as I gaze above, I smile to myself and whisper: “How goes it with the Crystopeds? How are things in Seraneb?”

When I first read it, I was also convinced that this case study was about Cordwainer Smith. Not only did this essay show another side of the writer I was researching, but it made me believe that I was peering into some truths about our unconscious. Regardless of my skepticism of Freudian theories, his literary qualities were so dazzling that I was more than happy to accept this as fact.

But now I realized it was a red herring, but I also could not ignore the sanist implications found in this essay.

I must stress this again: Kirk Allen didn't hurt anyone when he thought he was a science fiction superhero. He was a productive worker until his superiors decided he was too "weird" and therefore a "security threat" whatever that means.

We might even consider his behavior "normal" these days. He's just someone who kinnies a character. I'm sure some people would still consider kinning to be "weird" behavior, but weirdness is practically a deviation from the norm. Anytime you do something that's a little different, you're just going to be seen as "not normal".

I can only read this essay as someone who has been forced to suppress his neurodivergent thinking in order to fit into what the psychiatrist deems normal. That's just neuronormativity. This is the violence that people talk about when they write about psychiatric control.

And besides, what's the problem of having fantasies that "intrude" into your daily life? Arguably, I think people have too much "reality" these days. When Lindner writes that "slowly the whole amazing defense collapsed or better, decayed, to be replaced, item for item, by reality", it reads to me like the decaying of dreams and utopian fantasies. It allows the reassertion of capitalist realism: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

I think the obsession with "reality" as a principle allows people to become so cynical that they become nihilistic. Think of realpolitik thinkers: they cannot imagine world peace, so we must always take up arms; they chastise naivety by saying, "This is the way the world is. Grow up."

Thus, I agree with Peter Sedgwick when he writes in Psychopolitics that "the radical who is only a radical nihilist is for all practical purposes the most adamant of conservatives." I see "reality" as a policing concept to stamp out utopian visions for a better world and force people to give up and conform to capitalist society.

It sickens me to read how Kirk Allen was forced to pathologize himself into a patient of Robert Lindner. And it doesn't make the sanist narrative about Kirk Allen palatable when people say that the "cured" Allen went on to write some of the best science fiction ever written. It meant that what I was reading and analyzing had repression painted all over it.

I do not want to see Cordwainer Smith's stories as proof that he has overcome his neurodivergence. It's too pathologizing and reductive for me. Everything about the treatment of Kirk Allen is revolting.

While reading about mental health had certainly radicalized me, my disgust with the pathologizing of people like Kirk Allen came from my studies of Japanese socioeconomics. To explain the growing population of dissident youth in the 70s and alienated adults from the 80s to the present, academics of all stripes (especially psychologists) blamed the rise of hikikomori and NEETs for the Lost Decades.

In a 2003 Psychology Today article titled "Total Eclipse of the Son: Why are millions of Japanese youths hiding from friends and family", the hikikomori phenomenon has been "likened to Asperger's syndrome, a mild variant of autism" by Western psychologists. However, the hikikomori "disorder" was "considered culturally unique and is linked to violence". One Japanese psychologist thought it was caused by "neglectful parenting," which sounds a lot like the debunked refrigerator mother theory.

But there are many arguments why Japanese youth might be alienated and unemployed: the so-called Japanese miracle was a bubble, the privatization of public services initiated by prime ministers like Koizumi Junichiro caused a lot of economic chaos, and so on. While not perfect, Anne Allison's Precarious Japan analyzes Welcome to the NHK as a truthful exploration of what it means to be a hikikomori: alienated from capitalist Japan, people look to otaku culture for something.

Instead, we continue to see the pathologization of the otaku media both inside and outside Japan. Robert Lindner's neuronormativity is still on full display in discourses about what to do with Japanese youth. If you like subculture media a little too much, the essay's medical model implies, you need to be fixed by therapy because you're not being productive enough.

I see subculture media as a breathing space for alienated people. While not everyone in these spaces is marginalized, I see these works as potential places to explore our own alienation. If the mainstream isn't making work that resonates with us, then we have to make our own.

That means airing our dirty laundry. It's going to be read as "weird," as deviations from an implicit norm. Contra Lear, fantasies are not cathartic but struggles to conceive something more beautiful and acceptable than we currently live in.

Not everyone is going to like what we're doing, but that's okay: let's celebrate our recognition of our alienation when we talk about what excites and saddens us. In fact, we should double down when societies try to paper over our alienation and call it a non-issue. We should be proud that we are "wrong" because that's what we are.

I write for the Kirk Allen in all of us who wish we were something more than what capitalism has made us. He represents the subculture: unacceptable by societal standards, yet proud. And he shall have the final word to Robert Lindner: "Crystopeds and Seraneb are in fact doing fine, thank you. How about you?"

The Substance (2024) is a superficial movie that makes me think about alienated bodies

2024-09-22T00:00:00Z

This post features unmarked spoilers for The Substance including its ending and discusses its body horror elements.

I was skeptical at first.

The trailer was one of many that didn't look good, but the rave reviews from critics and friends with good taste in movies made my partner and I decide to see this as a movie date that afternoon.

The first few minutes offended my developing slow cinema sensibilities: the theater acoustics amplified the already disgusting slurping of Harvey, a TV producer, eating cocktail shrimp. He lectures the main character, Elizabeth Sparkle, on the expiration date of women, specifically in reference to menopause. Closeups of his fingernails, shrimp shells, and teeth chewing the shrimp meat flood the screen. Everything in the scene is excessive: so much raw color, squishy sounds, facial pores -- I'm being held hostage by the movie.

But at the end of the movie, we came out of the theater calling it a masterpiece of body horror cinema. We are still reeling from the glorious audiovisual violence inflicted on the screen; it is as if the movie vomited on us and we were happy to receive it.

I didn't expect to love this movie, and I want to know why I did.

For one thing, I don't find hyper-stylized work very interesting. While I enjoy strong art direction as much as any Criterion Collection bro, a movie needs to use those elements to tell a memorable story.

And the plot is a well-trodden one. Elizabeth is a washed-up celebrity barely surviving on her Jane Fonda-like exercise show, but she has turned 50 and the TV people want her out. The movie really begins when she discovers The Substance, a miraculous drug that can separate a "better version" of her from her body.

And by separate, I mean that a new and younger body grows out of her older body. Enter Sue, a younger, sexier version of herself. Sue gets the chance to replace Elizabeth on her own exercise TV show.

This sounds like a miracle, but Faustian tales like this and The Picture of Dorian Gray always have a catch: both Elizabeth and Sue are still connected, like the common motif of an egg yolk splitting into two. If Sue doesn't feed Elizabeth or switch to her in time, part of Elizabeth will rot and degenerate.

It's very obvious what the movie is satirizing: how beauty standards alienate women. Hollywood and other industries extract value from past and successful women until they are obsolete and then abandoned; these vampires then go after younger women who conform to the ever-restrictive and higher standards of feminine beauty. While substances like Ozempic may allow these "older" women to go back into business, the commodification dynamic is still the same: Elizabeth becomes alienated from her Sue self as Sue takes more and more of her existing beauty for herself.

In fact, Elizabeth and Sue are so alienated that they see each other as different people locked in a struggle for their own survival. At one point, Elizabeth trashes the apartment to make a point to Sue: this "old hag" who gave birth to her has autonomy too, and she deserves a say in what Sue is up to. Sue, on the other hand, has a nightmare where the chicken drumsticks Elizabeth has been munching on might protrude out of her body while she's filming an episode.

The only closure offered by the unnamed organization that stocks The Substance is a willful termination of the Sue self. The movie offers no easy resolution: the damage in the treatment (or what the organization calls "The Experience") stays with the body. Elizabeth, already an old body, has to kill the ambitious, youthful side of herself that the organization exploited. It is a fitting tragic fate for a woman who pursued the glories of youth only to cut her life short.

But the movie doesn't go the girlboss Hegelian route: she couldn't kill Sue and reach a higher path of enlightenment. No, Sue retaliates and the movie goes on.

And that's what makes the movie great: it continues to devour itself.

If the movie had ended earlier, it would have been a shallow piece of entertainment. A pretty movie that says nothing we haven't heard before: male gaze, self-destructive beauty ideals, etc. Indeed, you could walk out of the theater thinking this movie has nothing original to say. Writes Dana Stevens for Slate,

What made it so tedious and grating, for me, was not the concept but the execution. Fargeat approaches her material with a hatchet, hacking methodically away but rarely sculpting with any nuance. Fans of The Substance may object that her bluntness is a deliberate style choice, and the filmmaker would no doubt agree. But setting style aside (to the extent that that is ever possible), what exactly are the ideas at play in The Substance? If the film is meant as a social satire, it’s hard to discern its target, other than an abstract notion of oppressive “beauty standards” in which neither the beauty industry nor social media plays any significant role.

I agree with Stevens here, especially when she later says "that the message and the vehicle used to convey it are too much in sync. Fargeat’s clobbering approach leaves no space for the audience to speculate, to make our own connections and discoveries." There is a reason Miriam Balanescu writing for the BBC calls it "2024's most divisive film". I totally understand why people might be critical of its politics; a good portion of the movie is devoted to butt shots, and it reminds me of the impossibility of making an anti-war movie without glorifying some aspect of war violence.

But while I concede that the movie lacks anything original to say, I cannot help but find the way the movie replaces subtext with body horror quite compelling. The movie likes to scream lines that foreshadow Elizabeth's demise into the audience's senses. There is comedy in how much Elizabeth and Sue want to show and hide Elizabeth's portrait, respectively. And the way the same guys would act differently between the two characters is also quite funny.

In fact, I'm pretty sure I would hate the movie if it tried to play smart once. The movie seems to acknowledge it is derivative and never becomes some artsy-fartsy budget horror movie -- it is a high budget movie with b-horror movie sensibilities. Because the movie is lecturing the audience on how to think about the beauty industry, it doesn't try to tap the audience with their elbow and chuckle at how smart that metaphor is. It elbows the audience and makes them submit to its metaphoric violence.

I don't see it as a provocative feminist film, but as a slaughterhouse of the senses. Like the flashing images that may trigger epilepsy and repetitive drones in SOPHIE's "Faceshopping" music video, the film wants to terrorize the audience into awareness of the dynamics of commodification. This maximalist ethos could become another example of collusion with the enemy -- one audience member wrote on a review card that they got an erection watching Demi Moore's performance as Elizabeth at the theater my partner and I went to see -- and I can see the real concerns surrounding it. But the bloodbath in the final arc, the dismantling of any pretense that this is a serious horror movie about beauty and alienation, and the excessive self-awareness that it is also a self-aggrandizing spectacle make it one of the most honest movies I've ever seen.

The Substance knows it can't critique society, so why bother? It lacks the ironic distance necessary to make it an effective satire because it doesn't want to pretend to be something else. In this sense, it is truly a movie that refuses to alienate itself.

And it is this honesty that is deeply infuriating, enchanting, and unforgettable when you take a step back. The movie slides and bounces between "good" and "bad" filmmaking because it simply stays true to the principles it has created for itself. No one, not even the director who sees the film as a critique of the male gaze, can twist it into something stable without losing the frenetic dynamism that makes the film what it is.

The movie is an honest deformity that I happen to love.

In a Vogue interview, director Coralie Fargeat says of the ending where Elizabeth/Sue becomes "Monster ElizaSue":

When the final transformation arrives, it felt quite intuitive to bring the character ultimate relief. Ironically, it’s when she’s totally deformed and monstrous that she doesn’t care what she looks like. In fact, it’s the only time she looks in the mirror and kind of likes what she sees. That’s the moment when she finally feels like she deserves to go out in public, no matter what she looks like. We hide behind our polished smiles, and I wanted the character to unleash those hidden anxieties. The audience [in the film], which stands in for all of us as a society, screams and hates her for this, and I wanted to portray how violent that reaction can be. That the only real moment of relief that she has is when she doesn’t have a body anymore, I think, says it all.

While the movie is clearly making a statement about how much people fucking hate the literalization of convoluted beauty standards, I think the "monster" is also a stand-in for the movie itself. Like the "monster", the movie is a hodgepodge of ideas that are never fully developed but are still in your face.

And that's because the movie is comfortable with its own identity. We can see this in the resolution: The only self Elizabeth/Sue really likes is this "monstrous" self because it is the first time she doesn't feel alienated -- in a sense, she has achieved the beauty she has always sought.

While I cannot ignore the fact that the movie ends with Hollywood moving on, I think Elizabeth has finally reached a resolution with her alienated self. When she drags her remains onto the plaque on the Hollywood Steps that bears her name and begins to imagine the glory of her heyday once again, I don't see her as a loser character anymore but as someone who found the self she's been looking for. Her melting into a blood pool feels like she's melding with the celebrity essence she's thought she had lost. It may be a tragedy for the audience, but I think she has found an inner peace that is impossible to explain to the outside world.

And that is kind of how I feel about the movie in the end: it feels whole, even solid. While I think the critics are ultimately right that its innards are of little value, perhaps even poisonous, The Substance is a very honest body of work. Its sincerity is contagious, and if everything in it is simply surface level, that's fine -- there's no shame in saying something derivative.

What I take away from this movie isn't just the fabulous final sequence, the beautiful scenes of body horror, and the stellar performances by the lead actors. It's also that movies can simply say what they want to say and take their leave. Nothing in the film attempts to speak something grander than what it already has: the immediacy of the metaphors and symbols leaves little room for interpretation, nor does the script attempt to step into quotable lines territory. This makes the movie vulnerable to criticism of its superficiality, but I think it also means that it can never condescend to its audience and preach something that doesn't exist in its running time.

This "what you see is what you get" style of filmmaking certainly doesn't create the conditions for cinematic contemplation that make movies unique and thought-provoking works for many cinephiles, but I think it makes me more conscious of how I watch movies. I have to think about what structures the way I perceive the screen, the performances, and the visuals. I was self-conscious about the way I take in the audiovisual diarrhea of how the beauty industry disgusts me and invites me to revel in it.

The lack of depth makes me gaze into myself, into what makes certain scenes so ideologically beautiful or/and repulsive.

So I don't think The Substance is a profound movie, but I don't think it's deficient either. Rather, it lands on a messy balance that allows me to grapple with my ways of seeing. It is a gorgeously contradictory Experience that refuses to settle into something likeable or unlikeable. To me, the film is like a human body: even if we modify it, it's never going to be completely satisfactory for our own purposes, and we have to think about it and how we use it every day.

But the movie is happy with itself. It experiences euphoria with its own body, and I envy it. That's why I think it's a modern body horror masterpiece: it makes me aware of how alienated we are from our bodies for alienation from ourselves is a deeply terrifying experience, and that's what I think makes body horror films so wonderful. The Substance may not reach the technical heights of a Cronenberg classic for me, but my viewing experience was just as contemplative.

What an incredible experience.

On the demise of Cohost, the internet as a dead mall, and blogging as a whole

2024-09-19T00:00:00Z

I have complicated feelings about the demise of Cohost.

On the positive side, it has rejuvenated my blogging spirit. Before Cohost, I was burnt out on writing: I was being plagiarized, getting terrible comments, obsessively checking stats, and so on. Cohost's strange system allowed me to write again, to not give a shit what people thought, and to just assume that I could write my own thoughts without fear of repercussions. It was also where I learned to meet new people of all kinds.

On the other hand, Cohost remains a social media platform. I still see the same Twitter drama (especially when it's imported) that I despise, a lot of social justice discourse that goes nowhere, and just a lot of "online" behavior that I'm sick of.

I've been writing on and off on platforms, and I still see the benefits: it's networking with a good ounce of shitposting, and it's still the best way to find new articles and people. I can see myself reluctantly joining Bluesky and Tumblr to meet more people, but I'm not sure if I want to do more than post links to my articles.

I've been wondering about my user experience when I was using Cohost at its brightest moments. It's not that the ethos was bad, but I still think social media platforms are toxic. I was still anticipating my notifications the same way I am hooked to responses, retweets, and favorites on Twitter. I want to see what people have to say. I find myself clicking on the site. Nothing really changed for me: it was a nicer, cozier Twitter experience for me. The same conflict I see on Twitter, just with eggbugs.

Even if the staff somehow survived this month, that doesn't mean the Cohost experiment was worth it. It created a lock-in ecosystem, albeit managed by people like you and me, and transferring files from the site to anywhere else was a pain. I understand that the site will soon have an export feature to help with that, but the site was clearly not intended to expedite exits (remember when deleting accounts had to be done manually by staff?).

I know that people have signed up to Cohost to read and comment on my stuff, so it makes it more complicated for me. As I move away from platforms and toward self-hosting (Neocities isn't self-hosting, but I can self-host once I feel ready), I think about how I should have written on my own site. I have more control, and I don't get distracted by the number of notifications.

But I can't kid myself: I depended on a stable community to keep me going. What is a blogger without an audience?

I think I'm just tired of constantly checking a platform for validation.

Sure, I like it when Rock Paper Shotgun or Polygon links to my articles. But it's more like a nice surprise. The sense of immediacy of social media platforms -- that someone might comment on it -- is very, very addictive, and I can't help but check the site.

I already do that on Twitter. I ego-search every instance of my site and posts, even when I know no one has commented on them. It's just a bad habit I want to get rid of.

So I was more annoyed than depressed by Cohost's demise. I would be okay with it dying (the writing was on the wall) if the staff gave us a heads up. Archiving everything in a few weeks is a pain. But other than that, I feel sentimental but also a tiny bit free.

It feels like the only platform I can belong to without some regret is a blogging platform with some webring capabilities. I'm not suggesting that hosting sites like Neocities are the end all be all either; what I long for is some kind of writing community that holds everyone accountable. I envy the neurodiversity blogosphere, for example: they have been posting their work for so long that it has found its way into anthologies, academia, and, more recently, publishers like Verso and Pluto Books. It makes me wonder why all the anime bloggers ditched blogging for microblogging and notification numbers go up -- all we did was atomize ourselves.

At the same time, I realize that I relied on Cohost to draw attention to my writing. I wonder how many people will follow my blogs via RSS; very likely they would prefer I still post them on social media sites like Tumblr and BlueSky. I have a real feeling that I may not have as many readers as I used to.

I guess that's okay. I think I need to start writing without expecting anyone to at least like or repost my articles. I already dislike tracking reader metrics anyway...

I could only write this reflection days after I archived everything that I consider important on Cohost. Reading this back for minor revisions, I sound bitter. I'm irritated that my behaviors have been thoroughly modified by social media and metric sites, and I'm trying to unlearn them. I meander because my suppresed anxieties about the future of internet communities exploded with the demise of Cohost.

I don't know what I want from the internet. A forum to share ideas and knowledge? No, it feels like we're in a bunch of dying shopping malls, opening new stores and waiting for the day when the municipal government steps in and says, "Sorry, we've got to tear this place down because we have to build condos here." And all we can do is post on our Instagram about how well our stores are doing.

Perhaps the real source of my frustration and anger is not the death of Cohost, but rather my online habits, how platforms have shaped them, and how I found myself in the same dead malls I see on another site that traps creators and audiences into their ecosystem, YouTube.

Whenever people complain about the demise of the internet and how it used to be so good until the corpos took over, I wonder where they're coming from. It's always been bad: the internet I grew up with wanted you to check forums, Facebook Messenger notifications, your RSS subscriptions, and so on. Everything is designed to keep you locked into the corpo web until the venture capitalists get bored and put their money elsewhere.

The posh coffee shops, the luxury condos, and the spanking new website that boasts a new way of accessing the web are all on life support the same way dead malls are.

The owners and their customers are extracted as much as possible before being abandoned to their sickly demise.

I see my worldview as ultimately self-defeating because the sites and communities I use on a daily basis could one day face this fate. Cohost was the first in recent memory. When will places like Discord fall?

The internet already feels like a post-apocalyptic landscape. To modify an idea from Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant in Health Communism, "it is not necessarily the case that our websites are sick. But none of them is well."

I yearn for a community that can be robust in the face of this deteriorating political economy of the internet, but I have a hard time imagining how any of this is going to work on an international scale.

Nevertheless, I know I have to keep writing about subculture and whatever else interests me. That is at least my promise to the people who read me. I don't think I can ever stop writing.

But I try not to write with the hope people will read my stuff anymore. I recognize that's the same toxic impulse that traps me in social media ecosystems. I want to be free from that.

No, I write because I want to free my mind from my hyperfixations and shout into the void. I'm so obsessed with the niche and the obscure that I feel the need to share every detail I find, and I can't help it. I find that writing about subcultural media is literally like mourning the good times and the bad times in that sense: blogging helps me process complicated feelings about a subject that inspires and terrifies me so much, so that I can move onto newer hyperfixations.

The latest hyperfixation to end up in words printed on my website is Cohost. It has some of the things I hoped for and some of the things I detested. I don't see it as a passion project, but as any other text replete with contradictions and gaps that point to something unique.

And like other influential texts, it changed something in me and made me think about how surreal reality is. Its short life provoked its members to explore new ways of writing and reading. Still, it falls into the toxic cliches that plague other texts like it.

I hope, as with every other article I write, to capture a fraction of what it's like to experience Cohost as a text uniquely situated in its material and phenomenological circumstances.

I step back and look at what I've written. It will fit nicely with the articles on subculture media I have written so far. It's time to move onto newer sites.

2024-09-17T00:00:00Z

-- title: On writing for myself or a target audience date: 2024-09-17

Anonymous User asked:

this might sound like a strange question, but when you write, would you say you have a target audience, or do you write solely to express your passion and interest in the subjects you enjoy with little concern for who your audience is?

While I always lean toward the latter in theory, I do create a target audience in my mind. I've been influenced by Umberto Eco's notion of the "ideal reader" where he sees the reader being structured by the texts the reader reads.

In practice, I choose my topics with little regard for the audience. But I also make sure that what I write is easy to understand, and I don't use jargon unless it's necessary. Rather than following literary criticism's "use theory to explain fiction," I tend toward "use fiction to explain theory" (though admittedly every writer bounces back and forth on this dynamic -- or as Marxists and Hegelians would put it, it's a dialectical relationship).

Lately, I've been influenced by writers who publish political and social criticism in Verso and Pluto books because they often propose radical ideas about how to fight for an anti-capitalist future. That's not an easy task if you're not sure about their ideas (I'm still digesting Empire of Normality's ideas). So while I'm reading them and thinking about the world we're in, I'm also interrogating their rhetorical techniques and how persuasive they are.

I think passion doesn't have to be a naive position. It can be as political and critical as you want; it just depends on how much you want to read into a work. This is the same reason I write about political theory books I've read from time to time; fiction is written by people who live in cultural and political contexts, so it makes sense to read about history and critical theory, and then comment the connections and contradictions between theories and fictions. Passion can be articulate and allow readers to be impassioned by the criticism they read -- ideally, I want people to open their minds to these new imagined worlds, or at least entertain these thoughts.

I want readers to play along with me and think about the ideas and themes brought up in the works I'm writing about. Thinking along with a work seems to be the best approach for my writing style. Sometimes the work will point to new avenues I never considered, and I need to explore this and that... I want to capture the dynamic and liveliness of the subject I am writing about. It can be annoying -- sometimes I find myself trapped in the annals of my bibliographical hell -- but it suggests the power of a work to suggest something more vibrant about it. If a work is provocative enough to make me write about it, I have to respond with the respect it deserves.

This approach is pretty silly, but it's what I do. I know I have a readership, but I imagine that it must be self-selecting and close to what I imagine my "ideal reader" to be. I trust my readers to be as inquisitive as I am, even if they can't follow the work/argument well -- they hold me accountable, and I refuse to treat them as people inferior to me. I imagine that they want the best work from me, and so I must do my best.

So, to answer your question, "yes."

I wonder about the kind of queer fiction I actually want to read.

2024-09-10T00:00:00Z

This article has unmarked spoilers for A Probability Experiment Turned Me Into A Clockwork Girl And I Really Don’t Know What To Make Of It All and will explore ideas found in gender bender fiction.

For a long time, I couldn't find the queer fiction I wanted to read.

Not that I know what I wanted. I went through my twenties reading a lot of the classics (your Moby Dicks and Electric Sheeps) since I couldn't find the queer fiction that would resonate with me. I knew I wasn't cis or straight, but the LGBTQ+ works I read that ranged from mediocre to okay (Wandering Son/Hourou Musuko, Bastard Out of Carolina, etc.) didn't excite me in any way.

And I think it's because they're just not interesting places to speculate about gender.

It seemed like the most interesting English-language work on queerness was on the web. I never spent time reading original and fan fiction on the web, partly because I was a literary snob, but also because I was studying around the world without consistent access to the internet. But I noticed that there was fanfare around internet fiction, and that stuck with me.

I just never looked for it. Instead, I was distracted by queer Japanese media, especially yuri, that made me think about my thoughts on gender. I thought I was cold and unfazed by romance until I read yuri.

Now, I feel like I kinda know what kind of work I'm looking for: spicy situations that invert everything I know about societal norms; blunt critiques of heteronormativity and conservative politics; and gender bender stories.

The last one is pretty fun to me. It's the most thought-provoking of the three I laid out because it has to play on irony. There's something to be said about how unremarkable it is to be a gamer guy, but becoming a gamer girl will make a lot of people notice you. Never mind that this will be irritating in real life, the fantasy of gender bender fiction makes this a very funny and interesting prospect.

What gives? For me, this paradox is what makes queer fiction interesting to read.

This is where A Probability Experiment Turned Me Into A Clockwork Girl And I Really Don’t Know What To Make Of It All by nothingspecial comes in. It was recommended to me by a friend, Contessa, who knew I was into this particular kind of exploration, and my curiosity about internet fiction never wavered.

Well, I had to read it. I do like gender bender stuff.

The problem with college, I thought to myself, is that you don't have to go, but everyone expects you to anyway.

This is how the story begins: a monologue by Stuart, a shy guy who seems to have enrolled in the wrong department at the wrong college. His self-loathing in the first chapter is so overwhelming that it spills over into his descriptions of other people around him:

I looked around the classroom. I could tell you plenty about why a number of the other freshmen were sitting in Introduction to Applied Metaphysics.* Bruce Harper? The money, or at least the prospect thereof; he made no secret about that. I didn't consider that invalid, really. Eric Lidenbrock? Natural egghead; you could tell just by looking at him that he was going to spend the rest of his life buried in one research project or another. They probably couldn't have kept him out of the program if they'd wanted to. Tammy Greenfield? Granted, a stunning blonde with a face a sculptor would kill to have crafted was a little more out-of-place in this kind of milieu, but if your gaze happened to drift low enough to take in the fact that she was in a wheelchair, her legs obviously atrophied from years of disuse, anybody who knew anything about the subject could tell you why she was here. Emma Shaughnessy? Same as Eric, she just dressed better.

* (Metaphysics, of course, being the study and analysis of higher-level patterns observed in conventional physics - the search for the reasons why the low-level mechanics of the universe behave as they do, and especially for the reasons why they sometimes don't.)

He makes it clear that he doesn't belong here, but his knowledge of metamorphic research, the main hard sf concept in this work, is astounding. He discusses several key historical details, such as the Navy destroyer and its mermaid crew, and has strong opinions about certain principles in the field before going on his lunch break.

During lunch, one of his friends, Emma, tells him and Tammy that the college is getting a probability exciter:

And that's what a probability exciter is?" Tammy said. "Okay, interesting idea, but what do you do with it?"

"Well, that's the question," Emma said with a shrug. "It's still extremely new technology - they've only just started building the things in the last couple years, and most of the initial experiments have been the probabilistic equivalent of smashing particles together to see what they break apart into. But the potential is highly interesting, especially for metamorphic research."

I finished the last bite of my burger as I thought about what she was saying. "It's a means of making things more predictable and repeatable, isn't it?"

She grinned. "Exactly! That's been the whole problem thus far - the best we've gotten for experimental methodology is variations on 'expose subjects to slightly different high-energy fields and see what happens.' But if we can actually induce events at a specific level of probability, we can start to make meaningful determinations about the potential for inducing controlled transformations. This could be a leap forward for metamorphic research like nothing we've seen before."

Tammy raised an eyebrow. "As in, if you could work out the probability of a specific change, you could make it happen reliably?"

"Potentially. It's going to take a lot of research before we could work that kind of thing out ahead of time, though. For starters, it's going to be more inducing changes at specific probabilities and seeing if the results are consistent from subject to subject."

To summarize: this could be their greatest chance to advance the metamorphic sciences because they could manipulate variables to control transformations.

They're going to use Stuart as a guinea pig. They're going to put him in the exciter and see what happens. He can't fight back. Something is going to happen to him whether he likes it or not.

And so, the inevitable event we've all been waiting for is going to happen ... in the fifth chapter.

And we don't even see his reaction until the next chapter. The writing and plotting in A Clockwork Girl is, to put it bluntly, all over the place. I've taken the time to quote passages from the first chapter because they show how clumsy the writing can be. The writing can be a slog, and the plots can go nowhere. I found myself irritated by the way the author focuses on certain details, and I wished the writing would get to the juicier stuff more.

But there's also a modicum of queer possibilities within its writing style. In "3:00: The Girl In the Mirror (pt. 1)", Stuart finally turns into a clockwork girl and checks herself out:

Part of what was troubling her was that the figure in the mirror was clearly a woman, but just as clearly not human. The hair, for starters - the color was unusual enough, but looking closer at the unusual texture...it was artificial, filaments of some other material rooted in the skin of her head. But the "skin" was also different, coarser in texture, less glossy; it too was artificial, a layer of felt in a human skin tone, stretched over an internal frame that shaped the head.

The "skin" didn't fit right around the joints, either - there were creases on the inside of the elbows and knees, and it was split around the outside. The gap revealed enameled metal, pearly-white against the skin-tone of the felt. The fit on the face was better, smoothing the moving parts that articulated eyebrows, cheeks, and lips into a convincing facsimile of human features, but the eyes were obviously artificial - pearlescent orbs with a glass coating, the irises shutters made from tiny, delicate blades of purple onyx.

But the most obvious clue that she wasn't a human was the polished brass shaft protruding from the middle of her back. This had a two-lobed, roughly heart-shaped blade on it, maybe an eighth of an inch thick, with holes in either end; an enormous winding key, slowly turning counter-clockwise to the ticking of some unseen escapement within her body as it metered out the energy from a comparably enormous mainspring, countless mechanisms chattering with activity.

The other thing that troubled this strange clockwork automaton was the part where she was me.

I stared into the mirror for what felt like an eternity, watching her, watching me: the key on my back - my key - slowly turning with the unwinding of my mainspring, driving my mechanisms, operating my new body. Hearing the chatter of things I didn't even know the names for turning, clicking, catching, releasing, extending, retracting; marking time, reacting to stimuli, processing information, making decisions, triggering responses. Feeling the perpetual motion; not a sense in itself, but a subtle interference, vibrations carried through my frame and fed back into the sensors for other stimuli - touch, hearing, balance - to form a phantom sense of the parts that I couldn't feel directly.

I watched my own expressions as my mechanical brain gradually, inexorably processed what had happened to me. I was...I was a machine; I was a girl. I was an automaton; I was a clockwork mechanism; I was a doll. I was a God-damned wind-up toy.

Most writers would linger on that moment, but I doubt they would focus on the details like this. The paragraphs show an almost excessive focus (in my opinion) on the gears that compose his body and the imperfection of the "skin". Stuart did not become a "perfect" girl, but these descriptions almost make it sound like the author chiseled her character out of marble. I can imagine the texture and sounds of this strange and unusual body.

It's not a body I want, but it's an interesting body.

Every time I pick up my phone and read the story in the gym, I wonder what it feels like to have this body. Stuart (who will be known as Susan in later chapters) struggles to understand how they should feel about this accident. She didn't ask for it, but now she has to accept that she (and their friends) have become demihumans and go back to everyday life.

And weirdly enough, the world around them is chill about them. They can attend classes at the university or go out to eat without causing any trouble. Their family and friends aren't too upset either after the initial surprise -- things just kinda go on as seen in an exchange in "5.00. Facing the Music (Pt. 2)":

"So she knows you're a guy, so what?" Emma watched from the bed while her body hefted a box of textbooks onto the rickety handcart we'd brought from the maintenance room. Her roommate sat on the other end of the bed, still in a daze.*

* (She'd taken it better than I expected; no screaming, just silence and a thousand-yard stare. She'd be alright in a few hours, I thought. Probably. It's not every day you see your roommate with her head off.)

"So...how!?" I sputtered. "Was I wearing a sign?" I pondered how to fold a stack of dresses without wrinkling them, gave up, and settled for carrying them by the hanger, my arms held high enough that they cleared the floor. It wasn't like I had muscles to strain.

"Honestly, kind of," Tammy said, wrapping up the last of the cables for Emma's personal electronics. "You do realize that your body language is like 90% the same?"

Everyone knows Susan, the guy who turned into a clockwork girl. Her behaviors haven't changed, but she is too conscious that they may have transgressed gender norms and affect how people perceive them. They have a hard time feeling okay with people accepting them.

This makes the story rather unusual when you think about conflict in serialized stories. There's no external conflict that threatens the protagonist or their friends. It's all internal: if there's a conflict that motivates the story, it's that Susan doesn't feel comfortable with her body and society being so accepting. She's so used to self-loathing that she's shocked and confused that people might like her, maybe even more than when she was just a guy.

Without an external conflict guiding the structure, the story meanders as long as Susan is caught up in her thoughts. It's more than happy to infodump setting details or have the characters go off on philosophical lectures about identity (8:40. Maidens and Madeleines (Pt. 1))

"No, but I'm not a different kind of..." I paused, considering it. Was I not? Being a man sort of was a difference in kind from being a little boy, in so many ways; was it that much smaller than the gulf between a man and a woman? But then, a boy was the larval form of a man; it was natural to go from one to the other, even if it took time. Surely that was different than-

Emma laughed. "But you could be. 'You' isn't a fixed, immutable thing; changes in what makes up 'you' are part of life. You're a different person now than you were a month ago, and you were different then than five, ten, fifteen years before that. So it's not like your 'self-definition' is something you have to consciously adhere to; it's a reflection of your own natural properties. And it's okay if those change - whether you choose it or not."

This can admittedly be quite silly, but I appreciate how the pacing captures the ebb and flow of Susan's contradictory thoughts about her body and place in society. I found it fascinating how much the story respects her feelings to its own detriment; the story is happy to halt its plot in order to let Susan unpack their thoughts.

Self-discovery is a messy business, and the story is fine with going around in circles because that is how Susan thinks.

The approach allows for some very valuable digressions for me. While the story repeats itself and that can be irritating, I found the repetition quite effective at the very end. In "9.00: A Boy Named Sue (pt. 3)":

It's what you wear to pretend to be something you're not. That's what I'd said to Emma - but how much of me was a costume? How many layers had I wrapped myself in, trying to be what people expected, pursuing goals that weren't mine, looking for direction from someone else because I had no compass of my own...? I suddenly couldn't stop thinking about it. And now I was pretending to be someone else entirely, dressed up as yet another character...was there even a real me in there, under all the make-believe, or was it just hollow inside? If there was nothing underneath, did it even matter how the outermost wrapping was shaped-

I've seen passages like this before. They can be mind-numbing at times, but I found myself in sync with Susan's character. She thought this shit over and over again because their sense of wearing a "costume" was so important to her that I started thinking about my "costume" too.

To what extent is gender an act of masking? Is authenticity possible, even in a society as accepting as this one? How is it possible to love oneself when the gender binary exists? The repetition had taken a toll on me because these were questions I had pushed away in order to get on with my day, but I had to confront them as I read it.

The more I digest this story alongside Susan, the more creative I feel I can be in expressing my thoughts about gender in interesting ways. I feel like I'm growing with Susan and beginning to internalize her struggles, even if I'm just reading the same thoughts about self-love repackaged for a different chapter.

But there is one chapter that made me feel this the most.

In "8:40. Maidens & Madeleines (pt. 2)", an old man comes out of nowhere to rant to Susan and Emma about his best friend. It doesn't seem relevant to the story or the characters until he brings up the fact that his best friend turned into a mermaid while serving in the Navy, the same incident that sparked intellectual curiosity about transformations:

"How did...how'd you deal with it?" I asked. I sipped my tea and frowned; it'd gotten cold, and I'd been too wrapped up to notice. "How did she deal with it...?"

He shrugged. "Well, for a coupla weeks we just talked. Hadn't seen each other since we shipped out, and it was good to talk to Charlie again and it was good for Charlie to talk to anybody - so I'd just go over to visit every day. It was the damnedest thing - she'd been that way for months, and she'd get around and take care of herself just fine, and never acknowledge that she was a mermaid instead of havin' her legs blown off or something. But I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say nothin'."

"Then one day - I forget what set her off, if it was anything - she just broke down crying. Just sobbin' like her own mother'd died. Didn't know what to do then, either, but I figured she'd take it bad if I comforted her like ya would with a girl - so I gave her a slap on the back, put a hand on her shoulder, and we sat there for an hour, with her bawlin' her eyes out. At the end of it, when she finally calmed down, she asks me, George, d'you think I'm a pansy?" He chuckled. "I told her I figured, any fella that went through this and didn't cry over it hadda be crazy."

Eventually, his best friend went to an all-girls school and learned to accept herself for who she was. As his story draws to a close, a very interesting scene happens:

While we sat there, digesting everything he'd told us, the barista, a dusky-skinned young woman in her mid-twenties, made her way over to the table. "Granddad, are you bothering my customers again?" she asked, with a wry smirk.

The old man chuckled and slowly, creakily, rose to his feet. "Just talkin' with an old friend, sweetie," he said, turning to me with a knowing smile. "Well, you ever wanna talk about it, ya know where t' find me." He doffed his cap, nodded adieu, and made his way out of the shop.

"Sorry," his granddaughter said, bemused. "He gets like that sometimes. Hope he wasn't a bother."

I shook my head in a daze; Emma waved it off. "No, no, not a problem."

She smiled and nodded, turning to go back to the bar. I blinked, shook my head, and took another look. She had her hair up; at the base of her skull, behind her ears, I could just make out closed-up gill slits.

This broke my brain when I read it. I couldn't believe the author had snuck in this fascinating detail. Just like Susan, I was left with questions and my imagination to think about what we had just read.

I wanted to know more about this grandfather, this mermaid, their granddaughter, and so much more. But the author has wisely left that desire unanswered -- we have to supply ourselves with our own interpretations if we are ever to be satisfied. I'm sure it's possible to do just that, but I'm still unsure what to make of that.

And I think that's a beautiful thing because I felt a little bit like Susan the day I read that passage.

I don't expect people to read this article and think this is a story worth putting their time into. The hard SF elements are not easy to read, nor do they feel grounded in actual science. It has no breathing room for its characters and plots, so that important events and interactions always feel spontaneous. I can't say that I enjoyed the banter between the characters that much, and the ending is too abrupt to feel conclusive.

If anything, I should dislike the work. But I don't. Clockwork Girl is a clumsy work that goes in many fascinating directions, and I still think about it from time to time. It's perhaps the closest thing I've found that makes me go, "Woah, this is the queer fantasy work I've always wanted to read."

I can see myself not finding any value in reading this work before, but I read it at the very moment I began to think about the kind of gender fantasies this work stimulated. I wondered what it was like to have a body that wasn't obviously human, how it felt to be alienated even though one was accepted into society, and so on. This story allowed me to speculate on a body so different from mine that I found more appreciation for what I have and idealize right now.

I don't like to make grand statements about the value of fiction or whatever because they might come back to bite me in the ass in the near future. But at the very least, I think there's something fun about that kind of speculation, about being able to think outside the gender box and just go on a journey that's so foreign to you but in the end feel like you've connected with its themes.

And that's the kind of queer fiction that fascinates me right now. It allows me to break out of this mundane heteronormativity for something more exciting, something more queer. While it's important for stories to explore how queer people are marginalized, I want something different right now: I want the sense of wonder that's inherent in science fiction to appear more in queer fiction ... I want new and unusual queer possibilities that haven't yet been imagined ... I want to speculate, dream, and explore our beautiful paradoxes.

I wonder about the kind of queer fiction I actually want to write. I'm still not sure what it's like, but I think it should be something like Clockwork Girl: messy, insightful, and inspiring. If someone came across my writing and found themselves imagining a new form of reality, as I did with this work, I think I would be very elated.

I Saw the Internet Glow - Internet Subcultures and the Films of Jane Schoenbrun

2024-09-03T00:00:00Z

This article features unmarked spoilers for the following Jane Schoenbrun's movies: A Self-Induced Hallucination, We're All Going to the World's Fair, and I Saw the TV Glow.

If trans is not identified as either/or, but depends on the “angle” of the subject’s gaze emerging in different contexts, then the slight modifications of gender could be likened to the nuanced space of the shimmer.

-- Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and Aesthetics of Change by Eliza Steinbock

There's something queer about the internet.

I don't think I'm describing a particular lived experience when I say something like that. You don't have to identify as queer -- you could be a transphobe for all I care -- to realize that surfing the web does something very strange to you: you could be anyone with an anime avatar, you could surf the web and just listen to what people are saying without feeling like you're intruding, you can quite easily explore the ambiguous and liminal spaces to your heart's content.

The internet can be described as a safe place where danger lurks, but I think it would be more accurate to describe it as a place where you are allowed to step out of your body and be something else for a little while. People often joke in Discord conversations that they don't really see people like themselves typing in conversations; instead, they imagine the anime and furry avatars typing. Even if you take a selfie picture or record your voice saying something very silly, the "characters" in my head will always be your avatar -- when you change avatars, you almost become someone else entirely. I also think my personality changes a lot when I change avatars, and I don't know what to make of that.

But these experiences, when I write them down, sound rather silly and untrue. Imagine talking to someone who is offline: they might think you are describing an extraterrestrial experience and approve or reject it depending on his preferences. Whatever they think, it's an experience they're not likely to have.

That's a part of the issue of describing anything queer. At the beginning of Shimmering Images, Eliza Steinbock admits that not everyone might agree that there is a trans theory of being at all, that it might be that it might be "false or unintelligible". In fact, the films I'm going to examine in detail are often criticized for being vague, incomprehensible, pretentious, and so on.

But I think Jane Schoenbrun's movies are compelling descriptions of a developing queer and trans aesthetic because it indulges in this ambiguity, this vagueness, and this aura that everything feels so concrete and abstract at the same time. I am not interested in convincing the haters, the disaffected, or anyone else of the artistic merit of these films; what I am interested in is why I find these films strangely authentic to my own internet experience, despite having very few ties to the communities to which Schoenbrun belongs.

And I believe it has something to do with how critical it is about the experience of consuming the internet.

The Internet as Self-Induced Hallucinations

I find it fascinating that the first movie to have Schoenbrun's name as a director is A Self-Induced Hallucination, a documentary about Slenderman and the impact it has had on the internet and in real life. But instead of a good old-fashioned video essay with original and poorly cited research on YouTube, we watch a movie composed of other YouTube videos, large and small, about the Slenderman subculture.

There are no auditory or visual changes to the footage in A Self-Induced Hallucination as far as I can tell. Only videos debunking the mythology, kids reacting viscerally to the spooky man, Jenny Nicholson explaining the communal aspects of creepypasta, news reports of the Slenderman stabbings that sent the world to chaos, and tulpas. We can only grasp the meaning of the film through the cuts and transitions to other clips; there is no interstitial or narrative voice that organizes the clips into an ordered nature. It's up to us to make sense of this essayistic movie and understand what it's trying to say about the online communities we find ourselves in.

The structure of this film forces the audience to sort things out, perhaps similar to how one might investigate a creepypasta like Slenderman. We are a captive audience, in the shoes of these internet sleuths, watching clips to make sense of this phenomenon. I originally thought it would be silly and boring to watch this documentary, but as I watched it more and more, I found myself in a fugue state like everyone else watching it. I found myself hypnotized by the movie, not sure how deep the rabbit hole was, but still crawling down it.

It reminds me of a time when I was bored out of my mind and decided to read the lore behind Five Nights at Freddy's. I realized it was a waste of time, but I got caught up in discovering the mystical powers of Golden Freddy and the amount of speculation people had. It was, for lack of a better word, pornographic: I consumed, consumed, and consumed to see more people discussing what they thought of the work. I never saw myself in the community, but somehow I felt that if I were younger, I would be a participant in the subculture. It's not that I cared about the lore at all, but I was already deep enough that I should feel like giving my two cents on the subject.

Perhaps, this is how I got into a lot of online subcultures. I lurked so much that I absorbed enough information to feel like I should say something. It didn't matter how pointless it was; I just wanted to say something and see what other people thought.

But the Slenderman subculture is different from online subcultures like FNaF and Goncharov: the stabbings ruptured this illusion that this might be safe. The second half of the video is all about understanding if this creepypasta subculture is harmful or if the burden is on the perpetrator. While the documentary talks about how people think it's all about mental illness and hallucinations, it concludes with a rather long video log of an army brat who developed a tulpa and was perfectly normal and functional. His psychiatrist even defended him to his parents because he was perfectly normal.

As the movie draws to a close, the title of the movie becomes clearer to me. For Jane Schoenbrun, internet subcultures like Slenderman are self-induced hallucinations. We give ourselves nightmarish visions of Slenderman or Golden Freddy or whoever. But the documentary never demonizes the internet or the people who use it: the documentary is in a sense a celebration of the internet communities for their insightful thoughts and commentary, and that they should be seen as something worthy of being shown at international film festivals.

The film invites us to reflect on the artistic and creative efforts people have made to create this hallucination. There are comics, animations, and even original songs dedicated to this character, born out of a shitpost on the SomethingAwful forums. They deserve anthropological readings that explicate the anxiety and intrigue within the community. This is what many people are growing up with, and I suspect that many more internet communities of this kind will soon follow.

Still, the film's message is ambiguous. While it tries to be as empathetic as possible, it seems to be uncomfortable with the way we watch and create content on YouTube. We mindlessly watch videos as if on autoplay, with no real control over what the narrative should be. The content just rains down on our faces, and here I am trying to justify how I spent my 67 minutes of my life.

I feel like I'm watching a movie about how I watch YouTube videos.

We're All Performing for the World's Fair

The Slenderman creepypasta has a lot of baggage that makes it productive to talk about, but it can be quite distracting if one wants to focus on a specific theme. I suppose this is why Schoenbrun decided to create a fictional creepypasta subculture in We're All Going to the World's Fair.

Much of the detail is left vague: we first see Casey induct herself into the subculture through a long, uncomfortable shot from the POV of her webcam by pricking her finger. There are creative endeavors similar to the Slenderman subculture, but the lore seems deliberately hidden. Instead, the film directs us to the production of internet creepypasta and the parasociality of it all.

The film shows how the production and consumption of creepypasta material are one and the same. Casey watches other people's videos, which often deviate from her own vlogging style. While she reflects on how she's a horror movie fan and wants something exciting to happen to her in the subculture, other people seem to be more creative: music videos, plastic costumes, etc. flood her viewing history. After each video is played, the moviegoer is greeted with the "replay" icon.

The replay icon haunts the entire movie. There's something surreal about buying a 10GBP ticket to see a critically acclaimed movie, only to have the replay icon stare at me. What's the difference between me watching a video essay, the movie itself, and the creepypasta Casey's watching? I don't know. That must have been the point of A Self-Induced Hallucination too: it must have been alienating to watch YouTube content on the silver screen.

Placing our ordinary internet interactions on the pedestal of cinematic art does several things: it defamiliarizes our activities and makes them worthy of contemplation. We watch, perhaps horrified, as Casey makes an internet friend with an old guy who calls himself JLB. JLB considers himself an expert on the World's Fair subculture and only interacts with people he deems serious. It's unclear if he's attracted to this young teenager or just a fan of this little creator, but they talk on Skype anyway.

I see JLB as a mirror of us voyeuristic viewers. He seems successful enough to own a two-story house, he watches videos of Casey and comments on how creepy they are, and he seems to think he has a friendly relationship with her. While we sit quietly and content watching Casey make YouTube videos, he takes the next step and tries to connect with her as a person.

In that sense, there's not much difference between us and him, as much as I hate to admit it. Casey's videos are becoming more and more sensational, even though the views aren't going up. But even though we're not talking to her, we're participating in her attempt to play with the algorithm. She wants to go viral, and we are her serious fans. It is a symbiotic, toxic relationship.

We have to deal with the dilemma created by the blurring between Casey's performance and Casey as a person. Even though we have the cinematic gaze, we don't really know Casey. We think we do, just like JLB, but she's a teenager exploring and developing her philosophy.

The deep irony, of course, is that these same parasocial relationships are responsible for creating such vibrant internet subcultures. Think of the fancams that terrorize social media, or people like me using oshi icons to indicate who we're a fan of: this contradictory space allows for very interesting games like HoloCure. It's not just the Caseys of the world, the JLBs also play the role of a fan spreading the word.

The ending plays with that idea: JLB tells a story that he and Casey made up after a feud, Casey is now studying theater in New York, and they met for the first time before Casey said she'd been to the World's Fair.

The veracity of his claims is questionable. The movie shows Casey living in the mountains, perhaps in a mountainous state like Colorado, and that seems far too neat an ending. It is up to the viewer to believe him or not. I don't believe in his fantasy myself.

But it doesn't matter. What's more important is this: he is telling a story, a piece of lore that contributes to the history of the subculture. Like Casey, JLB is a weaver of tales, and the yarn he spins is part of his repertoire. He has narrativized his encounter with Casey into something meaningful, into a novel form of creepypasta. In this scene, there is no distinction between fan and creator in internet subcultures; everyone is participating in a communal form of storytelling that may or may not be preserved for generations to come.

The audience is a recipient of this new lore, and I'm writing my own take on this lore that may or may not go viral. The cycle continues.

We Did Nothing When We Saw the Cinema Glow

The tragic passivity of the audience is in full bloom in Schoenbrun's latest movie, I Saw the TV Glow. Owen is a fan of a fictional TV show stylized after Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Adventures of Pete and Pete, and he learned about it from Maddy. More than half of the movie is told in an extended flashback in which Owen, as an adult, reflects on his childhood and teenage life revolving around this TV show.

We watch their friendship grow as they become more and more invested in the show. Owen can't watch the TV show ("Isn't that a girl's show?", his white father says) because it's too late at night, so she records the show for him and leaves it in the dark room where she develops her photos. The relationship was rocky at first; he apologized to Maddy for not knowing all the lore, but Maddy says never to apologize. We also learn that Maddy sees herself in one of the two characters, and there are glimpses of Owen doing the same with the other character.

When I first saw it, without any context of Schoenbrun's other films and on a daylong plane trip to Heathrow, I thought I was watching a cute young adult coming-of-age movie. It was fun to see Owen connect with the protagonist of the series and wonder if he could be like her. But I also thought it was a tame movie so far -- in retrospect, I wonder if the movie would be more successful and popular if it stayed that tame.

But the movie takes a turn: the entire setting of the movie is inverted, and the movie is actually not an allegory. The TV show they're watching is real, and the reality they're in is a hallucination that pacifies the protagonists as they slowly suffocate to death underground. Maddy gives the call to action: Owen must bury himself underground so he can return to the real world and fight the TV show's antagonist in the originally canceled sixth season.

This revelation is reminiscent of the opening sequence of The Matrix where Neo Anderson has to take the red pill and see the Matrix as a fake. But the Anderson of this movie refuses: he thinks Maddie is delusional, and he continues his life in this bland "reality".

The film returns to Owen in the present: he has a nuclear family that we never see, but he insists he loves them very much; he streams his favorite childhood show and is disillusioned by how cheesy it is on his LG Smart TV; and he works the rest of his life as a sickly employee in an arcade.

Near the end, his exhaustion is at its limit and he screams in the middle of the kid's birthday party. Everyone but him suddenly stops moving, finally confirming this "reality" is the blue pill. In the bathroom, he opens his body in front of a mirror and sees something glowing inside him.

I remember thinking this was the trans coming of age I was waiting for. Owen finally realizes he has dysphoria and he's going to learn how beautiful he actually is.

But the movie ends with him coming out of the bathroom and apologizing to everyone, breaking Maddy's rule of never apologizing.

I didn't know what to make of the movie. I felt uncomfortable with the whole ordeal. It was probably the most confusing plane ride I've ever been on. I had to talk to someone about it as soon as I got off the plane.

When I watched it for the second time, this time in the theater, I knew what I was watching: the audience.

The film antagonizes the audience in the same way that it forces Owen into uncomfortable situations. The phantastical images that are supposed to soothe our aesthetic sensibilities haunt us: after Owen watches the last episode of the TV show and learns that he is trapped in the Matrix, he opens the door to his house and sees two grown men standing before him; they are the adult actors of the titular characters from The Adventures of Pete and Pete. If the previous films use creepypasta subcultures and online interactions to haunt audiences, I Saw the TV Glow uses childhood shows and nostalgia to terrorize us about the stagnation we possess as cinema aficionados.

When my partner and I came out of the theater (their first time watching it, my second time), our thoughts immediately went to Bertolt Brecht who once said that "art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it." It was the closest thing we had to a call to action.

This could be our future if we do nothing. Just watching queer cinema does not make us queer. The cinematic dreams could haunt us just as the childhood TV shows haunted Owen.

Conclusion: Subcultures as Ghost Stories

Internet subcultures are a fixture of my life. I wander between them, taking in the sights and sounds of what people have managed to create. I write about them for free and dream of the utopian possibilities that internet subcultures inspire in me.

But I also fear the comfort these subcultures instill in me. I don't have the same gender dysphoria that Owen has in the end of I Saw the TV Glow, but I do understand the anxiety he faced: what if we're actually doing nothing, despite all the effort we've put in?

Owen worked a long life to get where he was. He achieved the textbook American Dream. And yet, he lived an unfulfilled life where all he could do was yell.

The chalk drawings also haunt the screen: there is still time, they say. There is, but it is also frightening: the refrain represents all the broken dreams he could have had, and time is ticking away. It is as uncomfortable as a memento mori.

In the philosophy of I Saw the TV Glow, my favorite subculture media that influenced me as a person can appear as phantoms to remind me that I could be a better person, and I chose not to be. We're All Going to the World's Fair tells me I'm losing myself in my parasocial interactions as a fan and creator. And A Self-Induced Hallucination laments that I will consume another parade of content and talk about the value of subcultures into the void.

I don't know what to do, and I think that's the point of Schoenbrun's films so far: to make us painfully aware of our paradoxical approach to the internet. It gives us hope and even avenues for change, but it also prevents us from making change: subcultures become simulacra, like The Matrix, and I'm stuck in them -- what a horrible thought.

There are no solutions presented in these films. All they can do is present different angles on what it means to be queer within subcultures, and that's it. We can only modify it so much before reality stops us.

Perhaps, queerness is a synonym for alienation from one's own body and surroundings. That's why I don't think you have to identify as queer to recognize that using the internet is a queer activity we enact on ourselves: you are constantly socializing in disembodied forms and interfacing everything abstractly.

I used to take comfort in acknowledging my alienation and queerness. I look for arguments for alienation like those found in the Xenofeminist Manifesto:

XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given–and it’s certainly not given by anything ‘natural’. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction.

I like the rhetoric of this and I believe there is some truth to it, but now I wonder if I should approach alienation and the web differently. It scares me that I dream about the shimmer of the internet sometimes.

All I can do now is click the "Post Now" button and wait. Wait for what? For something to happen. The internet is full of possibilities after all.

airport transit thoughts on criticism

2024-08-20T00:00:00Z

@Iro asked:

What are your / do you have any specific tips or methods for evaluating media more critically?

methods to evaluate

i honestly watch/play/read something and then think about what i read. i don’t really do anything special, let alone use critical lenses. if i do that, it’s going to be retroactive.

i take pleasure and revulsion to be the most important and interesting aspect. the aesthetics of a work should guide me to reflect on what exists and what is missing.

but this could all be quite sophisticated to some folks. i was reading critical book and film reviews since i was young and developed a kind of taste on the kind of reviews i want to see.

which brings me to my next section:

reviews

the way i write my reviews is to consider it as something like a play report or a snapshot that tries to simulate my experience through the work. i want to capture how i feel about something because i’m probably going to reread the review at a later date and think about how i felt then.

and then, i try to articulate or enhance what i find to be most provocative. for the hayasaki no kuroyuri article, i wanted to make sure readers understand this is indeed an attack on japanese heteronormativity, so i looked around for anecdotes and philosophies that help explain metaphorically what the work is trying to do. it’s why i brought up sugita mio and my terrible encounter with that guy who hated lesbians but liked yuri.

then, i just write. i write till i reach the conclusion and think about what my ultimate message is. i usually cut down any sentence, change sections, do some more research, and revise again and again to make sure the point of the essay is clearly delineated.

the zambot 3 article makes for a good example. it was originally a bunch of fragments, but once i reached the toy section (this was a late addition and i realized i wanted to add this paratext in), i realized what i wanted to say about zambot 3. i basically cleared out paragraphs i sweated for hours because that’s what i had to do to make sure people get the oomph. i also reordered the paragraphs to make the reader go in a kind of journey that mimics my own and make them reach the conclusion by themselves.

for me, a good article/review isn’t about convincing people. it is a kind of narrative journey that i crafted so people can understand how i reached this conclusion. it is a shame when people use my articles to say xyz is good or bad when i think my reflections are more about “the friends we made along the way”, to use a popular meme. i want readers to think alongside me and think together on what this work could mean.

i have very little use of reviews and articles that simply display knowledge or critical power. that just bores the hell out of me. why i dislike northrop fyre and harold bloom. only book i’m cool with that is erich auerbach’s mimesis. but i mostly admire anthony lane the film reviewer and mike russo from the intfiction space for writing articles that are clearly grounded in the environment they’re writing in. they’re historicized. you know more or less when russo is writing it or how much research lane has done before watching the movie. i like this transparency.

conclusion

for me, the art of criticism is not about evaluating the work but evaluating and trying to accentuate the meaningful relationship between critic and work. i don’t think critics have some epic 20/20 vision that could peer into the essence of the work (in kantian terms, the thing in itself) and go “this work is about toilets and here’s why.” it’s always about the abstract layer, the way someone believes the work is about toilets and here’s why.

so in a way, reviews are actually more about how someone experienced a work and decided to talk about this. we learn more about the reviewer than the author in a certain way.

i often think about this when i write about untranslated media. for better or for worse, few people can check out the works that i have written about. when i wrote about argus, i knew that i wasn’t writing about the work. i really can’t. argus is a complicated work and i don’t believe anyone has done justice to it. however, i think i wrote pretty well on the way i understood argus. i brought in plotinus and discussed how i understood the ending as connected to the one. people can disagree with that, and that’s fine. it’s just how i read it.

i think what people mean when they say meaningful/good criticism is not stuff they agree with (if they want that, go to r/anime and write how some popular anime is underrated). rather, it’s anything that is provocative, shows something extremely different, and makes you go “huh, i didn’t think that way.”

i like my kitakawa post because fans of the work found it so different from the conventional read they began to appreciate the work even further. i like my 1000xRESIST post because the creative lead thought my assertion that it was a game made for a generation not born yet so interesting, and they’re able to reflect on the creation they’ve made. i like the reviews and articles i’ve written that have generated new ideas and narratives for a richer reading for people who read my stuff.

umberto eco, in his afterword to name of the rose, once described novels as a machine for generating interpretations. italo calvino talks about how the process of rereading leads to new ideas because we often encounter the same words in different ways. peter bayard believes the way we talk about books is more important than reading them. they’re all lofty ideas which i can disagree on its scale, but they are probably right in one thing: it’s fun to write something that makes someone else want to write new stuff.

so i think the best reviews are like the good stuff in science fiction: they instill a sense of wonder in people and make them speculate a new horizon, hopefully by making them pen a new thing.

i hope this helps. i don’t have any ideas on how to critically evaluate the essence, but i do have ideas on how i see criticism as a project that makes people become more curious and learn more about the wider world we live in.

if i have to summarize the core ideas of brain powerd

2024-08-18T00:00:00Z

it's about tomino's struggle against dualisms and binaries as established by modern societies.

anything organic, that is alive and youthful and spirited, is full of complicated emotions. the robots in brain powerd are brimming with organic energy. they are like children that need to be raised properly. they can follow orders or they can just do whatever based on their whims, most often taking cues from the pilots' own temperaments. such a dynamic being means you can’t simply pretend they are not connected to nature. organic reality cannot be split into binaries and dualisms, even if humans are sometimes bound to feel this way.

take the concept of family: it has caused a lot of suffering with the characters because they either don’t have it or are abandoned by it. but characters still seek some affirmation, usually from the opposite or something that can fulfill it. such a relationship cannot be a binary or of opposites. but they also cannot be left single, hence tomino’s bizarre criticism of single mothers. it has a misogynistic bent, but he also believes men are responsible for allowing this phenomena to happen. everything bad cannot be ultimately blamed on one person or symbol; it has many underlying factors. these binary-looking relationships need to be deconstructed in the derridean sense: there is too much excess on one figure (single mothers) and it needs to be exploded, so we can see causality is in fact multifaceted.

so brain powerd preaches interdependence between the organics with its bizarre usage of jargon. it tries to explode every opposite relationship, especially ones related to kinship, by showing the contradictions in their thinking. violence, especially a way to keep them apart, only aggravates the pain. binary thinking is toxic to the brain.

tomino once described brain powerd as a second debut and there are plenty of “revivals” aka the brain powerds and grand chers become more powerful mechs. i think he is also trying to allegorize his own graduation from doing uc gundam, as a way to find what is “organic life” or creative to him.

what he is interested in isn’t ossified formalized structures but vital life. but he has to do this in this bizarre roundabout way that remains true to post-eva real robots. he sees children, free from the usual opposition found in mecha shows (teens vs adults, organic vs metallic, etc) as the real exit. their interdependence between themselves and their parents give him an exit from the usual war violence he often portrays in uc gundam. he sees children as a blank future to project hope, as possibly a way to exit this binary styled thinking.

it’s a very strange show full of tomino-isms. but i ended up liking how bizarre it is and the ideas it proposed. it’s surprisingly emotional at the very end: tomino does care about his weird characters and wants them to have a satisfying ending that doesn’t heal all the wounds but still a happy one to work off from.

i think post-victory, tomino has been trying to conceive a story that doesn’t fall into the nihilism within the history of violence in uc gundam or become as commercialized as standard anime. even the way he portrays the americans who are the most malicious of the lot, there is still a point of recognition: this is a country without history and it wants to conquer other countries with history. it is like one of the neglected children, like jonathan.

if people are interested in the show, they should at least be prepared. it’s like he made a doujin game with no care for the audiences. while people who don’t know tomino can certainly find value in it being “so bad it’s good”, it is more worthwhile to think about what he is trying to communicate about the difficulty of communication, of articulation, of finding synthesis in fake binaries.

it is, to use hegelian/marxist terms, tomino at his most dialectic. and in the context of western philosophy, his most anti-dualistic work. he really went crazy with binary thinking to the point he invites watchers to deconstruct his show. he wants them to participate in the overcoming of such false binaries/dualisms, to sublate and find a clearer and more powerful definition of society. the audience cannot be passive; they must be active in deciphering and untangling what tomino wants to say.

this is a tall task to ask for someone, even tomino fans. but i think it's a worthwhile experience if you are interested in the show. i also recommend this review, though i think the negative take on the admittedly conservative gender politics can be too reductive:

https://spacekaleidoscope.com/2020/07/11/brain-powerd/

cool show to think about. i'm looking forward to watch g-reco movies because people often bring g-reco up in discussing brain powerd. i do have overman king gainer, dunbine, and l-gaim to watch first -- and i want to rewatch zz, victory, and turn a gundam at some point...

nonstories and parasociality

2024-08-17T00:00:00Z

i was talking to a friend about how parasociality (i.e. the audience is so "connected" to the performers they've been watching that they think they've become friends) is a horrible experience. it can objectify the performer into a "character". any move enacted by the performer that isn't "in character" is worthy of reprimanding by the audience because the audience believes they know the performer better than the performer does.

there's a character role the performer must follow. these expectations are often unwritten, bu the performer must regardless play alongside with the audience if they want to "succeed". this is debilitating and harmful for the performer.

and it reminds me of NonStories...

one of the big central ideas about NonStories is that every character has been designated a role that they must follow. however, the characters often break the roles and even the audience expectations.

every character is treated as fully realized people with their own agencies. they don't need to bow down to formulas laid by some creator. no matter how precisely formulated the plans are, characters can break out of the structure and become something else.

there can even be characters who you think you know for so long but will turn out differently depending on the paths they take. these characters cannot be reduced to objects or traits; they are sentient as far as the story is concerned and can become someone entirely different.

indeed, some of the major violence is caused by the story trying to make the characters follow a set path. they resist the forces and will do everything they can do to get their own way, their own life, etc.

in this light, i see parasociality as the same kind of narrativizing/characterizing (and therefore reactionary) force found in NonStories. no wonder performers often struggle: unlike the characters in NonStories, they are actual people who want to break out of pigeonholes and stereotypes.

they want to be seen as people, not characters.

how can audiences see performers as people? i'm not sure, but i think NonStories suggests that we need to be open to them doing different kinds of shit. rather than scolding them for experimenting with their performance, i think we should encourage them and let them figure out what they want to do.

this means a total reconfiguration of how audiences should think. they can't think a performer's oeuvre can create a narrative that they find comfort in. they need to realize each performance is indeed interdependent but in a chaotic way that can suddenly break expectations. a narrative ossifies/reifies a human being into a bunch of tropes that can be cataloged in a database. i think we can do better than that.

anyway, play UnExist and NonStories. bye.

Zambot 3 is an empty symbol of justice I want to buy one day

2024-08-13T00:00:00Z

This post will have unmarked spoilers for Zambot 3, the Berserker novels by Fred Saberhagen, and explore their themes of violence, history, and Zambot 3's final two arcs starting from episode 16 to the end.

An Interview with the Zambot

I first heard about the influence of Zambot 3 when I stumbled upon an interview between Yokoo Tarou of NieR: Automata fame and Tomino Yoshiyuki. Yokoo awkwardly and nervously babbled about how he saw stories as building blocks and what made video games unique while Tomino asked insightful questions and listened intently. I've never seen these two creators, so characteristically abrasive in interviews, become so docile and seemingly respectful of each other's work. It was a surprisingly wholesome watch.

At the very end, Yokoo mentions that he is part of a generation that has learned to tell stories about protagonists who do not have to be totally righteous and antagonists who have a reason to fight because he grew up watching Zambot 3.

I knew about Zambot 3 as the first original directorial debut of Tomino. But other than the fact that it's a super robot show that has appeared in several Super Robot Wars I've played, that's all I really knew. I was in a Tomino mood after rewatching Char's Counterattack, and the only non-Gundam Tomino show I've seen is Ideon -- I figured it should be easy to watch since it's only 23 episodes.

Let's just say I didn't know what I was getting into.

Japan, 1977

The first thing you see in Zambot 3 is Jin Kappei, a hotblooded rascal, riding a motorbike through the small fishing village by Surugawa Bay. His rival, Kouzuki Shingo, and his gang of bikers have him surrounded and are getting ready to give him a beating until the cops arrive on the scene and chase Kappei. All of this is happening as aliens from outer space, the Gaizok, begin their invasion of planet Earth.

From the first few minutes of the show, we get something very different from what you might expect from a mecha anime or science fiction as a whole. The show zooms in on the daily lives of the people in these fishing towns, trading ports, and even a Shizuoka town near Mt. Fuji that are being disrupted by the Gaizok. Later, we see white-collar workers on trains in cities as far away as Hakodate and Sendai. We are not watching Blade Runner but a post-WWII Japan that is still in the process of developing itself.

The only thing that can save Japan from total destruction is a bunch of mecha and ships left behind by Kappei's alien ancestors from long ago. This will require the combined efforts of the entire Jin family. While Kappei flies the Zambot Ace, his cousins Uchuta (Tokyo) and Keiko (Shinshu, now part of Nagano) fly the Zambull and Zambird, respectively. The three branches of the Jin family also fly three ships that can be combined into a mega-ship called the King Beal.

There's a lot of things going on that must make it bizarre and unusual for the kids watching the show as the episodes came out. This was the Japan they can see from their windows. They could picture the Zambot defending Osaka Castle and other familiar sights from the brutish Gaizok. They might also imagine that their cousins from far away are in the same struggle against evil. It's a kind of fantasy that invokes the unifying power of Japanese families in the '70s against this unknown evil: what if we all banded together and fought for justice?

A Kami for Our Own Purposes

However, this familial fantasy is often overwritten by the violence of the show and the suspicion from other Japanese people. The first half of the show is depressing to watch: the Japanese citizens, unaware that other countries like France quickly fell to the Gaizok, believe that the Jin family was the reason the Gaizok came to Earth. If the Jin family hadn't fought the Gaizok, if their ancestors hadn't come to Earth, perhaps the conflict could have been avoided altogether.

Their beliefs doesn't simply come from ignorance. The way Kappei fights the Galzoks is often very reckless, and it doesn't feel like the Jin family is actually winning. He is following in the footsteps of many hot-blooded protagonists of super robot shows before him, and the ends will justify the means in the long run, but the consequences go very deep into the show. His friends from the fishing village will go as far as Hakodate to find some peace, only to encounter more death and violence. There is even an episode that focuses on a young girl who is traumatized by the Zambot 3 because her parents died in the battle. It's not hard for the people to find a scapegoat, a reason why they're suffering from these indiscriminate acts of genocidal violence. As the patriarch of the Jin family, Kamikita Heizaemon, once said, people hate them because they haven't won the war yet.

We thus watch the Jin family, a symbol of the now disintegrating Ie-family structure, struggle to protect Japan. Their traditional family bonds are tested in the modern world of 1970s Japan, and their ways are seen as alien and not part of the Japanese narrative. When the Japanese people finally believe in the Jin family, it comes after a long period of resistance, and everyone is at the point of despair.

It's also hard for me to separate the Jin family from its kanji, 神 (which is usually read as kami). As Japan marches toward a nuclear family and a secular future (i.e., our present), it is reluctant to trust more traditional notions of community; and yet such calls may resurface at moments deemed politically useful and salient to the Japanese people. We see a modernizing Japan that no longer believes in the mythic power of the kami/Jin family, but they may return to these traditional/alien concepts when the time is right.

The anime constantly shows the dehumanization of the Jin family. Even when the country has finally accepted Japan as a major civilian power in episode 20, the first thing they do is take control of King Beal and the Zambot 3 because they don't believe in the family could actually fight.

This is a cynical, almost misanthropic vision of humanity for any work, let alone a show for children. The only people who recognize the Jin family as soldiers who are sacrificing their lives for the greater good are their close friends; everyone else treats them as villains or assets. It twists Kappei's super robot pilot personality into something darker: he goes from being a rascal to someone who tries to mask his frustration and trauma with his hot-blooded temper. He doesn't know how to respond to a humanity that rejects his loved ones or his cries to be loved.

Instead, he is objectified into a source of admiration and hope, not as a person but as a dehumanized symbol for our own purposes. He and his comrades are toys for our imagination.

The Revelation of Human Bombs

This all culminates in the penultimate arc where the main antagonist, Killer the Butcher, has instructed his goons to make bombs out of people. Butcher has always been characterized as a comedic villain, clearly inspired by gay stereotypes and villains of the time. He loves to find creative ways to murder people, and unlike his contemporaries in other shows, he often succeeds.

His diabolical plan is to exploit people's empathy: since everyone is fleeing to refugee camps, he has instructed his underlings to create fake refugee camps to kidnap people and turn them into living human bombs. They are then released into the cities in a state of forgetfulness. These walking bombs can only be distinguished by the star on their back, a fact that was discovered by chance by Kappei.

The episode in which the human bombs first appeared, #16: 人間爆弾の恐怖 (fan translation: The Terror of the Human Bombs), is a traumatic watch. Everyday people are being blown up in train stations, dams are destroyed, and even a plane carrying passengers explodes because one of the pilots is a human bomb.

It's clearly the most successful campaign Butcher has ever done, and it's hard for me not to think about how people used to talk about the so-called COVID superspreaders as walking bombs.

But it's much darker than the current pandemic we're in: there's no way for someone to recover after being implanted with a bomb. Even the Jin family, with all their technological wonders, have no solution. These people are finished. They have to die on the outskirts of Japan, or they could cause even more suffering.

These horrific scenes not only convey how close and personal the war has become, but also give Kappei less of a reason to fight. His family and friends, the people he has been fighting for since episode 1, are all dying. What gives him the strength to continue fighting for a human collective that will soon tire of his bravery?

We also get a glimpse of how powerless Zambot 3 and the Jin family are in certain parts of the war. They only know how to fight and lack the diagnostic tools to find out who has the bomb and help people recover. One episode in particular feels cynical: in #18, a friend of Kappei's escapes from the Galzok, and the first thing the Jin family asks her to do is show her back to the camera so they can figure out if they can welcome her back to the base. Fortunately, she didn't. But the same kind of welcome wasn't allowed for the one friend who was actually a human bomb -- she had to be quarantined away from Kappei, and he couldn't handle that. When she exploded without fanfare, all he could do was "ask" her why she was born when all she did was get chased by the Galzok and then die. The Zambot 3 is a tool of war, not of medicine.

In my view, the human bomb episodes shatter any belief that the Jin family is fighting for humanity. While we see everyday people suffering in the refugee camps and learn to understand their suffering, we see the Jin family suffering the most. They keep saying they are fighting for the greater good and the survival of Earth, but they are unable to explain their reasons to anyone. Humanity did not call on them to take up arms. And when the humans began to let go of their resistance, the Jin family learned that they weren't up to the task.

This is not to say that the Jin family is Machiavellian or opportunistic. Far from it: I think they're too pure. Like the Japanese children who were drafted to fight for Imperial Japan in World War II, they saw themselves as the only ones who can defend the country. I'm sure some of that must have been true at the time, but it becomes less and less coherent as the show goes on. Their cause is hollow, and they can only do so much to save the friends they love.

In the end, the Jin family is not soldiers but civilians. Japan was only saved because they happened to be there. Otherwise, there is no deeper meaning to their existence.

Galzok the Berserker

In the final episode, when all but Kappei and the "civilians" of the Jin family and friends have been wiped out, Kappei finally meets Butcher's boss, Galzok. Its true identity is Computer Doll No. 8, a brain-like machine designed to destroy all forms of evil life. It asks some pointed questions about the "reasons" he fought for such an evil race that is humanity, some of which have already been refracted in this essay.

There is an unsubstantiated but very believable claim that this antagonist is based on Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series.[^1] The following section assumes this to be true, not only because it is highly likely, but because I find it very interesting on how it diverges from Zambot 3.

The Berserkers are a non-living, robotic species programmed by their creators to kill all lifeforms. They first appeared in "Fortress Ship" (released as "Without a Thought" in Berserker). The story begins like this:

The machine was a vast fortress, containing no life, set by its long-dead masters to destroy anything that lived. It and many others like it were the inheritance of Earth from some war fought between unknown interstellar empires, in some time that could hardly be connected with any Earthly calendar.

One such machine could hang over a planet colonized by men and in two days pound the surface into a lifeless cloud of dust and steam, a hundred miles deep. This particular machine had already done just that.

It used no predictable tactics in its dedicated, unconscious war against life. The ancient, unknown gamesmen had built it as a random factor, to be loosed in the enemy’s territory to do what damage it might. Men thought its plan of battle was chosen by the random disintegrations of atoms in a block of some long-lived isotope buried deep inside it, and so was not even in theory predictable by opposing brains, human or electronic.

Men called it a berserker.

They can also appear as smaller robots and have learned to communicate with humans by kidnapping and experimenting with human brains. In "Starsong," the Berserkers learned to “culture” brains from their studies of human brains because they were deeply interested in their ability to think. They have also reprogrammed some human brains to simply compute algorithms, and that's all they can do -- such a brain, according to the narrator of the story, "seemed incapable of anything but going on with the job", and if it were still considered human life, euthanasia might be a more fitting end.

The Berserkers are a formidable enemy that has captivated science fiction writers ever since. As the highly opinionated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction states, "Berserkers soon became a significant icon of Genre SF, a myth whose cumulative force is perhaps more potent than any of Saberhagen's individual stories about them." It's also made a name for itself in discussions of Fermi's Paradox: What if the reason we're alone is because the aliens are all dead thanks to some Berserker probe?

But the Berserkers, at least in the early Saberhagen stories, are not meant to be existential threats, but gigantic obstacles that bring everyone together. Humans and their descendants are the only races that can fight these AI ships because they have a fighting spirit that no other alien species possesses.

In "Stone Place," the reader is introduced to Johann Karlsen, the newly appointed High Commander of Sol's defense. Karlsen is newly engaged to a woman he is in love with, though he admits it is part of a political marriage.

However, the planet she's on has been taken over by the Berserkers, and there are Venerians plotting to overthrow him. When his fiancée is rescued, she has been brainwashed and finds him frightening, only to flee into the arms of the POV character. She dies, however, in the victorious battle that marks the end of the story, and he realizes that part of the prophecy that says he will die owning nothing is true. And yet he turns to the people around him and proclaims that on the day he dies,

"I will remember this day. This glory, this victory for all men."

It almost seems that "only death could finally crush this man". The story ends with the POV character, a poet, returning to his work:

The world was bad, and all men were fools -- but there were men who would not be crushed. And that was a thing worth telling.

According to the Independent, Fred Saberhagen served in the US Air Force during the Korean War from 1951-1955. This may explain the very rich descriptions of being a soldier going in and out of shifts in novels like Brother Assassin (translated as 皆殺し軍団). And according to Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, he was also an editor for the Encyclopedia Britannica where he wrote the original entry for science fiction. He had lived an illustrious life, writing stories about how the violence within humans sparked life and thus resistance against the cold, lifeless machines.

Yes, humans can be destructive. Yes, humans can start wars. But the same warring nature of humanity creates the vitality of what makes humanity great. There is an almost Nietzschean quality to his writing: what appears to be the violent impulses of humanity is actually its expression of life, and we must say yes to that. Even pacifists have to acknowledge that.[^2] The war machines they develop during their many civil wars are, in fact, the only thing that can stop the Berserkers. The Berserkers allow humans to stop fighting each other and work side by side, even in shaky alliances, against this common enemy. It's a powerful mythic narrative about how people will succeed no matter what evil force they're up against.

There's one problem: "Stone Place" was not translated in time before Zambot 3 aired. In fact, the few clearly heroic stories Saberhagen wrote were not translated and published until after the show was over.

If we only read the stories that were translated before Tomino and his staff started working on the TV show, we get a picture of humans mostly losing to highly intelligent computer monsters, and that's it. There is very little hope, only despair that people are losing their meaningless lives for nothing. The small victories that the humans have achieved can only do so much.

So when the Berserker-style villain asks Kappei why he fought for a humanity that would reject him, Kappei had no Saberhagen-style answer. Instead, he could only reject its accusations in vain. His family and friends have died, and there's no answer to give their sacrifice any meaning.

As the ending song suggests, Kappei's only "rational" reason for fighting — his only coherent answer to Computer Doll No. 8 — is that this is the only home he has. His ancestors lost their home, all other habitable planets have probably been destroyed, only Earth is a home to him. He didn't fight for the humans who fought over his status, nor for some greater justice. Kappei just wanted to live in a home, a place that would never betray him. He fought not for humanity but to belong somewhere.

And in that sense, for a show that depicts so many displaced people as refugees, the Jin family are perhaps the biggest and most tragic refugees of all.

The Berserker in Zambot 3 is not an existential threat to humanity but to the idea of cooperation in face of war. Indeed, humanity never gets its shit together. They refuse to cooperate or would rather take control of the situation. Thus, the questions all revolve around the evilness of humans who will never be considerate, will never reciprocate, and will only abuse and exploit those who can help them. History shows that humans are a selfish race that will only feel be grateful when the tides of war are on their side.

This makes it impossible for me to see the Jin family as martyrs. I find myself reluctantly agreeing with Computer Doll No. 8. Kappei's indomitable spirit was ultimately used by the Jin family to protect a humanity that continually refused to acknowledge their existence. He was another child soldier who fought for Japan.

I felt empty when the people who had rejected Kappei ran to welcome him back into society. A Japanese writer described the crowd as an unthinking mass that reacts to situations when it best serves them. It's hard to know what their long term intentions are, but all we can really say is that the final montage is a mirror of who we are in reality.

There is an iconic shot of the battered Zambot 3 crying before the final montage. Its arms and legs are torn apart. The sun is setting. No one can hear or see this super robot that has done so much tearing up. It is emptied of the fighting spirit that Saberhagen saw in his human characters as it rusts away into the forgotten annals of history.

The Zambot 3 is also a toy.

On the Pixiv dictionary page for the Zambot 3 show, there is an unsourced quote from Tomino saying that after the finale episode aired, the production company, sponsors, and toy store owners were scared shitless. I have no doubt that it must be true: the grim finale is still unheard of in modern anime.

But the toys still sold well, even to the 1980s. According to the Japanese Wikipedia article on Zambot 3, someone claimed in the February 1978 issue of Toy Journal that Japan was experiencing some sort of boom in radio-controlled and transforming toy cars. It's also possible that Daitarn 3, which aired next, might have helped its sales.

There are also several commercials featuring the Zambot 3 toys that aired from 1977 to as late as 1982:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlT7VBd4SGQ

These commercials do not contain the traumatic episodes depicting the Japan children know in ruins. The first shows the characters alive while later commercials drop references to these kids. None brings up the Gaizok. One particularly memorable commercial shows a real kid putting on Kappei's helmet and imagining they are a part of the robot fight.

This may be jarring to today's audiences. Did kids not watch the show where the toys came from? It's certainly possible, but from time to time people like Yokoo Tarou will comment on how they grew up watching the show. There is even a TV special that ranks Zambot 3 as having the third most disturbing finale to an anime.[^3] Surely, even if children didn't know their toys came from such a traumatic show, their friends might.

I don't have a psychological explanation for all of this, nor do I care. But I want to at least suggest why I might be interested in owning a Zambot 3 model for myself.

The Zambot 3 is like the ultimate symbol of a commodity. It is a vacuous symbol of poetic justice. Its existence undermines the belief that human beings can overcome any form of adversity.

The irony intrigues me in a morbid way. Unlike the Gundams which all feel like a blur to me because they're concrete and realized symbols of war, the empty and artificial content of the Zambot 3 fascinates me. It has tried to commodify the spirit of super robot shows, but there is nothing mythic inside this piece of plastic. And yet, this abyss of nothingness allows me to reflect on the futility of heroic sacrifice.

I see in this religious symbol the senseless struggle, the uncaring humanity of which I am a part, and the people who died in history to keep us alive. Capitalism allowed us to buy this sacred mirror to look at ourselves, or I could buy this for my nephew who's going to be two next year. The possibilities are endless as long as they are transactional in nature.

There is no life that we can speak of inside the Zambot 3 toy. It is simply a toy. Perhaps its success as a toy confirms the TV show's message: no one cares about the people who saved the world until they’ve proven their market value.

The fetishism of commodities and heroes has transcended any need to ground objects in historical or cultural spaces. No wonder the Zambot 3 cries: it knows it has become a revoltingly successful toy.

[^1]: Many blogs and the Japanese Wikipedia often mention this as some historical fact without citing any sources. I have not been able to find any public quotes from Tomino or any of his staff about this claim.

However, I find this somewhat credible when we consider how similar Computer Doll No. 8 and the Berserkers in the Saberhagen novels are. But I'm wary of confirmation bias especially since a section of the article hinges on this, so I tracked down the release dates just to be sure.

The first Berserker novel published in Japan at 1973 is surprisingly enough the second novel, Brother Assassin, translated as バーサーカー皆殺し軍団. Reading the book does not adequately explain the gruesome nature of the Berserkers, though it is a very fun read. The book that introduced the Berserkers to the world, simply titled Berserker and translated into Japanese as 赤方偏移の仮面, was not published until 1980. However, stories from this book have appeared in one form or another in Hayakawa Shobou's SF Magazine, starting with the July 1969 issue, which published the first short story of the book, "Fortress Ship". By the time Zambot 3 aired in 1977, the staff might have read three short stories from the book (the aforementioned "Fortress Ship," "Patron of the Arts" in September 1969), and "Masque of the Red Shift" in March 1970), one short story that would appear in the upcoming book, The Ultimate Enemy ("Starsong" in June 1970), and the novel Brother Assassin in 1973.

While I cannot definitively say that the staff is influenced by the books, it is more than likely that they were able to follow the Berserker storyline if they subscribed to the magazine. Personally, I found the books to be enjoyable and insightful in understanding Zambot 3, and I would recommend that people seek them out if they are interested in the subject matter and what I have to say about it. They are enjoyable works of pulp fiction that remain timeless to my boomer brain. [^2]: There is one Saberhagen story that deals directly with pacifism: "The Peacemaker". Unfortunately, it was untranslated when Zambot 3 came out, but I think it is worth mentioning in the footnotes.

In Berserker, the non-combat alien narrator introduces the story by recognizing that there are different ways to praise life. But nevertheless, they "intellectually" admit a certain "truth": "In a war against death, it is by fighting and destroying the enemy that the value of life is affirmed." The fighter will not need to worry about the health of their enemy. The pacifist, however, may feel differently: while the state of war may not affect the fighter, the pacifist's pacifism affects their own being. The narrator touches "a peace-loving mind, very hungry for life" and the story begins.

The protagonist of "The Peacemaker" decides to negotiate with a Berserker for peace. When he sees the holes in the Berserker's hull, he "felt a faint thrill of pride. We've done that to it, he thought, we soft little living things. The martial feeling annoyed him in a way. He had always been something of a pacifist." After a philosophical discussion about the spirit of life and the sentience of humanity, he seems to have convinced the Berserker to abandon the attack as long as he provides the AI with some human tissue to study.

Of course, this was all a ruse. The Berserkers probably escaped because they were too damaged to lead an attack, but they may have set a trap for the protagonist to unleash on humanity. Unfortunately for the Berserker, he provided his cancer tissue, and it turned out that the Berserker actually cured his cancer.

I read this amusing short story as a rebuke to pacifism for ignoring how human ingenuity thrives in the face of obstacles. While I don't share Saberhagen's politics, I admire his clever reversal of a pacifist character to make a point about how humanity's greatest weapon may be its creativity in times of struggle. [^3]: As recorded by a blogger who recorded this special on Fuji TV. For those curious, the second most disturbing finale is School Days and the first Space Runaway Ideon.

On the Perverted Stuff in Perverted Fiction - Onimai and Piss Jokes

2024-08-06T00:00:00Z

If I were writing this for an academic journal, the title would be something like "Preliminary Remarks on Perversion as Liminal Spaces Within TSF Fiction". No one would read it, but it should give an idea of what I want to say about the exploration of sex in this genre.

This post will discuss the sex and piss jokes in Onii-chan wa Oshimai! series.

I think Mahiro is very funny.

I've been reading Nekotofu's Onii-chan wa Oshimai! (translated as Onimai: I'm Now Your Sister!) and its spin-offs lately. For the uninitiated, this is a doujin manga series about an older brother who was given a miraculous gender potion by his younger sister, turning him into a cute little girl.

Ooyama Mahiro, our protagonist and who I will use she/her pronouns for from now on, is given a new life as a middle school student from her deadbeat adult past. Mahiro finds herself experimenting the everyday practices of being a woman her age: going to hairdressers, window shopping, doing fortune-telling with her classmates, and dressing up in the most adorable clothes. I won't repeat too much of what I said about the anime adaptation, but my main point still stands: what I find admirable and enjoyable is how the euphoria she experiences is not so much a fantasy as a "potential present" that is unfortunately blocked by material reality. In a more equitable world, I think trans people should have the same experiences that Mahiro was able to have.

But for most people, when they think of the show or the manga, they usually think of how fetishistic it is. When I started reading the manga on Pixiv, I was deeply impressed by Nekotofu's fascination with piss. One of the later chapters just starts with Mahiro pissing in the toilet. The reason given in the story is that women have smaller bladders, so Mahiro has trouble getting used to it and finds herself pissing a lot. I'm not sure about the science of that.

So no matter how you look at it, Onimai is a fetishistic manga from conception. Here lies the part where I should say something about what I think about the content. While others may write detours in their video essay scripts to explain away the fetishism or provide a moral justification for problematic content, I honestly don't care.

Let us instead talk about fetishes.

Because Nekotofu slams the audience with so many of their fetishes, the manga makes it clear where their priorities lie. What they consider good humor often borders on what they consider funny and erotic. I've noticed that if a chapter starts with Mahiro pissing herself or growing her dick in the most uncomfortable situations, it's going to be pretty good. It's juvenile and stupid, and that makes the episode quite funny and interesting.

I am going to christen this phenomenon as "the perverted stuff". This is an undeniable feature of Onimai, and I think it is this remarkable aspect that makes its exploration of gender ambiguous, conflicting, contradictory, and fascinating. Its "unclean" nature allows for a deeper exploration of what sexuality and gender can be.

This isn't a novel idea. Writers like Esther Newton (Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America) have written books about drag culture and -- especially the latter -- how they problematize understandings of gender through their humor, the clothes they wear, and so on. This allowed future thinkers like Judith Butler, in the deeply unreadable book Gender Trouble, to describe gender as performance.[^1] There's something to be said about how we can discover differences and contradictions in the subjects we study, and then extrapolate to make a general statement about societal norms.

But I find these explorations on drag culture to be, well, outdated and a bit irritating. The amount of detail these works go into has little relevance to how I interact with gender norms on a daily basis. I don't crossdress, and I'm more concerned with how I present myself online than offline. While there are more valid arguments I could make against these works, I find these studies unproductive mostly because they don't give me anything to work with.

Meanwhile, I think the Onimai manga fired up my neurons. What does it say about gender and Mahiro that her dick came back and she was so horrified that her classmates turned her on that she immediately sought the gender potion so she could stop thinking dirty thoughts? Or her confusion at being seen as a mother figure, even to a high school student, because she is able to empathize with people in a very caring way? It's all horny shit, mind you, but I think the speculation from silly fetish jokes like this is quite fun and profound.

I like to think of "the perverted stuff" as an environment to imagine absurd scenarios. Mahiro is an avatar to explore situations like menstruation as fetish comedy. She's familiar with masculine activities like keeping pornography under the bed, but she also likes to play as girly characters in MMOs, even before she was drugged.

Mahiro will once in a while describe her struggle to preserve her manhood, but she's always thwarted in surprising ways. Part of it always comes from other people's redescriptions of what she initially thought were masculine activities; there's a running gag with two guys who think she's the ideal girl because she's a hardcore RPG gamer. She'll even try to take off her clothes in class if it's too hot, only to be stopped by her classmates who think it's too revealing. Rather than seeing this comedy of errors as her being unaware of gender norms, I like to see Mahiro as a character who believes that she is being consistent with her gender identity and is constantly expanding her horizons when the accidents happen.

For the manga, "the perverted stuff" functions as a kind of playful, liminal, and ambiguous space that allows gender conventions to be the joke. It's funny when Mahiro is confronted with the realization that the "manly" things she can do are considered "feminine," or that she finds the feminine activities (which include a lot of outdoor activities) far more preferable. Most importantly, her male NEET traits -- social withdrawal, laziness -- are rendered as a kind of lazy imouto figure who needs some vitamin D. For all intents and purposes, Mahiro is usually perceived as a girl.[^2]

In fact, one of the things observed by characters who know her identity (specifically Mihari, who is Mahiro's sister) is that the most dramatic change comes not specifically from sex itself but from Mahiro regressing to a younger age and what that culminates. Mahiro knows too much about sex for her young age[^3], but she'll also act like a big baby. Onimai seems to suggest that the fantasy of age regression and age in general might play a huge factor on how we define gender.

These are all preliminary remarks to a larger project, but I hope that my sketches of sexual comedy suggest that there's something profound about noticing the patterns and why perverse laughter can arise from these situations in depicting the fissures found in gender. By turning our current notions of gender into perverted jokes, Onimai defamiliarizes them and makes us laugh at the absurd.

Before I close this section, I want to mention the chapters and the anime adaptation that don't get this pervy. Because we are so used to the breakneck pace of the fetish jokes, these chapters often come as a surprise. As of this writing, the latest chapter is #90 and it features a high school character who learns that she has passed the entrance exam. She decides to celebrate the end of an era by having her friends and Mahiro dress up like her and take pictures. I found this chapter to be bittersweet and poignant.

The anime adaptation, on the other hand, amplifies these moments. One particular episode (#9) features a dialog-less montage of the cast looking over the Christmas lights and taking pictures together.

No jokes, just beautiful visuals and animation. The segment lets the atmosphere speak for itself, and you can feel Mahiro learning to take in a new sight for the first time.

While these moments are clearly meant to be breathers, I also think they are only possible because the "perverted stuff" has allowed them to grow as people. All these misunderstandings and transgressions allow them to grow. These moments allow us to reflect on the journey these characters have taken.

I think that's why they can suddenly make people feel something and cry because they didn't realize they were growing with the characters in their misadventures. This growth is something I want to comment on, and it's part of why I wanted to write this essay: to make it visible.

Closing thoughts, or why I wrote this essay:

I don't want to claim that what I've written is a very sophisticated defense of this juvenile humor, nor do I want to convince people to start laughing at pee jokes with me. I'm also skeptical of moral arguments that basically suggest that the only people who can ethically enjoy this stuff are trans women.

This non-stance leads me to proclaim the following: feel free to view Onimai and fetish media as morally indefensible. I have no problem with people finding these works distasteful. However, I do get annoyed when people refuse to see them as analytically interesting.

I find works like Onimai interesting in the same way that academics used to look at drag culture to explore notions of gender. Onimai is a playful work that uses perverted comedy to provoke me to redefine my own understanding of gender. This is a deeply self-serving (in academic terms, self-reflexive) approach to discussions of gender and sexuality, but I want to stress that these works are very insightful to the questions I have.

When I write about my thoughts on a piece, I like to think about the times I'm in. Right now, we're in a lot of ideological battles about gender (last time I checked Twitter, there's some talk about transphobia at the Olympics), and that means gender has become extremely contested. Very little of this shit is funny. There's a lot of dark stuff out there. When I write about how hilariously provocative Onimai is, I think about how gender comedy can still be provocative and funny to me.

And I think part of the comedy comes from me recognizing the absurdity of the political situation. When transphobes ask people to think about gendered restrooms, Onimai thinks about Mahiro's hesitation to enter the women's restroom. I doubt Nekotofu is thinking about the real world implications, but I do.

This essay is, in a way, my attempt to ground my sense of perverted humor in the present time and space. It's possible that in the timeline of Post-Indigenous States and Trans Respecting States of America, I would find Onimai uninteresting to think about.[^4] But since we are in the present, I think what I find fun and insightful comes from the work that disrupts my current thoughts about gender and sexuality.

Whatever you think of Onimai, I think it's worth learning a thing or two about how its humor could lead to some interesting avenues on gender. Its bizarre digressions can lead to alternative paths not easily taken by "serious" academics, thinkers, and activists. And I will always find "the road not taken" to be the riskiest and possibly most rewarding endeavor.

[^1]: If you are interested in the legacy of Mother Camp without reading it, this review from American Anthropologist is quite good. Personally, I like this book more than Butler's... [^2]: One incident does stand out: in chapter #83, the scientist who knows Mahiro's identity hesitates to give her New Year's money because she sees her as a man who has come of age. The joke is, of course, about children receiving money, and should be seen as a generation joke, not a gender joke. [^3]: This section of the post focuses on Mahiro, but I'll be remiss to point out that some of the comedy relies on the different characters' knowledge of the birds and the bees. A common joke involves a blunt reference where one character (Asahi) is completely confused. [^4]: This doesn't mean I might not find it funny. I do find a lot of juvenile humor hilarious to this day.

The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - やけくそ料理人と不良債権 (#61) and Inifis (#14)

2024-07-30T00:00:00Z

More Wolf RPG Editor Contest games coming your way, this time cooking and saving your little sister from becoming the vessel of a god-like figure.

やけくそ料理人と不良債権 (#61)

Romaji Title: Yakekuso Ryouri Hito to Furyou Saiken

This is a deckbuilder roguelike where you cook, cook, and cook. The protagonists must set up shop and cook their way to first place in the festival, or their debts will catch up with them.

Your starting deck is always the same. Several cards that increase the amount of resources (chicken, fish, and vegetables) that help you cook certain dishes for your customers. Most of the cards are also linked to a member of the kitchen: unless it's a card that says otherwise, the card "uses up" the member until the deck is refreshed. Any resources accumulated during the turn are wasted when the deck is refreshed, and the clock advances a few minutes. This is the only way to cook more food after you have used up all the cards you can use in a turn.

Along the way, players can choose to recruit friends to bring their expertise and cards to the table, or to improve their current recipes. They can also use the shops to buy new cards and upgrades, or use their accumulated exp as a get-out-of-jail card to buy resources in a pinch. As the popularity of the food stand grows, more and more customers are asking for more difficult orders.

The player must reach at least 100 popularity before three strikes and the clock reaches 18:00. After that, the player must satisfy all three customers with the pickiest orders possible to beat the game.

As you can see, this is a very demanding but fun game. Every turn is valuable: you want to use as many resources as possible to satisfy as many customers as possible in one turn, and this requires a lot of strategy. In one Normal Difficulty run I had, I got all the way to the final stage only to get terrible cards that wouldn't let me serve one of the easier dishes to the last customer and game over. It was exhausting to fail at the last second, but it also taught me to make sure my deck was concise and actually useful.

I'm not particularly good at this game, but I enjoyed learning how to play the game and controlling the flow of customers and resources. I can see this being a hit for folks who like games like Balatro if this game is translated. The sessions are long (30 minutes) but very satisfying once you get into the rhythm of the game.

やけくそ料理人と不良債権 is a game that I keep returning to. I still can't beat anything harder than Normal, but that doesn't mean I won't keep trying. The characters are cute, the music is lovely, and the gameplay is easy to pick up and play. I can't wait to play it again and see how far I can get.

Inifis (#14)

When I was given the prompt to name a cute girl, I entered my usual Japanese name, Kasucchi. It turns out that I am the sickly little sister of the player character who has now been chosen to be the vessel of a god.

The player character, a priest, wants to betray his church and save her from this terrible fate. He only has eight hours to lead her to safety. There are several paths the player can take to accomplish or fail this task. Taking out a few guards and securing an escape route might be a viable option. Or the player might want to draw the blade to silence eyewitnesses. Whichever ending they choose, the player will return to a room full of unlit candles, representing the many endings they haven't seen. They can return to the Inifis world and replay the game, carrying over their stats and most of their items.

In this way, the player is encouraged to repeat the gameplay loop, to learn all the secrets of the setting, and to tweak their route in order to reach an ending that satisfies their curiosity. Battles and puzzles become easier once you find the shortcuts and items that make them easier. You know exactly where to go to get the ending you're after. It's very satisfying to master the game's structure and reach an ending without really thinking about it after a few minutes of pointless play.

It's not accurate to call the game a sandbox title, but I keep thinking of it that way because there is no right ending. There are two endings that can be considered "true" endings (and are treated as such by the developer as admitted in the omake room), but they are not mandatory. The player can feel fulfilled by completing one ending and never playing the game again. I haven't done all the endings myself (I'm missing about three), and I still feel like I have a complete picture of what the game is about.

Instead, the game is more about uncovering the small details of the setting that led to the unfortunate event and the actions the player will take. As the player tries to see as many endings as possible, they will inevitably discover some of the more disturbing facts behind the premise and realize how little these events matter in the larger scheme of things. Ultimately, this is a story about sibling love in a dark fantasy world. No matter what truths are revealed, how many characters the player character kills, whether or not the sister is saved, etc., I was left with a feeling of hopelessness.

I wasn't sure what I was doing when I started killing innocent people or stopping the ritual. Was saving Kasucchi all that necessary? I know the ending where you do nothing sucks, but I wonder if it was still the best ending. After thinking about the player character's motivation and why he did what he did, I just think it's a tragedy that it had to turn out that way.

The truth behind the final moments of the game stays with me. I was impressed by how short the game is (2-3 hours), and yet it felt like I was watching a massive setting unfold before me. It's clear how much this game is inspired by Fanastasis (confirmed by the developer in the omake room), and it's doubly impressive how it uses a similar structure and setting to condense a rich experience into such a short and intense experience.

I would even go so far as to say that this title should be considered one of the most impressive fantasy furige because of its brevity. Yes, there are titles like Tobira no Densetsu that impress players with their scope. But the innovative structure, the themes of religion and JRPG storytelling, its methodical approach to reusing stock assets, and a fully fleshed-out setting that plays out in a three-hour game is incredible to say the least.

I felt lost on a journey as I found mysterious secrets that remain unexplained to me, fought villains who are really minor villains in a larger story, and imagined the larger world beyond the small town of Inifis. What happens out there? The little I know about the setting makes it oh so tantalizing.

Inifis is a highly recommended title. It is the kind of dark fantasy title that I adore in the furige world, and it makes for a great introduction to the world of furige. I would love to see people pick it up and realize how incredible furige actually is.

Phew, that took a while: writing about two different fantasy titles that represent the wide spectrum of furige is pretty exhausting! But I hope these two titles, especially Inifis, make people curious about this wild and interesting world.

As always, feedback and recommendations are welcome!

The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - アンブレラブレイバー (#13) and グッドバイ (#35)

2024-07-28T00:00:00Z

It's impressive how many solid entries there are in this year's Wolf RPG Editor Contest. Not that I'm complaining! Here are two horror games that go in very different directions: a coming of age story and the meaning of art criticism.

アンブレラブレイバー (#13)

Romaji Title: Umbrella Braver

Kou is a little boy who entered an abandoned mansion on a dare. He was immediately lost, but a young woman who happened to live in the mansion found him -- her name is Ameri. She knows the way back to the main entrance, but he has to hold her hand and chase away the ghosts that live in the mansion with an umbrella.

Umbrella Braver is a non-field game, meaning there are no dungeon maps to explore. Kou and Ameri can only advance through the screen with the click of a button. There are no items or interactable systems; Kou can ask Ameri why she lives here and so on, and that's it. Exploration has been reduced to a menu screen, and all the player can do is move forward and hope their health is high enough to take on some of the harder ghosts along the way.

The ghosts that Kou has to fight follow a strict pattern. Ameri tells you what kind of moves they will make, and it is up to the player to react. Each ghost acts more like a puzzle, and the player's moves can affect how they behave. For example, the first ghost can attack Kou, but the player can use Kou's special move to deflect the attack. It is even possible to avoid taking damage to Kou's courage points (the game's equivalent of hit points) in this particular battle, which is handy because there is no way to avoid taking damage in later battles.

This is not a roleplaying game at all. It's a fully deterministic adventure game, and the player has to figure out by trial and error what is the best optimal way to defeat a ghost without losing too much courage. I found this quite fun because each enemy requires its own strategies, and the methods the player must use reflect the ghost's personality.

And I also liked the dynamic between Kou and Ameri. Kou is just a scared elementary school student while Ameri is trying her best to be a dependent big sister character. Their relationship develops pretty quickly through some simple interactions; I think it's pretty funny to see Kou regain some of his courage when he hears Ameri talk about how some ghosts look like marshmallows. I can tell that the developer has thought long and hard about how to show how much he cares about them through the gameplay and its systems.

The story is also quite nice. While it doesn't aim for anything grand, it's pretty much a story about two young and lonely people who find some comfort in each other. Both characters have a complicated relationship with their families, and their isolation means they understand each other in a way that goes beyond words.

And that's why I think the ending sequence, while corny, worked for me. It's a fairytale-like ending that feels deserved after what the player and Kou have seen throughout this short journey. The final CG made me smile.

Speaking of which, both the art and the music are original and work very well to complement the atmosphere the game is going for. The main characters look great, and the CGs are well chosen. The music in particular is impressive: the final boss track is quite emotional and apt for the theme of the game, and it's all piano.

I definitely enjoyed Umbrella Braver. It's a great game to recommend to people interested in what short furige can be: intense, moody experiences with creative combat systems and setpieces, and a nice story to boot. The game can be finished in half an hour, but it still feels bigger than it is -- that's the sign of a damn good game, I think.

グッドバイ (#35)

Romaji Title: Goodbye

The game begins with this footage of a puppet-like character singing a very familiar folk song. The camera zooms in and as the song comes to an end, the camera lingers awkwardly on the puppet. I tried pressing keys to advance, but the game system doesn't respond: all I can do is stare at the puppet staring at me.

And then the sound novel begins with somebody describing that this was a show they watched as a child. It captivated them from a young age, and they're trying to explain to the narrator what the show is like.

This 15-minute game is a dialogue between the narrator and their friend who's recounting what it is like to watch this strange show. It is divided into five sections, there is no title screen except for a black screen and menus displaying the sections, and there is no other context. There's not much to focus on except for the puppets and the person who seemed to have seen something truly bizarre as a child.

The game seems to acknowledge that the player may be looking for meaning in the game. There are heated debates about what makes a good story, and whether stories really need meaning: does everything need a reason to exist? Can a story simply exist on its own, in a vacuum, with no allegorical meaning whatsoever -- or is there some hidden meaning on the part of the author that we can't grasp because we're just pontificating about someone's childhood show?

I found myself wondering about the meaning of the show (and the game) alongside the two characters. The stark audiovisuals of the childhood in question and the grounded yet surreal discussion of artistic meaning in narrative make for a fascinating contrast. And I'm particularly impressed by the writing in this game. The writing drew me into its little world: the dialog had enough personality to make the interaction quite mysterious and philosophical without being overbearing or condescending. It was enjoyable to hear two highly opinionated people talk about what their quest for the show actually means.

The narrator seems to take the view of an auteur: since everything is invented by the author, there must be some meaning behind every narrative device. Meanwhile, their friend takes an aestheticist approach: sometimes, the artist just did it for fun, and that's all you really need. Their debate reflects real-life discussions about how we should interpret art, and I found their opinions quite fascinating.

Having made games myself, I find it interesting to observe how people will overlook and hyperfixate on certain aspects of my own work. But I'm also someone who writes about games myself, so I'm sure the creators I've written about will notice what I've chosen to think about and what I've ignored to tell my narrative of the game. I don't have the ultimate answer to what criticism should look like in its relationship to art, but I do think it should be able to uncover what is valuable in a work.

This is probably truer when I talk about untranslated media, like the games in the Wolf RPG Contest. For better or worse, people won't know about these games until I talk about them. I'd like more people to know about these titles, but I realize that I'm the only one who can do that, and I'm bound to misrepresent them in some way. Nevertheless, I find great joy in bridging the English-speaking world with the Japanese world -- there is meaning, I think, in recognizing a foreign language work because it reminds us that the world isn't just in English (or Japanese for that matter).

But I also know that translating that meaning is sometimes a futile task. What if the game I'm talking about has no meaning? What if writing any kind of criticism is pointless? I'm sure there will be people like the narrator who will want to say there must be, but I think there's something scary about thinking you're writing about some Dadaist nonsense.

Goodbye definitely has a message because it taps into the fear of all critics that they might seek meaning in nonsense. It's a particularly effective horror title, I must add, because I began to question what I was doing. It's a provocative game that challenges the basic premises of making art from the perspective of a horror game, and I'm very grateful to have been able to play it.

I definitely want to play the creator's earlier games after this. I think they're very good at writing horror, and I like a little horror in my life. Especially when it's so close to my own hobbies.

I can't believe how many good games there are in this contest. While I think I've played some of the strongest games in the contest, titles like Goodbye really surprised me and made me think I was still underestimating the contest somehow.

This is incredible -- and I can't wait for more.

As always, feedback and recommendations are greatly appreciated!

The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - エリスと悪魔の書 (#37) and かわいいヒヨコの大冒険 (#67)

2024-07-27T00:00:00Z

Here are two games that best exemplify the variety found in the Wolf RPG Editor Contest: a dungeon crawler and a baby chick simulator.

エリスと悪魔の書 (#37)

Romaji Title: Eris to Akuma no Shou

Eris is a cute girl with a book, but she has amnesia and can't remember what she's supposed to do. Her job, as the fairy Ruko reminds her, is to seal the demons that have escaped from the book. It is up to her to dive into different book worlds and search for the demons.

Each book world is composed of simple dungeon mazes and sometimes a few gimmicks. Items are scattered throughout the map, and enemies appear based on how many steps you've taken. Eris has to fight a boss or recruit a party member at the end of the map. So far, so typical for a dungeon crawler styled after the Wizardry games.

What makes the game stand out, however, is its interlocking systems and how each aspect responds to the other. For example, when Elis finds a treasure chest, she and other party members can comment on what they've found and who might be best suited to wear it. Weapons are tied to your character, so it may make more sense to spend the upgrade shards you find in combat on weapons before armor.

You can also re-spec your character's skills: say if you encounter a boss that likes to take a beating when hit with ice attacks, it might be a good idea to increase their skills, even if it costs more MP. Afterwards, you can simply reset the skill back to zero and not incur any MP penalties for dungeon crawling.

There are not only level caps on Hard, but also item caps: you can only have three revives, anything more goes to storage. You'll need to be familiar with the skills and crawl around the world carefully if you don't want to waste your items.

And finally, once you unlock party member swapping, the WT system, inspired by the Active Battle system of Final Fantasy games, can be cheesy because party members with better speed can be swapped with a slower character and you still have the turn.

There's a lot of depth found in this relatively simple game. The developer has clearly refined the game mechanics to make them as smooth and interconnected as possible, which makes sense considering they used the same systems for two other previous games. I've enjoyed min-maxing the game on Hard because it makes me think about how I should approach optimizing my party for quick fights that don't consume a lot of my resources.

The systems are really impressive, but unfortunately the difficulty of this game -- even on Hard -- is way too low. Enemies have very low HP, and the maps are quite small, so the best option is usually to bum-rush your way to the end. I always found myself below the recommended minimum level and was able to beat the boss of the level without really thinking. While the game does allow you to buff enemies through the option screen in order to get a better drop ratio, I found the drop rate for upgrade shards to be frequent enough, and the maps give you plenty of useful items anyway. I didn't really need to be stingy in the shop, and later skills trivialize encounters that should be difficult.

The only real challenge is the final boss. Unlike previous bosses, it is extremely involved, uses a late game mechanic, and requires some preparation. The boss is somewhat unfair, but I found it quite engaging because it made me think about the systems and how to use each character to their best potential. I was usually three to five levels in most parts of the game, but I decided to level my characters to the max level the Hard difficulty would allow me to have a fighting chance. It was fun to think on my feet: the bullshit attacks of the boss meant that I had to find ways to prevent them from even having a turn, and I had to switch my characters in and out depending on what phase the boss was in. Finally beating the final boss felt like a real accomplishment, and I'm glad I did.

エリスと悪魔の書 was honestly a great experience. The characters are very cute, the game's remixing of familiar stock assets into something coherent and pleasant to look at is impressive, and the combat systems are super fun. I just wish the game was more difficult -- it needed more spice for me to really recommend it: I wanted more elaborate dungeon exploration that induced attrition in me, and I needed tougher encounters like the final boss to really love this game.

Still, it was a fun five hour game. I enjoyed it, even though I wanted the game to be harder. I can see a lot of people enjoying this title and getting excited about playing more Wizardry-style dungeon crawlers, and that's always a good thing in my book.

かわいいヒヨコの大冒険 (#67)

Romaji Title: Kawaii Hiyoko no Daibouken

You are a baby chick. You have wandered far from your family and friends, and now you are being hunted by cats of all stripes, snakes, and birds. Not only must you dodge these mighty beasts, but every step you take reminds you of your hunger... how long will it take you to reach safety?

Anyway, this is a game where you have to avoid enemy sprites in set patterns. If the chick sprite interacts with a hungry animal, the chick will die and you will receive a tombstone to commemorate the chick's short life. Each step also reduces your hunger counter, so you will need to look for worms along the way. You can bring up the menu and save your way to victory, which is what I did.

The game even encourages you to do so. At the beginning and end of each level, there is a statue sprite that tells you what to expect and reminds you to save. In the final level, the statue even says that it's a game that anyone can beat, regardless of skill level.

かわいいヒヨコの大冒険 feels like a nice diversion from the heavyweights in the contest. The silly lighthearted nature of the game probably works best for streamers who are going through the contest like me; it only takes a few minutes to complete the game and reach the staff roll. But along the way, you get some charming writing about the chick who misses their family and friends while the statue encourages the player to keep on playing.

And the ending of the game made me laugh out loud. I won't spoil the final illustration or the credits roll, but they are worth the price of admission. It's a cute title that doesn't try to be ambitious, and that's cool. Not every game has to be a 300-hour epic: it can just be a game about a little chick escaping cats in a garden maze.

These two games are a lot of fun to play through, and there's more to come. Man, I'm going to write so much about this contest... I hope people don't mind me spamming their timelines with posts like this.

Feedback and recommendations as always!

The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - 記憶のあらいかた (#52)

2024-07-26T00:00:00Z

Romaji Title: Kioku no Araikata

This short game is very strange, and I mean that in a good way. Just like the previous game I wrote about, I think this game needs a post of its own.

For starters, a girl with a bandage on her cheek wants to know your name and the game window closes immediately. You can open the game as much as you want, but until she learns your name, the game will continue to crash.

How do you get past the first screen? Well, the game description in the contest tells you to enter your name in the readme file and save it.

A younger version of the girl now appears and wants to marry the player, but there's a problem: the player doesn't remember who she is because it's been too long. In her place are three women who look exactly like her but have different personalities.

There is Mi-chama, a charismatic girl who wears a crown. Then, there is Mi-sama, a literal angel. And finally, there is Mi-san, a classic possessive type who asked for the player's name and wants to monopolize them. The three characters don't have much in common except their hair color, they seem to like the protagonist, and they are voiced by the same person (the game's creator, みやの (Miyano)).

It's obvious that the real girl who proposed to the player is an amalgamation of all three or something, so you need to find the real her. Unfortunately, this depends on their poor memory. For whatever reason, they simply cannot remember who she is. The girls come up with a strange solution: can you check your memory and delete the garbage there?

I hope you're ready to delete files inside the game folder and wonder if you'll accidentally break the game or advance the game state...

I won't spoil the final puzzle of this very short game, but I'll just say it is surprisingly involved. There are many variations that you can access if you're not interested in solving the puzzles right away, and it's impressive that every line is voiced by the sole creator of this game.

Still, the writing probably won't work for many people. Myself included. I scratched my head trying to parse what in the world each character was saying; it almost felt like I didn't know Japanese when I read Mi-sama talking about the trumpets of heaven over and over again. There is very little context for me to ground myself in, and I didn't understand why the story was written the way it was.

But the game has so much confidence in itself, and I was enchanted by its voice. I didn't understand what I was playing, but I knew I was playing something unique. It's fun and innovative to be able to delete files and get closer to the true ending, even though it's pretty scary. I'm always afraid of losing progress and having to restart the game. The gameplay loop is so weird and the dialog so peculiar that I started to have fun and smile along with the text.

It's easy to write off the game as a silly gimmick, especially since the game just sort of ends. The cleaning metaphor doesn't really feel like it works to me. But the experience of playing this game is so unusual that reaching the end was quite memorable for me.

And that's the most important thing to me: I want to remember this game for a long time. In a contest like this, I'm always looking for ways to remember individual titles among a plethora of titles, and this game's approach is so eccentric to me that I know it's going to worm its way into my long-term memory. It's clear that the creator has a vision for the game she wants to make, and I admire her commitment to it.

I'm also happy that the Wolf RPG community seems to be receptive to the game. The comments I've read on the forums are as impressed as I am. The amount of programming that went into making this game must have been staggering. I can't even imagine making a game like this with the engines I know. The creator has also posted illustrations of her characters thanking the reviewers, which is a very sweet gesture.

The more I write about the game, the happier I am that it exists. While I don't exactly love it, it's worth a try because the ideas it plays with are very fun and interesting. The game excites me because it's so enigmatic. I don't understand it, so it's fun to think about what the game means to me. More importantly, the creator seems to have had a lot of fun making the game, and it shows in the final product. It's clearly made out of love for the idea, and I'm on board with that.

記憶のあらいかた is a uniquely eclectic game that should get more players. I'd like to see what people think about the game because it would be fun to see what works and what doesn't. I'm still in two minds about how effective the game is for me. All I know is that it's a fascinating game and I'm honestly quite fond of it.

It's strange to play another game that crashes at the very beginning. I hope to play a game that doesn't do that, but I think my curiosity is making me look for unusual-looking games right now. Maybe I'll play one of the longer RPGs on the list.

They won't crash in the beginning, right? Right?

As always, feedback and recommendations are welcome!

The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - 魔王復活物語 (#23)

2024-07-25T00:00:00Z

Romaji Title: Maou Fukkatsu Monogatari

Unlike my [other](2024-07-23-The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - 勇者不適伝 (#1), 勇者の苦難 (#59), and 迷宮郷まよろば #51) [posts](2024-07-24-The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - 箱庭ドールメーカー (#15) and 水底の記憶 (#11)) on the Wolf RPG Editor Contest, I'm going to devote an entire post to this one title. It encapsulates a lot of what I find wonderful about the community, and it deserves a lot of attention for what it is: a love letter to Japanese free games (i.e. furige).

There will be unmarked spoilers throughout the post.

The first thing the player is greeted with is a clearly unfinished title screen. The title is missing and there's nothing to see except a black screen with the usual options. Starting a new game crashes the game: Wolf RPG Editor says Map001 is missing. I was so confused by this that I unzipped the game again, only to get the same error. While redownloading the game, I realized that there was a save file ... and I should start from there.

This save file starts at the very "end" of the game: the party has reached the last room of the Maou's castle.

All they can do is fight the final boss, an easy task because the party has very strong characters and a ton of HP and MP recovery items. The final boss has two phases, the latter of which reveals a silhouette of a girl who keeps screaming that she can't remember something important. Defeating her lets you restart the game with a clear data -- and this is how you start the game.

The game finally begins: it however does not start with the protagonist, Hiro, being summoned to a world by a bunny (a future party member you will use against the Maou) -- that happens a little later -- but with a streamer named Hiro getting angry about a free game he just played.

After that surreal intro, I kept running into standard Wolf RPG Editor errors about missing maps. I also found a floating notepad icon that the game calls an "Idea Memo". The game cuts to a dialog between two unnamed high schoolers about making a free game in Wolf RPG Editor:

There, they start dreaming about winning first place in the Wolf RPG Editor Contest. The girl's grandmother encourages her to program the game she's always dreamed of making, and she drags the narrator along to do just that.

After that sentimental flashback, I led Hiro out of the castle and he was suddenly ambushed by a random assassin without any warning. And the starting town is empty, with shops selling junk and junk only. In an Idea Memo scene later, the narrator berates the girl for her haphazard use of tilesets.

I'm clearly playing a meta RPG that's interested in the relationship between amateur developers, players, and the creative process of game development. This isn't the first game I've played that comments on its own creative subculture -- Kuso Game Girl Wateri (クソゲームガールわてり) comes immediately to mind -- but this is at least the first game I've seen that commits to the premise of amateurs making a game together.

And there are many bugs, many of them game-breaking. The puzzles in the game revolve around overcoming the broken gameplay mechanics and missing graphics that make gameplay progression possible. The player must carefully read the idea memo scenes and understand how the narrator overcame the jank; they may have to use a balance-breaking skill to overpower an unfair boss, skip puzzles by abusing unintended mechanics, or even use the "original" save for clues.

The counterintuitive nature of this game is deeply frustrating, but it is also charming. It makes me feel like I'm not playing a meta RPG, but a real game made by two aspiring game developers. I feel like I'm playtesting their creation and learning about their game design philosophies through the Idea Memo scenes.

The programmer is clearly in love with all sorts of furige and wants to emulate them as much as possible while the narrator holds her back and makes sure she focuses on cleaning up her mistakes and bugs. As a result, the "actual" game ends up being more or less consistently energetic: the party is led by straight-faced characters while a heroine clearly inspired by the programmer gets absurdly excited for furige cliches like boulder-pushing puzzles.

It's fun to see this dynamic grow and develop, especially as the game becomes more ambitious. Actual mechanics, graphics, animations, and music are now being placed with some care. The programmer is proud of her work, scouring websites for appropriate audio-visual assets, and the narrator is clearly enjoying how the game is turning out, even if he admits it's a broken game.

But the game has to "end". There's a reason this game is unfinished and left the way it is. The lategame is full of hard puzzles that require a lot of leaps in logic, but I like the way it is because it's hiding the truth of amateur game development: finishing games is hard, and people might not like what you've done. The constant worry that people won't like your games and that you shouldn't be wasting your time on such silly pursuits is real; these are high school students who should be thinking about the future.

It's a theme that's been explored in several titles, but what I find particularly unique about this game is that it integrates the Wolf RPG Editor community into its story. The creator of the contest, SmokingWOLF, is also the same person behind Wolf RPG (he just released the engine used for One Way Heroics to the general public), and he has cultivated a community that is interested in pushing what is possible with the engine. The contest is a gathering place for like-minded people who enjoy making games in the engine, and various streamers and reviewers have recorded their thoughts on these games. But as far as I can tell, few people outside the community have documented the contests -- I'm probably the lone wolf writing about it in English, and I doubt many people are reading my articles about it based on how few notifications I've received.

So, the game seems to invite us players and developers to think about what it means to play games by people like the characters in 魔王復活物語. What does it mean to stream or write about them? And what does it mean to submit a game to the contest in your jaded, hopeless adult life?

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I agree with the comment by koineriruru on Twitter:

https://x.com/koineriruru/status/1815954523539587160

Roughly translated:

While I think the "you have to play four games in the Wolf RPG Contest before you can judge" rule was put in place to prevent vote brigading, it also means that there is a unique meta-game: short games are not at a disadvantage, and it is interesting to see what counts as strong work compared to other sites and contests.

It is unlikely that 魔王復活物語 would be published outside the Wolf RPG community, but if it did, it would be ignored because the game would crash at the beginning, there would be too many bugs, and so on.[^1] Few people would have played this game to completion. The sad thing is that even in the context of the Wolf RPG Contest, I'll probably put this game off -- if a friend hadn't vouched for it so strongly, I might have skipped it because I'm only trying the games out here and there.

According to the afterword, Kagerou is more than prepared to receive complaints that the game did not work or had abrasive mechanics that hindered progression. And even then, the comments are still frustrating to read for them. I cannot emphasize enough how likely this game is to fail, to become another forgotten product in the internet wasteland, and to serve as a serious reminder that our parents and teachers are right: stop making games and focus on your real jobs.

It remains to be seen if the risk pays off, but at least it worked for me. The final puzzle is a masterpiece: it's extremely difficult because figuring out the solution is the easy part -- finding the place to enter it is almost impossible. The player is tasked with discovering what it means for the 魔王復活物語 characters to complete the development of the game.

When I finally entered the solution to the game, I felt overwhelmed. The game mirrors my anxiety about making my own games, writing about the games people made, and wondering if people will ever treasure niche media. The ending shows how the game feels as vulnerable as the players and developers within the community: in the end, it wants to be played, streamed, and talked about by as many people as possible.

Everyone wants to make a fun, memorable game that they can share with everyone. The games people have made in the past show that anyone can make a game if they try. But at the same time, it's scary that your experiments might fail. Maybe no one will play your game, or maybe everyone will hate it. The game is your work, your life. It's frightening to find people who might reject your way of life.

The final scene reads like an impassioned love letter to all furige developers, especially those deeply embedded in the Wolf RPG scene. It embraces the history of the people who make, play, and write about these games and says, "I will join you in worrying about our future together." It doesn't deny that it's hard to make niche games that don't impress everyone, but it recognizes that like-minded developers will reciprocate and give your game a try.

I don't know if anyone outside of the developer and a few members of the Wolf RPG community read will this long post about a game that uses a lot of stock assets. I've been writing about untranslated games for so long that I assume the worst. This article is objectively a waste of time and effort to write, even by my standards, because I could be doing something else more productive.

But I must admit one thing: there's nothing more that excites me than putting in a lot of effort into something so minuscule and negligible. I love overthinking about the pointless, the trivial, and the useless facets of life. I love the impossibility of introducing a community of developers to people who can't play the games because of language barriers. I love all this and that because there's something beautiful about doing objectively unnecessary and unproductive things together.

I enjoy writing about subcultures of all kinds because I feel like I am part of the discussion of whether any of this matters. The feeling you want to make a game all of a sudden is irrational, but it's real. Several people have made 150-hour free games with extensive lore and themes in their spare time, and that's more impressive than the people who work in studios making games with the same amount of content. Even though they have jobs and families to take care of, they still want to make the games they dream of -- and I want to write about them because they share the same dreams I have.

I don't know if I'm making the world a better place per se by encouraging people to indulge in their hobbies. Sure, there are real problems to solve, but there is also a place and time for your silly games.

There is a reason the Wolf Editor Contest plays a prominent role in 魔王復活物語. It is the greatest excuse, the best deadline to get your silly project out there. The contest is a festival where everyone can do just that: make and play games and have a good old time together. No wonder the Wolf RPG community is so welcoming: people really want to play each other's games!

Every second of this game is precious to me. Its parodies of free games I've played or at least read about, its commentary on amateur game developers and the communities they belong to -- it's all made with love. I laughed and sniffled at every moment, especially in the lategame, and it made me think about what I love about the furige world: it made me feel like I was part of a community, of something larger.

This game succinctly expresses the hopes and dreams of people who make and plays free games. Anyone who wants to understand why people can become so passionate about the free games they've played should at least try this game out. It taps into something so fundamental about the furige experience: that something free could be so surprising and full of wonder, and it makes us think about how lucky we are to be playing games like this.

I want to play and write more about the games made by people like the characters in 魔王復活物語. They may make the most unpolished and buggy game known to mankind, but I know they'll put some of their soul into it. I cannot wait to see more of their absurd boulder-pushing puzzle antics in upcoming Wolf RPG contests.

They are, in my opinion, the best kind of developers the furige world needs: people with a lot of zany and creative energy.

Okay, that was a short post. I'll try to write about more games in the coming days. As always, any feedback and recommendations will be greatly appreciated.

[^1]: After this post was published, the developer said that they’ll happily put the game on Freem.

The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - 箱庭ドールメーカー (#15) and 水底の記憶 (#11)

2024-07-24T00:00:00Z

This is looking like it's going to be an unusually strong competition. A Japanese friend I respect has recommended me several games to try out, and the two I've tried are absurdly good:

箱庭ドールメーカー (#15)

Romaji Title: Hakoniwa Doll Maker

This doll-raising game calls itself a deckbuilder game with board game-styled gameplay, which is probably the best description for a game as eclectic and interesting as this one.

The gameplay loop goes like this: your dolls have weak default stats, and you can create better versions by placing them in the fields fighting monsters, holding on the experience points to multiply them (very similar to carry-over mechanics in games like Labyrinth of Galleria), getting treasure chests that replace an attack card with more useful skills, and completing the field area. This powered-up version can be used for dungeons -- create a party of these overpowered dolls and overwhelm the boss to complete the dungeon.

As you can imagine, this creates a pretty addictive loop. You're optimizing the best party combination you can get with these puppets. I've spent two hours repeating the same few maps, seeing gains in my dolls as I learn more about the system and acquire more useful dolls. Sometimes I wasted time because I kept forgetting there was a turn limit, and my dice rolls for movement were shit -- every time you go over the limit, the game dramatically reduces the HP of your dolls.

I also enjoyed the combat mechanic in the game. Battles go by very quickly, even though you need to end turns and gain Action Points to unleash bigger damage. There's some fun strategies and synergies between the dolls and what skills they get.

The writing and worldbuilding is also quite fun, but I don't have much to say about it yet. I haven't finished the game yet, and I'm still at the beginning of it. The characters introduced so far are quite funny, and I like the character art in general.

All in all, I really enjoyed this game and can see friends getting into gameplay loops where you raise characters over and over again being super into this game. I had to put the game down before playing the next game, but I'm going to start this game after I finish this review. It's way too much fun.

水底の記憶 (#11)

Romaji Title: Minazoko no Kioku

A proper playthrough of this game should take fifteen minutes. However, I spent an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't finish the game, and I will spend many more hours thinking about how good this game is.

Upon starting the game, the player is greeted with this incredible piece of animation:

https://x.com/reminder_89/status/1812842946800283834

Yuu can't remember why she's wearing a kimono, but a masked girl accompanies her to a summer festival. There, the player can play some mini-games like a shooting gallery and buy a hamburger for herself. But when Yuu examines the items she gets, she gets hit by flashbacks in which her young self is friends with a girl with the same hair color as the masked girl.

This synopsis sounds like I'm describing a typical episode of a yuri manga, and you wouldn't be wrong. As I played through the game, making the choices I thought were appropriate, I thought I knew where it was going. I took in the sights and sounds of the gorgeous CGs and animation, while the text predictably revealed the character dialogue for the types of characters they were.

This should be a cute read, I thought -- until I saw the words "Normal End" appear on the screen. Over and over again.

I kept restarting the game, trying out new choices and gameplay options, and wondering if I actually misclicked an option. Whatever the combination is, I must be one choice off -- but I kept reaching the normal end.

I had to think about what the game was trying to say about Yuu and her relationship with the masked girl. The autopilot wasn't working. I needed to understand why it wasn't working out.

Alas, I lacked imagination. I had to watch a stream, and I was surprised by the choices you have to make to reach the true end. The true path to the end reveals itself quite quickly (you can skip through the game with CTRL, and it will stop when you reach unread text), and I was stunned by what the game did. It made me realize that the struggle with the game system was intentional because, as the masked girl suggested at the end, it's going to be difficult to realize what she had to do. I had a hard time understanding what she was supposed to do.

My (and her) inflexibility is the reason I keep reaching the Normal End over and over again. Our stubbornness made the game an impossibility. But once I accepted what the game wanted me to do, it became something bigger and more evocative and resonant. The hairpin scene after completing the game is also worth reading because it also captures a central theme of the story quite well. (Late edit: I found this analysis of the game's choices and the Normal End very insightful.)

水底の記憶 is a shining example of how you can make something short and powerful when everyone else is making long and sprawling RPGs. While it's always fun to go on huge adventures, something as simple and honest as this game can still be equally impressive.

This game is perfect. No compromises in the writing, the sound, the game design, the art direction -- everything is in service of making you connect with the relationship between these two characters. Simply a masterpiece through and through.

I seriously recommend this game. It did things to my heart. I need to see a cardiologist after this.

As always, I appreciate feedback and recommendations on what to play next. Though honestly, I think I just want to play more yuri kamige...

The 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest (第16回ウディコン) - 勇者不適伝 (#1), 勇者の苦難 (#59), and 迷宮郷まよろば (#51)

2024-07-23T00:00:00Z

Hello, and welcome to what I hope will be the first part of my journey through the 16th Wolf RPG Editor Contest. For those who don't know, Wolf RPG Editor is a free engine like RPG Maker that allows more programming freedom and has created its own unique subculture (very similar to interactive fiction).

I've been following the community on and off, and it just so happens that I'm free that the 16th Contest is going on right now. This is a showcase of what people have made, and people can vote and rank what they think is the best game in the contest. I'm looking forward to playing some of the games and writing my first impressions -- they won't be as complete as my usual posts, and some of these titles will remain unfinished because some of them can be very long. But I know I'll be revisiting at least one game in the contest. I want to at least capture my thoughts on the games this year, and also give readers a glimpse of what the Wolf RPG community is capable of.

The contest can be found here, and I've included their entry numbers for reference. Without further ado, here are the three games I played today and found interesting:

勇者不適伝 (#1)

Romani Title: Yuusha Futekiden

This is a RPG that seems to be heavily inspired by Undertale, though it's not very obvious at first glance. You play as Hiroto who seems against the notion of violence, despite being chosen to fight the villain terrorizing the land. Instead of fighting enemies and reducing their health to zero, he and his friends choose to negotiate and reduce their Fighting Instinct (FI) instead.

Which leads to an interesting dynamic in battles: you are trying to keep the enemies alive while telling them to calm down. Killing them will actually result in a game over, so you don't just have to deal with all of your characters dying in battle. You don't really have that many skills that can reduce HP, so it's not a problem -- but it does change the pacing of the fight quite a bit.

Pacified enemies will heal the party a bit, which is a nice thing to have considering that any enemy attack (even regular ones) will hit the entire party. While there are characters designed to be tanks, they cannot be your typical defenders. Instead, you are trying to keep the party's health as high as possible while fighting some pretty nasty enemies that cycle through different states (their attack and the amount of damage you deal can vary depending on their mood). So you often have to balance doing chip damage, waiting for your character's FP to increase so you can use their skills, and using items from time to time.

I really enjoyed this dynamic on hard, but unfortunately the developer seems to be a little too concerned about players getting stuck. Each game over not only returns all items used during the fight, but also gives you some spare change. You can always grind for money this way, and this is particularly an issue because you can pay the inn to give experience points to the party. For this reason, there's very little reason to engage with equipment or items for most of the game; you can just spend your way to higher power levels.

I also found the writing of this game to be too long, uninteresting, and plain for my taste. Characters talk about things forever, and skipping text can take a minute or two. I think I might not be on board with its wholesome vibes.

All in all, I found the game quite enjoyable to play through. The battles can get unbalanced, but I also enjoyed the pacing of the battles quite a bit. Give it a try if you're curious about the game.

勇者の苦難 (#59)

Romaji Title: Yuusha no Kunan

This may be the most authentic recreation of the RPG Maker 2000 aesthetic on a non-RPG Maker engine. And it's incredible.

You play as Alex and must defeat the four bosses in order to take on the Maou. The gameplay is taken from Tower of the Sorcerer (puzzle fans may know this as the main inspiration for Tactical Nexus), and it's a challenging iteration at that.

Alex has access to four dungeons of varying difficulty from the start. While it may make sense for the player to complete the dungeons sequentially, it's pretty obvious that you're supposed to switch between the four dungeons and pick up upgrades along the way. Scattered throughout the maps are not only attack and defense upgrades, but also useful bonuses such as increasing the exp of enemies. The player is expected to repeat over and over again, charting the best path to get all the most useful upgrades and items.

This makes the game more difficult than most other Tower of the Sorcerer-likes I've played. While the game has three difficulties, Normal gave me a rude awakening. I couldn't cruise to victory. I spent two hours on the game, restarting it over and over again, and still found myself softlocked because I wasn't thinking far ahead. It's a genuinely challenging game that demands to be taken seriously.

As for the RPG Maker 2000 aesthetic, I kept forgetting that I was playing a Wolf RPG Editor game. It felt authentic once I forgot that RPG Maker fonts tend to be pixelated. The game creator clearly understands what makes this aesthetic nostalgic and compelling. I was lost in a world of my own nostalgia.

I recommend this game to anyone who enjoys hard puzzle games and titles that force you to plan ahead. Even though I couldn't beat the game, I still enjoyed it and didn't feel like I was wasting time getting stuck.

迷宮郷まよろば (#51)

Romaji Title: Meikyuu Kyou Mayoroba

This game excites me. Not only because it's a beautiful title with great graphics and music, but because it's the kind of game I've always dreamed of playing: a game where you can just explore and get lost.

I don't know what the story of the game is. I watch as my player character rides a train and arrives in this mysterious land. She can explore a theme park of toys, a volcano, a wasteland filtered through VCR scan lines, walk on puddles that reflect her face, and scuba dive. The map is vast. Light refracts differently on the player character depending on where she is. The constellation of stars, chocolate cakes, and cherry blossom petals crowd the screen. Everywhere I go, I see magic.

Each location has a different visual style and musical direction. This results in a confluence of different atmospheres: you can go from getting hungry from floating burgers, to exploring mysterious and enigmatic Shinto shrines, to trekking along streaks of lava. There is no consistent tone, just mood whiplashes -- and I find that very exciting.

I don't know how I feel as I embrace my wanderlust and experience the different worlds the game has to offer. While there are shortcuts and a goal to reach, I find myself simply checking out each room and marveling at the optional sections that few people might encounter. It's a nice feeling to get lost in a game like this: you don't know what to expect, except that it's going to be something very beautiful and resonant.

I haven't finished the game yet, but I had to put it aside so I could continue writing about the contest. I know I'm going to revisit this game and give it a full review. I can see this game becoming a new favorite of mine, and I'm looking forward to discovering the secrets the game has in store for me.

If there's any feedback or games from the contest you'd like me to check out, feel free to comment below. I'm excited to write more about this contest.

read きみのことがだいすき, a shoujo one-shot manga about a girl who realizes she's fallen in love with her childhood friend

2024-07-12T00:00:00Z

it's not unusual for children's fiction to broach lgbtq themes these days, but the way this one-shot introduces the themes and ideas around lgbtq issues to children is very clever and timely.

when the protagonist wonders if it's weird to like the same sex, she starts searching the web and watches youtube videos about same-sex couples. there's a panel a bit later where she realizes she isn't alone, that she is part of a community, and the world expands for her.

it's a clever manga since it encourages children to look up these topics by themselves. they've heard from parents about how they should reproduce, hook up with the opposite sex, and so on. they may feel lonely thinking this feels off, so seeing not only this manga reflect their anxieties but also tell them that there's a new world to explore is quite refreshing.

https://ribon.shueisha.co.jp/library/20240628/03.html

i'm also fond of the ending because it takes a pretty political turn on how the girls see marriage laws. even if we disregard that this manga is made for children, i think this is still a very subversive direction.

definitely recommended if you are learning japanese. every kanji is ruby'd/furigana'd.

I don't know what I did in Heaven's Vault

2024-07-11T00:00:00Z

I always think of adventure and roleplaying games as a bag of magic tricks. They have narratives to unfold, but they are also games where you control character(s) and solve puzzles. This interaction creates a pleasing feeling of control (aka agency), and the systems feel responsive and attuned to the player's whims, even though everything is pre-programmed.

I enjoy testing what I'm able to do and what I can't in these kinds of games. It's fun to play Renegade in the Mass Effect trilogy and see how the story tries to explain how an asshole can still save the galaxy. It's fun to sequence break adventure games like MYST and beat the game in a few seconds.

It's bizarre to play Heaven's Vault and not know if any of my actions matter.

This science fiction game follows an archaeologist tasked with finding a missing person, only to uncover archaeological discoveries that could shake the foundation of historical knowledge. Much of the gameplay revolves around sailing the rivers of space, learning the language of the Ancients, and collecting artifacts from the ruins with a trusty robot companion.

But at its core, the game is a massive Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) game made by a studio that has its origins in the interactive fiction community. Not only did Inkle make 80 Days (a dazzling feat of choice games), but their first games are adaptations of Steve Jackson's Sorcery! books. Suffice it to say, they're very familiar with the structure, and it's not hard to see Heaven's Vault as a refinement of their techniques.

Still, choice games (and arguably any work of interactive fiction) are illusions. They fool players into thinking they have made significant in-game choices that reshape the narrative. 80 Days is definitely massive, but the developers focused on a few arcs more than in other places. And anyway, the player can reasonably minmax their way to the finish line or any particular arc without recourse to guides.

Heaven's Vault feels like it's the opposite. As Emily Short puts it,

[it is] an interactive story in which the player experiences much less diegetic agency than she actually has. The world is full of interactive stories that use smoke and mirrors to convince you that you’ve made a difference. Heaven’s Vault frequently deceives you into thinking that you haven’t.

Unlike a lot of video games and interactive fiction, I never felt like I was in control of the narrative. Or that I was aware that the narrative was actually being manipulated. All I was doing was asking some questions, following some clues, deciphering some languages, sailing to some uncharted waters, and so on. I never felt like I was talking to a game master. I don't feel like I chose anything that mattered. Every plot development felt organic, and that confused me: I had no idea how large the game was.

At all.

Nothing feels like it matters, so paradoxically every action feels like I'm shaping my journey. Whenever I uncovered a secret in a location where I wasted minutes on the ground, I felt like I was taking a path that few players had taken. I don't know how true that is, but it certainly feels like it. I know that all my choices are valid and that any path will lead me to the end, but I still think of the places I haven't been, the characters I haven't talked to, the clues I've never picked up -- because I've been whisked away to the ending.

I can only think of what was closed off to me, and I have a hard time imagining what 100%ing this game could even look like. There were empires I never discovered, moons I never saw, etc. Which choices did what? Did I miss something? The whole game intimidated me from beginning to end because I couldn't comprehend its scope.

It may sound like I'm exaggerating for effect, but that was my whole experience playing the game: the black box nature of the game made it feel big. Someone who completed the game earlier had no idea what I was talking about because I completed the game in a very strange way. The horizons suggested by this game made this game as much as the lush setpieces and colorful dialog did.

I just loved that not knowing what I was doing was a more magical experience than completely mastering the game, and I wish more games were like that.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/774201/Heavens_Vault/

There are parts of the game that irritate me: the bizarre default refresh rate that can induce motion sickness (check the settings), the sailing (though I admit it makes the world feel big), and the flawed approach to language (I'll be writing a post on games about language and translation).

But is it safe to say that this is one of the most impressive adventure games ever made?

I think so. At the very least, it is a compelling game that made me speculate on what it could be and couldn't be. It was exciting to play Heaven's Vault: to feel like I was uncovering secrets upon secrets and redefining history and my own player experience, even though I had no fucking idea what I was doing.

That's the kind of mystery I crave in video games right now.

finished TUNIC

2024-07-08T00:00:00Z

i enjoyed my time with the game, even if a good chunk of it is deja vu.

this may be a very strange comparison at first, but the game reminds me of Stephen's Sausage Roll. both games not only sport a lo-fi aesthetic, but they also begin with no tutorials (at first) and you have to figure out how to play the game by just trial and error.

of course, Stephen's is much harder than TUNIC: the latter is easier if you are familiar with zelda-likes. but both games are very much about "searching" for the tutorials -- Stephen's makes you think about the early puzzles while TUNIC is particularly novel for making you search for the pages from instruction manual stylized after The Legend of Zelda. you need to learn what the controls are, etc.

most of the gameplay is about you wandering around as the cute furry version of link and killing random enemies. i enjoyed this kind of post-fantasy apocalypse vibe that the game is going for: the good vibes of A Link to the Past, i guess. you're fighting ghosts and ancient monsters.

but i found the main part of the game too similar to be truly enjoyable. it felt routine, despite the game wanting to evoke a sense of wonder that i first had when i played my first zelda. while the game is mostly written in a fake language, i could intuit a lot of the solutions from the get-go and not really consider the manual that much.

this all changes in the endgame sequence, which is clearly the highlight of the game. without spoiling, i was deeply impressed by what the game demanded you to do and i wished it was there from the very beginning.

i like TUNIC more as a galaxy brain puzzle game than a zelda-like. it's just too derivative of other zelda-inspired games. i still enjoyed the gameplay loop and there are definitely moments of wonder as i pieced together the lore and the mechanics of the game. it certainly captures a lot of The Wonder playing snes adventure games for the first time much better than a lot of retro throwbacks. the game is [“large” as opposed to actually large](../posts/2024-06-22-Some thoughts about Large and Black Box Large Games) and that’s what makes it feel authentic nes.

so i can see why people love this game and consider it as a favorite. i think this is a highly polished game with pretty great moments, and i would definitely say anyone who has it as a favorite has good taste in puzzles. i simply wanted more and that's a pretty good flaw for TUNIC to have -- most games, i find, often wear out their welcome and i was just thinking this could have done much more.

in a way, TUNIC feels like a celebration of the current trends for video games: a little zelda, a little metroid, a little dark souls, a little fez, and more. nothing is original, but it’s quite good at capturing their charms.

definitely a recommend from me. it might be slow for most of the game, but the endgame is truly spectacular.

About the Mass Effect 2 Overlord DLC and What It Means to Play Through the Series

2024-06-24T00:00:00Z

This post describes ableism and media representations of autism from a neurotypical perspective who is dating an autistic partner. There will also be story spoilers for the DLC and discussions of the post-9/11 politics of the series.

The Overlord DLC begins like any other Mass Effect 2 mission: Shepard and their team stumble upon a planet where almost everyone has died and the only survivor is a scientist named Archer. He tells Shepard that a rogue AI has gotten loose, and if they hadn't arrived in time, the rogue AI could have uploaded itself into the universe.

Archer then ordered the team to shut down the rogue AI. The player is dropped into a small open world to explore: they can admire the waterfalls and natural rock formations pointed out by the Hammerhead AI. There are two other bases that the player must explore to unlock the final base that housed the rogue AI and Archer's brother, David.

At this point in the DLC, the player doesn't really know who David is. Archer gives some hints that David merged with the rogue AI and something went wrong. Nothing in the other bases suggests anything else.

However, the rogue AI often screeches and the subtitled text reads "Unintelligible". Scientists who encountered the rogue AI were trapped in the base and felt herded into areas where Geth, an alien machine species that connects to a network, will kill them easily. Before dying, the scientists felt overwhelmed and wanted the rogue AI to shut up.

Once the player enters the final base, logs and flashbacks reveal that Archer had found a way to communicate with the Geth: he could use David's autistic mind to order the Geth around.

When Shepard interfaces with an infected terminal, they are separated from the team and enter a virtual environment that replays David's memories. Here, Archer's motives become clearer: he needed to get results from his research project, so he forced David into the experiment. David is a "mathematical savant" who repeats the square roots of numbers, and his photographic memory allows him to cross-reference the languages "in a snap". As Archer puts it, "he's literally a human computer." He tells his worried assistants that communicating with the Geth should be harmless and that everything should be fine.

David, of course, is terrified. He's overwhelmed by the sounds and wants it all to stop. But the experiment continues.

Shepard finally encounters the rogue AI, now named "David" in the enemy name UI. After the obligatory boss fight, Archer interrupts Shepard and tries to absolve himself of responsibility. He didn't expect David to be so hurt, and he even says that if the project succeeds, David might be in a better place.

The player now has the option of sending David to his doom or taking him away from his brother. I chose the latter without thinking because even though I've played Renegade (bad/evil) options before, I just found it too horrible to consider the alternative.

The Paragon (good/lawful) choice makes Shepard pistol-whip Archer, and David is sent to an academy that deals with people like him. The DLC ends with David repeating the square root of 912.04 and "it all seemed harmless..."

My first reaction to the DLC was confusion. While I'm not a fan of the Mass Effect series, I did enjoy pretending to be a U.S. Supercop and the spectacle of entering various alien planets. The "Overlord" DLC caught me off guard and left me feeling quite revolted.

The way autism is portrayed in the game is much worse than I'm used to seeing in mainstream media. Movies like Good Will Hunting and Rain Man were questionable enough, but this was far more offensive to my sensibilities.

My partner looked at the screenshots and was horrified at how dehumanizing the portrayal of autism was. It's fine for autistic people to refer to themselves as having alien minds because it's kind of a pride thing. But when a neurotypical writer repeats it throughout the game, it's almost as if they're validating the worst myths about how autistic people think and why they should be infantilized.

Every conversation about David was about how much of a savant he was and about the people who decided his every move. Whether you end up violently disagreeing with Archer or not, David never gets a say in where he wants to be except that he didn't want to be here. He had no agency. He was an object to be moved around.

I was curious what autistic Mass Effect fans had to say about this DLC, and surprisingly, many on the Mass Effect subreddit seemed to agree with the portrayal. While there were people who didn't like DLC like me, most fans thought David's experience was validating and kicking Archer's ass was indeed kind of awesome. They also disagreed with a VICE article that claimed the DLC sided with Archer when the narrative was clearly about standing up to ableism. When critics bring up the fact that you can just do the evil option, people also just say, "That's Mass Effect for you. You can do whatever you want because it respects player agency."

I'm not saying they're wrong to find value in this kind of representation. While I see this as another example of tragedy porn and a savior mentality, I understand why autistic fans find this affirming because it was surprising to see Mass Effect take on something more grounded and social. Whatever qualms I had with the game's representation of autism, it at least said that autistic people exist and deserve to be seen as people. Ableism is actually bad. If you are an autistic Mass Effect fan reading this post and disagree with my interpretation, more power to you.

My real issue lies elsewhere. I want to circle back and think about what it means when people say, "That's Mass Effect for you." Throughout the series, you are often presented with important-looking choices that seem to determine the fate of the universe, but are actually cosmetic choices that allow you to roleplay as the Shepard you want to be. Even though I find the post-9/11 vibes of Mass Effect repulsive, I did find some pleasure punching the journalist who tried to interview me in a bad faith way.

Which brings me to Mass Effect's trademark narrative design and why I found this DLC far more atrocious than the usual Mass Effect-isms. I don't think "Overlord" is fundamentally different from other scenarios the game has done, which is why fans usually don't find it dissonant. Objectively speaking, it is just a fun DLC to play through with good setpieces and fun combat encounters.

And I can imagine that there could be another version of "Overlord" that didn't make autism some magical superpower. There could be a more humanizing version, one that gives David agency as a character and allows him to beat up Archer in a way that's more validating than what the game currently offers. In the hands of a better writer, the DLC could be better too, if it had space to interrogate Archer's ableism and space to discuss the marginalization of autistic characters.

But I will still find this hypothetical version flawed because this is Mass Effect as the fans say. The ability to choose outcomes and have the story tailored to allow players to experience a power fantasy as Shepard means that it will always be a story about feeling good and powerful.

For better or worse, the game's main strength is that it privileges the player and lets them beat up straw villains if they choose. The format that Mass Effect has chosen is rather inappropriate for discussing social issues like disability. The antagonists of disability are not individuals like Archer, but the very idea of disability, the ideology that some people are not equipped to live independently because of some arbitrary "handicap". Everyone wants to live and function like everyone else, and in a more just society there will be no advantage or disadvantage as long as everything is taken into account. I do not want to see some people "needing" more attention and care than others, but rather the elimination of inequality altogether.

And this is the opposite of what Mass Effect usually does. Say what you will about how it deals with race and 9/11, but it's much easier to create the strawman of terrorism than the strawman of ableism. It rehearses the arguments the US used to invade Iraq because the game can say, "This person caused the evil.” It's silly and untrue, but people already tend to see dictators and criminals as harbingers of violence. We can see them as villains and revel in the fantasy of overthrowing them to change the world. Something more societal and subconscious, like ableism, is harder to pin on a shitty guy. Taking out Archer doesn't feel like taking out a terrorist.

Playing this DLC made me realize that the Mass Effect series is fundamentally incapable of discussing any topic that requires more than a strawman villain. It's easy, if ridiculous, to imagine Shepard taking down the leader of a racist organization. It's harder to take down a guy who's part of a societal impulse to oppress disabled people and then think David's ableist nightmare is over. Put another way, Shepard can beat up a racist but it would be preposterous to say they can end racism. This is the usual for Mass Effect, but it feels absurd when the game takes on something like ableism, which has no "terrorist" characters.

In a very strange way, the DLC is almost like a Brechtian exercise: it defamiliarized Mass Effect-isms by placing the usual scenarios closer to reality and estranges me from its premises long enough to see how artificial and contrived its narrative design is. If the DLC is just the Mass Effect writers doing what they've always done, but this time it's about autism, what does that say about Mass Effect 2 as a game and its rhetorical tricks? I realized that I was desensitized to violence against alien species because that was what Mass Effect 2 was about, but I started to think differently when the same shit was done to autistic people. It made me realize how the supervillains I was fighting made the fetishism of alien species as subhuman more palatable.

Other than the caricatures of autistic people, I don't think the "Overlord" DLC did anything wrong. It was simply a watershed moment: it revealed that this was what the Mass Effect series had always done, only to people close to me. And I find this fact uncomfortable because it made me realize how susceptible I was to the propaganda efforts of Bush's USA. I was so caught up in Mass Effect's fiction of defeating strawman villains that "Overlord" caught me off guard. I realized I was no different from the liberals who shook their heads when the USA bombed the Middle East because it couldn't be helped.

It was this DLC that made me realize that I was complicit in perpetuating this fantasy that there were named villains of societal ills that could be defeated by playing this game. "Overlord" shattered the illusion by going after something I actually knew, and the game repulsed me because I thought my own philosophies were repulsive. I wasn't principled enough to resist the racist ideas of Mass Effect.

So, I appreciate this DLC for humbling me. As much as I disliked the message, I enjoyed most of the gameplay (okay, I disliked the Hammerhead sequences, but when has the series ever been good about vehicles) and everything else up until that moment. Before the "Overlord" DLC, I was happy to be smug about its message and that I knew better. Now, I'm not so sure I can.

I will end the post not with another screenshot from the DLC, but with another scene from the game:

That scene made me laugh the first time I played it, but it could have been in a possible alternate version of "Overlord". And that scares the hell out of me.

Some thoughts about Large and Black Box Large Games

2024-06-22T00:00:00Z

I've been playing Mass Effect 2 on the side, and unlike my negative experience with the previous game, I've come to appreciate the game more as a kind of Final Fantasy 7 for XBOX 360 players.

I'm not saying it's as good as FF7, but what I mean is that it was able to create experiences that felt bigger than they actually were. You don't revisit places with memorable set pieces that often, and the galaxy actually felt big. This was my experience with FF7 where I saw bit by bit how big the world was after leaving important locations.

The key word is "felt". It's not about whether this is real (of course the game is bigger than ME1), but rather my feeling that Mass Effect 2 feels big and worth exploring.

And it made me think about Large Games, how daunting and unplayable they are to me, and yet I have played long games like La Mulana 1 without a problem.

I believe there are at least two kinds of Large Games that have been conflated in recent years.

1) The Physically Large Game

This is the typical AAA game caricature. The file size is large. The maps are big. The assets are big. Everything is big and takes up most of your PC's hard drive. You know to some extent how big the game is because of the file size and what the game press has said. You open up the map screen and it tells you how many objectives there are. I see that mountain and I can climb it.

This is Large and Big as people tend to know. People are going to have very different feelings about this -- some might see it as ambition, some might see it as bloat -- but I personally see it as dread.

I look at the objective list and cower. There's so much I have to do because the game tells me it's big this and big that. When people started describing Tears of the Kingdom as having too much to do, I lost interest. I can only think of it as a game full of chores, and I know that is an unfair characterization. It's just the way my brain worked.

At first I thought it was because I was not interested in Large Games. Maybe what I wanted was small and compact games. But that didn't make sense to me because I played so many long JRPGs.

2) "Large", or Black Box Large

It took me a while to realize it, but I like it when Large Games don't reveal how large they are. I put this "Large" in quotes to indicate that it's quite imaginary or obscure. A better way to think about it is to describe how a black box works.

God bless Wikipedia because it can describe things better than I ever will:

In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black). The term can be used to refer to many inner workings, such as those of a transistor, an engine, an algorithm, the human brain, or an institution or government.

The TL;DR would be "we don't know what's in here, but it's doing something" and I want to use that to describe the size of games.

A classic example of what I consider a "Black Box Large" would be something like the Etrian Odyssey games. That's a dungeon crawling RPG where you know you're delving into something, but you don't know how deep it goes. You have to map it out for yourself, and then realize through your own efforts how labyrinthine the dungeons really are.

This hits different from knowing that a game has ten floors with three thousand rooms. You discover the size of the rooms for yourself. It feels more accessible to me, and there's a sense of mystery about figuring out how big the game is.

But there are other ways to make something feel big without giving everything away. Something I found interesting while listening to an interview with 1000xRESIST's creative director was his description of Final Fantasy 7 as a game where you leave places. For him, there's something sentimental about leaving places you've been forever and then exploring a wide new world. It transforms the sense of loss of not being able to access places into something great and wonderful. Like it's saying, "You may have to leave your hometown, but there's a bigger world out there."

If you play 1000xRESIST, you'll find that each chapter is full of unique setpieces that don't appear in other chapters. The same goes for Final Fantasy 7, Mass Effect 2, and other games where you lose access to places you're familiar with. You are forced to go to different places, a new world. I think this negative sense of loss and the strange need to "immigrate", for lack of a better word, make the world feel bigger and harsher than it actually is.

Because if you think about it, there is no way a game would just throw you into a softlock. It's clearly meant to advance the story and make you see things. But I think for a player like me, it makes the journey after the status quo is dead feel more hectic and alive.

It just makes me wonder, "Is there a world even bigger than my fictional game home?"

Why the Distinction?

Let's imagine two versions of the same game that follow these outlined philosophies. The first game is a title that advertises its size. The second game hides it and takes players on precarious adventures in unfamiliar terrain. These two versions are the same game, and yet I think their different priorities have led to unique results.

This is all a matter of preference, but what I find exciting about the black box variety of big games is that I get to discover how big they really are. La-Mulana 1 felt magical to me because I didn't know when the game would end. I kept unlocking newer items and harder areas, and I didn't know how to understand what I was looking at. Compared to games where I knew how much text and gameplay there was going to be, I found this enthralling and mysterious.

It felt like I was on an adventure figuring out how deep something went. The anxiety and awe I felt created a larger game than it really was. It's all imaginary when you step back and think about it, but I would argue that imagination is a productive space that makes games feel like fun and not a chore.

This is why I really love old text adventures. I couldn't tell how long a game was because it was all text and the puzzles could range from trivial to absurdly difficult. Getting stuck on a puzzle prolongs the game and stimulates my imagination.

But when I encounter a standard Metroidvania, I get what is advertised on the Steam Store page. It did actually take me 20 hours to complete, and I did actually encounter all 500 unique rooms with 20 special weapons. Nothing surprising, nothing different.

And I think that's tragic to see genres that are all about exploration be something like a routine. I know what I'd be getting into and I don't like that.

I think that's why people loved Final Fantasy 7 and Mass Effect 2 back in the day, because you didn't know what was going to happen. Now it feels trite to play another video game.

We Can Make Games Like This

I don't think this is a post written by a boomer who thinks games used to be good and magical. Instead, I know of several recent titles that bucked the trend. If you need an AAA example, think Elden Ring, where you find new areas because the map you had was incomplete. There are also many indie and doujin examples: Sylvie RPG is a game full of secrets, and NonStories is a game that feels impossible to describe other than "big".

Nor do I want game developers to read this and go "aha, I'm just gonna obfuscate my mechanics." You could be the next Kawazu to make the next SaGa games, but I don't think every game needs that. I'm playing Thistlemine, and it's a game that tells you everything you need to know, but you still have to fight some challenging puzzle bosses.

What I want is a sense of mystery back. A sense of not knowing everything. You can do that by adding new mechanics, by creating friction, by adding a challenge, or just by adding some dank plot twists. I don't want to be able to predict what I'm going to do in the next hour. That sucks, and it makes me feel like I should be doing my real chores.

I think Physically Large Games and the companies that make them today are forgetting that games can be towering in size, but it doesn't matter if the "size" isn't felt by the player. Just because a game takes up so much of my free space doesn't mean it feels like a place I want to explore.

All in all, I think physically small games can feel big. My partner enjoyed Void Stranger, a 300MB game. After encountering a certain mechanic, they joked that they now treat the game as an SCP. They're playing with it and learning how the game works. It started to dawn on them that the game was much bigger than they thought, and it's exciting.

I think we should want more games like this.

i played The Beginner's Guide and this is my lamppost. also, thoughts on criticism and museums

2024-05-28T00:00:00Z

i thought i was going to not write a post about the game, but since i already wrote so much on discord explaining my spoilery thoughts on the game, i might as well.

i played The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe and The Beginner's Guide back to back for the first time today, so i was pretty detached from most of the context. the only knowledge i have of TBG was innuendo studio's video, which turns out to be a tangential tutorial to reader-response theory lmao.

so playing this game was interesting to me because while i know what the game was about, i was surprised by how blunt the messaging is. it's literally saying "bro, parasocial relationships between critic and artist are bad". i was quite surprised and shocked to read reviews that didn't get what this game is about.

the more positive appraisals kinda elude me too. they're talking about The Meta and what it means for reading and i'm just kinda confused. i'm really unsure why people are hung up on how to know whether they're forcing an interpretation on davy or coda.

because, to me, everyone is doing that.

i certainly won't install a lamppost on some alt game, but the idea is still similar: every interpretation we make is a curation. we choose what to keep and what not to keep. in the context of TBG, it's extremely artificial: we skip labyrinths and ignore the three dots thanks to davy because he has a particular interpretation of coda as a tortured artist recluse and he wants us to see that.

but i also think all criticism is bound to do that. we make claims/narratives based on how we review a game: XYZ is a masterpiece of puzzle games, ABC is about racism, DEF explores the repressed homosexuality of an author, that whole deal. we're going to carve out our explanations like that, sometimes with finesse and sometimes by hurting them.

the way i think of criticism/interpretations is like curating a museum. let's say you are trying to narrativize the historical memory of atrocity: how should you begin the trip, what should the museumgoer anticipate as they walk through the exhibits, what colors should be used for walls, any audio to be used, etc. you are trying as best as you can to compress the multidimensional forms of an atrocity into a few minutes of walking through a museum.

at the same time, such museums are going to be omitting something. there will be conflicts of interests: the curator is likely to have a stake on the subject matter and may even have -- gasp -- an agenda.

for example:

https://louisthings.itch.io/monuments-to-guilt

Monuments to Guilt is clearly a digital museum with a political goal: to show that we have made it inhospitable for homeless people to sleep soundly. if we actually cared about homeless people, we would build them houses. instead, we don't solve their problems and instead make their lives more terrible. going through this digital museum hurt me and made me realize the seats i've taken for granted are uncomfortable as shit.

i changed as a person. good museums kinda do that to you. museums with good curation will make you accept a very compelling, multifaceted narrative about historical events. i don't know everything about accessibility in seats, but it piqued my curiosity.

in the case of The Beginner's Guide, the most meta it went for me is how cognizant i am of the "designed identity" of the museumgoer/player and how poorly constructed it is. i, the player, have to accept that davy is an authoritative voice and trust their curation to be complete. the "player" (not me but the Idea of the Player) should agree to everything what davy has said because he made a pretty swell game called The Stanley Parable and he even doxxed his own email. however, there are several times when i started to distrust the Voice of the Curator and saw several games, especially at the very end, to be critical of how davy abused his relationship.

the very end of The Beginner's Guide is when the museum/curation collapses. the player identity is revealed to be a sham, they're not the fellow understander who will work alongside davy. instead, the player's role is to reinforce the critic's own readings as valid. they are the audience nodding to what davy is saying until the very end where the illusion dies and they're just a yes-man to davy's bullshit.

i find this pretty cool. obviously, the real designer davy has constructed the game in such a way that the player will realize they have been duped all along and it's executed pretty well. they become aware how they've accepted the narrative and reinforced the self-deception davy the critic has. this designed identity is very cool and deserves more analysis than what games criticism has currently done.

i also find campster's video on The Beginner's Guide so fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAbh28j11RQ

you can just skip to the ending if you value your time. the more relevant text is as follows:

"So I'm either analyzing the game that says, 'Analyzing games is often done to the detriment of the work and the benefit of the analyzer' -- and let's be clear, I have edited this video to help me make my point, is that any different from Davy skipping the Whisper maze ... or I'm assigning value to this game based on the mental state and personal life of a man I've never met and then again I'm just as bad as Davy."

this is utterly fascinating to me. i think campster presents the two choices quite well and struggles with the ethical dilemma of being a critic. be an exploiter or be an asshole. it's hard to tell if this is a Bit because he echoes the breakdown davy has and wonders if he is projecting onto the game before saying "Game criticism must be more than that, right?"

my personal answer is campster's worst nightmare because i share in the nihilism the game has: everyone writes criticism to gain something of value. i do it to advance my own craft as a game designer and fiction writer. some people do it for youtube videos. perhaps, game criticism is an art form like aaa games because they're extracting value.

like a curator who is struggling to keep things together, the game critic is going to construct their reader/player. they are creating a narrative on how to read the game, like davy on coda's games. i sorta wish they understand and own that responsibility: media criticism often benefits the critic because they increase their social capital if done well. they gain more social acceptance, people will admire them more, etc. even if people hate the critics, they are going to know the latter's names more than the designers who made the game. this is why this extraction of value needs to be dealt with by responsible people who are willing to attribute and respond to creators well.

i think players and critics then and now are too owned by the fact that curation is a messy project. they are afraid of putting lampposts in places that don't exist. being told you're oversimplifying is scary, i get it. but honestly, they should accept they're doing harm -- they should accept they're doing epistemic violence.

no good curation is flawless. there's always things we can talk about, framings we can be questionable, etc. the point of discussing about curations/criticism isn't "what can be done better" but "what isn't explored and how can we talk about it in light of said curation". there will always be something missing.

my lamppost says that the breach of trust with coda happened because davy was sharing the game with modified assets and saying "i know what coda is trying to say and so, i'm speaking for them". that goes beyond responsible curation: that's speaking for a person who cannot speak for themselves. but curation itself, already a toxic dynamic, is fine: we need to curate the elements of media that interest us and narrativize them into pieces of legible criticism that people can read. as long as we own the violence and talk about it, this is fine.

and yeah, this means erasing stuff that does matter to the author. that's cool if you aren't literally editing the game files -- way too violent. it's still terrible, but you can't be ultimately comprehensive to find some ultimate message the author has left behind. you can only have an interpretation that you've created, a "narrative" that you've grabbed from digging through the game. any interpretation is going to be "damaging" the game.

so i think game criticism is curation, nothing more and nothing less. and curation is epistemic violence no matter how you spin it. it's apt that The Beginner's Guide is a museum of personal games and you're being guided by a terrible curator. in a "better" world, davy the curator would have asked for permission and allowed coda to speak once in a while. while i write for personal betterment, i also hope my articles work as good museums for the media i write about.

that's pretty much it. okay, bye.

早咲きのくろゆり (Hayasaki no Kuroyuri) is a yuri visual novel about teenagers who are hurt by heteronormativity but determined to fight it

2024-05-24T00:00:00Z

This article discusses homophobia, falling birth rates, reproduction, gay conversion therapy, and heteronormativity among other things. There are also some unmarked gameplay and plot spoilers for easier writing and reading.

The Forever War

Can the use of tax money for LGBT couples gain public support? They don't have children, therefore they are not productive.

-- Sugita Mio as reported in The Mainichi

I remember when I heard about the comments made by Mio Sugita of the Liberal Democratic Party. I was still studying in the United Kingdom and I thought I understood homophobia: it's simply hate speech toward certain classes of people for loving differently. The vitriol that Mio wrote and later aired on a right-wing TV show didn't match my naive understanding of homophobia.

It had to do with the real demographic problems facing Japan: if the country doesn't increase its replacement rate, there will be too many old people for the young to support. Eugenics was and still is alive and well. This is a "rational" reason for people to oppose homosexuality, and this "reasoning" was so frightening that I ended up reading books like The Political Economy of Japan's Low Fertility edited by Frances Rosenbluth to understand what was going on.

I knew instinctively that the low fertility rate had nothing to do with gay people. Academics have pointed out that the cost of parenthood has risen, and the Japanese state has done very little to support it outside of tax breaks. But I still couldn't shake the fact that queer people are unlikely to reproduce and will therefore be the scapegoats for falling birth rates. It makes "perfect" sense to tax them for not "contributing" to society.

A year later, I returned to Singapore and met an online mutual. As we leafed through the yuri section in Kinokuniya, he said, "You know, girls in fiction are super cute when they get together. But when I see women doing this stuff in real life, it disgusts me."

As he ranted about how gay people weren't doing their job, I wanted to vomit. I'm friends with a Sugita Mio. If they knew who I was, they would "rightly" view me as part of the problem that people weren't reproducing enough. I held it all in, nervous laughter and all. I think I stopped discussing yuri media afterwards until I started writing yuri visual novels because I was not just afraid of Sugita Mios out there but me being perceived as one. After all, aren't all yuri fans just in it for the fantasy and the fetishes? Social media said so: that's why we should grow up and engage with real lesbian media by real creators working in Hollywood right now.

This encounter happened six years ago. I like to think I've learned to move on, but I know I haven't -- not until we live in a world where the fertility crisis is no longer the main narrative.

A Brave New World

For better or for worse, 早咲きのくろゆり (Hayasaki no Kuroyuri) brought back those memories for me. A 2023 yuri visual novel by 1000-REKA, it follows Sasamori Hana's idyllic days with her crush Oomiya Itsuki and at first reads like a typical school life work with a science fiction twist.

However, what should have been mundane reads like a work of horror to our eyes: Hana listens to the teacher lecture on how the purpose of all living things is to reproduce, former criminals are "reformed" and will never do harm again, and the school encourages students of the opposite sex to "hang out". Catchy beats and chill tunes play as Hana reluctantly fills out a school survey asking if she's had encounters with men. These extreme measures were prompted after Japan faced a population crisis from a fictional pandemic; while the country successfully overcame it, it remains reluctant to relax its family planning policies. There's no doubt that Hana lives a normal and comfortable life with her family and friends, but the Japanese state lurks in the background, watching her every move.

It's hard to criticize a teenager for believing the state will care for them, especially when she's focused on her studies and future. Hana is especially concerned about how to live with Itsuki. The two have known each other since middle school and they're going to university together. Hana doesn't realize that their bond is more than just being close friends; she treasures every moment she spends with Itsuki. If anything, Hana seems unaware of how much Itsuki loves her company. Even their friend, Nishiki Aoi, jokes about much they care for each other.

The three are getting ready to graduate and decided that as one last project together, they should commit to a bucket list. Simple stuff like going shopping or watching the shark b-movies Aoi loves together. One day, during one of their outings, Hana saw Itsuki get into a fatal car accident and wakes up a few hours before it happened.

Hana realizes she is in a time loop and she can save Itsuki.

A Mind Forever Voyaging

With the help of Shoubugawa Maya (Hana's aunt), she must find ways to avert disaster. Otherwise, she will spend days reliving how her love was brutally killed.

This is where the player comes in. The job of the player is to guide Hana to an appropriate conclusion; they can use a text input parser to "suggest" to Hana what to do next or stop doing. The player must look for lines in the narration that are openings for these suggestions: Hana might be wondering where to go and -- in typical text adventure fashion -- the player can type in a location.

Hayasaki no Kuroyuri has three difficulty settings: beginner, expert, and pro. These settings don't change the content of the game; rather, lower difficulties present more clues to the player and automatically record important lines. I personally recommend playing on Expert because the gameplay is not only interesting but also relevant to the narrative experience.

Anyway, the game allows you to jump between nodes in a flowchart timeline of events. Players can record interesting lines that may prove useful and explore locations with point-and-click adventure gameplay. These interactions make the usual visual novel narrative more than just text to be read; it is meant to be analyzed, reduced to its essence, and used to solve puzzles. Though it cannot be compared to the likes of Infocom and Sierra, Hayasaki no Kuroyuri is a unique attempt to combine the gameplay of modern interactive fiction/adventure games with the readability of visual novels. It doesn't return to graphic parser games (examples include the original Mystery House), but instead offers a novel compromise between two types of gameplay: we read a visual novel and type in text to see if we actually understand what the game is trying to say.

I quite like this because it's a good way for the game to check if you're following the plot well. Visual novels like Chaos;Child already test your understanding of the story by giving you the equivalent of pop quizzes, so I find this version to be a nice upgrade. As a player, I realized that I was actually affecting the world within the visual novel by doing things "correctly" and seeing the consequences that follow. The feedback encouraged me to explore further and that made me more and more concerned for Hana's well-being. I cared about her and wanted her to have a happy life with Itsuki; it felt good to be a part of that and to help Hana grow as a person.

A Clockwork Orange

But even though I'm advancing the game state, I still feel like I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing. I began to wonder about the whole adventure game framework. Why is there no way to make multiple saves? What is the purpose of this limited parser gameplay? These peculiar inconveniences stand out so much that they must have some purpose.

After finding a way to rescue Itsuki from death, I am left uncertain what my role is as a player. Kakizaki Natsu, a sweet boy under most other circumstances, decides to ask her out on a date and Itsuki can't say no for some good reasons. Hana realizes that even if they don't talk to each other, it's natural for boys and girls to be together and they seem to make a good couple. But it hurts her and she enters into a new loop, repeating a new cycle of trauma. What am I supposed to do as a player in this situation?

Well, I can tell her that she can give up on Itsuki, so she can move on with her life. If she cares for Itsuki, then let Natsu date her. It's the answer most readily available to the player.

And it sucks.

The fact that I can encourage her to do so through the text parser makes me uneasy. That's too much control over the life of a closeted teenage girl. Paradoxically, I wanted less player agency/freedom because I felt like I was becoming an authority figure. I wasn't sure how to interpret this engine and my position as a player: should I brainwash her to be less gay?

Actually, is this whole interactive fiction framework literally gay conversion therapy?

Oh. Oh.

Hana doesn't know she's in this video game, and she doesn't know the player exists. Her thoughts intermingle with the player's input without her consent. I was horrified to realize that the adventure game segment I'd been enjoying was a "fun" and interactive form of conversion therapy.

I was part of the surveillance state that is ruining Hana's life, and I don't think any possible salvation will come from me as a player. The visual novel is the problem.

It's the Only Neat Thing to Do

But Hana is not a malleable character: unless the player tells her to give up, she will automatically find her resolve and repeat the loop. It doesn't matter if most paths lead to a dead-end; she doesn't want to lose Itsuki and she will try to find a way out.

I think it's hard not to admire Hana. She doesn't seem to be the type of protagonist who is proactive and changes people's lives; in more conventional yuri media, she would often be portrayed as the passive and prestigious one of the couple. But the time loops test her affection for Itsuki enough to change her and make her look for ways out.

After all, if she wasn't actively searching, she wouldn't be able to create openings for the player to suggest new paths. Many of the correct inputs that advance the game state are simply reminders to Hana; everything else such as her words, gestures, and actions, is up to her. The player can only guide her in the end.

And I think that's very effective: since the game won't let the player relinquish control, the next best thing is to let the player assist. None of the player's solutions solve everything. In fact, the final command in the third chapter complicates the relationship dynamics because of what Hana says. But it's true and authentic to her character: the player is simply highlighting things she's not aware of, and it feels wonderful for her to spin the input in her own way and change the circumstances of her own free will.

In a way, I don't think I saved her like some kind of master strategist. Instead, she saved me by never giving up her love. I felt like I had a connection with Hana because of this.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

That said, Hana is actually not my favorite character. She is an incredible protagonist, and the game's mechanics clearly harmonize with her personality, but I was drawn into the game when I realized there was something going on between Natsu and Sakurai Shuu.

These two guys are very close and Natsu is clearly in love with Shuu from the moment they are introduced. Natsu always blushes when Shuu says something weird but cool. I honestly like this couple more than the main couple because their dialog has some very cute banter and Shuu is just very charismatic.

So whenever I see Natsu convince himself that he should date Itsuki, it saddens me. It makes me think of many people (older or younger) who could've lived happier lives if they got to live with the people they love. Many people in heterosexual relationships might as well be victims too.

And I think that creates a richer and more critical understanding of heteronormativity. Hayasaki no Kuroyuri links the erasure of gay identities and the spread of compulsory heterosexuality to the lives of people growing up. Every LGBTQ+ law affects the lives of children, even if they are cis heterosexuals. To enforce heterosexuality, teachers and other authority figures must police "less desirable" forms of sexuality in young people. None of the teenagers in the game seem aware that gay people actually exist; they feel alone, confused about their own sexual identities because they are disconnected from the histories of people like them. Heteronormativity isn't just about how we should love the opposite sex, it's also about how we should police children to be "upstanding citizens".

Indeed, this conclusion suggests that most people -- even the antagonists -- are victims. The power elite and the structures that enforce heteronormativity are not present in the game, and they can't be overthrown anyway. The "villains" we do see are ordinary people who have been twisted by the ruling ideologies as their patriotic duty to keep Japan's population level afloat. They may be responsible for the harm, but they are not "evil"; they have been forced to sacrifice the lives of children for some mysterious Japanese eugenicist cause led by the truly evil people in power.

And the player is part of that equation too. The false choices and forced loops embed the player; they have no choice but to play the game and hope that Hana is brave enough to think radically. As a reluctant participant, the player can choose to enact the banality of evil or help a teenager exit this "loop".

Hayasaki no Kuroyuri thus makes heteronormativity as a structure visible to the naked eye: it is the visual novel framing we are playing, the biology classes teenagers are receiving, the alarmist speeches made by politicians, the reports on the fertility rate crisis, the aggressive family planning policies, and so much more.

Bloom into You

I wish I had played this game when I was younger, when I was deeply troubled by the intersection of my own gender identity and the politics of reproduction in the global north. I knew rationally that I needed to reject the claim that queer people were "unproductive," but I didn't know how.

I've read a lot of queer theory since then, and I still have a hard time pretending that I shouldn't "contribute," whatever that means. It's not that I have any national pride. I was just raised to be a heteronormative person.

This game -- and writing this article, I suppose -- allowed me to interrogate my own thoughts on the subject. I often took long breaks from the visual novel in order to reflect and think about what I value in sexuality and relationships and I knew I'll be writing a lot about this game. Hell, there's still more I want to talk about, but I think this article is not the space for them. I'm just getting tired writing this.

But I think this game has done a good job of dispelling most of the discomfort I have about being queer in a world that's in crisis. In the end, the narrative that we should put everything aside to reproduce is an authoritarian argument, especially when we are manipulating children's lives to correct our historical mistakes. Productivity is the wrong lens through which to talk about our future; we should be looking at something else like how we make the world safer for newer generations to express themselves in the way they want.

I would like to read more yuri and BL that is as politically and socially aware as Hayasaki no Kuroyuri. There's obviously room for fantasy, melodrama, and grounded stories in LGBTQ+ literature, and I welcome them -- but I want something as direct as this game that comments on the issues we face today.

There's value in reaching out and thinking through difficult issues together. It may not do much and it may even complicate things, but it's reassuring to know that we're not alone in thinking about them.

And well, if yuri media taught me anything, girls opening up to each other always make for great cute moments. I should do that more often.

Hayasaki no Kuroyuri is available on Steam. No English translation has been announced, but one can hope.

Cryptmaster is a fun dungeon crawler where you can type DAB and your skull friend will reluctantly dab for you

2024-05-22T00:00:00Z

~~Parser games are back, baby.~~

When I read about the history of interactive fiction and early computer games, I learned that people bought the first text adventure games not because of their puzzles but because they were amused that a game could respond to them. Typing > fuck in Zork 1 leads to the response, "Such language in a high-class establishment like this!" It felt like the computer was talking to you like a tabletop dungeon master. I'm not as impressed now that I know games are just a bunch of inputs and outputs, but it must have been revolutionary at the time.

But when I picked up Cryptmaster, the titular character responded to my every input by speaking aloud and I was fooled into thinking the game was speaking to me. I thought of every word that came to mind and I was impressed by the illusion that the game understood everything I said. It felt especially real when the Cryptmaster articulated my words with their voice and brought up something relevant.

It came close to capturing a fraction of that magic of text adventure games.

That was my experience with the game in a nutshell. While it's ostensibly a dungeon crawler where you control four characters brought back from the dead, it's more about exploring the limits and possibilities of the built-in parser. There are battles and puzzles, but they're all just smoke and mirrors for playing with text input. How much you enjoy the game depends on how innovative and fun you find interfacing with the game.

The parser takes one word and that's it. You never have to chain words into sentences or perform complex actions: everything is reduced to typing simple words like "Yes", "Jab", and "Piss". This greatly reduces the complexity of the puzzles and combat, but I find that much better.

This game is about knowing how the parser interacts with other mechanics of the game. Each combat skill is hidden by default, and you have to type in what you think the skill might be, based on the letters you've recovered from fighting enemies and opening chests. The more you do this, the easier it is to fill in the blanks and unlock the next level of skills for a character.

Let's take the mundane activity of opening a RPG chest: you ask the Cryptmaster to look, touch, and even taste the item you're trying to guess. Correct answers don't give you the item per se, but they do give you the letters to help you solve the skills you're stuck on. Wrong answers will make the Cryptmaster close the chest and shrug, but you won't lose anything. All the chests are doing is giving you clues.

The same goes for combat: you can use the skills you've unlocked by typing the words. There's a sort of ATB system where the characters can't move until their stamina is fully replenished. You can make Joro hit the enemy and Maz yell to give Joro another turn. Simple stuff that doesn't build upon itself. Higher skills use some of your resources and enemies may block certain letters that you can use, but there's never been a time when I've had to manage my resources. Instead, it's more about exercising your typing muscles and getting clues to unlock more skills and memories.

I enjoyed this gameplay loop a lot. I didn't worry about losing progress and I just moved on, racking my brains on the next set of riddles. The game never punished me for being terrible at them, and it even offered options to make the game work for me (I turned on clues for the treasure chests and puzzles and found it to be a more appropriate difficulty for my brain). It's fun to just zoom through the game and solve puzzles like this.

And I'm also in love with the witty writing and excellent voice acting. A lot of the jokes land for me, and I'm always amused by how the game has so many vocal responses queued up for me to trigger. I laughed when I typed "scissors" and the cryptmaster complained about the choice of paper. The non-parser jokes are also great: every character has their own voice, and there's a great mini-game that takes the parser responses to a whole new level.

For people who want more game-like features, there's also the optional card game called "Whatever". You can play with NPCs you met throughout the game and collect cards based on their design. It's pretty fun, but I didn't like the fact that you had to grind the battles to buy new powerful cards.

The music by Surasshu is also fantastic. I consider "Pantry" to be one of my favorite town themes of all time and there's so many good dungeon and combat tracks that I still listen to after completing the game. The soundtrack evokes a kind of vibe that I haven't seen in games before, and I think the game is worth an admission for the soundtrack alone.

My only complaint about the game is that it just kind of ended. I was pretty invested in the world building and the characters, so to see the story just stop and say "it's over" was kind of disappointing.

But I guess that's a sign of a good game that actually won me over. I played a few games after Cryptmaster, and I still come back to how enjoyable the typing crawler experience was. I was impressed by the technical chops and entertained by the writing, gameplay, and music. It's incredible to see how all the elements work together to create a strong and compelling package of a short game.

Cryptmaster is an ingenious piece of entertainment that made me marvel at the technology of video games, and I know for a fact that it's just a bunch of clever illusions that make me think the game is more complicated than it really is. It's just not a game I'm eager to see someone take a deep dive into and explain the inner workings of the game.

I'm cool with being fooled by it: it's a great parlor trick to play with friends and it deserves more recognition.

No Case Remains Unsolved

2024-05-21T00:00:00Z

this is the latest game by Somi, a korean developer who used to work in a field adjacent to law enforcement. i became a fan of them after playing Legal Dungeon, a simulator where you play as a cop reading the most boring documents ever to figure out how to climb the career ladder, because its critiques on the police force are very specific and impactful.

No Case Should Be Left Unsolved is no exception: the police has interviewed suspects related to a missing child case that has gone cold. you have to look for different leads by clicking on hashtags that lead to new nodes being opened up, input important days to unlock more truths, and sort the interview transcripts correctly. you have to guess from context, think about who actually said these lines, and why certain characters would vouch for others when they knew something had gone terribly wrong.

the gameplay resembles some twine interactive fiction titles i've played, but there's a lot going on that is best kept as a surprise. many surprises organically come out from the player figuring out its system and i was very amused by the discoveries i stumbled upon.

i won't say more about the game except the ending is quite the banger and it left me speechless. it not only interrogates this specific cast of characters in doing what they have or have not done but also what the police should be doing in situations like this. even if you think the cops are the good guys, you'd have to admit this is the kind of situation that cops can't bruteforce their way in earning that happy ending everyone in this case deserves.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2676840/No_Case_Should_Remain_Unsolved/

this game is genuinely fantastic and i hope more people play it and Legal Dungeon. it's cheap and it took me shy of four hours to play through the whole thing. it might be one of the better police procedurals too because it's so sensitive to the emotions of the witnesses/suspects and the half-assed nature of police work. i consider this to be the golden standard of what police procedurals should aim for.

Arctic Eggs is a short game that answers the most important question, "Can you fry eggs on Mt. Everest"

2024-05-20T00:00:00Z

The answer may surprise you.

Arctic Eggs tells you that you have no freedom except that you can walk and you have a frying pan. You ask people if they're hungry, and they ask for eggs with cockroaches and sometimes ice cubes.

So, you go around and you hear people talking about making a time-lapse of meat rotting in their apartment. Nihilism is in the air: the world is going to enter into a new ice age, chicken farms are outlawed, and people can't remember what pink flamingos look like. Each text describes a fleeting moment or thought of a character whose backstory is unknown to us. I'm a stranger to the setting, but I'm here to listen to wishes and cook eggs.

The main mechanic of this game is simple: you have a frying pan and you need to cook eggs and whatever toppings the denizens of Antarctica are craving. You swirl around the ingredients (ah, they really want cigarettes to flavor their eggs) and flip the eggs or fish or whatever food they want. Everyone will be healed by your masterful cooking while you listen to some hot post-apocalyptic jams.

Recognizing that this game could aggravate my wrist problems, I opted for the controller. The controls are simple: L2 to stabilize your pan, right analog to rotate, release L2 when objects are on the side to flip them. But there's still a layer of complexity as more different types of objects are added and eggs start to overlap, making them uncooked.

This can get frustrating as the game lacks drop shadows for most things -- ice cubes were so notoriously difficult that the developer added shadows -- and the physics can get bizarre quickly. There are difficulty settings that change the shape of the pan, and that's it. You still have to deal with the gameplay, you just have more leeway. The game isn't particularly long, so there's a nagging feeling that the game is trying to extend its length by making the gameplay annoying.

But I found this mechanic interesting from a narrative standpoint. Nobody knows how to cook, and the way they treat their food is alien to our current standard of living. I'm just blending in: I can cook a little better than any of these people, and they marvel that I can cook sausages and fish without breaking a sweat. It doesn't matter that I've accidentally flung my eggs several times. The fact that I've done it is still incredible in a culture that has forgotten what a cuisine should look, taste, and feel like. There are no vegetables. Organic matter seems to be down to chicken eggs, sausages, fish, and cockroaches. Nobody is eating healthy, but how could you: the world is ending and all you have is a bunch of cigarettes you don't want to waste.

The more I cook, the less culture shock I experienced. I knew my character's motivations to meet the Saint of Seven Stomachs, but the real reason I cooked stingrays and pufferfish was to hear what people were feeling. There are games with more standard settings and professions where you listen to what people moan about their lives, but being a cyberpunk bartender is not as exciting as cooking eggs with tank ammo in your frying pan. The dialog is also unusual but familiar: everyone has one or two lines about the vibes they are experiencing while living in this hell space.

I can guess the intent behind each satirical narration, but they all seem like lines I've scavenged from a future version of social media. They read like utterances from the future, subposting on events that have traumatized their speakers.

I was disconnected from the contexts these lines meant, but this archaeological exercise somehow felt resonant: I felt like I was connecting with people living in a distant dystopian future through these strange poems left by people who really loved my fried eggs. Foreign yet emotive, these stories evoke dreams of a world now lost, and their tellers can only philosophize about their impending doom.

The language differs, but the sentiments are the same: am I really cooking eggs for the future or for a present that's losing hope every second?

I often find myself thinking about Arctic Eggs, not because it's a must-play, but because it evokes a nostalgia for our present. Characters wistfully describe how people used to have it good until all their privileges and luxuries vanished into the ether.

The only vehicle that connects us and them is our frying pan. I don't have the brains to explain the philosophical or ecological underpinnings of the game, but I still felt something in their nostalgia. Their wonder at the simple act of frying eggs fascinates me in ways I cannot describe. And so, I lack the imagination to express what's so profoundly alienating about this game.

That is why this game captured my imagination: I don't know what I was playing, and I'm glad that my ignorance allowed me to appreciate how strange and bizarre this game is. I hope more people will play this game soon.

Crow Country is a friendly survival horror game for people whose greatest fear is uncertainty

2024-05-19T00:00:00Z

This "short" article describes some light mechanical spoilers on Survival Horror mode and is intended for players unfamiliar with the genres and ideas from which the game draws. I'm assuming that people who are into survival horror have already played the game or are not interested in reading about it until they have.

Crow Country begins in silence.

There is no explanation as to why the player character is there. There are no enemies in sight and all the doors are locked. All you have is a pistol and your curiosity.

I have fond memories of my slow trek to the save room. I could see the whole area pretty well, and there's nothing creepy about it. However, the silence is eerie -- I know that enemies will soon appear and swarm the area. It's strange to visit an amusement park that's so empty and devoid of life.

The only companions your player character has for a while are the notes left by the staff and the game magazine tips scattered around the map. The former reveals the staff's inability to keep the amusement park running by noting the disappearance of key objects, and the latter gives you game tips on how to navigate the game and avoid obstacles. I hadn't encountered the objects, rooms, or monsters they described. The foreshadowing kept me on the edge of my seat, expecting the corners and edges of the map to reveal something I'd read about.

I remember getting lost and wondering what to do. It wouldn't be long before I encountered a monster and got into the swing of things, but the first few minutes of the game awed me with its serene, depressing atmosphere.

There was a sense of wonder that the game created simply by evoking suggestions in my mind. I knew that survival horror games tend to be on the short side of things, but I remembered wondering how big the game's setting was going to be. How many rooms of monsters would I have to run through to get to the next checkpoint? What kind of riddles will I be solving? Where is Mr. Crow and why is the amusement park in such a run-down shape? Questions like these were swirling around in my head as I found my first monster and shot it down.

And the game somehow gets more atmospheric.

As I walk back and forth looking for items to use for certain puzzles, I get mobbed by monsters. I glance at the ammo counter as I aim poorly for the headshots. It's not worth it. I let my character run away from the monsters as much as possible.

The puzzles, on the other hand, confuse me in a fun way. They are not based on the logic of real life: they depend on different devices, require strange visual clues, and password systems that can only be solved by reading seemingly unrelated documents. The puzzles are full of funny and quotable flavor text, making them more lively than usual. Setting this game in an amusement park makes the usual obscure puzzles more interesting to me: I can imagine that employees have to go through these hoops just to get a ride to work, so that kids and others can't exploit the system. This happens in real life, but it's much more exaggerated in the world of Crow Country.

These two elements intertwine to create an atmospheric feedback loop: enemies make exploration difficult, while puzzles give players reasons to roam the environment in search of clues. The more they solve the puzzles and mow down the enemies, the more they can imagine what it was like to work and play in this haphazard amusement park, and the more mysteries they can uncover lurking in the background.

This loop is by no means unique to the game. It's a well-worn idea from the survival horror genre, which describes a certain set of conventions: tank controls, cumbersome gun handling, limited resources, peculiar puzzles, etc.

But I think it's better to think of the genre as using a toolkit to create a kind of tension.

Unlike other genres, this is all about pushing the player to progress through the game. You can't just grind for experience points or replenish resources. You have to keep trudging along, never fully prepared and always uncomfortable. They must try to conserve and optimize every ammo and medkit they see on the ground, or they may find themselves in an unwinnable situation.

That said, this is a bit of an illusion. Sure, it's possible to softlock yourself in these kinds of games, but the game adds and subtracts resources and monsters by tracking how you're playing and how many key items you've collected. Your ammo is rarely at zero, but your eyeballs are still on the number because it's going down and you're missing your shots. The only saving grace is that you can kill enemies and they won't spawn again, but it might make sense to run past them and save your ammo for tougher situations.

The game validates all playstyles, but it has to hide their tricks. In a good survival horror game, the illusion of always being in a tight spot feels real and visceral: you don't know how to get out of it, but the game will slyly give you a helping hand -- like a dungeon master twisting the narrative to let a struggling player off the hook.

Crow Country and other survival horror game live and die from their illusions. This genre may be challenging, but it also wants players to complete their games the most. It balances difficult, recourse-intensive gameplay with help as long as players are observant enough to spot it.

At the same time, the illusion depends on how experienced you are with the genre.

I've played a few survival horror games, but not the Resident Evil series to the end. I don't think I am experienced in the game. Still, I found Crow Country too easy and unchallenging. I was full of ammo and medkits. I was loaded with ammo and medkits. I may be shit at aiming my weapons, but most enemies crawl towards the character very slowly, and every wound she took felt like a scratch that could be patched up with one of my many medkits.

The illusion fell apart for me, but I kept going.

I was intrigued by the story and puzzles the game had cooked up, and the characters were memorable and never wore out their welcome. When I reached the endgame, I felt I could relate to what the protagonist was feeling as she approached the final boss.

Relief was on the other side, but I wasn't sure how to get there. That push-and-pull tension worked, despite the lack of abrasive qualities in the gameplay. I understood what the character felt when she looked into the flames to record a save: there may be hope and doubt, but the future still glimmers.

Crow Country is not a difficult game, even for beginners to the genre. However, it understands that uncertainty drives players and characters to action. The monsters and puzzles of survival horror are the symbolic manifestations of unease and ambiguity. The discomfort is haunting and I want to overcome it.

Completing a survival horror game always makes me feel liberated and powerful for a few seconds. This temporary catharsis is sometimes overwhelming because it feels like I've lifted a huge weight off my shoulders and I can feel a lot of emotions pouring in.

In that sense, Crow Country made me feel that way: not by challenging me, but by letting me explore and live in a forbidden world before finally finding a way to lock it all up. I watched the flames flicker as the credits rolled.

There will be another tomorrow, another survival horror game to survive.

1000xRESIST is a game for a post-2019 Hong Kong protest generation of diaspora children that don't exist yet

2024-05-15T00:00:00Z

This article discusses the illusion of the North American immigrant dream for cultural refugees, the exhaustion of living under Han Chinese families, police violence, the mixed legacies of the Hong Kong 2019 protests, and the cycle of parental abuse and trauma in Chinese diasporas from a Chinese Indonesian perspective. There will also be unmarked spoilers for gameplay and story.

Associations

I have three stories to tell.

An art gallery in San Francisco, 2016. I was visiting some friends and took the opportunity to see an exhibition of rare paintings by Monet. In the main hall, a Chinese mother was carrying her toddler on her shoulders to look at some Western paintings. The mother kept telling the kid that she didn't understand what she was looking at, but she told the kid that it was important to take it in.

Central, Hong Kong, 2013. I was traveling between Chicago and Jakarta, and I had a day to just walk around the city-state all by myself. I've never traveled alone before, always with friends and family. I wandered around and found an independent bookstore where I found Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The book was about Marco Polo describing the cities he visited to Kublai Khan, but they're all descriptions of some aspect of Venice. Everywhere I looked and walked, I saw Hong Kong as refractions of the cities I've visited -- it makes everything familiar and strange. Almost like a second or third home but not quite. Hong Kong became one of my favorite cities to visit.

Lunch break at a British university, 2019. My parents said on Whatsapp that these Hong Kongers were doing too much in 2014, but now? It was ridiculous, and the cops were right to tear gas them. I closed the app and scrolled through Twitter, only to see an old woman holding the British flag in front of a militarized Hong Kong police force. Sinophobic tweets from Hong Kongers were everywhere, people begged Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo to save Hong Kong from communism, and Qanon tweets mixed with desperate pleas for help. I closed Twitter too.

The first memory is of my alienation from the Han Chinese American diaspora. It would be unfair to extrapolate from this one family, but I have always remembered this scene. It was echoed in some of the Chinese American literature I read -- and I didn't get it.

I didn't understand the obsession with fitting in. My Chinese Indonesian experience showed me that I would always be a foreigner in my supposed homeland. My heritage was censored and suppressed. We died to be Chinese. Why did this mother want to tell her child to absorb as much Western art as possible? This irrational, unsympathetic anger made me realize that my experiences will never be relevant in Chinese American discourses, and I've come to accept that years later -- I'm not Chinese American, and my commentary on their concerns is bunk.

I associate the concept of Hong Kong with the second memory. It's a city I've never lived in, but I often dream about it. Hong Kong is a symbol of struggle and identity for the Chinese diaspora around the world, whether you like it or not. It's also the home of Bruce Lee, who tells us to "be like water making its way through cracks". I watched its dramas and movies religiously, telling us that everyday life is as interesting and artistically capable as action and science fiction flicks. Hong Kong has influenced me as a person over the years, both culturally and politically.

But I never realized that this aspiration would also break me. The third memory reminded me that even though I was far from the battlefields, I can still hear the echo of screams in Yuen Long and see the blood spilling around Prince Edward Station. The siege of the universities, the mysterious deaths of Hong Kongers at the hands of the police, and the forced confessions of the Causeway booksellers are still fresh in my mind.

It was too recent for me to think about 2019. I needed a few more years and maybe a few more drinks to reflect on what could've been done. There's too much to unpack, especially when the world hasn't really come to grips with the geopolitical situation surrounding China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Nevertheless, 1000xRESIST came out.

The game follows Watcher, a clone of ALLMOTHER whose sole mission is to join communions with other clones to remember the memories of their one god. These memories are supposed to portray ALLMOTHER as an omniscient figure, but it turns out that their god is Iris, an angsty teenager whose parents moved to Canada after the 2019 Hong Kong protests.

The first actual level of the game is a school colored in amber. Soldiers decked up like Master Chief linger in the corridors, criticizing Iris for her theories of "socialized immunity" and her reckless actions. Watcher needs to get to the gym, but the gym is bugged out in the communion. She learns from Secretary (a flying object partner) that she must find a way to connect memories and after encountering a floating photo of Jiao on the rooftops, the player can now teleport between different time periods -- back to when the school was actually a school (the year is 2047 when Hong Kong is slated to officially become part of China) and not a quarantine chamber for soldiers.

Students can only see the Watcher (and thus the player) as Iris, so they chat about things that weigh on their current lives. They bicker about school grades, the Occupant alien outside the high school, and whether washing their hands will even help against the alien airborne virus. When people cry uncontrollably, it can be a symptom of the virus. Those who are not infected use eye drops and hope for the best. Everyone must hold back their tears or they could be suspected of carrying the virus. But despite these existential threats, students and teachers try to do their best and go about their daily activities. Some lose their minds and pray to the alien to pardon their family members. Others immerse themselves in pointless Model United Nations meetings.

Iris, on the other hand, is too comfortable with the situation. She's been taught from an early age never to cry or show her feelings, or she'll lose everything. White students already see "Asian" students like her as model minorities, too serious about grades and the future. Iris bottles up her feelings and criticizes Jiao for not doing the same.

Jiao is a nice and sweet girl who seems to have moved from China and is still unused to the weather and linguistic climate of Canada. In a conversation, we learn that she and her parents learned English by watching true crime. But her accent is still strong, and she keeps using Mandarin Chinese for words she doesn't know, to the chagrin of Jiao who only knows Cantonese. Jiao likes Iris enough to ask her out for the dance.

But there is a barrier between the two. No matter how close Jiao wants to be, Iris pushes her away and reminds her to speak in the language of the country she had just moved into. And I feel every cut that the game delivers because I've done that to other people and other people have done that to me.

The first chapter of this game is an honest, brutal examination of how diasporas and international students don't really know how to talk to each other. Iris and Jiao don't understand what the other needs, and so they hurt each other. Despite the science fiction veneer, I ended up thinking that the game might be about diasporas struggling to assimilate in Canada -- a close friendship between two outsiders who overcome their differences and connect.

The communion in the next chapter also focuses on Iris's troubled relationship with her parents, which makes me wonder if the game was just gonna be about diasporas. I'm not sure why there was a science fiction sheen to all this: cloning technology, the so-called Orchard which is a hub world full of prayer rooms and shrines, and a faux religion calling Iris their ALLMOTHER. Wouldn't all these elements distract the player from focusing on a heartfelt story about how a Hong Kong family tried to start over in a democratic country, only to find that such a dream was not available to them?

I was thinking that the game was going to have the kind of story that movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once and Past Lives try to explain to younger diasporic generations and other moviegoers: East Asian immigrants don't always fit in with the ruling classes, and they often develop a perspective that most people find alien but still valuable to hold on to. They are the artistic voices of immigrants who say that life here has been hard and full of regrets, but they're still grateful to have a new life. If only other generations and races could connect and understand us, the suffering necessary to reach this state of understanding would be lessened. So, I didn't think the game would be anything more than that: I just assumed it would be a yuri story about Iris and Jiao from the past connecting with Watcher and teaching her how unique and beautiful the diasporic perspective on life is, even if the conflict leads to some tragedies like the Hong Kong 2019 protests every now and then.

I let my guard down. I talked to several people who said something similar. We all thought this would be another story of diasporic exceptionalism fictionalized and allegorized through science fiction tropes.

The science fiction elements are, however, are an extension of the memories of the 2019 protests.

Before any communion takes place, the player can take the opportunity to explore the Orchard. As they get lost by poorly designed signs and an honestly too large map, they may stumble upon interesting conversations between the Watcher's sisters. The clones speak to each other in a coded language taken from ALLMOTHER's poetry: for example, "hair to hair" means that each clone is born from Iris's hair. Each is a walking acolyte, ready to present their interpretation of a line of poetry or the selfless acts of their god.

Or some are just willing to slack off or kiss one of their crushes. Everyone may be a clone of Iris, but there are mutations that set them apart. This society of clones is not as cohesive as one would imagine.

Each clone is also assigned a function and then color-coded accordingly: the Fixer and anyone who are wearing green are good at tech, the Knower and her followers are dressed in purple and archive knowledge of human history, the Healer and her students in green birth new clones, Bang Bang Fire and the orange soldiers she trains do drills to protect the Orchard from the Occupants, and the Watcher is clothed in blue and tasked with observing her surroundings.

Everyone ultimately follows the orders of the red Principal. She is closest to ALLMOTHER, and whispers from other clones suggest that she often sleepwalks, muttering to herself about ALLMOTHER.

This hierarchical structure resembles the Platonic ideal of structures idealized by vulgar Confucianism: people know their place in a community and are able to be filial to authority figures, especially to their elders and superiors. Mothers know best: let them decide on what their younger and inexperienced daughters should do.

Did Iris knowingly recreate the patriarchal societies of Han Chinese communities in order to create a matriarchy? It's hard to tell what her intention was at the beginning of the game since she also suffered in her own family and I was just wondering if this was the devs' attempt to allegorize Chinese communities. I put it aside for now.

But regardless, I knew there would always be expressions of doubt and frustration toward authority figures. Whenever contradictions between the official narrative and what people are experiencing emerge, people get angry when their perspectives are denied. And it doesn't help that factional tensions could introduce new complications because they have different visions of what serving ALLMOTHER should look like.

Yet, they all work together -- sister by sister -- to please ALLMOTHER. Iris could be abusive and had the right to beat her daughters up, but working for her made sense: everyone would stop bickering with each other and work together for the common good.

But the player knows better: the first thing they see in the game is Watcher stabbing ALLMOTHER with a shard before they have movement control of their avatar. This is an inescapable conclusion that comes sooner than I expected. I understood why Watcher killed ALLMOTHER because I had already seen Iris's memories: I laughed at her self-deprecating remarks, like how she had a "resting bitch face," but I also couldn't stand how she mistreated Jiao who was her closest friend.

Her disgust with Jiao went beyond what I expected, especially when Jiao copied everything from her. When Jiao dressed up and cut her hair to look like Iris, Iris snapped, unaware of the irony that she would be creating clones to save a dying human race. Jiao clearly saw Iris as a role model because Iris had survived the harsh, racist winters of Canada, and Jiao wanted to adapt. But there was no reciprocity beyond a few hollow words about how things might be better after high school: relations are strained, and it is only when Jiao is gone that Iris finally realizes how much she depended on her.

When Iris became the ALLMOTHER, I saw her as an authoritarian figure. It didn't matter if her loneliness was real; she was hurting her daughters, who in turn felt the need to hurt others. Many of her daughters begged for approval and she wouldn't budge. She could have de-escalated all the tension and bickering if she had bothered. I saw her as the core of all that was wrong with the clone society, and perhaps erasing her would help the society function better.

The violence felt right. I didn't see her murder as shocking anymore. I thought I was almost done with the game, and I ran through the stock phrases in my head to describe what the game was like.

But the game continued.

A cycle -- of what? -- resumes. The march of time parallels the time before. Everything seems to have changed, but the dynamics under the hood are still the same.

I realized that the game was never an allegory from the beginning. It was speculating on a future where Hong Kong had already been absorbed into China and everyone who had fought for its independence had fled. The violent imagery unlocked something in me as the protest imagery became more intense. Desperation coursed through the veins of the clones in the later chapters. They spoke words I've seen on social media in 2019: there was no escaping the references to sacrifice, police violence, and self-immolation. I felt the waterfall of suppressed thoughts about what it means to be Chinese in a post-2019 Hong Kong protest.

The game asked questions no one dared to ask. Too recently, we waved them away. It's a good thing our Discord friends only knew about the incident because of the Hearthstone thing. Imagine explaining how we all got here: you have to start with the fall of the Qing Dynasty, bring up Sun Yat-sen's promise to unite the Communists and Nationalists, lament the Chinese Civil War, and so on. And then, we can finally begin to explain the special and unique circumstances of Hong Kong and how it developed as a British colony before being handed over to China.

It was better to sweep it all under the carpet.

But after a certain point in this game, I saw Hong Kong in everything. The game even encouraged it. I was running through corridors that reminded me of the videos people shot as they ran away from the police. I saw an interrogation that followed the same premises as Gui Minhai's forced TV confessions. Whether the player is reliving memories of Iris and her parents or wandering through the hubs to find a purpose in life, the parallels are everywhere: ALLMOTHER looms over the horizon like China watching over Hong Kong's every move, the soldiers at Iris' school resemble the orange soldier clones patrolling the Orchard, and the game's mothers are unable to connect with their daughters. These aren't just parallels; they are the continuation of a trauma that never ceased and everyone is recreating the Hong Kong and China dynamic over and over again.

There was no going back: protesters and cops, clones and ALLMOTHER, Iris and Jiao. The memory of Hong Kong standing up to China echoes through time and space. When clones talk about burning themselves in protest, they are referring to the doctrine of Lam Chau, a scorched-earth policy born out of panic: the Umbrella Revolution of 2014 failed, so peaceful protest would not work against a China that ignored their cries -- people were now in a corner crying, "If we burn, you burn too."

1000xRESIST isn't interested in exploring the causes of the 2019 protests. Rather, it's interested in the emotions that fueled the violent protests and made them so bloody. It does not romanticize these protests, nor does it downplay the real desperation of the protesters against the government.

It just cries not only for Hong Kong, but for the people who still long for the city even after it's all gone.

Karen Cheung writes in The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir that "it is not Hong Kong that has died, but the imagination of the place we were promised in 1997". Even before the protests, the spaces she used to frequent were disappearing due to gentrification. Artists and movie stars were working for China, not Hong Kong. Cheung describes earlier in the book that

Hong Kong’s capitalism perpetuates an endless reproduction of wannabe oppressors, and with the help of government policies and Chinese money, we—consumers and residents and small-business owners and future landlords—devour ourselves until there is nothing left.

And yet, Hong Kong wanted a myth to define itself. Later in the book, Cheung speculates,

The creators of the myth ask: Who is it that perpetuated the idea of Hong Kong history being the development of a fishing village to an international city? The act of mythmaking, of creating an alternate history, is to assert sovereignty over your own story, when politically you’ve had no say over your own future at all—when the handover was forced onto you. The people of Hong Kong had been stripped of the right to self-determination, with no seat at the table when the negotiations for our fate took place. You are Asia’s world city, an international financial center, an inalienable part of China, the government tells us, the foreign press tells us, Beijing tells us. But if we cannot rewrite our origin story, can we at least reimagine our future?

This future would take the form of finding a way out of becoming "just another Chinese city," to use a common editorial phrase in newspapers and blogs. Flags of the United Kingdom and Colonial Hong Kong were waved in the 2019 storming of the Legislative Chamber. Hong Kong has a bit of Britain in it and their citizens are proud of it: I learned from conversations about the game with a Hong Kong friend that its law had more in common with British common law than with China's, and that its supreme courts still employ British judges. The colonial past was more acceptable than the state capitalist present.

This confuses me as someone whose grandparents suffered under colonialism. The angst they have to feel different, like how Iris hated Jiao dressing up as herself, is just so far from my own experience.

Nevertheless, this identity was always at stake. Cheung describes how, to a certain extent, Hong Kongers saw the city's decline as inevitable. The handover meant that Hong Kong would lose its individuality in fifty years' time, and the dread permeated the atmosphere. The 2019 protests were their last stand against China: they saw themselves as David against Goliath, but in retrospect it looked more like a suicide attack.

At the same time, they were proud of this impossible city they had helped to build. There was something precious in this metropolis that was worth preserving. People dreamed of the utopia known as Hong Kong, even though that dream had long since died. The 2019 protests were, in this light, one last rallying call to protect this dream. They fought SARS with their masks and they're fighting COVID and China with their masks on. China was just the Enemy of the Week. This fighting spirit is worth writing love letters for: Hong Kong has always defined itself against opposition and this is no different.

But 1000xRESIST wants to say something different: it eulogized the death of this once great city. Iris's parents are terrorized by the visions of Hong Kong; her father wants his ashes there while her mother says, "I dream of every night going back home. Haunted by a place that doesn't exist." Their daughter and the player's avatars replay the moving images of a city they've never seen before. This phantom, now a lost future, can bring comfort to those who seek it.

However, this yearning is a drug: Hong Kong was born out of questionable circumstances that would always lead to conflict between it and China. Hong Kong needs China to define itself, and China will always oppress Hong Kong. They are two mothers who loathe each other, just as Iris loathes her mother. In other words, Hong Kong needs an Other to say it isn't Chinese. This abusive relationship is how the dynamics of Hong Kong and China are made.

Iris is probably unaware that she longs for Hong Kong, but her unconscious longing after dealing with so much racist crap in Canada caused her to reproduce the violence when she tried to talk to Jiao or her daughters. She disciplines her daughters in the same way that her traumatized mother disciplined her. She can only emulate and teach the heritage she still remembers. She longs for a home that can truly accept her. But that home has vanished from the face of the earth.

So, Iris suffers. Her daughters suffer. They all suffer from their nostalgia for Hong Kong.

1000xRESIST is about the cycle of diasporic trauma, and that's something I'm not ready to hear about.

The trauma seeps into everything it touches: families, societies, politics, childhood, food, dreams, love, and so on. Everyone overseas wants to recreate their Hong Kong identity as much as possible, even if it means perpetuating the cycle of violence.

Near the end of the game, a character comments that humans are the worst piece of technology because they are "too capable of storing clutter [and] too desperate to hold onto things." If there is a true antagonist in the entire game, it is memory. Humans remember grudges and lost things far better than they are willing to forgive. Memory does not always provide catharsis -- it can instead entrench you further and further. Everyone in the game repeats events beat for beat, much like how the 85-track soundtrack repeats leitmotifs.

In a way, no one has left the city. They are still in the streets and subway stations fighting each other, only this time under a science fiction pretense. The memory of Hong Kong remains and this is how diasporic trauma reproduces itself, even for the people who don't remember it.

1000xRESIST seems to suggest that the listlessness of diasporic children like Iris and her daughters stems from a lack of belonging. They've tried their best to give themselves a sense of purpose by integrating further into their constructed society, but the community lacks an organic structure. Hong Kong is still too close to their hearts and they know whatever they built won't satiate their longing.

But the game fantasizes an ending for them: they must run away from the city they once called home. They have to pack what they can and leave if they want to change. No one can keep everything the same or the violence will continue. Some things have to be locked away.

When I was given the chance to do this for the characters in 1000xRESIST, I was overwhelmed. I had to erase memories and possibilities for a new future. That didn't feel right to me, not because I felt any kind of dissonance with the game's themes, but rather because I felt like the game was attacking my beliefs.

Since childhood, I have fantasized about the reunification of Chinese people around the world. We were all orphaned by our histories, but as China and Taiwan opened their doors to each other, we came into contact with relatives we thought had disappeared. My late grandfather in Jakarta met his younger brother in Taipei, and I remembered tasting local delicacies in Meizhou. I lived in Shenzhen and visited Hong Kong. It felt like we were all becoming one happy family, even though our history was full of bloodshed. We're finally regaining our sense of a Chinese community.

But incidents like the Hong Kong 2019 protests and the general aggression against Taiwan stopped my dreams. I still held onto the possibility that things could change for the better. It had to. Xi Jinping was just a bad apple clinging to power through machismo. The Hong Kongers have probably pushed too many buttons, but there must be a way to get the city back on track. We just had to wait for Xi to die and for someone better to lead the CCP.

So, I had to argue with the logic of the game. I didn't want to agree that what I wanted to do would perpetuate a kind of diasporic trauma, even though I also felt detached from the events in China. I just had to believe. I was still dreaming of Hong Kong in my own way. I saw Hong Kong as a place where we could all gather and eat yum cha together. Abandoning that possibility was too grim, too much for me.

And it was at that moment that I realized who the target audience of this game was, at least the audience that would be most receptive to its message. It certainly wasn't for Chinese Indonesians, but it also wasn't for Hong Kongers who were still fighting China on the ground. More tellingly, I don't think it's even for the diaspora and refugees directly affected by the 2019 protests. I imagine they are still too close to the events to take the game seriously.

This game is for their children, the generation that has not been born yet.

I reiterate: the 2019 protests are too recent for the game to be impossible for all of us to analyze. I don't think anyone, let alone me, can articulate what the game is trying to do because Hong Kong is still with us. Iris hasn't been born yet. We have to wait until 2047, when Iris is a high school student wondering what the hell Jiao wants from her, for the game to make sense.

This is a game for the Irises who will ask us why we are still haunted by the phantoms of Hong Kong and our continued failure to build a home. They will want answers as to why they cry for a city they never knew existed. They will be looking for a way out of this loop that we Chinese diaspora have created to trap ourselves.

1000xRESIST teaches them how to run away from home and become independent from our traumas. They must learn to resist a thousand times our dreams and hopes if they are to carve out a better future for themselves. They must pack up what they need and leave. They must choose their ending.

As for me, I wonder what I should say when I see my 1-year-old niece, who may become an Iris in the future, questioning the premises of my diasporic trauma. Will I be like my parents, who told me to remember our heritage even though I didn't care one bit about what they were saying? What if she reads my post about the game and argues with my reluctance to accept the game's message? If she told me I was ancient history, I'd probably have to agree.

It's difficult for me to accept the game's conclusions: Hong Kong was a symbol for me, even though I know better. I cannot fight the irrational part of the brain. I wanted Hong Kong to somehow overcome China, even though I know it's impossible.

Writing this essay has made me rethink how I view my diasporic perspective. I don't expect most people, especially non-diasporic people, to understand my struggle, and that's okay. I wanted to navigate my feelings about being a member of a diaspora and what it means to give up the dream of returning to one's motherland.

And there is no shame in seeking recognition from a motherland (or actual mothers). There might even be degrees: not all diasporas and refugees have to follow the same standard this game gives, depending on the circumstances.[^1] I think for Chinese diasporas, we want to be loved, understood, and accepted by the people who gave us birth. The desire to return to our homelands is understandable, but it should not be not at the expense of the children who will replace us.

Not to mention that I think Confucianism and our upbringing often stress children to remember, to revere our traditions, and to memorize our historical traumas. It's still important for them to learn a bit about our history, but this game reflects how they can inherit our traumas. I wish I knew how to balance our priorities for this.

1000xRESIST is hard to write about. I can think of more things to say, but it will never feel complete or satisfying. I am not ready to talk about this game yet. All the conversations I have with Hong Kongers, Chinese people, and players are not enough. It's too visceral, it reopens many troubling lines of inquiry, and it leaves me with a visible gash in my chest. It hurts.

And that's why I think people, especially Chinese and Hong Kong diasporas, should play it. We need to remember the heartache in order to prepare ourselves for when our children ask us, "Why did it have to be this way?" Whatever answer we give, we have to realize that what they will arrive at is an answer they will have to create out of our answers.

This is their story, not ours. They can decide how they want to leave Hong Kong and China. I trust them to find a satisfactory answer.

[^1]: Initially, I didn't want to bring up how articles about the game often bring up the current Palestine protests as a common corollary. It makes sense for writers to ground readers in something more familiar to them. That said, I don't think the message (as I interpreted it) would apply to survivors of settler colonialism. The brutality of Israel and the displacement of Palestinians are not comparable to China and Hong Kong, even though both examples are violent. While Palestinians abroad might be considered a diaspora, I don't think they would resonate with this game's message to the Chinese diaspora to pack up and leave. Even if one agrees with the message of the game, Palestinians should get their homes back. Diasporas have unique needs and problems. This is a pretty important distinction that I hope more writers who want to bring up Palestine when talking about this game will respect.

Mass Effect 1 is not fun. It is not innovative. It is not interesting. It sucks at everything it sets out to do. It is Content.

2024-05-05T00:00:00Z

This game is a war crime in the history of narrative design. This game is a black hole of money and talent. This game is the antithesis of video games.

I was promised something big.

I don't play AAA video games that much, but I do play them when I want to chill out and get lost in the spectacle. I enjoyed the Arkham trilogy and was impressed by how they intertwined the cinematic sequences with the game mechanics to create a complex portrait of Batman. I loved Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which recreated my childhood memories in a big and beautiful playground. While I'm skeptical of corporations, I respect the money that goes into creating lush and vibrant worlds with interesting gameplay that enhances the story.

I think AAA games, for better or worse, understand that their almost infinite budgets can create unique scenarios where the level of interactivity is matched with high fidelity graphics and polished gameplay. Sure, there are independent games that allow for deep player expression, but seeing your actions affect the high-resolution models of the world and your character is extremely evocative. There are text adventure games where you can choose how to dress, but it doesn't feel as meaningful as a character creation screen with 4K graphics.

AAA games justify their bloat by becoming great blockbusters. They want you to feel comfortable and engaged while you eat your popcorn and go wow. You stop thinking about the world outside the screen and, for a little while, you indulge in escapism.

I wasn't able to do that with Mass Effect 1.

The game begins with your protagonist who is already considered a war hero. Humans and aliens, even the haters, admire them. Everyone talks about how incredible they are on the field and that's why they're getting nominated to the Specter position. Your character stands on a pedestal without any interaction.

This bothered me because I hadn't even gotten familiar with my protagonist and now I'm told that they're a coveted figure in the cosmos. I felt detached from my avatar. I was supposed to roleplay as Shepard, but I didn't know who they were, and the choices didn't reflect my own thought processes.

The game lost me even more when Jenkins, a kid who wants to see some action, got shot. It was strange that the narrative assumed I cared about him, especially after the mission was over. Indeed, the many deaths and sacrifices that appeared on screen were given so much gravitas that I thought I should've cared as a player. I felt like I was missing something that made me care about the characters, and it's entirely possible that I did, but I kept thinking that I wasn't interacting with the game mechanics in any meaningful way outside of combat.

Speaking of which, there are very few tutorials in the game: you get a couple discussing combat and the map, and that's about it. I didn't understand how equipment or upgrades worked. The Mako (everyone's favorite vehicle) doesn't even get tooltips explaining the key inputs, and it took me seven hours to figure out that it can shoot cannons.

All of this made me feel like the game was not interested in what the player thought about its systems. It seemed to expect you to steamroll through the game, no questions asked. These finicky mechanics are certainly important on higher difficulties, but they don't seem necessary to complete the game on standard difficulties. It makes me wonder why the game even has so many mechanics if the player can just ignore them.

And ignore, I did.

Paradoxically, this made the game more responsive. The game's UI is extremely clumsy because it's trying to reinvent how menu screens work. Mass Effect 1 wanted to redefine how players interacted with everything from dialog to tactics to menus because everyone was talking a lot about how we had to start from scratch around that period.

What this usually means is that the left analog will point the cursor to the option you want to select. Once the novelty wore off (that is, a few seconds later), I realized that this was more effort than scrolling down a list of choices; it reminded me of the Metaverse VR crap that didn't take off because people found it easier to type text into the address bar and use the mouse to add items to their shopping cart than to gesticulate a million ways to do the same thing.

This creates profound problems for Bioware, a studio known for hiding delicious world-building details in dialog screens. They can't list, say, eight text options on that puny dialog screen (four is possible but stretching it), so they have to hide the rest in the bland and unremarkable "Investigate" option.

If you're interested in a character's life history or the cultural history of alien species, you'll have to get used to selecting "Investigate" and choosing your option there. After your interlocutor speaks, you will be booted to the root of the dialog tree and have to navigate back to "Investigate". The first few times are irritating, but imagine wanting to know about every alien and human NPC out there: you'll probably want shortcuts if you don't hate your thumb.

So, contrary to my love of NPC dialogue, I stopped talking to almost everyone who wasn't relevant to the main plot. It's a shame since some of the most colorful dialog were hidden in the recesses of some dialog tree. Using this tedious dialog wheel was just a chore.

Wasn't the promise of blockbuster media supposed to give me a reprieve from the real world? Why was I thinking of ways to avoid dialogue when that was supposed to be the appeal of an RPG?

Why would anyone find this game fun?

This was the question that kept running through my mind as I progressed through the game.

Aiming guns in this game doesn't feel good, whether I'm playing with a controller or a mouse. Simply aiming the reticle at an enemy isn't enough as each weapon has an ambiguous accuracy rating. None of the weapons feel great to use either: the assault rifle is flaky and goes all over the place, the shotgun doesn't do enough damage, and the sniper rifle isn't always accurate because of the RPG mechanics. The pistol turns out to be the most reliable weapon in the whole game because the recoil isn't bad and you can shoot it repeatedly without overheating.

However, it is much better to instruct your party members to use their skills to destroy enemies by going to the Tactics screen and pausing the game ala Baldur's Gate. The game never explains tactics (why would it explain an essential mechanic?) nor does it feel responsive to target enemies with said skills.

I reluctantly lowered the combat difficulty to easy because I just didn't find the combat engaging, and I certainly didn't find running through the same bland copypaste corridors with the same cover interesting. The game also rarely autosaves: it only does so for some story content and when entering a new map screen, so I wasted several minutes on sidequests. I was so put off by the stinginess of the autosaves that I stopped doing sidequests altogether -- another example of how ignoring the game makes it run smoother.

I also stopped searching for treasure chests because the loot they gave me was trash. I was supposed to get better weapons and armor (you get vertical progression in the game through equipment), but the quality was so random that as soon as I got equipment that felt tolerable to me, I stopped. I ignored obvious branching paths that pointed to treasure and beelined to the goal.

The more I played this game and the more I was told that my character was a hero, the less I felt like a hero. When my player character took the helm of the ship, I groaned when I saw the galaxy map littered with planets that you could never visit (you could read ChatGPT-style entries about those places instead!!!), and all I wanted to do was access the relevant areas. When I saved a colony from the antagonists, I felt hollow because the one colonist who hated you now appreciated you, and I realized the character was designed to pander to you. When I convinced my buddy Wrex to put down the gun, I felt depressed because he learned that the antagonist had found a cure for the virus the Council used to prevent his race from overpopulating, and all I could do was tell him he was wrong.

I just didn't understand who my character was anymore. What was I even playing? I thought I was supposed to be a space cop, not a visitor to the worst theme park of all kind. Even playing a rogue cop who kills terrorists didn't help me deal with the dissonance. And I can't imagine that most people, even fans of the series, wanted the game to be this way.

Who was this meant for?

I tried to understand Mass Effect 1 as a game, but I couldn't.

And I don't believe it recognizes it's a game either. It has no interest in making itself playable, let alone being fun. Instead, I realized what the game was when I reached the ending of the game.

I took down the big baddie of the game in the midst of a 9/11 allegory. I could decide the fate of the Council and I was surprised that I could do this. I picked to let the Council die and the game showed their demise.

I looked at the screen in dismay. The Council was the organization the game had been building up to all this time: I became familiar with their antics, they were the gatekeepers of galactic politics, and they were my player character's superiors. But I, the player, chose to end their lives.

Someone has told me this is simply a cosmetic choice in the future games, but it doesn't matter for me right now. What's important to me is that I could just wipe out an entire political system with one flimsy choice.

I could bring up how stupid the Conduit reveal was, how generic the alien worlds you visit are, how the self-insert writing would be laughed out of Narou, how the plot can be summed up as "Thanos just appeared at the end and we need to fight him", and so many countless crap. But the fact that I could just bend a well-defined setting to my will was the most egregious sin the game ever committed: it meant that nothing mattered because the world revolves around me, the player.

I wasn't playing a video game. I was playing Mad Libs. I didn't have to worry about gameplay systems or dialogue because Mass Effect 1 had one goal in mind: to give the player free rein. It's more than happy to let players abandon worldbuilding details, gameplay mechanics, and flavor text because it's so pandering to the player that it's happy to lose its own identity as a game. When I ignored much of the game, that's Mass Effect 1 working as intended: it doesn't penalize you for not reading the codex or exploring optional locations because the most important aspect of the setting is you, Shepard. As long as the game doesn't stop focusing on you, everything is on the table.

You control Mass Effect. You make Mass Effect work or not work. It's your Mass Effect.

It's your Content.

I don't play games to experience some higher artistic purpose. I certainly don't make them because I have an artistic statement to make.

If anything, my interest in games comes from the simple desire to see my interactions set off a chain of reactions that change the state of the game. There's something beautiful about seeing the game respond to your actions, whether it's a boss being combo-ed by your character or the click of a switch in a hardcore puzzle game.

I am particularly fascinated by the possibilities of narrative design because you guide the story as the story guides you. It makes sense to design systems that allow that interaction to flow smoothly or be interrupted to create new feelings. When a visual novel makes good use of auto-read and unfolds new CGs in a pivotal section, I applaud the developers for pulling it off.

But Mass Effect 1 doesn't want that. It wants to please the player by letting them dictate what is important in the game -- in other words, it wants the player to be its narrative designer. The developers have relieved themselves of the responsibility of designing the narrative and that means allowing the gameplay to be optional.

I know I'm being unfair to the game, so I must give it credit for doing something that critics, fans, and commentators have neglected to mention: it has pioneered what it means to be content fodder.

Mass Effect 1 is designed like those video essays that turn out to be summaries of movies and video games. You feel like you're experiencing something, but you aren't. You're just swimming through the canals and sewers of Content.

And you know what? Mass Effect 1 is really good at that. It's the perfect embodiment of wasting time and that's what the game market wants right now: a good old-fashioned piece of luxury commodity with none of that artful stuff.

some thoughts on I Won't Finish This Game

2024-04-20T00:00:00Z

(CW: suicide and game dev trauma)

i won't finish this game is an "incomplete" game: it lacks menu graphics, GUI, music, and all the other components you would expect from a visual novel. And the narration lampshades that in the very beginning. We are thus introduced to the narrator, a game developer who -- for many personal reasons unknown to us -- cannot complete a game.

Instead, they hear the voices of their more successful peers: sending funny pictures of cats while showing off their game progress. Their developer friends have large followings and often receive encouraging comments. The narrator is clearly jealous of their friends, but they are also supportive of the work, making sure to leave comments and good ratings. In the eyes of the friends, the narrator is a supportive person who is going to make a cool game someday. But in their own perspective, that is not the case.

I found this narration effective because I've been there myself. It's easy to see myself as a failure, as someone who cannot complete games. I know that my envy toward friends are misplaced and I can't shake it. The first half of the game is the narrator questioning their own interpersonal feelings and how they feel they are a burden to their friends; that's a feeling I'm all too familiar with as I watch my friends succeed in their careers while I feel like I haven't done anything all that incredible. It's a touching essay about how jealousy manifests itself in strange ways, making people feel suicidal and depressed, even though they should be happy for their friends.

But the game becomes more compelling when the narrator learns about a visual novel with high production values released on a game jam. Unlike this visual novel, it has a slick GUI, music, voice acting, and much more. There is clearly a lot of effort put into the title -- and yet, the story is manipulative: it kills off a character with a flimsy suicide excuse or has the player character murder them, and the game asks the player to create burner accounts and TikToks to get the game 5,000 ratings on itch.io if they want to see their favorite character live.[^1]

It's tasteless, and that may be why it's so effective at getting people to play the game. People are shocked by the game and are "moved" to save this character because the character is being held hostage by the author and there is a small chance that they can save the character. The narrator is confused and angry that people are reacting to this game with awe and shock: How could a team with so much money and talent make something so sleazy and offensive, and still be rewarded for their shitty efforts?

Very few visual novels, let alone an incomplete title, will ever be able to match the viral success of a suicide-baiting title. A game that explores suicide in a nuanced and empathetic way will never be as popular as a title that uses suicide as shock and does all the "good game design"-isms. It's a grim thought that I unfortunately have no idea how to respond.

But for the narrator of i won't finish this game, there is an answer: a commitment to never finish a game. If finishing a game results in a title that disrespects the lived experience of suicidal people, then so be it: they'll never finish the game, and that's why we have this game in this form factor.

The game comes from a real source of frustration with oneself and the unfairness of indie/underground game development. We are often told that working for the corpos is akin to losing your soul, but when someone can make such a tasteless title for a visual novel jam, all bets are off. After all, a game is a game -- it is a commodity made to entertain people. No wonder someone decided to make something that relies on cheap, manipulative storytelling tricks that hurt people who then want more from the game. After all, audiences are consumers, even in a non-paying environment. Who cares if said consumers are people who think about suicide? In a marketplace of games, the audience is simply a mass that should keep giving them clicks and money. A classic case of supply and demand, not some mysterious need to make interesting games that care about and respect people. The meritocratic underground game scene is susceptible to the same capitalism woes as AAA gaming is.

Hence, the radical answer: "i won't finish this game."

It is radical because it is disappointing. The statement rejects success and completion as a goal and paradoxically becomes more "complete" and meaningful. While the narrator finds solace in suicide as a rejection of life, perhaps the real solace is in rejecting the need to complete games and compare oneself to other successful people. I see this determination to reject games as a way of rejecting the commodity and trying to find something more beautiful and interesting.

I found this title powerful for that reason. I'm not sure what the author's message is, but as someone who wrote the main scenario for a visual novel about game developer trauma and the meaninglessness of making visual novels, it resonated with me. For a long time, I was unsure of the point of making games that people ordered me to make. I was supposed to feel success, but I felt nothing. In my delusions, I would see the underground game space as a place to escape to, but I know that's not true at all. No matter where I go, I know I'll be looking at the analytics page and comparing my stats to other people's. The one solo dev game that was successful horrified me because I saw it as a failure and everyone said it was beautiful. Is this what being a successful game dev is like? I was stuck in a rut, and the world of "artistic" expression around me felt hollow. In a word, alienation. This game, from the perspective of someone who has completed several games, feels like a concise, effective, and subversive summation of my experiences in the itch.io space.

And very few people will bother to download this incomplete game. Instead, more people will play other titles that use cheap spectacle, predatory mechanics, and abusive parasocial dynamics to keep players engaged.

https://naarel.itch.io/i-wont-finish-this-game

I don't want to be a part of this churning. I don't know if I have the strength to stop making games because it's the only thing that keeps me sane in this world, but this title reminds me that it doesn't matter if the games I make are incomplete. If success means so little, then I should be able to make subversive titles that are flawed in people's eyes. The envy we all feel for successful projects may feel wrong (and it usually does), but there are times when we should accept that it's okay to be spiteful.

It's fine to never finish a game if success still means exploitation.

[^1]: This game is real, by the way. I am not naming the game because that would be pretty disrespectful to the author of i won't finish this game.

To the Moon is a mess I wanted to love but was instead hurt by

2024-04-15T00:00:00Z

Blog Post

This post will discuss topics on autism, ableism, and other adjacent subject matter. And there's going to be spoilers because there's really no way to go around it.

How I Learned of the Game

To the Moon is a groundbreaking RPG Maker XP game. As a commercial title, it predates titles like Dear Esther by focusing on narrative and dialog. It deals with autism at a time when the term was used to denigrate people who were different. And it may be one of the earliest games I know that uses the term "neurotypical".

I've known about this game since it came out in 2011, but I kept putting it off because I wasn't that interested in what was being marketed as artistic and important in this era of Premium Indie Games. That all changed when I saw this still excellent video from Questing Refuge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znWjY70dAA4

The argument is simple: even though we have more media focusing on autistic characters these days, To the Moon somehow still hits. They make a clear case that the game is impressive because it features a late-diagnosed autistic woman (still deeply underrepresented) who doesn't have any kind of savant-like abilities; it also features another autistic character who is different from the main autistic character. The game also challenges the premise of manic pixie dream girls while addressing real-world issues. This all sounds appealing to me, especially as someone who is dating a late-diagnosed autistic partner and is also the uncle of a non-verbal autistic nephew.

It's the kind of work I'd like to read about because there's never enough good information about autistic people. For better or worse, I went into it with slightly higher expectations because it's such a well-received work and it was highly praised by a very cool autistic parent video essayist I follow. I also streamed the game to my partner because I knew it was a short game that they might be interested in.

Narrative Game Design Before Narrative Games

You follow two scientists/engineers who are contracted to manipulate the memories of Johnny, a dying man, to fulfill his wish of going to the moon. To make this happen, they have to go into the recesses of his childhood memories, implant the desire there, and make him "relive" his life where he could finally fly to the moon before he dies. It was such an odd premise that my partner quipped that they could see the ethical implications on the horizon.

Nevertheless, I find the premise working well with the RPG Maker engine. To get deeper into his childhood memories, you must guide the scientists to find objects that create enough memory links to find the one symbolic object that will allow them to traverse to an earlier part of his memories. Most interestingly, the game never explains that this is what you have to do. You learn it through the techno-babble tooltips and just by interacting with the world. I thought this was quite effective because it made me feel like I was connected to the scientists who were exploring the psychological worlds of Johnny while giving him a memorable personality. We learn that he's very fond of pickled olives, an object that one of the scientists finds disgusting for some reason.

Each memory is also full of original assets, so locations have their own distinctive feel to it and nothing feels recycled. I was surprised by the mansion and town fair maps in particular. The maps are also quite small; you'll never get lost in these places, but they're also large enough to function as visualized and interactive memories.

That said, assets are probably too detailed compared to other RPG Maker XP games since there is no yellow paint to indicate what is an interactable object and what isn't. But the few moments where I was temporarily stuck didn't matter too much. There is one part that sticks with me though: in the therapist memory, you have to stand on a certain spot on the couch in order to get the McGuffin to advance the game state. I think the intent is that it's a spot where Johnny is anxiously sitting for their turn, but I found this vague and questionable.

In most cases, the game has very recognizable objects and intuitive places that make a lot of sense as to why Johnny would find significant meaning in them. It's rewarding to make educated guesses and get one step closer to understanding what's going on with Johnny.

River and Johnny

But Johnny is not really the main star of the game. As we delve into his world, we learn that his life revolves around River, his spouse. She is the main reason why people remember this game so fondly and why autistic people find her portrayal so meaningful. However, she's also a mystery to the avatars we control and even to the person she's married to.

Before the scientists jump into their memories, you can take control and explore the mansion with the caretaker's children. There are many origami paper rabbits in the basement. In the lighthouse, we also find a multicolored paper rabbit. There are also several photos in the bedroom, including one of a strange animal (later revealed to be a platypus). All of this seems strange to everyone (and to the player as it keeps adding some jumpscare-like BGM).

The game doesn't hide who made the paper rabbits: in a few minutes of gameplay, we learn that they were all made by River. As we enter the memory where she begins to fold the paper bunnies, she interrogates Johnny, asking him what he thinks of the paper bunny. Johnny responds by describing the quality of the paper and the color of the rabbit. And she continues to fold rabbits in silence.

Past memories continue to tease the tension between what should have been a loving couple. Johnny doesn't understand the person he's married to and asks Isabelle, an autistic friend of the couple, to explain to him why she acts the way she does. In the therapist's memory where River is officially diagnosed as autistic, Johnny refuses to read the book about the condition. And in one of his earliest childhood memories, he admits to a friend that his interest in River is that she's different and strange, completely removed from his typical life. Perhaps, being close to her will help him find a different life altogether.

This was all fascinating to my partner and me. We were initially concerned about the game's treatment of River as an enigma; however, the game -- especially with the introduction of Isabelle -- shows that the game's framing comes from Johnny's neurotypical fetishization of autistic people. He may have loved River and he at least tries to give her space by following the therapist’s recommendation to do equine-assisted therapy, but he doesn't seem to care about how she thinks. When she asks him about his old obsession with Animorphs and why he left the books in the boxes, he says he's grown out of it and seems confused that River would ask that. It's such an interesting exchange because it subtly shows the difference between the two characters: River cherishes childhood memories while Johnny neglects them. It also works as a microcosm of their relationship because Johnny, like other neurotypicals, is more interested in the big picture while River is fixated on the specific. There is a distance between them, and we found it very compelling that the game touches on that.

It is obvious that Johnny regrets what he did to River. His reluctance to empathize with her made their relationship shaky, and his desire to go to the moon is clearly related to finding a way to reach her. But that seems like a lost cause: she died before he did, and he still doesn't know what she means by the symbolism of paper rabbits and lighthouses. He will die an unhappy man, unsure of what River wants from him and what he really wants.

Unethical and Unfunny Implications

This is where Sigmund Corp. comes into play. To the Moon is the first episode of a series of games depicting the scientists and engineers creating artificial memories by manipulating old childhood memories and the unethical implications of doing so. The premise is definitely fascinating and creates interesting conundrums for the player and characters.

However, this premise isn't explored in To the Moon itself and for a long time, it was the only game in the series. It also didn't help that we have to control two very unlikable avatars who seem like they're from the worst sprite webcomics imaginable.

Dr. Eva Roselene and Dr. Neil Watts are not very good characters, and they are a symptom of the game's larger problem: its humor. I've put these two characters on the backburner for a long time because I don't think any of their dialog is really relevant to the story -- if anything, it's detrimental to the game.

I can see where the writers are coming from. This is supposed to be a series, so it makes sense that the characters we follow have strong personalities who then struggle with their ethical code as they continue to do this job. This is especially clear when they agree with the player that Johnny is kind of an ass and they aren't sure how making him an astronaut will clear his abuse toward River.

However, they also make jokes like this:

Instead of acting like professionals with a little history, they act more like high school students role-playing how business colleagues should act. They bicker for too long, make so many wisecracking jokes, and are so generally disrespectful to each other that you want them to shut up. Their dynamic is so fundamentally hostile that the few times the player would agree with them about the situation feels like a mistake.

I find their appearance intrusive to the atmosphere of To the Moon. Actual moments of emotional resonance are ruined by Eva telling Neil not to say what he is about to say, or Neil shouting hadouken. I understand that the comedy is a product of its time, but it's extremely difficult to ignore when it's sometimes the punchline to an emotionally effective scene. They don't strike me as people who are willing to grasp the unethical underpinnings of their work at all.

Beta Blockers, Memory Loss, and Twin Brothers

Even though the protagonists were obnoxious, my partner and I were willing to ignore them as much as possible because we found the game very interesting. Unfortunately, when we started the game, we entered the second half of the game and found ourselves disgusted and even harmed by it.

Eva and Neil discovered that they couldn't get to Johnny's earliest memories, and that's quite a problem because they can't make him realize his dreams of being an astronaut with what they have. No matter how much mischief they have caused, nothing has changed his circumstances.

While Eva ponders the meaning of River to Johnny, Neil calls his office only to discover that Johnny has been taking beta blockers, which are associated with memory loss in people with cognitive disabilities. I thought this was a rather contrived plot device as you could say that Johnny is taking them to deal with his traumatic experience to be discussed soon, but it's the kind of thing that people in this business should already know.

We finally enter the first of three blocked memories where we learn that Johnny had a twin brother named Joey, and that the boy was hit by their mother's car. This explains why his mother keeps calling Johnny "Joey" because she has, in the wise words of Eva, "gone cuckoo." It also turns out that Joey was the one who was into Animorphs, not Johnny. And finally, we come to the earliest memory, which takes place at a town fair: Johnny wanders away from the fair and looks up at the stars; a young River approaches and says he's taken her place, and they both look at the stars (described by River as lonely lighthouses) and promise each other that if they don't find each other, they'll regroup at the moon.

I'm not sure I like this sentimental direction, because it suggests that

1) The reason Johnny became obsessed with the need to feel different is because he had an inferiority complex about his deceased twin brother. This over-explains a very common feeling neurotypicals have toward neurodivergent people since it absolves them of responsibility for learning to empathize with them.

2) It cheapens River's struggle to be understood. She wants Johnny to remember their childhood together, and that's fine. The paper rabbits come from him describing the rabbit-like shapes in the moon and she wants him to recall that, but the beta blockers serve as a very convenient explanation for why Johnny can't remember. It throws away the whole "neurotypicals forget the details while neurodivergent people are sensitive to them" dynamic so that Johnny can look like a redeemable figure. See, he didn't choose to forget -- it was this one plot device that made him forget.

But the game takes an even more bizarre step: Eva suddenly realizes that she has to "move" River into Johnny's memories if they are to fulfill the contract to deliver him to the moon. Neil doesn't want that, so we enter an epic RPG Maker horror-style gameplay segment where we have to dodge zombie Evas and spike with epic music blaring in the background. Despite all this, Eva has disappeared during the fateful encounter between River and Johnny while leaving Joey alive. Eva assures Neil that she trusts River to do the right thing.

We then get a montage of old memories with River being rewritten to the tune of some boring vocal interlude, and Johnny joining NASA. After we do the basic gameplay loop for the last time, Eva hesitates, wondering if she will come. Johnny is now ready to be an astronaut -- and then he is introduced to his astronaut partner, River.

The game ends with the player characters watching the rocket fly to the moon from a bridge. Both Johnny and River are on the rocket, of course, and we see flashes of them getting married under the lighthouse and so on.

The end. A happy ending for Johnny and a good job well done for our protagonists. And the game lets you know that there are sequels to this game. I immediately uninstalled the game and my partner and I groaned in pain from the entire endgame sequence. It might be one of the worst endings I've ever experienced because it actively hurt us.

What We Took Away From the Ending

I know our interpretation will be quite controversial for people who know the series and those who found meaning in the game. I'm not going to deny those readings because we certainly lack the context of the series, but I think it's too hard to ignore what the game did to River as a character and how the game seemed okay with it.

Everyone agrees that the ending is about rewriting Johnny's memories to fulfill a rather shallow wish. I think there are two main camps for reading this ending:

1) The cathartic bittersweet read: even though it is shallow, it is still somewhat fulfilling because it respects the wishes of everyone involved. My partner and I saw this as the goal of the ending.

2) The black-pilled nihilistic read: Nothing was accomplished except to satisfy Johnny's own ego. Many people, often people familiar with the series, have this reading.

I would prefer to read the game in 2), and it seems the series was headed in that direction. A friend of mine said that the first minisode explicitly addresses the dilemmas of the setting, which makes this reading very useful in the long run. It's also lampshaded by Neil who says that it's fucked up to remove someone so important to him just so he can go to the moon.

But without further context, I don't really have any reason to read it as 2). There are a few reasons why:

The presentation, especially the montage, is pretty saccharine and wants you to sniffle at the moments in which River disappears.
The climax depends entirely on Eva not explaining her actions to Neil and instead keeping the player guessing about her intentions. She often mentions how much she trusts River.
River actually meets Neil at NASA, and it's presented as a nice reunion.
And finally, no one really comments on how bizarre this is. Everyone seems satisfied with the way the plot of the game resolves itself and the characters move on to their next job.

I can easily believe that the writers are actually trying to do 2), but I think the 1) interpretation is just too strong. And I think this is how most people who write about To the Moon saw the game when it first came out: people were crying about this relationship being given new life, not getting depressed about how fucked up it is.

And I really hate the 1) ending because it downplays River's struggles and gives Johnny a get-out-of-jail-free card. It lets Johnny die a happy person and everyone is just fine with that. It's not just an unsatisfying ending, it's a deeply offensive and hurtful one.

Conclusion: Maybe, Sentimental Endings Suck

I don't want to hate this work. There have been much worse mainstream works that have portrayed autism and have worsened our understanding of it. To the Moon came from a real source of compassion for neurodivergent people and their diversity. There are educational aspects that remain timeless and while the humor hasn't aged well, the gameplay loop is engaging.

It's objectively a good narrative game worth studying by game designers and storytellers interested in narrative games and representations of neurodiversity.

The ending, however, sucks ass. It dilutes the complex relationships between neurotypicals and neurodivergent people for cheap emotional spectacle without fully committing to its setting and ideas. The first two hours made for a flawed gem of an experience, the last two hours a painful and frustrating one for my partner and me.

Ultimately, I see the game as an interesting, if hurtful, work of historical importance. At the very least, the errors I've identified mean that it's something I can explore in my own writings. I don't regret playing the game nor do I want to erase my memories of it.

I just want to remember the pain, so I can hopefully make something more meaningful than To the Moon.

A NonStories Non-Analysis

2024-03-22T00:00:00Z

NonStories is a 110 hour roleplaying game about roleplaying game narratives.

Setting the Stage

NonStories takes place in a fantasy world where a human kingdom stands alone in a continent full of monsters and demons. Adventurers seek glory and treasure through doors to other worlds while politicians rot in their seats, ignoring the suffering of the lower classes and believing that might makes right. Magic seems to exist but only in limited quantities and to specific people. Everyone has to depend on themselves in this cutthroat life, and that seems to be the only narrative people can lead.

Our protagonist is Seiji (聖二) who lives by this code. His greatest strength is also his greatest weakness: he cannot go beyond his pragmatism. He and his childhood friend Shizuku (雫) work odd jobs for the Siegfried family who are invested in the efforts of a weak but noble liberation army trying to defeat the local mob group, the Thousand. Although Seiji knows that he would be directly affected by the outcome, he is most interested in getting his money's worth. After all, heroism doesn't pay the bills.

However, this all changed when he encountered the assassin Angetsu (闇月) who gained a deadly interest in Shizuku. He becomes aware of his vulnerability, the fact that he might lose someone he treasures, and more. Seiji wants to climb the social ladder, so he can get Shizuku to safety. He cannot rest until he knows Angetsu and her higher-ups, the Renmei (連盟), are nowhere near her.

This is a story of everyday people fighting against the power elite. A tale where the good nobles side with the lower class against the dying power brokers clinging to their power. A narrative that the good wins against evil.

It's not the story NonStories wants to tell.

Setting the Stage, Again

But our protagonist, Setsuna (刹那), isn't interested in following the status quo. When she hears someone calling for help, she wants to be there to listen. She doesn't know everything -- all her knowledge comes from the books she happens to have read -- but she will beat up evildoers and gods to save people. Koto (古都), an agent related to the Renmei, is annoyed that Setsuna is an uncompromising Samaritan who cares little for herself. In fact, she shouldn't be alive in this dog-eat-dog society. Setsuna is so much of an anomaly that the world notices her and begins to threaten her safety.

But she helps the poor and needy because the world is full of weak, weak people. People are drawn to her because she accepts people, monsters, and more without judgment. It's hard to know if she does it out of compassion or empathy; she seems to view helping the needy as a duty and nothing else. Nevertheless, her actions attract people and demihumans to join her party against the forces of evil.

This is a story of heroes who risked their lives to save mankind from destruction. A tale of adventure and bravery. A narrative of good overcoming evil.

It's not the story NonStories wants to tell.

Setting the Stage, Again and Again...

NonStories takes place in a fantasy world where a human kingdom stands alone in a continent full of monsters and demons...

What is the Story of NonStories?

Describing NonStories is like describing an obsession with storytelling: there are infinite possibilities in storytelling, but the plausibility of rare events like deus ex machina endings is so minuscule that it often feels pointless to bring it up -- and yet we fight against it, wanting to see those rare and perfect happy endings. The inner critic in all of us wants fair, challenging stories, but its real guilty pleasure is looking for a story that cheats the rules of storytelling and gives every character we love a wonderful, utopian ending.

This paradox is explored in NonStories and its predecessor, UnExist. Both games scoff at the niceties of conventional video game storytelling as a limitation on the infinite possibilities out there in order to tell an interesting narrative. These games want a way out, but what would that exit look like?

In the case of NonStories, the game builds a vibrant world full of different factions, teams, and alliances to explore the many stories everyone leads. Whenever you start a new turn, you can choose from a list of different missions. Your characters can use physical or magical attacks, but both types consume a currency (BP for the former, MP for the latter) that can only be replenished through expensive items or by landing on certain tiles. Let's not forget that higher-tier magic can be interrupted by physical attacks (this applies to you and the enemies). Hence, the longer the mission, the harder the gameplay becomes as each simple encounter adds up.

The game is really a series of long wars of attrition for the player. I've lost many hours to the game because I simply lost concentration and allowed the enemies to destroy my fully equipped party. But in those moments of gameplay, I was pretty much in sync with what the party was feeling. Whenever there is a cutscene where the party is exhausted after long treks and boss rushes, I can feel it. Rather than approaching difficulty as the developer challenging the player's wits, the difficult parts of the game result from the story reacting to the characters' actions.

As you read the lore and immerse yourself in the politics, you eventually realize that you are brushing up against the story of NonStories (and for that matter, Unexist). Characters comment on events like film critics; they don't believe that stories will turn out like some Dragon Quest game, even if they notice how similar certain plot beats can be. It's just a fantasy to believe that good will prevail in the end. Only the results, not your suspension of disbelief, matter. This doesn't follow the physical laws of the story, so of course the story will retaliate and try to kill your party. The stories of NonStories are your real enemy.

Good luck in trying to kill the story. You'll need it.

Breaking the Story

If you dare to persevere, you'll have to learn to sacrifice. Is this recruitable character worth it, or should you abandon them for rare minerals that can help you forge the ultimate weapon? You don't have that many days to get everything, so you have to make a choice and live with the consequences.

I often spent a couple of hours plotting out my plan to get as much as I could while sacrificing as little as possible: I know I want this character, this mineral, this item to cheese other maps, etc. But there's a voice in the back of my head that says I'm missing out on something and it's going to make the game harder for me.

All I can rely on is the sum of my strategies and mistakes, accumulated after hours of stressful gameplay. Either this strategy works or I've softlocked myself 60 hours in. Each victory is a huge sigh of relief.

And I could stop there, feeling rewarded for my efforts. But the friction of the game is compelling. I want to see more, to see what can be accomplished by overcoming the story. It's a game that took me over a month and a half to play, and I spent my work time thinking about what happened in the game so far.

When a character reflects on the story so far and compares it to a second-rate RPG without a hint of irony, I can't help but wonder what the "real game", the "real story" of NonStories is? It has no interest in telling the stories of video games and their characters. It has a story it wants to tell, but it can only be told if you overcome all the previous stories it has written as distractions.

The Real Story of NonStories

I spent 110 hours searching for the "real story".

It's a long, challenging game that still takes my breath away as I write this. I haven't written enough about the lush setting, the huge cast, the emotional arcs, the legendary lines uttered by lovable and frustrating characters, and so much more. The game is difficult to write about because it introduces so many different elements that are worth thinking about in their own right.

And I don't think I've done a good job of capturing the scope of the game and how much the title resonates with me. Still, I want to at least express what I think about the game's central idea of stories and what we do with it.

Why do we tell ourselves stories, especially video game stories? Games like Caligula Effect 2 posit that games are meant to be interacted with as reflective, almost therapeutic experiences; they allow us to look at our own lives from different angles through the lens of a video game. Meanwhile, something like NieR: Automata sees video games as proof of our intelligence because we dare to treat silly little things with the utmost respect and seriousness they deserve. Games, in this sense, are cultural artifacts that express something valuable within our "useless" endeavors.

But NonStories doesn't seem interested in how games affect us, nor does it have anything profound to say about human culture. It is, however, interested in the stories we often tell ourselves to justify actions we take or beliefs we hold and lose out on the alternate possibilities we could've taken. We end up playing certain roles, no different from the roles in a fantasy role-playing game about a human kingdom stranded on a continent full of monsters, and it's hard to break out of these ideological narratives. It takes a lot of patience and energy to break out of the eternity of narratives.

And if we do go off script, it will only be temporary, a speck in time. Eventually we'll have to return to the stage and continue our roles -- but those moments when we could be ourselves are precious and worth holding onto. If we could hold on to those moments more tightly, perhaps we could learn to be curious about the world.

Put another way, stories in the world of NonStories are limitations imposed on us. They make us solipsistic, apathetic to the affairs around us, and complacent in letting tragedy take its toll because the powers that be have decided what our stories should be: a bunch of template JRPG stories we've seen elsewhere.

We are always flooded with narratives and we don't take the pleasure of momentary possibilities seriously. Learning to recognize that there's a world out there, not a series of laid-out stories, is quite difficult. But if the high and fair difficulty of NonStories says something, it's possible to regain our curiosity again and learn to care about the people around us.

I hope more people get the chance to play NonStories. It's becoming a new favorite of mine.

P.S. I've written more about NonStories's gameplay here and here.

sylvie rpg is pretty good

2024-03-21T00:00:00Z

Sylvie RPG is about seven things: surprises, surprises, surprises, surprises, surprises, surprises, and more surprises.

the game is in theory a "bump combat" game, but there is more than meets the eye. your max level and attack are seven. the resolution size is 49x49. most screens have a secret, with some of them having obscure conditions. when you get hit, you temporarily lose your shield. and the bosses are all gay girls.

there's many ways to play the game, including grinding to get money and exp. but i don't think it's that necessary past the first few minutes. the nice thing about the game is that it isn't long at all. i finished it in two to three hours (with another break to complete another game) and the compactness means the game isn't going to wear you down.

https://sylvie.itch.io/sylvie-rpg

there may be some bizarre maps that can annoy you if this was a larger, longer game -- but thankfully, Sylvie RPG is a short treat. i enjoyed mentally mapping where to go, finding fun secrets, and laughing at how silly the game can be.

it's a game that sparks joy. i feel like a kid playing a game again, rediscovering what made retro rpgs magical to me. i also recommend giving sylvie seven bucks for her work since it gives you a nice pdf explaining her design principles behind the game -- as always, i find her detailed writing insightful for my own future endeavors in game dev and criticism.

finished GOOBYE WORLD, a pretty short personal game about indie game dev life

2024-03-20T00:00:00Z

this is an hour or two long narrative game about two college students who tried to take a stab at game dev in their adult life. the game's writing is very plain and the graphics aren't flashy at all, but that's intentional:

it's depicting the ebb and flow of indie game dev life without any attempts to go beyond the premise.

the narrative is framed around storylets of the two characters meeting up and trying to work together. however, their story is not a fairytale story of success. the characters struggle to get their game published because the programmer wants to make games that's to their taste -- and you know what, good for them since everyone's making the same kind of popular game out there.

but that's hell you're walking into. making an indie game that follows the trends isn't easy to begin with; making a retro game that doesn't have anything modern won't cut it. throughout the game, you get some interactivity in the form of a retro platformer called BLOCKS on a gameboy. you don't have to beat the game, but it's quite a challenging puzzle platformer if you do and it makes you wonder who would play this game outside of the narrative game context.

and well, aren't we part of the problem then? the reason these people are having a difficult time making the game? etc.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1833490/GOODBYE_WORLD/

GOODBYE WORLD is a melancholic game that doesn't present any salvation for indie game developers who choose the hobbyist side of things. and i think that's great. i've seen people discuss this as an "important" game in reviews, but i don't like that adjective since it makes the game sound like a cultural vegetable you have to eat someday. nah, i just think it's awesome that a game can be this bitter without compensating at all and it's something i like to see more.

in a way, this is a glorified itch personal game marketed at audiences that primarily use steam and consoles, but i quite like the framing and the characters resonate with me. it's not going to appear on my top games list, but i'm glad to have played this short game and it left me with an impression that makes me think about how i approach game dev not as a commercial venture but as an interpersonal relations space. i made friends in game dev, but i also feel concerned that said friends will judge me based on the games i made.

it's difficult and i think that's why the game works for me. i hope more people play it.

p.s. if you know japanese, the IGN Japan review is worth reading as it is a sympathetic read on the game and it makes me wish more japanese people could play personal games from itchio:

https://jp.ign.com/goodbye-world/63927/review/goodbye-world

watched A Man Escaped or The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut)

2024-03-03T00:00:00Z

and damn, that might be one of the best movies i've seen.

it's a tense movie about a french resistance soldier imprisoned in vichy france that, despite being full of long takes and "slow cinema" techniques, never feels slow. every second isn't wasted and each cut is purposeful and deliberate, making even mundane moments unbelievably stressful. every second isn't wasted and each cut is purposeful and deliberate, making even mundane moments unbelievably stressful.

i would seriously recommend it to anyone, even ones allergic to old movies. it's a hypnotic movie that should be taught to people in ww2 history classes

thoughts on the puzzle game design of the witness

2024-02-26T00:00:00Z

it truly is a game full of genius and non-genius content.

i play a lot of puzzle games and i often give up near the end because i got bored of it. for example, i dropped Baba is You at the endgame puzzle because i realized the necessary steps for executing the final solution were too much for little gain. puzzle games can be too hard or too easy and they become pretty uninteresting to me as a result.

The Witness is one of the few games where i actually completed, so it joins the ranks of Void Stranger, the Hexcells series, and Voxelgram for me. it satisfies my love for certain logic puzzles with clear rules and creative solutions.

it's also full of stupid shit.

disclaimer

for this post, i'm just going to talk about the puzzle game design. no lore discussions, no secret ending stuff, only the boring puzzle game stuff from a player who enjoyed and hated every second of The Witness.

if you are looking for some epic essay on The Witness being good or bad, go watch YouTube. i'm just interested in discussing what i find interesting in The Witness's puzzle game design and what i take away from it.

no puzzle game knowledge needed

the most novel/refreshing thing The Witness is changing how solving puzzles work. the best way to explain this is through another logic puzzle game. i'll be using one of my favorite puzzle games, Tametsi, for example:

Tametsi is a logic minesweeper game and the rules are therefore clearly laid out: numbers indicate bombs near the tile, so tread carefully. there's no mystery in the rules or the way the puzzle is designed; the "genius" is seeing how someone could design a beautiful minesweeper puzzle in surprising shapes and guide you to making educated guesses. this is the kind of puzzle i usually play and enjoy the most.

but it doesn't lead to any unique discoveries for the player. even the famous "Miracle Sudoku" video by Cracking the Cryptic is more about going "how the hell is this constrained ruleset supposed to help me fill in the blanks?" for the puzzles of Tametsi and miracle sudokus to work, the rules have to be carefully parsed and followed by the player. in some ways, we are like programs trying to compute the algorithm the devs have written for us; however, the code is just a bit obscured and our joy comes from executing it and going omg that's crazy.

The Witness has this too, but its puzzles are introduced differently because it has its own grammar. unlike many puzzle games that have rules established by tradition (anyone can play any sokoban game once they know the rules), The Witness has its own shibboleth, that is its own language and custom unique from everything else.

and most of the game's difficulty is figuring out wtf is The Witness saying:

don't worry about spoilers by the way because this solution is wrong. this is one of my screencaps drafting a solution and likely you won't understand wtf i'm trying to do anyway. but i paste this screencap to show that, unless you are familiar with the language The Witness is doing, you won't understand what i am trying to do and what my mistake is. to put it another way, you don't need to be a genius at sokoban or sudoku to play The Witness; you just need to be good at The Witness to play The Witness.[^2]

and that means the game is leveling the playing field for everyone. they all have to start from scratch and figure out wtf the rules are.

rule-finding structures the entire game

just like learning a language, you gotta find the game's grammatical rules. these are sprinkled around the world and you have to go out your way and explore this somewhat open world. this is where i think the game becomes magical.

early on in my run, i discovered some screens with rules i've never seen before. i tried to figure them out, but it was a waste of time. however, as i explored other spaces and then learned how the rules worked, i could apply them into the older screens i passed. solving these puzzles and unlocking shortcuts or secrets was unbelievably rewarding; i never felt this kind of metroidvania-esque progression in a puzzle game before where, instead of getting tools, i am gaining a more comprehensive knowledge of the game's ruleset and can take on even harder puzzles.

and it's not like the puzzles are easy. many puzzles often play with your superficial and elementary understanding of the rules; in fact, it will block you in order to make you arrive at the proper definition. i like to think of it as learning a new word and getting more and more equipped to use it. i've discovered symbols where i assumed it followed xyz rule, but it turns out that it had a more precise and nuanced definition. it was fascinating to see how my understanding of the rules kept changing but still manageable; it's just more refined than ever and the earlier puzzles that stumped me made more sense with this new understanding.

it's also great that you're learning rules to learn other rules. it's even more rewarding when you find and solve puzzles that mix these rules together. i don't think these puzzles are complex or hard; however, navigating the interplay between these rules is so satisfying that i want to see more complex variations.

this is a really interesting way to do puzzle game progression that can only be done with original mechanics. pattern recognition becomes easier and faster once you are able to iterate and reiterate on the rules many, many times.[^1] it's kinda like learning your multiplication tables in schools: you notice that the 9 table is quite easy because both digits will always add to 9 (54, 81, 36). indeed, a certain timed "challenge" in The Witness post-game requires quick recognition of puzzle patterns and it's only reasonable because people have been immersed in these rules for so long that they start seeing it in puzzles and elsewhere.

i find The Witness novel because i'm playing a new kind of puzzle game. i can't depend on previous puzzle game knowledge that much like i would with sokoban games. it's nice that i have to relearn how to play puzzle games all over again.

environmental puzzles?

this is also present in the environmental puzzles, which i'm a bit mixed on. both the mandatory and the extra challenge puzzles are different from the types of puzzles i'm used to, but i don't find them satisfying.

i'm more of a Puzzle Purist where i dislike add-ons and ornamental details that figure into the puzzle. i just want the board and the puzzle, plain and simple. so i wasn't fond of the puzzles where you have to go around the map and look at the puzzle in a different way. i just find it annoying at best.

but at the same time, i recognize there's some very clever puzzle building. these puzzles test how observant you are with the environment and enjoy breaking the constraints of what puzzles are usually like. i admire them, but i don't particularly enjoy them.

still, i think this is another aspect that makes the game equally enjoyable to everyone. it's beyond the restrictions of logic puzzle games and it makes the players engage in the genuinely beautiful environment, so it definitely earns its reputation.

audio, colorblind, and hard to see puzzles lol

what i don't have patience with are the puzzles that everyone already hates: the audio and colorblind puzzles.

the audio puzzles may be one of the worst audio puzzles i've seen in a game since it tests your understanding on pitch; it can be the easiest or hardest puzzle game. deaf people basically need to use a walkthrough for this.

there are also puzzles that are just hard to see, even if you have good eyesight and aren't colorblind:

the swamp puzzles have lime green on green, resulting in very low contrast puzzles. these puzzles are the most egregious, but there are countless examples of puzzles that have extremely poor contrast.

and starting from the midgame, i also had difficulty recognizing symbols from each other because the panel was too small. one shape could blur into another. i had to lean closer to the monitor to see what the hell the shape is.

for those who got to the endgame, they'll also be treated to some mandatory puzzles with flashing lights, resulting in a strobe-lite effect. a friend, upon hearing this, said that blow has invented a puzzle worse than audio puzzles and i cannot disagree with that.

and other endgame puzzles made me kinda motion-sick (in a game already notorious in making people who play fps games motion-sick. i won't explain why because spoilers, but i got headaches from staring at the panel.

these puzzles are not only poor for accessibility reasons, but the gimmicky ones don't really test your understanding of the rules that much. they are more or less isolated gimmicks that don't build your understanding of the more universal definitions/rules of the game; the game will bring them back from time to time, but they're not otherwise necessary to learn the other rules in the game. they're just gimmicks that stop some players from playing and nothing more than that.

and i think it's a shame that many people dropped the game because of some audio puzzle shenanigans. it's another instance of proof that what makes people drop puzzle games isn't lack of their intelligence/perseverance but bad puzzles.[^3]

conclusion: i have to talk about the looker

i like The Witness as a puzzle game. it reintroduced me the joy of discovering puzzle games again and i can see why this title has influenced how developers make puzzle games. i've always wondered why puzzle games have hubs or allow you to go to different puzzles through a map of sorts -- well, The Witness is to blame for that.

and if you play something like Can of Wormholes, you can see how people are trying to reignite the spirit of discovering new rules and methods through their own solutions. instead of dropping players into the map with no explanation (lol, Stephen's Sausage Roll), there are now games interested in handholding the player and making them excited about the new rules they're going to discover.

of course, nothing feels like it's able to capture the originality of The Witness. there's something riveting about stumbling upon these rules and learning to play with them. before writing this post, i played a bit of Taiji which is quite the 2d demake of The Witness. it's gorgeous, but i was already too familiar with the gameplay loop and didn't want to partake in the grind.

instead, the game that seems to understand The Witness the most is the offbeat parody, The Looker:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/

The Looker is a free "puzzle" game that parodies the story beats of The Witness, including its memorable beginning and questionable secret ending. however, the puzzles are all taking jabs on how The Witness as a game works.

these puzzles repackage the lessons and missteps from The Witness into surprising minigames. there are some intentionally silly puzzles, but there are a few puzzles that show a deep respect for the original game (the book puzzle in the altar follows the same knowledge acquisition progression) and there's even some nice innovations (the epic Snek arcade game). even the final puzzle is both a dig on what makes The Witness a work of genius and ridicule: you are drawing something magnificent through the environment and it cleverly builds on rules jokingly introduced throughout the game.

The Looker is very short and it can be played by anyone, even with zero knowledge of The Witness. and i think that's actually the best lesson it got from The Witness: make puzzle games enjoyable/equally difficult for everyone. the final puzzles speedrun the obsession people have with puzzle games and how they see everyday objects as puzzles from the games they've been playing. it's an obsession i wish more people could enjoy it.

if a nice riposte like The Looker could be made, i think The Witness is a boon to puzzle game history and i'm glad to have played it. it showed me new avenues on how to make puzzle games more accessible to players.

[^1]: again, this can be found in other puzzle games. but the point is games like The Witness levels the playing field; people who know sudoku can do magic squares easily as opposed to people who don't.

[^2]: if you've not played the game, you can watch the any% speedrun of The Witness and somehow not get too spoiled.

[^3]: i'm looking at you, Baba is You!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! for people interested in getting back to sokoban games or want to be introduced to a better puzzle game, i quite like Dungeons and Puzzles

60 hours thoughts on nonstories ii-t completion

2024-02-21T00:00:00Z

wrote this on discord, so i'm saving it for posterity:

the worldbuilding is crazy and elaborate. unexist is already big and ambitious, so nonstories being somehow bigger is wild. i can't believe how many plot threads there are and how they are continued. even "plotholes" are actually intentional
the plotting is extremely abstract so far. if you count unexist (a 30 hours game), you'd need to play like 90 hours of two games where you won't understand the plot
that said, the worldbuilding is so rich and detailed that i felt like, as a player, i was seeing a new world and it's fun to see old characters return in different contexts
the cast is very good and the character writing is good. i like setsuna and koto a lot, i ship them the most. but i honestly like everyone, even the het pairing in route i-1. you get a lot of atmosphere playing as seiji. it kinda reminds me of eustia and i wouldn't be surprised if the developer played eustia since they know eroge
speaking of eroge, the writing is fantastic. you get good fantasy, the metafiction is interesting, and the Actual Emoi scenes have this kinda tanaka romeo cadence that i dig
the gameplay, especially in ii-t, is incredible and intense. the dev understands how rpg maker combat and inventory work. there's a lot of balancing, resource/item management, and (macro) routing that i really enjoyed. it was fun to plan and figure out what the hell to do in ii-t while recognizing the sacrifices i must make
i'm pretty interested in what the hell iii will be. it's crazy how much the eien series is just running off Vibes for most of its runtime, but it's extremely good kamige vibes. the themes about Monogatari and Eien/Setsuna that are common in eroge like sakuuta are so cool to see in a self-aware jrpg context. i'm ready to be surprised again for the nth time lol

oh yeah, the yuri especially That Scene in ii-t's ending is very good.

40 hours thoughts on a longer than 40 hours game, Nonstories

2024-02-16T00:00:00Z

i am not done with the game, but i sure as hell want to talk about its crazy game design and why it might be one of my favorite games of all time.

what is nonstories?

good question. i am 40 hours in and i have no clue what the plot is about. it has connections to a previous game, UnExist ～夢叶わぬ道化達～, but in ways that completely mystify me.

i learned about this game from hadler (the true searcher of video games) who learned it from a viprpg user damu (だむ). damu said the best games they played last year was nonstories and labyrinth of galleria, which is incidentally one of my favorite games of all time.

and i also learned from hadler the game has a yuri harem in the second route, so that sealed the deal for me. 百合はいいぞ。

so let's talk about unexist first:

https://www.freem.ne.jp/win/game/14384

unexist is a free rpg maker game inspired by nepheshel, historie, and alicesoft games.

nepheshel, for those who don't know, is a game inspired by the likes of king's field and is translated into english with approval from the creator. @pig has written about nepheshel here but to summarize, nepheshel has inspired a lineage of rpgs that have interconnecting worlds/dungeons like dark souls 1 and there’s a town of amnesiacs, silent protagonist included.

historie is probably the more influential game in terms of historical influence since it creates this rather deep lore about the end of the world and features a timer that counts down every frame in the game. you have to speedrun through several worlds and figure out what to do to increase the timer, but also you get this delicious lore about how the world is kinda stopped in time.

i can say more about how interesting these games are, but i think it's also important to bring up alicesoft aka the eroge company behind rance series. the developer of unexist/nonstories is into alicesoft games and the way they introduce turn limits, encourage replayability, and ng+ bonuses. alicesoft is way too long to summarize, but i'd like to focus on two alicesoft titles that really remind me of unexist/nonstories:

galzoo island

galzoo island is a dungeon rpg tuned to the style of wizardry games but with a twist: you have to route the game. by that, i mean that you have hunt for events, trigger them to recruit party members, and speedrun the game before certain deadlines.

this encourages players to scout ahead dungeons and note down the sequence of steps they need to do before embarking on the proper run. if you don't plan properly, you'll make the game harder on yourself because the party members you could've recruited will appear as enemy characters from the rival character you're fighting.

i talk about the other details of the game here if you're interested:

https://twitter.com/highimpactsex/status/1457980602813083652

but i think it's important to know that galzoo's main appeal is this need to route, restart, and plan ahead.

rance x

it will be a disservice to say little about the game when it's the culmination of alicesoft's history and design philosophies as a video game, but that's what i am going to do here. rance x has the principles of galzoo but upscaled to the scale of world war 2.

you can embark on long campaigns to save humans from the demon army by walking on tiles. these tiles can trigger enemies, long cutscenes, or new recruitable characters. as the game goes on, you can start planning on how to build your party by doing specific missions in specific sequences. for example, you know a character might be useful for a later boss so you should pick the mission that has them, go on a specific pathway, get it, and then grind enemy encounters to make them stronger.

so in a way, rance x kinda becomes a deckbuilder game but rather than roguelike rng, you have to build your "cards" by picking certain missions in certain sequences to get the best party composition to take on some of the harder challenges.

i talk about rance x more generally here:

https://twitter.com/highimpactsex/status/1468999977946939392

but like galzoo, the most important part is that the game is about routing and grabbing important characters, items, and event triggers for later game content.

back to unexist, the previous game to nonstories: this takes the nepheshel/historie gameplay loop and update it with the alicesoft-isms introduced in the previous sections. you're not just going through metroidvania-styled rpg maker maps but you're supposed to be going through the game multiple times and taking notes on where to go next.

it's a pretty demanding game and that's why the unexist wiki encourages you to play the game from the sixth loop to get enough bonus points. in order to finish a loop, you have to go to sleep for 30 days and you need enough money to do that (thankfully, the starting town has enough items for you to do this). but it gets very silly to sleep so much that the world "ends" six times so you can ng+ your way.

i also found the gameplay loop too obnoxious for me to get through since, for spoilery reasons, you shouldn't level the protagonist up too much or you'll make the game harder. you end up needing to avoid enemy encounters and the enemies are moving in a random way.

i ended up watching these videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VK8fyb_Po-k&list=PLvQtxhc9w1otCxgMbQvlpr9ZEYEfoYhM7

all that said, i find this game kinda fascinating. as the screenshots of nonstories suggest, all the enemy sprites in unexist are handdrawn. the game is full of personality and the characters are all memorable (i kinda like how one of the party members is just an assassin who really likes killing). and the lore, all written in books you must collect, are unbelievably fascinating and relevant to the story of nonstories. it’s cool how it takes the idea of amnesiac protagonists in a town and turns it into adventurers wandering a massive dungeon connecting to different worlds. and the concept behind the gameplay loop is actually solid, just clumsily executed.

by the end of the unexist playthrough, i was deeply invested into the setting and it was a bit sad that i couldn't get into the game because i loved what the developer was doing in unexist. the story is very evocative and the backstories are unbelievably ambitious for a debut game. and i feel that if the gameplay loop was improved a bit, i would be in love with the game.

finally, nonstories

https://www.freem.ne.jp/win/game/28501

so when i heard that nonstories was going to explore the backstories in the books i've read, i got pretty excited. i'm enjoying the story a lot, but i have no idea how to describe the plot without spoilers and it's gonna be way too long and unreadable.

so let's talk about the gameplay, which is kinda why it's making me go oh my god this is the best game ever:

turn limits + routing

this screen is the main reason why i brought up galzoo and rance x. this screen will burn into your mind. you will never forget this screen and i think about it all the time while eating food or doing something else.

this is the screen where you have to consider what you should do next.

just like unexist, you have more or less 30 days per loop, but missions can time out after a few turns or are replaced by mandatory events. you won't see all the events in a playthrough because plenty of events will time out regardless of how optimal you're playing. you need to experiment with different missions and see what rewards, characters, and event triggers you could get.

i'm at the part of the game where i need to consider the items and equipment i'll be getting in future missions. while bonus points are useful for higher initial levels and better exp rates, the main difficulty of the game after three loops revolves around knowing which mission to pick. the obvious missions are the ones with recruitable characters, but soon i'll need to consider where to procure upgrade shards to make endgame weapons that make fighting certain final bosses viable.

the game also has branching paths, not as extensive as rance x where new stories are made, but they hide new events and really important items. i've been picking the routes with a lot of monsters because they give me exp and money, which will be very useful in the long run. every step i take is pretty meaningful because i know i'm building a party to fight a final boss i have no idea about and that i can't really return to these dungeons/maps. there is no "free battle" i can use to grind my characters up. the stuff i've done in this one turn (called action in the game) is all i have. the endgame for each route is just me armed with the culmination of all the steps i've taken against a greater challenge.

so every decision you take does matter and you can screw yourself over by forgetting to recruit a character, not getting enough exp or money to buy the healing supplies, or missing event triggers entirely that could help you in the long run. and these missions can also be quite long too if you haven't read the story content: it's possible to play these missions for 20 mins to even hours (more on that later), so more the reason to plan ahead and think about what missions you have time for irl and how much brain energy you can muster for the session.

resource management

i'm a fan of games that handles this aspect: shoot em' ups and breath of fire dragon quarter come to mind. these games see every aspect like enemies and items as potential resources to help you finish the game: in dragon quarter for example, enemies don't respawn so they cannot be milked for more currency -- there is a fixed conversion rate: an enemy encounter will give you xyz rewards and nothing more and nothing less. this means the limited enemy encounters become a kind of resource to rely on: you don't want to "spend" all the enemy encounters away but save them for a rainy day.

nonstories doesn't really go that far, but as i said, dungeons are not something you return to so you can't grind forever[^1]. rather, it becomes all about healing supplies and mp. very early on, you'll have enough money to purchase 99x of potions, hi-potions, and weak party heals.

but later on, there's a mission that took me two hours and i've calculated the number of potions used:

89 potions (500 hp)
17 hi-potions (1000 hp)
5 small party heals (500 hp)
3 mid party heals (1000 hp)

that's a lot of items and that means also a lot of money.

that two hour long mission is very stressful for me because there's very, very few saves. the game may offer save tiles in random tiles (rng), but they're not something you can depend on. you have to take long risky journeys and fight through enemies that can take down your party easily; there is no way around it. you're going to be healing a lot either through items or mp.

the better items that will save my ass like mid party heals are also extremely expensive:

starting from what is selected and going dodwn, the list is as follows:

mid party heals
phoenix down (only usable outside battles)
phoenix down (can be used anywhere)
bp healing item
mp healing item

they're pretty expensive. while you can get the phoenix downs through regular sessions, i find mid party heals to be the most useful and somehow the most uncommon find. i don't feel comfortable without sinking money into it because they've saved my ass from some of the tougher boss fights, especially the final bosses of the loops.

also, you might be wondering what the hell is bp, so let's talk about it. bp is a point system inspired from the likes of Galzoo, Sengoku Rance, and Rance Quest where even regular attacks use up currency. your characters can theoretically not be able to attack anything if they don't have any bp left. you may be tempted then to just use regular attacks and save the better attacks for later encounters, but certain enemy encounters require strong attacks because otherwise you'd be using healing items afterwards to heal up.

so you're juggling how strong your attacks are, your healing items, your mp (healing drains the same mp you use for attacks), the branching paths you could take (more monsters to fight or take the safe route), and the money that will be used to replace your healing items or buy higher tier equipment. this balancing act is a constant threat you're facing, especially in dungeons that will take like two hours with few saves.

this makes every session stressful and it's great. the game punishes you if you're being too risky or careless. for the third loop, i've lost around 8 hours to poor decisions, bad RNG, and just pure stubbornness fighting a hard encounter. it's pretty common for me to lose a run twenty minutes in and restart the game. the two hour long dungeon that traumatized me was so scary to me that i didn't want to lose any progress and i just kept marching on, avoiding diversions that will give me more enemies to fight.

and because saving is such a luxury in nonstories, i feel a huge sense of relief whenever i see a save tile. it doesn't matter if it's a checkpoint or i'm near a boss fight; i'm glad that i could reach it. it's exhilarating to see the hours of losing to some shitty encounter finally break through. every ounce of progression i have is unbelievably rewarding because losing is real and i am one step closer to understanding the overall story of nonstories.

conclusion

all in all, i really like what i've played of nonstories. the gameplay is engaging and i cannot stop thinking about the game because i'm thinking what's the next step i like to take and about the weird story so far.

and i know that the game is going to reiterate even more on what i've seen so far and do some fuckery with the bonus points. the extra challenges are apparently even more hardcore about this routing resource management bonanza and i wonder when the hell i'll get to that...

i like the story by the way and i'm deliberately avoiding explaining this until i'm done with the main story. it's just very difficult to explain even a synopsis of the game. all i can say is that i'm impressed enough that i've said it is like the rance x of free doujin games. the amount of worldbuilding, different settings, and characters in a rpg maker game with handdrawn sprites is nothing but incredible.

i look forward to playing the game more (twitter thread) and seeing my party lose my mage character for the tenth million time again, so i have to restart the game. it's fun and i want more people to play it.

[^1]: i'm not sure if this works in nonstories yet but in rance x, there is a very interesting exception where you can intentionally lose a battle and therefore waste the turn. however, you keep the rewards (exp, characters, money) you get and this makes "grinding" possible. based on the mechanics, i think this should be possible but it wouldn't be something you can rely on.

thoughts on needy girl overdose

2024-02-11T00:00:00Z

<img src="../../../images/Windose_RwhKr9eRJt.webp"

this game makes me feel old in a good way.

needy girl overdose is a game made by nyalra, a subculture writer i follow on and off. if you like amelie doree’s stuff, you may have seen her vid on barcode fighter — and well, nyalra’s post convinced me to look into it (i talked about it here). you can thank them for the video's existence. their writings are very off-beat and full of unhinged stuff to say, so in a way not that different from the stuff you read in ngo.

you play as a producer (referred as P) and you need to help ame who is this needy girl who’s overly dependent on you for every needs imaginable become the most important streamer of all time. by doing different activities like going out to akihabara, writing social media posts, and even sex, ame can come up with new ideas on what to stream. you can guide ame to stardom by encouraging her to stream games, conspiracy theories, and of course whenever she wants to break down live on stream.

as a streamer simulator designed through dating sim mechanics, this game is pretty interesting. unlike most dating sims (heh), the game reveals the multipliers and stats that each action will increase. most of the endings don’t require this math attention, but it’s nice to see how this game is mostly deterministic. you can route the game and know more or less where you will go after going through the game many times. it’s fun to plan ahead and do some theorycrafting on where to go next. this game is a pretty streamlined dating sim and it’s quite nice to play for this reason.

the game does add some annoying details intentionally or not. ame tracks how much you’ve been looking at your LINE convos with her; too little and you hit the bad ending where she leaves you because you’ve essentially ignored her. details like this turn the player into this obsessive control freak dominating ame’s life and she’s just kinda consenting to whatever you want to do.

indeed, the best streams come from abusing her mental health. you can emotionally manipulate her and make her do drugs. several endings in fact require some drug overdosing. if she gets too stressed, she will cut herself and even do a stream about it (which can give her a good chunk of views). you don’t want ame to be too unstressed or she will lead a normal life with you instead. you want her on the verge of despair and confused about what she thinks of you as you send her to go fuck someone else on tinder. there is no resistance from ame; at most, she will suddenly decide that she needs to do something at a change of pace but she will never say no to you. going for the be invoked ending (999,999,999 followers) basically requires you to send her to the hospital and then giving her drugs.

but what you cannot control is the things she does on stream. you are just a chat moderator deleting messages and pointing out superchats for ame to read. whatever she says comes from her stream of consciousness. her sponsored streams are great for this reason: she can't muster an ounce of deception and she'll just spit out the drink, saying this was the worst thing she's ever tasted. on other streams, she'll discuss schrodinger's cat and the meaning of life. she will joke about how steins;gate is a popular vn that might be milked too much or point out how the director of twilight syndrome is really into wrestling. she has no filter, too much subculture knowledge, and a "good face", which draws otaku viewers to her.

it makes one wonder why you the player need to be there for her. while her mental health is all over the place, it's not like she needs our help to take hallucinogens to stream her mental breakdowns or buy sayooshi to stream it. she's a fairly independent person and the co-dependency is artificial.

you can have many reads on this, especially if you are able to get the true ending. my read on this is perhaps influenced by the nyalra articles i've read the most though. needy girl overdose and nyalra's articles as a whole are about the overt romanticism of a japanese internet/otaku era that has long disappeared.

you can see this in the streams that she's poured all of her soul into: her subscriber milestone celebration streams. she brings up how, despite knowing that the internet is a drug to her, she keeps going back to it. she's addicted to the internet (and otaku space) because it's a toxic playground of hope and despair. we'll lament about the parasocial relationships everyone has with idols and seiyuu, but we also have them because we "need" it. just like how ame "needs" P in order to function, even though she doesn't need to, many people "need" the internet and otakudom even when everyone knows it's declined into a mess.

the isolation and "overdose" the internet cause people like ame to keep living in the "good ol' days" where people feel connected. facing late capitalism, people believed they could foster a sense of community if they shared enough subcultural knowledge to be in the cutting edge. rather than disagreeing with azuma's shitty thesis of database animals that we see everything as content to be consumed, otaku accepts that this worldview is actually how we can go beyond the hedgehog's dilemma: we can connect with each other by talking to each other about the content we consumed. Sharing Content is how we all live.

this is why a good chunk of ame's streams are about proliferating obscure knowledge. her creepypasta net lore stuff is an amalgamation of famous japanese urban legends (i'm sure people will be familiar with the train station one thanks to urasekai picnic). her stories and incidents resonate with viewers because she's "one of us", an otaku. the internet brainwashed many people into becoming an "otaku" and this was awesome: there was a garden of eden where we can become yukkuri and tell each other about quasi-scientific theories and analytical philosophy from the subahibi essays we've just read.

this is likely the theme nyalra arrived at because of their deep engagement with sayooshi, a game about some dude who doesn't know how to say "goodbye" to the normal life that he once led. in the sayooshi stream, ame says the denpa waves got to her since she started saying weird stuff. and this is clearly the intent of this game: this game knows it's a cognitohazard and the banger songs aiobahn feat. kotoko have pushed out are all songs about the near-impossibility of quitting the internet; they're all catchy and remind us that we can't quit the internet. we are stuck on the internet because we have grown to be dependent on it.

and well, it's hard not to resonate with needy girl overdose for me. my partner said that nyalra is basically me if i took drugs and was unstable, which isn't too far off from my own assessment when i was reading ngo. ngo articulates my hope and despair for internet communities. we have to constantly fool ourselves that this internet overdose is actually good for our thinking, even though we're in fragmenting communities on the verge of declining. subcultural histories are now disappearing because platforms are merging all of us into one big mainstream space. the only true path to recovery is to touch grass.

but we spiritually "need" the internet and otaku media, even if we don't need to. even when games like chaos;child exist to tell us to stop checking conspiracy theory boards, we'll keep doing that. we're hopelessly addicted to them in a way the WHO cannot really define.

i said the game makes me feel old in a good way. it's not the references that make me go "haha that makes me feel old" but rather ngo's philosophy. i feel old because, after all these years on the internet and real life, i haven't really changed my thoughts on how much i "need" the internet. i know people have "retired" from the internet and led happy lives and i know i can do that too.

but here i am, on the internet posting my thoughts on needy girl overdose. nothing has changed, even if the situation is getting worse, and i guess that's what the game is about. i'm watching my 20 year old-ish subculture brain poison play out as a raising sim and i'm going to play some shmups and rpg maker games after writing this post. this is the same "content" that ame will read and be nostalgic about years down the line.

in a way, we are the internet's needy girlfriends and i wonder when we'll be properly independent from it.

harvestella is a very weird rehash of jrpgs and sf i like also a farming sim and the most soulful thing to come out of modern square enix

2024-01-24T00:00:00Z

harvestella is a 40-90 hour doujin rpg maker game that would be promoted heavily by retro rpg reviewers if it wasn’t financed by square enix and sold on consoles like nintendo switch.

introduction: another ANOTHER EDEN

if you told me that and a bit more, i’d probably buy the game asap. but the title is very much unknown in the west while in japan it’s considered a hidden gem.

perhaps, it’s because it is marketed as a rune factory-like. it first made its appearance in a sea of harvest moon clones in a nintendo direct and square enix had since been marketing the farming/life sim angle quite hard.

but i think it’s not only misleading but it misses what could’ve made the game an impulse purchase for me: some important staff members including the producer/director come from ANOTHER EDEN.

ANOTHER EDEN is a peculiar f2p mobile rpg. it may have gacha and some login bonuses, but they are unnecessary for progression. instead, it’s a full fledged rpg that plays on tropes and plots of 90s jrpgs favorites like xenogears and chrono cross.

i won’t go too deep into details because the many things i like and dislike about ae can be grasped from what i think of harvestella: i find x from harvestella interesting and the same can be said about ae; i don’t like y from harvestella and that is also true for ae. their dnas are so similar (plot beats, ui, retro vibes) that i basically think harvestella is a 3d remake of another eden.

and that’s what makes the game so fascinating to me: this game doesn’t really make sense from a business standpoint and no one is out there wanting it, but it’s sitting in my steam library. i know i can play it right now, but it shouldn’t exist. how is this cryptid of a title even greenlit?

i am stupefied by its existence and i’m on board with it — until i get to the parts that i don’t like anyway.

a jrpg with a heavy farming minigame

let’s get it out of the way: harvestella is not a farming sim nor is it like rune factory. harvestella and its marketing may try to convince you to pick up the hoe and plant some carrots, but the main story can be progressed with little to no farming.

all the game did was replace the "hero" in hero's journey with "farmer".

your protagonist (who you can gender as "neutral") is a classic adventuring protagonist with amnesia. they team up with a girl named aria who is from The Future to figure out what's up with the world and the 死季 (Quietus), a red fog that makes people die.

you go to jrpg towns and fix their problems. there are Villains of the Week who happen to be the Sole Problem of the society to beat up, but also they are mysteriously part of an overarching plot. allies from different social classes and backgrounds join the party. an airship takes you across the world map.

and also, you farm.

even though they are deeply unnecessary (a theme that will recur in my retelling of harvestella and another eden), the farming mechanics aren't something to scoff at. the game takes many cues from the harvest moon/rune factory lineage: you have a plot of land and you can plant seeds in tiles. these seeds differ depending on the season you're in and are expensive in the earlygame, but they give you so much profit that you can create a moneymaking machine very quickly. as you do more of the main story, you unlock water and cave biomes that have their own unique plants. there are even sprinklers you can add, automating your stardew valleys.

but while the farming minigame covers a lot of ground, it is not full of depth. the economy is so simple and the game doesn't really demand you to farm much (there are no festivals or even a simple deadline where you have to turn in at least something to keep playing) that farming is just meant for income and only that. you could upgrade farms and build barns and coops to house sheep and chicken, but that's only going to help you generate more income.

a charitable way of looking at this is, to cop from a very good amazon ja review, harvestella is an introductory farm sim for retro jrpg players. the early rune factory titles and atelier series can be too complicated for players who have to juggle farming and rpg obligations, so harvestella doesn't do that. quests don't ask you to get specific produce because that would slow the pacing. and etc.

but playing the game, i got the impression that the another eden staff was tasked to make a farming sim because square enix said so and they used this opportunity to make a grand old-school rpg from their another eden experience.

HARVESTELLA FM19.99 - Playing the Greatest 90s JRPG Hits for You Boomers Out There!!!

the story mentions your farming activities maybe twice. really quickly, it drops the pretense it's a farming sim and goes full on 90s jrpg mode. it's gonna take you back to the past / to play the cool games that kick ass. harvestella is enthusiastic about recapturing the super famicom and playstation 1 days on modern consoles.

the towns, for example, feature a lot of unnecessary details that players will easily miss. because it's pretending to be a farming sim, many npcs actually follow a schedule. you don't need to find, say, party members with quests because their routine will be overwritten by the quest's needs. however, you can find them patrolling through town and doing other daily activities.

i'm also shocked by the amount of one-off environment details. there are setpieces designed just for cutscenes and there's areas that you don't ever visit. there is a confession chamber in the cathedral and you have no reason to visit, but it's there and it looks pretty comfy.

and npcs have very different and colorful dialog that can change after certain events have happened. it's not kiseki-tier, but there's a lot of effort into making sure these jrpg towns don't feel generic.

as for the actual game, much of the gameplay time for me was dedicated to completing the most old-school sidequests in different towns. the stories that make up these sidequests are really familiar ones to me: i saw my character listen to the desires of a teenage girl who want to see the sea one day, help rebuild the lighthouse to help sailors lost in the seas, and even investigate a mysterious well that may be haunted by a ghost. while the quests are clearly written assuming they will be done in a day, this is usually impossible due to farm sim time reasons. they follow another eden's format by making you go all over the world map to continue them, so they're more like elaborate questlines than individual and standalone quests. it's possible to do a rescue mission and leave the dying soldier for days because you're too busy doing other things and then return to it as if everything's normal. it's weird and they take up so much of the game that i got a bit tired of how much i was doing. the game feels like a visual novel, but you need to do chores in order to read more -- by the time you read the text, you just get too tired and want to go back to do the chores.

but i kept doing them anyway because, like another eden, it's refreshing to feel like i'm helping a jrpg town once in a while. i got pretty invested in some of the stories, especially the ones that deal with children. the game really stands up for children and you're always playing this blue archive sensei-like intermediary where you are making the parents carefully listen to what the kids are saying. there's even a part where you're trying to find out the location of another kid, so you tell the kids hiding that information she's got toys and playing with herself and they blurt out the truth and go "oh shit". as a gender-neutral uncle, i really enjoyed how much this game understands kids and makes their interactions funny.

(it makes me wonder if the parenting stuff reflects the older demographics of the audience that will enjoy this kind of old-school rpg...)

when i finally got to the main story, i was hit by a bigger nostalgia wave. so much of the plot beats are taken from the playbooks of my favorite jrpgs; it was to the point that i was just predicting the next jrpg plot it's going to use. you have the classic four mcguffin towers you need to visit, Villains of the Week you have to beat in order to solve structural problems in jrpg towns, and an overarching grand narrative where you reach for the stars and fight an otherworldy force -- it's the classic jrpg template that's been done since the beginnings of dragon quest. but it's done in a convincing, sincere, and earnest way that i was quite moved by.

like another eden, harvestella is especially inspired by old and new jrpgs, in particular xenogears and nier automata. it finds the technology of the xeno games utterly fascinating and agrees with yokoo tarou's cynicism on the excesses of humanity. at the same time, it marches on with a simple belief that despite humanity's evils, humanity rules.

this leads to some incredibly corny writing that i find extremely surprising in a commercial rpg that tackles current dilemmas in society. interestingly enough, harvestella does not shy away from how humans have behaved in the past, even bringing up themes that belong to metal gear solid 2. however, despite all that, it will keep arguing about how HUMANS HAVE HOPE and ONLY HUMANS CAN ACHIEVE THE IMPOSSIBLE. the title is in love with stories about discovery, the relationship between humans and AI, and the meaning of humanity despite wars. it doesn't take the transhumanist angle that games like crymachina would do but instead, hope defines humans. it is as if it's telling creators like yokoo to smile a little bit because humans want to live, dammit.

the earnestness in this game is so reminiscent of the 90s rpg vibes that made me play rpgs in the first place. and it's not just a homage to title chapter titles and questlines after famous science fiction works; it's the philosophy of the game because it's drowning in optimistic science fiction vibes that it can comment on human atrocities of the past but still say humans are the future with a straight face. humans adventure, explore, write, and do jrpg things: it's what makes us humans human.

ugh gameplay

too bad the action rpg part sucks ass.

for adventuring, you're usually exploring elaborate dungeons with unique gimmicks and they're all atrocious and long.

the game actually tries its hardest to make for interesting level design (again, another carryover from another eden) and it's usually borrowing from gimmicks of the past. do you enjoy teleport puzzles? harvestella has some for some reason. there's ice floor physics too. and the dungeons are so long that you have to do them in chunks because, due to the farming sim mechanics, you have a limited amount of stamina that gets depleted fast and you can't just eat food you produced forever.

some of this tedium can be relieved by searching for spots that create shortcuts at the expense of time and if applicable items. what i usually do is run through the dungeon, ignoring the million enemy groups to create these shortcuts and even try to reach the end.

it's not like the combat is any good either. you have the options to use different jobs/classes, but you can only set three at a time. the idea behind the job system is that you switch between the three jobs you have for appropriate situations: exploiting a weakness, creating distance, switching between skills that have cooldowns etc. however, i found that more of a hassle because it isn't that effective in tackling enemies. it's easier and safer to stick with a job unless you know what weaknesses enemies are prone to.

this simplistic combat system doesn't also match the complexity with enemies and bosses. for whatever reason, enemies and bosses can react differently to how far or close you are. telegraphed moves will show the area where the attacks will land. you're supposed to play it like some jank mmo from the 2000s, but your party members cannot be controlled in any way and your movement options are limited to running and a weak dash/spring. couple that with large enemies' hitboxes clashing with your hitbox and you can't really move well to dodge anything.

this gets really funny(?) when you're fighting the final boss. it's so big and its attacks cover so much ground that the camera has to take a step back, but all it does is just show the boss's large ass back. you are always under the boss to deal damage, so you can't really tell where the hell you are. all you see is just the texture of the boss, nothing else.

the combat isn't very fun and i swore a lot from how i would suddenly die because i got stunlocked without realizing it and no way to heal. the only way to play the game is to make a lot of vegetable juice by farming lettuce and putting into a processor -- your protag can chug like ten vegetable juices while they fight the boss because juices don't have animation frames while food and other items do. it's extremely silly to imagine soldiers drinking huel to keep on fighting.

xenogears disk 3: farming edition

but regardless, harvestella is a huge game that is full of content (perhaps, too much). it took me 40 hours and i'm quite a fast player; most people who finished the game have recorded gameplay time that ranged from 60 to 90 hours. this is a demanding game and i don't believe many people reached the ending, so folks are not aware how the plot is just some xeno series game.

there's many reasons why people probably don't know this, partly because the game has been marketed as a chill life simulation title for so long. but also, the story really begins 20-40 hours into the game.

it's literally the "it gets good 30 hours in, trust me bro" game.

many fans of harvestella hide the science fiction turn for good reason since it's very much a spoiler, but i find that to be the game's detriment. i find the game far more interesting once it suddenly becomes a long-lost cousin to the xenoblade games.

i won't be explicit, but it was utterly fascinating to see a so-called farming sim take on grand themes like saving the world and contesting the fate of humanity. the game introduces so much setting details that even the final boss gets their own lecture. the setpieces are so lavish that i started laughing and pogging when the game went all blue archive on me and remembering this is supposed to be a farming sim.

what i find most enjoyable about the game is the bizarre execution. its obsession to copy the successes of classic rpgs in the format of a farming sim action rpg hybrid is truly incredible because it's able to do so much but in a very weird way. it's largely derivative of so many great rpgs, but the implementation is so surreal that i find it utterly memorable.

on the same day i'll be planting a prized watermelon, i'll be fighting robots from the far future that question our sentience and grappling pasts that weigh on characters like aria.

it's awesome and very stupid. and the game doesn't even seem to recognize how strange it is: it just thinks this is the correct way to make games and i kinda love harvestella for that.

this is why i sorta saw the game as having soulful doujin storytelling. many doujin games, especially the good ones, believe in some of their plot beats so much that they'll not realize there's holes in it. harvestella doesn't seem to give a shit about whether its narrative design and ludonarrative harmony are coherent to people; it thinks they are and that's all that matters.

even if i believe that the game has a tacked-on farming minigame, there's something very funny and heartening about playing a farming sim that becomes a xenoblade 4. it's why i enjoy talking about harvestella than playing the game: the absurdity and the jarring nature of it all are what make the game interesting to me.

conclusion: The Heart.

but note that i have not said throughout the post that it's a "good" game. i don't think it's good nor is it fun. i just find the experience interesting and memorable.

i find most of the gameplay exhausting and too much like chorework. the story is too familiar to me, even if i found it exciting and nostalgic. there's way too much text density, which is also an issue for another eden. the 3d character expressions are static and have lifeless performances. and it's also just too long and much for its own good.

but i won't deny that i had some fun and found the game fulfilling like older rpgs i've played. because it knows it's building off successful games, the writers can relax and write some cool lines about humanity and hope that i find memorable. the dissonance between farming and the narrative is also constantly amusing to me.

outside of yokoo tarou's games, harvestella is the most interesting and soulful game square enix has released in modern times. and it's solely because this is a game that would be a huge hit with the doujin/free game circles i hang out in if it wasn't an overpriced square enix game.

it's the kind of game that inspires me because it's full of raw personality and speaks to me as an old jrpg fan. if i had the square enix money to make the dream game i've always wanted, it would be a mess like harvestella.

and i can't deny how cool that is. the game has a banging soundtrack by shiina of all people (and he's never worked on a square enix game besides this one) and it's full of life. it's the dream game you write in your middle school notebooks and plan to create using rpg maker 2000 during computer classes.

the whole game is the definition of Soul. i don't enjoy playing the game the same way i don't enjoy playing games made by middle schoolers who decide to take the rpg maker plunge. but i am still affected by it because it's a dream rpg come true and i get sappy over these kinds of romantic adventures. its optimism about humanity is so goofy that it warms my cold heart.

how can i not like it?

harvestella is a fucking weird game. it has so much Soul like some shounen protagonist and i want to cheer for it. this game truly comes from The Heart of JRPG Developers.

p.s. after writing this post, i realize it’s a candidate for the top game of the year for me not because i love it but because it has earned my utmost admiration. it’s such a cool passion project about exploring the fun of jrpgs.

it’s just a title that resonates with me.

p.p.s. i finished the game without spending a whole game year; i never saw winter...

tevi is the best game with the worst story

2023-12-10T00:00:00Z

i cannot believe this game is almost everything i wanted from a metroidvania game with unique bosses and the scenario is also one of the greatest stinkers of all time.

before this post gets seriously negative, i want to first stress that i love this game. the graphics are some of the best looking in indie games and the combat system is unbelievably satisfying. bosses are honestly some of the best i've seen in a game and the exploration, while the main game doesn't hold a candle to rabi ribi's free form style, is challenging and always interesting. playing it on expert was one of the funnest things i've done all year.

i'm also really, really fond of gemayue's storytelling when he is given the chance. you can read how much love i have for the irisu fight in rabi-ribi. so all the criticisms i have against tevi's narrative design come from love because i cannot believe how poor the scenario is at integrating with the gameplay.

there is a fundamental disconnect between the scenario writer (ein lee) and how gemayue designs metroidvanias. the scenario we got in tevi feels like it's meant for another title. the metroidvania design and boss battles suffer from this. i have never played a game where elements are at odds at itself and it makes this an "interesting" game to think about in terms of narrative design.

the tl;dr is that there's too much text that doesn't matter. the player is flooded with information that has no relevance to what they're seeing and interacting with. there's no reason for the player to care about the world, the characters, and what they are doing besides the gameplay being the best thing ever. in other words, the narrative design actually pushes the player away from caring about anything and i don't think the story in the game is supposed to do that!

1) your protagonists never grow as characters and it gets very dissonant as you become stronger

the most important part about any game is likely how the protagonist feels. tevi is a versatile character who can navigate the screen at ease, especially when all movement tech is unlocked. her buddies, seria and sable, provide her ammunition against enemies and bosses. the player can craft more items and sigils to make the trio's combos more powerful and easier to use. it's easy to think how in the game world they become closer as comrades against the greater evil as they learn each other's strengths and weaknesses.

however, that never happens.

your characters talk about how they're destined to be together, but for some reason there's not that much banter. no one exactly has chemistry, even if it's obvious there's supposed to be a dynamic. tevi, seria, and sable never feel believable as a friend group at all. instead, the characters only pop up to discuss the world around them and they don't even have silly slice-of-life dialog between each other. it's extremely strange that we never get anything that resembles a chat.

this makes it very strange as the player unlocks better combos. tevi's whole attack relies on her teamwork with the two and nothing about it makes sense outside of the game stat rules. while this may be minor for most people, i remember feeling off especially in the lategame when we unlock core expansions (the shmup bomb equivalent) where teamwork does actually happen; the current partner you're using fires up a shield while the other partner works as a substitute. switching between firing patterns/partner is smooth, so i find this very peculiar.

unfortunately, this is the least of the issues.

2) the worldbuilding doesn't matter

tevi's biggest sin is making you think the worldbuilding is important.

we get a lot of talk about how magic works and the politics that make up the world. we learn that there's a group of soldiers and robots who patrol the world. lots of interesting details that would work well in most stories. however, these details turn out to be pointless as conflicts suddenly get resolved and the game will then proceed to introduce new plots and settings.

this can become quite silly. in the earlygame, we get introduced to racism as a conflict: humans and beasts kinda hate each other and beasts also have the disadvantage in being unable to use magic. tevi is also a human who is wearing bunny ears; her science magic makes people think she's a beastkin. however, this conflict is never raised past a certain chapter where a boss calls tevi out for "beastfacing". THIS IS VERY STRANGE. the game introduces racism, tevi gets called out for pretending to be a minority, and then it never gets discussed again.

there are more spoilery worldbuilding details that just get thrown out for no good reason, so it's hard for someone like me to care about what tevi is doing. outside of the exceptional gemayue challenge, i feel like i'm doing nothing to change the world when i control tevi. the game will say, "Congrats for beating the boss", but what did tevi do exactly? the boss anyway will just go "Heh, I'll return!"

and there are also times when the game will set up something that should foreshadow a bigger plot arc, but it doesn't happen. the prologue begins with tevi being caught in a team rocket-like organization and you think they'll be recurring cartoon villains, but they only appear at the very end of the game -- right when i completely forgot their existence.

worse, if you like certain memorable details about the setting and characters and anticipate something bigger, it's not like they're going to return. there's like a fatally sick character who needs tevi's help and the plot seems like it's supposed to resolve that, but ... there is no discussion on what happened to her -- even in the epilogue. i am honestly surprised a game would introduce elements that should give reason for the player to be invested only to betray them for being invested.

i also think it's really cool for the mcguffins of the game, the astral gears, to have no narrative or mechanical relevance in the story. the final boss sorta remembers they're important, but other than that i'm not sure why i've collected these items. there's supposed to be an explanation (there's a quest that's literally called the power of astral gears), but it never happened...

3) the game will introduce the silliest worldbuilding because it thinks They Matter to the player

nevertheless, the game thinks some details are more important than what the player will probably care about. throughout the game, tevi will meet characters who she claims to have a long history together only for them to meet tragic ends.

everyone's favorite is likely the waffle robot in the beginning. waffles are introduced as tevi's quirky food love, so the waffle robot clearly has some rapport with her. but it doesn't build up at all: tragedy happens and tevi cries, promising the robot that she'll make the best waffles. i have never seen a "quirk" be this forced...

another character follows a similar arc: she gets introduced as a long-lost childhood friend of tevi and it's one of the most random events that ever happens in the game. and all of a sudden, the whole plot revolves around this character for a few chapters because she's important! ... until she isn't!

i think you may see a trend going on.

but i think the worst part about this aspect is how the Actual Plot reveals itself at the final moments of the game. all that worldbuilding details about the political factions and so on are gone entirely; it's some terrible romance story between characters who are only introduced in the final act. the game will force backstories into the player and it just never stops.

by the end of the game, i cared little about the antagonists' motivations. i didn't care about the stakes of defeating the final bosses. all i wanted was a good time with the game, which to be fair i did as long as i shut the plot out my mind.

4) you cannot ignore the text in story mode because the text boxes will intrude into the game

let's say you read all this and go, "Well, Kastel. Sounds like a bad story, alright. But wouldn't it be alright just to skip the text? It's not like the game doesn't give you clear objective markers."

this may be true and the game does have a useful skip feature. however, there are a lot of cutscenes in the main game and it's even more egregious during boss battles -- and this also happens during phase changes in the final boss.

it's awful to go from avoiding epic bullet hell to pressing Esc to skip the goddamn cutscene. if you die at a boss battle, you'll need to skip that cutscene again. there are so, so, so many cutscenes in the game.

according to my clear file's log, there are at least seven hours i spent on reading dialog. speedrun mode, an unlockable modifier, takes out the text and it seems like the game is more enjoyable that way...

5) the story fucks with the metroidvania design through plot gates

but finally, and this is easily the worst aspect of the narrative design, it ruins tevi's exploration. sections of the world do not get unlocked unless the narrative says so and it can get pretty bad.

i was once exploring this difficult dungeon and thought i've seen it all. then i returned to the story only to find out i have to return. imagine my surprise when tevi went into this deadend to reveal a pathway to the next area. it was the most rage i've ever felt toward a game.

rabi-ribi fans have good reason to get pissed at tevi, but i think this is honestly far worse than most metroidvania games. these plot gates discourage early exploration and item collection because in the back of the player's head, they're going to be here for the plot anyway. if they struggled to navigate this area, they'd rather do this once.

this linearity would probably feel better if the narrative actually had reason to hide these pathways. they could just add a door that can only be unlocked by a key an npc will give later. instead, it's just tevi revealing some bushes to a new area.

the lack of justifications in the narrative is pretty baffling to me. it's obvious gemayue's approach to metroidvania design was at odds with the story, hence these arbitrary plot gates. but at the very least, i expected a good reason for tevi to not be able to uncover these areas.

this aspect honestly defeated me as a player more than it should've. iirc i had to take a day off to play another game because i was so annoyed how much the game didn't want me to explore.

which leads me to my final thoughts on the narrative design of tevi: i don't think the story cares for the fact it belongs to a metroidvania game. its priorities as a story seem to fit a traditional jrpg game (multiple towns, episodic arcs) and it has no flexibility to accommodate the usual freedoms a player has in this kind of game.

and it's not like a metroidvania requires the most intricate story. as long as the player has reason to care about what is going on, that's pretty good narrative design. give a reason why these bosses matter, why we should help the protagonists achieve the impossible, etc. you don't even need to be a writer to do this -- rabi ribi offers the most contrived plot and it still made me sob.

instead, we got a laughably poor story that mocks the player for even trying to care about the game's world. and it's a shame because the gameplay is wonderful and the world is gorgeous. however, the narrative design makes it hard for me to care about the happenings of the world besides in an abstract "game" way.

i don't like seeing games in a very detached and abstract way like that. narrative design to me is how you get players to think about what they're doing in the world; it's not just crafted stories or detailed worldbuilding but a reason for the player to keep playing the game. defeating a boss because it's challenging and hard is always cool, but it's even more meaningful if the boss fight has meaning for the player. to put it another way, narrative design makes the game not feel like a chore, another item to check off your backlog list.

i have a difficult relationship with tevi because of this. throughout my session, i would enjoy fighting the bosses and exploring the world only to get hit by a narrative that works against my investment in the title. it was only until i played other games during my session that i began to appreciate tevi by not giving a shit about the plot. however, it doesn't have to be that way and it's unfortunate that tevi is burdened by this poor narrative design.

i write this post not just to say i really like tevi in spite of this nonsense but also to show how important it is for game developers to think about narrative design. you can write shallow plots for all i care as long as it is harmonious with the gameplay goals you want players to have. writing a wordy plot that goes nowhere only upsets the player and makes it hard for them to care about the game you're playing. narrative design structures the game for the player. fail that and you're going to lose players' interests.

as for the future, i'm so glad gemayue's next game will be solo. his stories are terrible, but at least they consider the purpose of text in narrative design. as moogy said, rabi ribi knows when to "shut up".

that said, i think it's entirely possible for a metroidvania to have a good, even focused story. there is an alternate timeline where tevi is written by an actual writer concerned about how players experience the game: the plot beats need to be timed well, player agency is respected, and the world actually feels like it's worth fighting for.

oh well, i still love this game regardless of my issues with the narrative design. it's still one of the best games this year. i look forward to replaying the game on infernal bbq and free roam mode at a later date. i just wish tevi was the ideal gemayue game that i hoped for.

rabi-ribi irisu fight thoughts

2023-12-08T00:00:00Z

this is a post vomiting thoughts on how much i adore the mechanics of rabi ribi's postgame boss, irisu, on hard difficulty because this boss fight is now embedded in my brain ever since i finished it a week ago or so. there will be epic mechanics and plot spoilers for this bunny danmaku game.

irisu is the final boss of the postgame and there's nothing prior that matches the demand needed for this battle of attrition. successful attempts take 15-25 minutes depending on how aggressive players get.

it's highly unlikely a player is going to beat her at first try because the first thing that irisu does is stack debuffs (including instant death) on you. they'll likely die from the first bullet irisu spews. these debuffs can only be avoided if the player correctly buffers their super carrot (a niche attack that gives the player character i-frames) and then times all their amulets (a command that is used for i-frames). to put it another way, the player has to use up all their i-frame items in the beginning and become themselves to be vulnerable to irisu's attacks for a bit.

irisu has three phases (100% health, 66%, and 33%) and each phase has a different set of danmaku patterns that requires their own strategies to mitigate projectiles. the player will have to air dash between gaps of bullets, guide targeted projectiles through streaming, and even push irisu away from them through charged shots in order to avoid getting nuked. at the same time, they need to attack irisu in order to whittle down their health and hopefully make the fight shorter. to do that consistently, the player needs to get used to navigating the entire screen and the pixel hitbox of their player character.

what makes the irisu fight so daunting compared to other boss fights in other games is that it's an endurance match. even if you're hitting irisu hard by doing jump attacks here and there, you need to basically outlast her. you can't be a "perfect player", but you do need to be a patient one. every phase becomes more manageable the more you practice and know where irisu is going to strike. i entered into a fugue state when i know how exactly she'll attack, when i'm likely to get hit, when is the perfect time to whip out your hammer, etc. and i started to understand irisu as a character.

one of the most interesting things with gemayue's games is that the stories are pretty bad. rabi-ribi has some bizarre story about bunny extinctions and tevi's no nonsense, no fun story makes it hard to appreciate. however, every boss in each game is expressive and features bullet patterns that make them memorable.

i'm reminded of how ZUN started naming his bullet patterns with "spell cards". to quote from my own translation,

One big shortcoming in shoot em’ ups is that enemy attacks often lack a distinctive identity. I tried my hand in naming these attack patterns. After doing so, the bullets started to gain meaning and I thought they became more interesting.

And that’s what the spell card system is about. It feels like those special moves from fighting games.

for ZUN, spell cards/named bullet patterns have their own narrative meaning especially if there's a story and character integrated to them. they give a purpose for players to overcome these bullet hells.

what makes irisu as a boss battle so interesting is that she's framed as an introvert character who is guilty of committing some heinous crime and cannot embrace the affections of erina (the player character). at the same time, she wants to possess erina and is jealous of everyone else. all of her bullet patterns are a push-and-pull match of her feelings. she pushes erina way with her screen-filling bullet patterns and then is pulled away when she tries to catch erina with a net. this contradiction of her gay feelings toward erina is very much the boss fight.

so when the player is trying to master these three phases of irisu, they are constantly appreciating the full spectrum of her emotions. this mess of bullet patterns is the only way for irisu to express her feelings and the player/erina has to endure the twisty and turning projectiles if they want to help reconcile irisu's feelings.

but there's also a catch. after the player is decent enough to drain irisu's health to near 0%, irisu takes one last stab in rejecting being accepted: she pathetically leaps to erina's position with her net and it is easy to avoid her. but all of a sudden, her health goes back to 100% health and she summons her final spell card inspired by dodonpachi daifukkatsu's true last boss: you must avoid a sequence of long bullet patterns that feels like forever and that's all you do -- it's a straight up avoidance/survival session.

this last moment of the boss battle is exhausting. i've reached this phase so many times and then lost my cool, losing very good runs to a bullet that can be jumped over. even if i was consistently reaching this phase, each attempt wore on me. it's draining to see twenty minutes gone down the drain every session. but that's the kind of herculean effort erina has to take in order to accept irisu.

when i finally survived this boss fight and saw the white screen and rank clear, i let out a sigh of relief.

but more importantly, irisu is embraced by erina and erina says "i caught you and i'm not letting you go!"

this silly line made me sob. this was the most emotional boss battle i've ever experienced.

i must stress again: this game's plot veers on nonsense and ultra-thin characterization at times. however, the demand placed on the player to understand irisu through her bullet patterns is so immense that there's meaning in "catching" irisu. i know the effort to "catch" her. i spent days thinking about the boss battle, watching videos on how people mitigate irisu's bullet patterns, and so on. irisu's psychology is her bullet patterns and i've come to know her very well, so it tugs on my heartstrings to see that line where communication is finally achieved.

one of the best things about rabi-ribi is how gemayue knows how to communicate complicated feelings through the player grinding bullet hell patterns. he may be a poor writer, but he is a storyteller: the letters just happen to be projectiles targeting you. irisu may just be a character inspired by gochiusa, but her actualization as a character comes from her boss fight demanding you to pay attention to how she expresses herself.

this fight is really what made me fall in love with rabi-ribi as a whole. while i enjoyed traversing its open metroidvania world, i think this fight kinda captures the power of storytelling in games. you don't need that many words (or even a story that makes much sense) to capture people's minds; all you need is to entangle them with your game rules and make them struggle to see the game eye-to-eye.

i like it when games demand recognition and appreciation from the player. games can create meaningful experiences if we give them the feedback it needs. this may result in friction and pain, but as the rabi ribi irisu fight showed, it can be the most powerful form of communication: we accept every element (abrasive or fun) in their own terms and let the game guide us to what it wants to say about something. i think this is the potential of games in general.

finished pentiment

2023-12-06T00:00:00Z

i've been interested in the game ever since people praised its focus on medieval monastic orders. in my spare time, i enjoy reading about medieval europe history and its legends (an alternate timeline, i would always lament, would be me becoming a medievalist). so this game was pretty right up my alley.

what i didn't expect was a strange game where you solve a series of murder mysteries in tassing, a small town in the holy roman empire. the reformation is in the background. everyday people are struggling to make ends meet because the abbot is kind of a dick. and you're some artist talking to people about the meaning of theology.

the best parts of the game have little to do with the overarching mysteries. it's all about talking to a wide cast of characters about their daily routine, especially during lunch and supper. you get a distinct feel for the social classes of each household and even learn some juicy gossip along the way. i'm "fond" of the patriarchal farmer families and the squabbles between the monks; they are petty and even misogynistic at times, but you also know where they are coming from because the situation is pretty dire.

i'm more lukewarm on the mysteries and the choice system. due to how the overarching mystery is structured, all "solutions" are validated and they work more as a glorified Consequences Matter choice. the game also uses skill checks and missable content to ensure replayability, but i find them pretty arbitrary at best; it's hard to distinguish which dialog is a skill check and how to prepare for it. it's clearly intentional because you are supposed to live with the consequences you make. however, i find that they're pretty abrupt for a mystery game because it's not at all obvious what is new dialog in the game and it's already irritating that you're just going back and forth this giant map of tassing to find out what's up -- it's shocking when i accidentally stumbled upon a skill check that i wasn't prepared for.

and i'm not sure if mysteries are the way to go for this kind of game, though i think it's one way to hook a player into the narrative. the game reminds me of the strengths and weaknesses of 1893: A World's Fair Mystery where the mystery doesn't really matter but every historical detail does. i actually wished pentiment had more conversations and exploration especially in the final act. indeed, i wanted something like umberto eco's Name of the Rose where the book is secretly a textbook on medieval semiotics...

that said, the game is very enjoyable. it's awesome to stumble upon some salacious details in this game and the medieval world felt very fleshed out. it's a visually stunning game, capturing the "flat" dimensions of medieval art without compromising visibility. i'd definitely recommend it if you're interested in historical tourism and manuscripts. it's a feast for the eyes.

IguaRPG is pretty good

2023-12-06T00:00:00Z

i got interested in this game since @sylvie keeps recommending it and it's honestly a fun game with personality. it's a short game, but each section has pretty varied challenges testing your knowledge and patience with its quirky physics.

you are an iguana who collides with enemies to reduce their hp. you can increase your stats, buy items, or just ignore that and play it like a lvl 1 iguana chad. there's not much focus on story or even difficult bosses; it's more a fun silly time than anything ambitious -- and that's neat.

https://hubol.itch.io/igua-rpg

sometimes, a short and silly game is a nice palate cleanser after playing some ambitious games. i recommend it if you're interested in a change of pace.

watched I How to Have Sex (2023), a movie that explores how people don't understand lack of consent and knowledge

2023-11-11T00:00:00Z

i got interested in the movie when people started describing it as a teen movie about consent. it definitely is that, but it’s also underselling how authentic it is as a teen movie. you have all the trappings (bad licensed music, flashing lights in clubs, just people partying) but also it brings out the actual british contexts and makes it quite clear these women are very young, definitely unaware of Society at large, and are uncritical of their own socialization — with one character being totally ignorant of what had happened to the protagonist.

so you end up having this movie that is clearly autobiographical but also critiquing the genre it works in. the movie kinda does the “big bang without laugh tracks” thing where you see the american pie comedy and then it’s just postrock or very slow ambient music to defamilarize the scene.

and we have many small moments when it’s just me and the silver screen and i have to think about what the protagonist is feeling. she can’t express herself as she watches the sexualization of her peers and she’s quite the silent protagonist, only saying things when she needs to.

so when the actual scenes about sex happen, they are kinda awkward and the movie has the good grace to barely depict it. we can’t imagine the pain. she dodges her friends’ curiosity about last night with euphemisms and “yeah, he’s fit”. she’s trying to understand what is happening and whether she even liked it.

i found this movie seriously effective, even horrifying at times. there’s nothing distinguishing this movie from any other teen movie besides its sound design and when the camera focuses on the protag’s thinking. you understand she’s partying in order to escape her shitty high school life but also she’s hurting herself.

and the ending is not very girlboss, even if the ending theme is kinda like it. she is still understanding her pain and i quite liked the ending.

the wicker man (1973) is an awesome "horror" movie

2023-10-31T00:00:00Z

this movie is a musical about a british christian who gets offended by paganism.

i don't know much about this movie, but i was curious about the genre of "folk horror" and i knew this was an influential british film -- and well, this movie reaffirms my suspicion that classic british movies are just very strange and cool.

the protagonist is a devout christian cop and he's trying to investigate this missing girl, but he ends up being spooked by epic folk music inspired by celtic and middle english stuff in this mysterious island. the whole movie is just him being horrified that children are learning about phallic symbols and teens are just fucking in the night.

i think this movie is supposed to be like "woo (neo-)paganism", but i was more fascinated by christianity's failure to give meaning to these villagers and how honestly the "heathen" pagans are having a good time. you get long sequences of pretty good folk music and it makes the moralizing weak, ineffectual, and foolish. the movie seems to recognize this as they keep reminding the protagonist that he doesn't understand the nature of sacrifices.

the movie is also quite gorgeous, even if parts of the film are lost. i was lost in the plethora of colors and music. i vibed with this movie so hard that the ending was actually quite shocking.

i don't think people outside the united kingdom have seen or heard about the movie (besides the infamous nic cage version), which is a shame because this film is an extremely enjoyable title. i was laughing and mesmerized throughout the entire thing. it's a movie that feels like a cousin of House (1977) in terms of how uninterested it is in spooking people and instead going for moods you don't expect in a horror movie.

and that's the kind of stuff i like. i hope people who share similar sympathies as i do get to see the movie and drawn into the strange world of the Wicker Man.

watched Enys Men (2023), a cornish yume nikki-like

2023-10-30T00:00:00Z

according to wikipedia, this is an "experimental folk horror movie" by mark jenkins. that's one way to describe it.

i'm a fan of the director's previous movie Bait, a black-and-white film movie about the class tensions between cornish fishermen and english tourists, so i've been looking forward to this movie for a while.

so i expected something steeped in cornish mythology and "retro" filmmaking. i got both, but the movie is far more experimental than i expected. Bait, in the end, is a traditional story; in Enys Men, we watch this one unnamed woman repeatedly perform the same routines forever and ever. the repetition is extreme, forcing us to search for diminutive changes in the most mundane of shots.

and yet, these changes are jarring and strange: the ordinary becomes un-ordinary; we start to observe everything natural as unnatural; and the pieces of backstory are so fractured that the viewing experience can never be complete without repeated watches.

my partner compared it to a RPG Maker horror-like and yeah, i thought of Yume Nikki too. but that game is at least more "friendly": we're traversing through fantastical realms, even if most of it is empty walking. here, we just watch the film take its own time and then suddenly we get a pastor singing a song or miners smiling at us. despite the entire movie taking on an island, these montages stretch time and space through peculiar usages of match cuts and other elliptical film editing.

i come out of the movie utterly unsure what i watched but changed. what makes this movie so unique to me is how it doesn't explain anything; we're just tracking this one character experience everyday life in disjointed time and space on this island and there's no rhyme or reason for any of these pretty shots. it's a baffling, beautiful, and boring movie that engrossed me till the end. the movie challenges us: it wants us to understand how it's depicting traumatic memories of the past in sequential, chronological time in film.

i don't expect people to flock to this movie, but for those who are willing to take the plunge, they will be deeply rewarded. it's an unbelievable work that interrogates film as a communicative medium and estranges the audience so hard that they have to think about its production. jenkins may be one of the more interesting filmmakers of this generation.

wanted a slow burn horror so i watched Occult (2009)

2023-10-27T00:00:00Z

and this mockumentary commits to the bit so hard that it becomes a movie not just about how japanese mass media participates in occult sensationalism and death but also about the economic hardships of people. it's horror that is grounded in critique of mass media speculation and a bit of sociology/class analysis (i appreciate how it explored the freeter life without judgment).

everyone brings up how the ending is great, but the supernatural horror only works because you're so invested into this honest depiction of urban japanese society and its failings. this is the kind of horror i love and i hope more people get to see it.

thoughts on va11s setting (has spoilers)

2023-10-25T00:00:00Z

va-11 is a likable game.

i don't mean this as a snide remark or anything, but i think this is a likable game that is doing something novel for many people including myself. instead of watching hacker protagonists and bounty hunters take on cyberpunk corporations, we're just watching jill pour out some nasty drinks for her customers. the setting of glitch city is captured in the microcosm of the pub. the limits of the pub are the limits of the world.

so my thoughts are related to this promise i assumed i got when i was starting my cyberpunk bartender adventure: i'll learn more about the setting through the characters i meet and serve.

many characters in va-11 are from all walks of life, but the ones that intrigue me the most are people like donovan who's an editor-in-chief of a tabloid paper and dorothy who's a sex worker lilim (the in-game term for sentient AI). these two characters have very distinctive social classes and we get the sense that they are adept at navigating their specific problems that only manifest in their specific ways. dorothy's sex anecdotes don't just provide entertainment but also give insight to how the sex work and lilim world work (the RNG build-a-sim model is amusing). donovan, on the other hand, suggests the only way to survive in a dog-eat-dog society is to blackmail; that's the kind of philosophy that will express itself as cynicism and even misogyny at times. i particularly like how sociological this game gets with these two characters since the title recognizes this is how they became, not through some elusive human nature but through their own development living in this society. it can be "infodumpy" in that the worldbuilding is clearly being written on-the-go and many digressions do end up being tangential, which is why the pacing of the first half is weird. but i think that's what makes the game charming -- reminds me of some doujin games i played where the pacing is hectic but there's still something there, like a rough diamond.

but the game is not always that. it's usually trying to subvert or actualize commonly seen archetypes in cyberpunk fiction or commenting on some contemporary (2016) phenomena. the bounty hunter guy whose name i'm forgetting is just a bounty hunter who has baggage and tells jill to avoid killing people. streaming-chan is a twitch streamer. there are YIIK cosplayers in this world. there's a dog who played too much mgs v. there's a hatsune miku lilim whose blog is unfortunately not that updated. gay tetsuo. many different modes of characterization that make glitch city multi-faceted and alive but also kinda making me wish there were more to these characters.

much of this may come from how undeveloped or predictable these characters can be and it doesn't have to be this way. alma ended up being an interesting character to me because, at first, she's presented as some bourgie hacker who suffers from the disease of terminal heterosexuality -- but she ends up having this experience that people in the global south (especially latin america) will relate to. the part about alma following an ex into politics but realizing everyone might not be that radicalized is obviously coming from a real source. what makes alma's character very different from the usual depiction of gray hat hackers is that the characterization feels specific to particular lived experiences, not more abstract cyberpunk tropes tinkering. i ended up learning a lot about the world through someone like her; she's a character who irritates me to some degree, but i realize this is the way she is raised and she's just doing her best. this is also why i think dorothy is a strong character too by the way.

what i find tragic about the second half of the game is that jill's arc is quite good, but it's executed at the expense of all this interesting setting exploration. not to diss on jill who i think is quite a funny redditor in a 4channer internet world, but i was disappointed that the story suddenly pivoted to her. i know that the story was going to explore who she was as a person (and the scene where alma interviews her through the bartending mechanic is quite good), but it came too quickly. and the endings/epilogues of the game anyway neatly resolve like almost every dangling thread, even the major conflicts in the background. i'm kinda shocked that the weird poet guy's story, for example, ended happily; his situation sounded rough and it's surprising he's able to settle down with a deus ex explanation. i guess i'm annoyed by how va-11 ended all modes of speculation on the setting for me and i'm supposed to be happy that every character, even anna, has a happy ending. people often criticize the game for being "unfinished" or a prologue to a larger setting, but my issue that it's too finished. jill's (and by extension, glitch city's) story has ended in this ten hour journey. it's weird.

at the same time, i think the game is very likable. in the end, these are all quibbles about setting and character potential not executed in a way i would've liked to see. i enjoyed my time with the game and the writing is miles ahead better than most indie games writing. it's also exploring some subject matter that's dear to my heart, which is probably why i would've liked to see more. but practically speaking, this is an awesome debut title coming out from the global south. there's so much good presentation, the writing is snappy (though too tangential and a few misplaced commas), and it's a polished work. if anything, it's good that a game makes me want more of what it's doing well -- it means it's done something to me and i like to see what sukeban games will do next.

someone asked me what my rating for the game is because all reviews need scores. so the score i'm giving is 7.8/10 -- as good as Party Babyz.

sandwich man

2023-09-30T00:00:00Z

so i watched this anthology of three shorts about taiwan during the latter half of the cold war. i didn't expect much from it because it's considered the beginning of the Taiwanese New Wave, a film movement that marries the formalism of the french new wave with an eye for kitchen sink realism, but i ended up enjoying all three shorts more than i anticipated.

they're easy to watch without much context of the history (though it would certainly help) and i would love for people to watch this because it's extremely sad and amusing at the same time. while there are parts that don't work for me, it's an expressive set of shorts that speak about taiwanese history and culture then and now.

i personally jive with it because i often connect history and geography to the media i check out. and well, this movie (and the Taiwanese New Wave movement) is conscious of that!

The Sandwich Man/The Son's Big Doll

the titular short directed by the guy behind A City of Sadness is about a guy who dresses up as a clown to advertise for a film theater. unfortunately, this advertising sucks and he gets bullied by the neighborhood for his outrageous costume. he however has to stick with it in order to feed for his newborn child and spouse.

what i like about the movie is that, despite the protagonist being a literal clown, it shows the hardships of an impoverished family feeding off rice rations. he works for his son the most (hence the big doll title) and yet, his success is very mixed. the guy doesn't know how to read, so he stumbled upon this job as a clown through some ingenuity of his own. and when he tries to be some patriarch, he comes off as pathetic and whiny. the movie sympathizes with the spouse instead who has to do everything for him.

it's also a gorgeous short depicting rural taiwan in both its beauty and flaws. people are moving in and out of this area, so it's not exactly decaying. but it's simply a big village with few jobs. there's homeliness to be found for sure, but there's also a sense that the situation will never improve.

i won't say too much about the ending. but it sure made me think "wow, this is ozu if he made a Twilight Zone episode". while i like the other two shorts, this short is kinda the highlight for the anthology because of this crazy ending. i seriously love it.

Vicki's Hat

two salesmen are sent to a village to sell imported japanese thermos pots. one is a thirty year old man who's trying to make enough money in order to take care of his expecting spouse while the other is a 20 year old who's worked with the army as an engineer and is just taking the job to leave his family. their salesmanship has not seen any successes and all they can do is think about how to sell all these goddamn pots.

i found this movie rather interesting because it's another angle on rural taiwan, but it's one that i actually have seen before. if the previous short is about stagnation, this presents a rural taiwan that's self-sufficient enough to be closed off to the world. the short can be read as two people trying to introduce technology that could ostensibly improve the lives of the people here, but there's no need for them to save time on cooking. in one scene, an old guy even questions the taste of the food if it's cooked that quickly.

i do like what the short is mostly doing, but there's also a part that makes me go uhhh. the 20 year old guy is for some attracted to an elementary school girl and the 30 year old even jokes about the "10 year plan" that he has to marry her and settle down in this rural area. i get what it's trying to do considering the ending, but that's definitely the lowest part of the the entire movie for me.

that said, the ending rules and is a great example of epic luddism. there's some obvious commentary on how japanese colonialism worked on taiwan too, though i remain unfamiliar with this side of history. despite that strange part i mentioned, i really liked what the short is trying to tell and how authentic its depiction of rural taiwan is.

The Taste of Apple

of the three shorts, this one has actual historical significance because it's invited a lot of controversy. this short depicts a traffic accident in the 1960s between a us colonel of the marines stationed in taiwan and a laborer from the countryside. the us colonel and his translator have to go through an actual illegally built slum district in order to provide compensation to the laborer's family who turns out to be quite big and poor.

this realistic depiction pissed off some conservative critics who begged the taiwanese state to censor this section because it would hurt the national image of the state as the movie's being sent to film festivals all over the world. what happened instead is that it promoted healthy discourse on censorship and realism. this incident is likely the impetus of the taiwanese new wave.

as for the short, it's a romp. it presents real poverty with unbelievable sympathy, but it also makes a mockery of the urban life and later the americans. this family is so poor that they are shocked by the us navy hospital they entered to visit their father. i was laughing throughout the entire short and i personally enjoyed this one the most, even more than the acclaimed titular short. there's something wonderful about seeing the "modern" lifestyle and riches through the lens of poverty. everything most people take for granted (like using western toilets) is alien to them and they make comedy out of it. what i really appreciate about the comedy is that it isn't mocking them, it's mocking us the audience who's familiar with this stuff. this impoverished family is just sincere and honest about their confusion.

the ending is really interesting. on one end, it feels like a classic comedy from the 40s where everything turns out all okay in the end. but the short also feels ironic: the poverty taiwanese people experienced could simply be erased by actual monetary support. this family is simply lucky, but it doesn't have to be that way.

in conclusion, the anthology has some rough edges, but it's perfect when it comes to exploring The Taiwanese Experience. i admire how the three directors have approached Taiwan as a subject matter in their own unique ways and their adherence to realism, despite some melodramatic elements, is awesome.

i've been thinking about how to write more stories based on social, economical, and political realities and i think this anthology has provided me some ideas on how to begin. this movie uses beautiful composition and other formalistic techniques to bring out the lived experiences of taiwanese people. it's a kind of arthouse kitchen sink realism that i really adore. for that and more, this movie is definitely worth watching.

city of sadness

2023-09-26T00:00:00Z

so this is a movie i'm unsure how to recommend to people who aren't familiar with taiwanese history, but i found it very personal.

i'll just provide a little bit of context first: the chinese civil war was perhaps just as important as the second sino-japanese war (aka ww2 in china) for chinese people. at that time, the communists and kuomintang/nationalists were fighting and they'd keep on fighting if not for the japanese. after the second sino-japanese war was over, the civil war ensued raging on. i think about this civil war because my chinese indonesian family has ties to the chinese civil war and it's split the taiwanese and mainland sides from each other. it was only until 2004-ish when we heard that the taiwanese side is still around.

the film begins with the birth of a kid to the tune of emperor hirohito surrendering. later on, we are introduced to tony leung's character who has suffered an injury that's left him deaf. he's still happy though as a photographer. but as the movie continues, his family gets into troubles with the shanghai mob and also the rise of kuomintang.

this movie is historically significant for taiwanese cinema because it's the first to really go after the kuomintang being a fascist regime. many people know for good reason mao's atrocities in the great leap forward and the cultural revolution, but taiwan also faced something horrible too. chiang kaishek and his troops would "interrogate" people they suspect of having communist sympathies and "disappear" them, all while food prices increased dramatically. the people living in taiwan became oppressed and started doing large riots. indeed, this movie also features the February 28 Incident for the first time on the silver screen, though its egregious violence is not depicted. instead, we hear radio mutterings about what had happened. in a way, the movie is not concerned about the violence but the anxiety and responses to what's happening in taiwan. and when violence comes close, the few riots that do appear on screen appear horrifying.

one of the best scenes features the deaf protagonist being interrogated by one of these mobs. he's asked multiple questions -- where are you from? are you japanese? are you a mainlander? -- before he almost got whopped by a rifle. the movie is truly at its best when violence looks like it's going to happen.

but it's also a powerful movie only if you understand what is going on. the subtitles i got were pretty poor and the movie doesn't really depict any context. the first half explores the background of the February 28 Incident since it dealt with tobacco contraband, so if you aren't aware of this, you'd be confused why so much of the film dealt with this drama. there are also many characters on the screen and scenes can transition without any indication of how much time has passed. i do think this is a benefit to the movie -- it mimics so beautifully the anxiety of waiting for good news before being smacked by several instances of bad news -- but it's definitely quite hard to follow at times.

nevertheless, i think this movie is an accomplishment once you understand how the movie resists sensationalizing a real trauma taiwanese families faced. the director isn't interested in turning this film into some political propaganda either. it's solely about a family who went through this transition period and how they suffered through this hell.

this is a movie that speaks to taiwanese people whose relatives and grandparents aren't there anymore. it reclaims a trauma in their own words, not others. i don't expect people with few connections to taiwanese history to get it. it's not a movie for them. it's a movie for us and i think that's beautiful.

(Editor's Note: Published as a repost on the same day)

https://letterboxd.com/screeningnotes/film/a-city-of-sadness/

letterboxd is full of uh... let's just say "white people reviews", but i quite like this one since they've done some reading about the history and tried to appreciate the movie at good faith without BSing about how deep it is or demanding the movie explain itself to them.

(Editor's Note: This section is another repost on the same day)

i've found an ebook that analyzes how a city of sadness is framed and it rules

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/maize/13469763.0001.001/1:2/--staging-memories-hou-hsiao-hsiens-a-city-of-sadness?rgn=div1;view=toc

this movie's cinematography and editing fascinates me, so i've been looking around for interesting explainers and i stumbled upon this academic cc4.0 book that's enriching my understanding of the work. it brings up some historical context, but its real contribution is how it explains why the movie's shots have so much emotional resonance.

i particularly like this section on how the movie (and the director) avoids medium close-ups and prefers long shots for like everything:

In City of Sadness, the closest Hou’s camera approaches any character is from the chest up, what would probably be defined a medium close-up. It is a physical distance that translates into an emotional one as well. However, Hou’s films can be quite moving, and the lack of close-ups is (surprisingly enough) one of the reasons.

Medium close-ups of single characters are close enough to make facial expressions legible, but by keeping the camera away from the action, long shots emphasize the context among characters. By extension, this occasionally reflects a cultural emphasis on the family before the individual, deriving, in the last instance, from a long history of Confucian thought. This suggests that in American movies, our cultural obsession with individuality translates into a cinematic singling out by means of the close-up; narrative focus on a hero is complemented by the mise-en-scène. City of Sadness presents an alternative approach to mise-en-scène where, more often than not, the characters are seen (in long shot) in the context of other family members. In fact, the only true close-up of the film is of a photograph Wen-ching is touching up: a family portrait. Hou compounds his visual orientation toward the plural by diffusing the narrative attention among a number of characters. As in most of his other films, it is difficult to decide who the primary character is.

According to Hou, he began using long shots to cover for his nonprofessional actors. At the same time, he asserts that the long shot—combined with the long take—produces a special kind of image: “I’m not using the long shot just for the sake of the actors. A screen holding a long shot has a certain kind of tension, and for this you can’t find an alternative method to substitute. I realize I am confronted with a contradiction here” (Mart Dominic and Peter Delpeut, “A Man Must Be Greater Than His Films,” 16).

it's such a unique way in envisioning movies. this particular attention to space, the instability of transitions, and so on are all discussed in this book. you don't have to necessarily watch the movie to read this book, but i think it's one of the most interesting pieces of film criticism.

(Editor's Note: Final repost for the day)

from the conclusion of this book

It is true that we emphasize the aesthetics of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s filmmaking and how his style mediates the representation of politics, even to the extent of alienating many in the audience. However, we suggest that the discontent expressed by the audience and the political critics precisely reveals the problematics of filmic totality. So what drove the Taiwanese to fill theaters for City of Sadness? Hou’s film even outgrossed the simultaneously released Miracles—Mr. Canton and Lady Rose (Qi ji 奇蹟), Jackie Chan’s major 1989 production. It is likely that the Taiwanese craving for images and narrations of the February 28 Incident contributed to Hou’s commercial triumph over Golden Harvest’s major action-adventure film, the first time that a New Cinema filmmaker ever outperformed the kung fu megastar, Jackie Chan. But it is the denial of that desire—the scopophilia of massacre—that upsets viewers.

Hou’s thoughtful restraint in representing violence seems to indicate his ambivalence to the filmic image. Yet, it is this ambivalence that lends the narration of Taiwan dynamic complexity ... While perhaps Hou is not historically correct in depicting Taiwan’s society—as has been pointed out by many historians—and his disjunctive form of representation arguably discredits his politics, the film provides an excellent stage to discuss a nation that has historically developed a culture of hybridity, a state of multiple, colliding ethnicities and languages.

Had Hou provided those dissatisfied spectators direct images of the massacre in a style purged of ambiguity—the manner in which a popular film would treat this history—his film would likely have held none of its power. Hou probably would have produced a film analogous to the frightening clarity of the Nationalist Party, replacing one pedagogical monologism with another. However, by staging the traumatic memories of the nation through its charged spaces and double writing, the film re-presents history with all its uncertain multiplicities. Whether it enlightened its audience will be endlessly debated and is ultimately inconsequential. The film finally helped bring the February 28 Incident into public discourse and sparked discussions about the character of the nation precisely through its multiple entry points. The health of a nation—and a national cinema—depends upon being open to this complexity.

i agree with this conclusion. indeed, i've read western letterboxd reviews that don't get why the movie is actually depicting the February 28 Incident -- but its power comes from it being "around" it. its discomforting ambiguity and reluctance to turn into a simple misery porn narrative is what gives this movie its potency. i'm glad that i've had the privilege to think with the movie and this elucidating book.

unedited incoherent thoughts on onimai anime as a potential present

2023-09-19T00:00:00Z

much has been written about onimai anime as this euphoric trans fantasy but what intrigues me the most about the anime is how, through its slice-of-life worldbuilding, it constructs this utopia of the present that feels realizable.

the anime has only two truly fantastical elements: the gender bender medication that makes mahiro a young woman and their parents are usually AWOL. otherwise, everything else unfolds rather organically: mahiro experiences feminine care thanks to her sister, she meets friends in middle school, and so on. past the premise, nothing is out of the ordinary. the very trans fantasy of reliving their life in school again is surprisingly grounded in that sense.

and yet, it’s a fantasy, even though it shouldn’t be. the show has put much attention to everyday activities and worries (going to the hairdresser, menstruation) that it becomes simply a “woman life simulator”. the show doesn’t always romanticize womanhood, but it shows how transitioning is clearly a good fit for mahiro. the final episode has mahiro postponing returning to being a guy because she feels better being a woman right now. it’s a poignant resolution since it’s a real question people talk about (whether to detransition), but not everyone is able to think about this dilemma — just speculate about it.

the onimai anime therefore is a kind of speculative fantasy to me. the little fantastical elements it has in an otherwise realized setting provoke watchers to think about what it’s like to be in mahiro’s shoes — or what’s different between the watchers and mahiro. aside idealistic elements, there’s likely not so much. the scenarios (what would mahiro do in xyz) simulates potential life experiences people could undergo. the show is not so detached from life that it’s easy to speculate about what's possible then.

i find it interesting that people bring up this show as one of the reasons they considered transitioning. this show likely pushed people who've thought long and hard about this and made them look into this seriously. this obviously shows how much they want to change their present — to chase that mahiro “ideal”. mahiro is having fun picking clothes and that fun feels so realizable and easy to do. when mahiro asks "is this really me?" as she looks at the mirror, it almost feels like an audience member could go "could this be me someday?" too. that speculation of “could i be like mahiro” is now transformed into a trans experience that can be lived and relived many times over.

the “this is pretty much realizable even when the fantasy elements are excised” aspect is what fascinates me about the show. there’s few things idealistic about the show. it’s optimistic, sure, but it also refers to some real boring and annoying stuff that women get into. mahiro finds long makeup sessions at the hairdresser and long bouts of shopping dreadful. not everything works out for her, but enough does that makes her want to be more of a woman. this is, i think, realistic. but the easy accessibility to trans care that's even an eighth as effective as mihari's wonder gender drug? that's the fantasy. the show is only a fantasy because people don’t have access to this stuff and are often ostracized for seeking it. many of the plot beats in the show should be replicable, but due to transphobia among other structural things (ahem, capitalism) this is not possible for so many people. onimai shows that this should be: it can make all the mahiros happy.

that's why i think of the show as depicting a potential present. this is the timeline that could’ve been something so much better. mahiro and us are living in the same “now”; yet, many people won’t have a fraction of her life at the moment. mahiro’s “now” is a real possibility people can have if given the chance, so the question is “what does ‘given the chance’ mean in this context?” mahiro’s life isn’t a lost future; this is another potential present that is waiting in the horizon. we just have to somehow redirect the present to that possibility. that answer will differ for everyone. for some folks living in privileged areas, this could mean exploring hrt options including diy. for others, it could mean switching up pronouns. and not everyone wants to be trans anyway, but they might want to have the mahiros of the world get that opportunity too. this present/“fantasy” feels so close yet so far, so it's important to think about why we haven’t gotten here.

even putting aside the political overtones, i think it’s an important cultural and psychological question. i’ve been thinking about “potential presents” for a while: why are the things the way they are, how do we create new alternative paths away from the main roads, what makes life even more interesting than what we have now today, etc. having a vivid imagination about what’s doable right now is how you fight things like nihilism and be able to wake up to a new dreadful monday morning. there’s always things to do and change everyday; it’s just that we need to learn about it in order to perceive it.

subcultures are perfect to think about new, possible todays. not everything in subculture is as bloomer as onimai, but they reward us with profound insights about our current realities. they are incisive about what is lacking in the mainstream and propose some cutting edge stuff about how to think about the present. it’s this fostering of the imagination about alternative nows that i admire in subculture media and much of it exists in onimai too.

indeed, with so much rich material in this slice-of-life show, it almost feels like a responsibility to interpret as much as possible. people may have different interpretations, but that’s fine. it provokes them to think of another present, a world that’s much like our current one but much better and livelier.

i think that’s the hope of all subculture media: they all desire a potential present that can accept their dreams and woes, their smiles and tears, their personhood…

to hear their voices requires us to be less stubborn and learn instead to imagine new presents that aren’t at all far from our current present. onimai is very good at showing the trans girl fantasy of reliving school again; that’s just a potential present that could happen today or tomorrow if some things change. here is a today that could be our today now. we just need to fight for it.

okay i am bored of writing, bye.

raishi was pretty good

2023-09-01T00:00:00Z

yesterday, i finished a nowadays obscure and unknown take on Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Raishi by Klon, Co. is rather unique in all the good and wrong ways and i found it an enjoyable title. i believe people should at least know this series exists.

the game was originally on vita and remade on the 3DS. it was then re-released on Freem as a free game/furige alongside its sequel. the free game version has no voices, but it has everything else in the game.

quick thoughts on the three kingdoms

if people are at all familiar with ancient china, they'll likely know we chinese love our historical dramas. many tv shows then and now are often adapting the same old stuff: Condor Heroes, Journey to the West, and of course Romance of the Three Kingdoms. the latter has received many different adaptations and if you consider the Dynasty Warriors series as a series of multiple adaptations like i do, RoTK is the Skyrim of adaptations.

why do people keep returning to this historical work by luo guanzhong? plenty of reasons: it's got good confucian propaganda, is the perfect setting for drama, and has very recognizable figures who are revered as deities (as an aside, i often pray to guan yu during my trips to chinese temples).

many of these characters are larger than life because they're really walking billboards for ideologies. liu bei is the embodiment of Ren (仁), which can be translated as co-humanity). cao cao is the machiavellian figure who demands peace through all costs possible. sun quan is menhera. everyone east asian loves to take sides and defend the indefensibly stupid actions by each faction.

so one can imagine that RoTK-inspired media is oversaturated, certainly no thanks to koei-tecmo needing to publish Dynasty Warriors every few months or so. but the demand is there and i think the first Raishi game, low-budget it may be, fits right into this strange market of "too many but we still want more" games.

what makes raishi different

let's set the stage: Raishi introduces a character named Kyou (he would be named Jiang in chinese) who has to fish for his mom. a hot woman appears out of nowhere and tells him to "play my game, my lord" -- and he teleports into the Eastern Han period, right on the onset of Three Kingdoms.

he joins shu han, a faction now full of ladies who seem infatuated with kyou/jiang being naive and cute. he becomes a student of zhuge liang (fem) and fights wei, the faction led by cao cao (mostly dudes but there's some hot women). incensed by cao cao's penchant for destruction, he supports shu han joining forces with wu (also lots of women).

at first glance, the game looks like Koihime Musou with the sudden forcefemming of old chinese men. Raishi is scary HRT propaganda. however, it's also worth noting that dudes remain in the game. xiaohou yuan is a dashing otomege guy. the game goes more for a Fire Emblem gender equality thing than a full-on harem for this one guy.

as the game progresses, the game more or less follows the major plot beats of RoTK in order to get what the author thinks is the good stuff. it speedruns what are usually climatic battles (the Battle of Chibi/Red Cliff acts as a tutorial mission), which i find interesting. to use a biblical example, imagine if the christian bible story started right when jesus was going to get crucified and we get everything afterwards.

more importantly, the game revels in the deaths.

i don't mean heroic deaths either, which RoTK and the millions of adaptations have. it has plain gruesome deaths, whether inflicted on men or women in the game. we're talking organs being cut out, decapitations, and limbs being torn off. there's an IGN article with the headline 極上の人死にエンタメ！ (roughly translating to THE GREATEST IN ENTERTAINING HUMAN DEATHS) in order to advertise the game and i think that more or less expresses why i like this game.

it's bloody. it's horrifying. even cute girls get murdered and it's awesome.

how raishi approaches history

why do i think these gory death scenes of cute girls and hot dudes as interesting? a fun reason: all the deaths are already foreshadowed if you know your RoTK. you more or less know when major figures die, but you don't know how. and the how question is the most interesting and shocking part of the whole game.

how will this character i know who's going to pass away around this time will die in this game? what are the new implications of these deaths? where will the game go next?

these are really refreshing, even if horrifying thoughts to ponder about. and what's more: the death cgs don't last very long on the screen. while the game is visually gratuitous, the game is textually not so. to do so would be antithetical to the promise this game is doing something different: it's anti-cathartic, brutish, and upsetting.

and the fact that i know a thing or two about the history makes everything feel grim. for the entire game, i felt like i was fighting the history that's already written before me. i know what's going to happen and unfortunately, i know i can't stop it and my morbid fascination compels me to play more of it. it's a really interesting dynamic forced upon players like me.

ideological twisting

the campaigns of the the other two kingdoms follow this grim retelling of history and i think they're more successful at it. much of the game's excuse for slice-of-life stuff is "hot girl wanting to bang the protag", which is kinda funny once in a while. however, once kyou/jiang is out of the picture, we get a better sense of how the cast should behave.

i'm fond of the wu campaign where you follow a young Lu Xun (pictured in the image of this post) who's very smart and yet dependent on her onee-sama. much like the actual RoTK version, she's a talented strategist who ends up being unable to go against her lord's terrible orders until it's too late. her tragedy among many others stands out because she's conscious about how emotions drive this needless conflict when all three leaders simply want peace in their own ways.

it's just that this compulsion to have it "their own way" leads to this violence. the game is quite critical of people being trapped by ideologies, even if it is sympathetic to these generals and strategists. it's just that these pure hearts don't realize there's opportunistic villains out there who can twist their ideologies into venom.

i really dig the antagonists of this game: they're cold motherfuckers who feel like plausible troublemakers. not only are they historical too but the way they deceive and then betray is oh so delectable.

would i describe this game as centrist? nah, it is simply pragmatic: sticking too hard to ideologies makes it easy for leaders to be vulnerable to monsters out there who don't care about having any kind of beliefs. there are many wolves in sheep's clothing out there and they're the ones that make history tragic.

gameplay

the gameplay is strange.

historical fiction at its finest

i won't spoil too much on what makes Raishi's final chapter interesting, but i'll bring up that the next and only game in this four-part series is set in the rather obscure Spring and Autumn period (right before the Warring States period aka the period that gave the Sengoku Period in japan its name). let's just say the series is about time-traveling chinese strategies and the overall story is kinda awesome.

unfortunately, the writer has gone AWOL since ... 2020. they last tweeted a funny anecdote about how they met someone who's a direct descendant of lu xun and apologized to them; they also brought up that they're working on the scenario of the fourth game, implying that the third game's scenario is done.

and the company closed up shop a few years prior...

i would love to see the rest of the games done somehow, whether published on narou or as jank SRPGs with strange mechanics. the first game is full of charm and a love of history while obviously displaying its inclinations to quick and visceral deaths. there's much to love about this game as historical fiction, even if the SOL parts are too "harem" for my taste. it's really fun and i hope more people know about it, so we can know what happened to the last two games of the series.

anyway, Raishi is pretty cool and gruesome. bye.

eliza

2023-08-04T00:00:00Z

finished eliza.

while the game's more relevant these days thanks to a certain technology fad, what fascinates me more is about how tech startup culture could distort dreams and hopes of a better future into something alienating and dehumanizing.

the writing spares no empty words and the atmosphere is on point. it might be one of the best visual novels i've played, just because it gets to the message so potently.

and if any game reminded me of my old unpaid internship days, it's probably good.

this is a great title to play if you're hitting your thirties like me. you get nostalgic over the technological optimism of what your generation could've done to save humanity.

but technology can't. technology is the opium of the masses.

playing this game right when i started getting interested in interactive fiction and parser titles is also, well, interesting. it reminds me that as much as i like simulation titles, i like it when they don't simulate properly at all.

people want technology to be immersive, accurate, and communicative with us -- a perfect mirror that reflects our desires and dreams. which i don't find interesting at all. all the fun stuff in simulation titles and games close to that come from the silly errors and happenstance stuff that generate stories.

i like game dev because it's so toy-like.

i wonder if we've lost that fascination with technology since we want it to fix our problems. they're not fun anymore. they're supposed to save us.

take a short hike in the Fire Tower

2023-05-21T00:00:00Z

i recently had the pleasure of playing The Fire Tower by Jacqueline A. Lott, which is a text adventure game that's all about hiking a real mountain trail. that's it. you're not solving puzzles or undergoing epic narratives; you're just reading text about a character taking in the sights, smells, and sounds of the appalachian trail.

this might be a very boring game for most people. indeed, as aaron a reed writes in his IF50 article on the game, many people didn't quite get it. and i get the feeling most people today might still not get it even when so-called walking sims are mainstream because it doesn't reach for narrative highs at all.

but this game, written by a park ranger who cares deeply for nature, is very beautiful for the people who are interested in exploration. each landscape you encounter and choose to explore invokes rich emotions, making the player's journey so personal and particular. the lack of puzzles has made players like emily short be "in a better position to enjoy the natural surroundings". the writing is also "sparse and transparent," as mike penman writes in SPAG, "it doesn't get in the way of the country depicted and everything is described with an infectious enthusiasm". The Fire Tower is simply a title between you and the text parser providing an interactive medium to this mountain trail.

indeed, good short games (especially text games) have always been intense experiences for me, but i don't believe i've encountered a work that also immerses you in this world so quickly with its delicate attention to space and time. it really feels like you're hiking a real space, with you just typing "northwest" into a text parser.

it's frankly one of the most impressive simulations out there. while there are certainly titles like Blue Lacuna that impress players with its overflowing systems of detail, The Fire Tower goes straight to the essence of why text adventure games are so enthralling and interesting -- there's no need for puzzles, narratives, or even heavy simulation of systems, but it can simply be a loving recreation of journeys and exploring new sights and sounds. even in its most tense moments, the game remains humble in painting what it is like to be there.

as reed writes,

The Fire Tower finds at the heart of interactive fiction a truth about journeys and why we take them, a seed of adventure that few other games dared leave alone to grow.

i get the feeling this game will deeply influence me as i make more text adventure games in the near future. this game may last 15-30 minutes, but its aesthetic experience feels like it will last for an eternity for me. i'd like to make a title as vibrant and powerful as this game someday.

please get to Obsidian by Rocket Punch Games

2023-05-02T00:00:00Z

in my search to find something as interesting as MYST, i stumbled upon a rather obscure title that people were calling it as a science fiction-styled MYST. i don't really agree with this comparison for things i'll explain later, but i do believe Obsidian can stand alongside that legendary title as one of the great FMV adventure titles out there.

Obsidian is a game that starts off in the woods. as you advance through the woods, you get hit by this dynamic soundtrack that is synced to your movement and the surrounding world. for a rather simple trek through the woods, it is a surprisingly evocative way to open the game with staff credits.

and then you find a tent where, inside, you can read through a PDA full of emails and FMVs about nanotechnology and a dude with really bad shorts. you learn that these two characters, leila (who you are playing) and max, are taking a well-deserved break from their work putting up a satellite that's fixing the environment through nanomachines. their vacation spot? the wilderness they've restored to full health.

don't worry about that weird rock formation in the forest though. i'm sure nothing bad is going to happen.

as you leaf through their diary entries and vlogs, you learn that the two have these vivid dreams: leila dreams of bureaucracy and max of fixing some mechanical spider. very normal dreams like my own.

however, max doesn't seem to be around so you start searching for him and reach the weird rock formation. all of a sudden, it "opens up" and now you're in the middle of the bureaucracy leila dreamed about.

and the game properly begins there.

what makes Obsidian utterly interesting to me is how it pingpongs between different moods and subject matter. you're laughing your way through tedious bureaucratic processes: an eye doctor whispers so softly you can't hear what they're saying, so you're told to meet the ear doctor who's annoyed that you can't see them very well and they refer you to the eye doctor; there's a hints booth that gives you unhelpful advice; and you can fill out a questionnaire that asks about how you eat your ice cream. this whole section seriously made me laugh. but once you get to max's spider dream, everything becomes this distressing allegory about the emergence of artificial intelligence and how sentient machines will master the four elements.

these elements by themselves are nothing special. indeed, apart from the environmental theming, the game is a mishmash of ideas. however, it is this mishmash, this rapid oscillation between different ideas that defines the game for what they are. each area is a dream by a character and there's no smooth transition between dreams of different people. when you get out of leila's dream, you're being tunneled into the max's dream through fmv vortexes. it's an unusual framing device that makes the game distinctive from MYST where the channeling books, the mcguffin technology that make traversing through the different Ages possible.

this is where the MYST comparison really falters for me, but it's also why i think Obsidian is such an interesting game. the MYST series is all about the grounded logic of the worlds they're in; you're fiddling with contraptions that people would use to go around to places. you're just someone troubleshooting alien technology in a way. this is something many MYST clones and the sequels not developed by Cyan don't get: the best puzzles of MYST and Riven don't follow some adventure game logic but instead a curiosity on how things work and is directly related to worldbuilding; Riven after all tasks you to become a geologist of the islands in the end. Obsidian doesn't care for that at all; it's closer to the pre-MYST adventure games and it revels in its dream logic, but it never goes to the infamous fridge logic sierra games love to do. instead, it's about creating these dream worlds that have clearly established rules and that's it, no explanation. there's certainly "logic" and "physics" in each dream, but they don't go out their way to be explained other than "dreams are cool, man".

and i think that adherence to simplicity is what makes the game really stand out for me. you're going through these gorgeous FMV sequences and alien visuals without much sense of what is going on. it's like going through a theme park attraction in a way. and the game is really flashy about it: musical jingles play when you move into a new sub-area and you get a different soundscape that changes the entire atmosphere. Obsidian is a flurry of emotional experiences and doesn't really stop until the game ends. the acting and the writing are solid and it's impressive how the staff is able to adapt to these different moods. i'm very fond of max's actor. his performance is charismatic when he needs to. i cannot fault Obsidian for anything FMV-related. it is a genuinely beautiful game that keeps me hooked and dreaming for more.

unfortunately, i do think the lategame puzzles are a bit rough: there's a bizarre timing puzzle that just sucks, many puzzles devolve into "just solve this chess-like puzzle" and don't really add to the experience of the game and story, and the difficulty is all over the place. the lategame puzzles with the exception of one hilarious programming puzzle feel like they're added because of the belief that games like it need puzzles. as much as i like the game for doing something very different from MYST and its clones, the consistent difficulty level and MYST's ability to make puzzles enrich your player experience are the things that i wish this game had learned.

and i think Obsidian's ending is a bit too abrupt. one can muse about how dreams like this must end and they usually end abruptly, but the lack of some epilogue hurts the title a bit.

but honestly, i think Obsidian as an entire package is incredible. i'll say it again: it's a shame this game is rather unknown except to adventure game aficionados and has not seen even a GOG re-release because it's really, really good. it shows off everything great about pre-rendered and FMV games: lovable actors in dreamy landscapes, unique worlds, and interesting stories not possible in games before and after this era. MYST can be remade into a VR game, but i cannot imagine Obsidian being anything but this janky pre-rendered adventure game. it's a lovely title and i would love to see more people play it.

if you're interested in a proper overview of the game, Obscuritory wrote a really good article detailing the story beats and the themes. for those too unnerved by FMV adventure shenanigans, there's a recent longplay that has recorded the journey from start to finish. people who are interested in playing the game can do so through ScummVM without any installation nonsense: just drag all the contents of the first disk into your favorite empty folder and the contents of the other four disks will directly go to the "Obsidian" subfolder that came with the first disk.

PLEASE READ A Mind Forever Voyaging

2023-04-06T00:00:00Z

when i encountered this passage for the first time, i was awestruck. of all my 29-odd years of playing video games, this was the first time i've ever read a scene where you witness the murder of someone like me.

and all you can do is record and be an eyewitness to this violence

A Mind Forever Voyaging written by Steve Meretzky, developed by infocom, and published on 1985 is not a game i expected. at first glance, it looked like a science fiction work. i've seen it touted as an anti-reagan work, which did pique my interest. but i only decided to read it after reading IF50's article on Photopia touting how it was one of the first titles to do away with puzzles and explored interactive fiction storytelling for its own sake. i figured i should give it a shot at last and see why this topped the IF lists forever.

but like with every infocom title, you gotta check out the feelies. in this case, there is an important short story that serves as the prologue and let's just say it's a really dank story that sets the fucked up tone super quickly.

and once you get into the game and start walking around in this simulated city years after the plans instituted by the fictive version of reagan are implemented, you are assigned to record the everyday happenings of the work. i took the work with care. i had fun exploring the city and figuring out fulfilling the goals while reading as much flavor text as i could.

but once i was done with the assignment and my creator was like, "lol i'm so swamped, do whatever in the meanwhile xD", i fucked around and watched the news. and then, i dived into the simulation and found myself exploring the world 20 years later, then 30 years later, and so on...

and in this futuristic depiction of the world, you see the united states go to hell hard. it's a libertarian paradise for the rich, a racial capitalism for the poor. i was horrified as i watched a woman get beaten up by cops, christian fundamentalists take over the town and get ready for lynching, and everything fell into disrepair. these events were surreal to experience because they seem so similar to what the fuck's happening in today's usa.

as aaron reed in the if50 article on this game mentions:

A common critique of the game has been that its political leanings are too obvious and overexaggerated: it has a “distinct lack of nuance,” a modern reviewer noted. Its projections of the Plan have been called naive caricatures of conservative policy, taken to extremes too ridiculous to take seriously. And yet in 2021, four decades after Reagan, many of the details of future Rockvil that were once meant to be warnings have already come to pass, and go unnoticed by modern players. The death of local newspapers; cities with contaminated drinking water from under-regulated utilities; a deliberately hamstrung postal service; politicians who reject facts as fake and declare the press the enemy; overly aggressive airport security measures; extremists occupying government buildings; routine mass shootings; a constant backdrop of police brutality—the list of parallels to today’s world, many of which were once science fiction, is profoundly disturbing to compile.

this is the nightmare world that some guy in 1985 fearing about reagan's rise to power predicted. how the fuck is this work so prescient? i can only wander around Pathologic-styled as i see the rich gets richer and the poor gets deader.

what really helped with my connection with the work is the protagonist who's just in this unfortunate incident. the guy just woke up and realized he was some AI. but he still had feelings and he had a family to tend to. i always made sure to visit his family in every instance and it was heartbreaking to see this family dissolve harder and harder due to white supremacy.

so when i reached the ending, i got hit by the feels. i didn't expect the tone of the ending and it felt ... apt for what we all want out of this experience.

i would write more and turn it into a proper post, but suffice to say, this is the one text adventure game i wish everyone played. it's the one that will stick with me because of how forward-looking the game was and i appreciate its brutal honesty about how fucked reagan's legacy would be.

this is likely one of the best narrative games of all time if you ask me.

getting people to play niche games

2023-03-27T00:00:00Z

i recently watched this fantastic documentary on text adventure games by jason scott and they mentioned the problem of “how do we get more people to play these games”. you see these veterans and amateurs burn out trying to make these games profitable while a select few is still hustling out there and saying, “There’s an audience that is clamoring for this. We just need more visibility.”

as the enlightened redditor i am (i don’t use reddit), the answer is clearly somewhere in the middle: there’s definitely people out there who would love these text adventure games and more broadly, niche titles in general. i’m defining “niche title” broadly here: the stuff that’s not on storefront pages like Steam or consoles. there’s people who would love to immerse themselves in these text only worlds if they knew (i count myself as a recent convert) or people who would go “holy shit, this indie game is kinda cool”. and there’s definitely this David and the Goliath appeal: the underdog communities can beat goliath with more support from the outside.

i get that, but i wonder how many people will actually play these titles even when good visibility is there.

i think about this a lot when it comes to indie japanese games. games are getting translated, people like me write about ‘em, and many blood has been spilled over polemics going “We need more diversity of discourses in games!” and i sorta wonder if much has changed.

sure, more people have picked up titles like Astlibra, but there’s a reason they’re niche, right? even with all the mass marketing these titles could’ve gotten, they weren’t going to find a lot of players. i’ve read that Zork and Myst were bestselling titles people bought as toys that did cool things, not as how we understand video games. i would agree that people probably bought Myst to show off their epic graphic cards and Zork because a computer speaking to them is very funny. those are interesting exceptions that did spawn entire genres… but their successes have not been replicated due to this toy factor.

so the passionate subcultures and communities that stuck around and talked about these niche games aren’t getting bigger. but they aren’t getting smaller either. in an interview with ZUN of Touhou that i am slowly translating, he mentions how his sales never changed throughout the years, even when Touhou as a "genre" has gotten bigger. the audience demographic clearly changed, but he thinks there’ll always be the same percentage of people in the entire world who would play these shmups. people may dip in or out, but the number of people should be the same. it can’t grow or diminish.

after years of writing about subculture, i somewhat feel similarly: perhaps, not as deterministic as ZUN does but rather even if we somehow mitigate the material restrictions, made niche games more accessible through articles and better engines, and expand visibility (all important things that we should be doing regardless), i still expect we won’t get that many people.

this is perhaps the fate for a lot of niche titles. they are niche because they are aimed at a specific audience. while i am also sure there are people who would enjoy interactive fiction but haven’t heard of it yet, it still requires literacy and people who love to imagine and think through what they’re reading. shmups and rhythm games are notoriously inaccessible, despite attempts to make them more friendly to newcomers. and so on.

there will be success stories where a title breaks out of the cage and hits the mainstream. thinking of titles like Fata Morgana for example: it seems like some folks know that visual novel, even if they’ve never tried it. but amidst all that success, people don’t really branch out and explore.

part of that is the current material conditions we are in: we are stuck using Steam and other spaces. then, there’s the more ideological/cultural conditions like orientalism and the looking down on smaller games. but i also think, in the end, the people who do go beyond these conditions and try another visual novel may still find issues with these titles and can’t gel with them for whatever reason.

Baba is You is another interesting title to think in this light: it’s a largely successful puzzle game thanks to its intuitive logic rules, its low cost is inviting, and the game itself lets you play many puzzles in most states of the game. lots of people explored and applied these principles in greater detail — and few people have explored further than a few titles that directly contributed to this game.

i think my role as a writer documenting these subculture works is not to make people play these games. i mean, it’d be nice to see folks play more visual novels. it’s where i’ve invested money and time into developing and theorizing about. but honestly, i just expect not that many people will play these games for a number of reason.

and i think we should respect that. even if The Post-Scarcity Indigenous-Respecting States of America ever come into existence, there’ll always be something limiting people picking up some game: it could be motion sickness, the game is impossible to play without sight, so many reasons that may still make us drop the game and do something else more palatable. the most niche games can’t be played by everybody.

instead of simply seeing ourselves as pseudo-marketers of the niche games, i think the role of writers and theorists like me is unraveling commodity fetishism. one of the most interesting videos i’ve watched recently that expounds on this is OneShortEye’s video on Owl Quest. at first, you think you’re watching some kusoge (and you are), but in order to get the joke, you have to understand Sierra Online and the people who worked in this company that inspired the creator of Owl Quest to make whatever the hell that is. each step of the video is the OneShortEye interviewing people whose titles made this kusoge possible. and the stories they have in this history are important and humanizes the production. in other words, we don’t simply see a kusoge as a commodity but as an array of humans and their social relations that culminated into this product.

i don’t think everyone can do this kind of documentary. i certainly can’t simply due to geography reasons. but i feel that subculture media writers are best at stripping commodity fetishism away and showing their viewers the kind of effort and labor had been put into these games. not everyone is going to play the King’s Quest series, but hearing the stories that made them possible is more than enough.

that’s what i think when i read someone on twitter going “I can’t play Zork but I admire the game from afar.” that admiration is valid and we can certainly supplement it by providing analysis, criticism, interviews, and other forms of evidence to validate the existence of the labor-power expended on these niche games.

the issue isn’t simply that niche games are invisible but rather we haven’t gotten the right lens to see them as labor-power. unfamiliar eyes can only see these titles as commodities and they can only shrug and say “not for me.” that’s valid if we simply leave these titles as commodities. but anyone who sees people working on this craft, expending a lot of effort and sweat into them, and more is going to end up reappraising this “product”. we may not get it, but the expenditure of labor-power is real and we wanna validate it.

and the role of criticism on spaces like here then is helping that validation. we shouldn’t be simply trying to get people to play these games (again, that’s more of a bonus) but to help the non-players to understand why people have put their labor-power into this. my analysis of games and other media i write about, i hope, should come across as me trying to assess and explain to people what kind of effort these creators are doing to an audience that may not know how to appreciate it. in a way, i view my own articles as teaching people how to appreciate them as much as they can, even if they don’t plan to try them.

i really think we should be less married to the “get these niche titles out there” mindset and think more about the labor and craft behind these games. thinking about that section in the documentary on text adventure titles, i respect these creators and also empathize wanting to make these titles into a full-time career. but even if that was possible and “the titles did get out there”, they may not be compensated well for their efforts. people may not view their games as products of their labor-power but as commodities. and that just means playing into the capitalist game.

so yeah, i don’t believe everybody will start running to play interactive fiction titles if they’re slapped on billboards at Times Square. even if they did, it won’t solve the recognition problem: everyone wants to see their efforts recognized in some form or another. instead, criticism should help murder the commodity fetishism and let people see the games as true craftsmanship. much like how people need to be trained to understand how to view paintings, what folks need really is criticism that teaches them how to understand these games as labor-power regardless of whether they play it or not. analysis that helps people look at labor clearly is good analysis in my opinion.

anyway, i’m going to watch Ordinary Sausage videos. bye.

p.s. i mirrored this post on dreamwidth because it would be easier to find anything long-form for me than cohost lmao. this should've been a dw post.

barcode fighter or how i convince someone to make a video on a trans-affirmative kids manga from the 90s that also has eromanga sequel

2023-02-23T00:00:00Z

[cw: some sexual references but nothing like overt]

the most important question

once upon a time, @gayanimegirl (saori) and a bunch of us in Prof. Lily, a yuri visual novel collective were wondering a simple question: "Where's all the trans-affirmative otokonoko manga?" saori was trying to write up a post on OniMai that's now been making the rounds on this site and she read some academic analysis about this shit.

specifically, she was looking for papers that explored the otokonoko (roughly femboy but so much more) subcultures and the media associated with them and how they might be connected to exploring gender. however, while she was getting to some good stuff, she didn't find anything dealing with earlier otokonoko manga in english.

it seemed obvious to us that there's not that much english-language media on this content.

so i started looking at the japanese wikipedia article for otokonoko manga. there's some of the more referenced early titles (Osamu Tezuka's Ribbon Knight for example), but the one that really caught my attention: Barcode Fighter.

wtf is a barcode fighter?

encountering a genius

looking up this title on google, i found myself reading nyarla (Needy Girl Overdose writer among an experienced blogger on japanese media subculture) talking about this manga. there, he started talking about how sakura's arguably one of the most famous otokonoko and how it probably traumatized a bunch of kids but what really caught my attention was the eromanga connections. nyarla wrote about how he lost his mind reading Anal Justice for example when he saw the line that was like "So you were the one leaving cum stains on the wall" in reference to the otokonoko protagonist getting super horny over futa girls doing shit. and the more i read the article, i started to lose my mind when i found out the mangaka, Toshihiro Ono, was also the same mangaka behind Dengeki! Pikachu, a childhood manga for many friends of mine. that manga was also heavily censored by the artist himself for the international releases because it was so fucking horny.

nyarla kept bringing up how the guy's a kind of genius. only a genius would connect a kids' manga about some random console to eromanga doujinshi about futas and otokonokos banging to make a peaceful world. and nyarla also wrote the post in preparation for a sequel one-shot manga that continued the story to let his readers know to get hyped about it. he wanted people to know about this genius. grab the kids' magazine that featured the beyblade protagonist on the cover because this was a one in a lifetime event.

then i read the japanese wikipedia article on Barcode Fighter. and it turns out sakura was more than just a nondescript otokonoko. she's a trans woman. this kids' manga connected to some console nobody but retro nerds ever heard about, the Barcode Battler, has a trans woman character. and there was a critic who talked highly of the manga: "This was a manga that told elementary school boys that it was fine to like otokonoko (read: trans) characters". okay then, something's definitely up. i hope, readers, you are as curious as i was and going what the fuck is this shit lmao. there's not that many moments where i was seriously rereading the japanese and going "I understand the language, but I still don't understand the concepts". this isn't some eroge with high-minded social science concepts. this is a kid's manga. it was aimed at elementary school students in the 90s and talked about a trans woman character. this is wild. for context, the lgbt boom in japan was undergoing right now. it's all talk about AIDS and gay rights, not trans people. in the usa, judith butler had published the groundbreaking book Gender Trouble in 1990, two years before Barcode Fighter was first serialized. the mainstream public was trying to grapple with the L and G parts of LGBT, let alone the already "obscure" T. the T was studied by academic sickos who read sicko theorists like butler aka not representative of the public consciousness.

how can a kid's manga talk about trans lives so directly? why does its existence totally confound me? i had to read the manga myself to find out. i could not believe this 90s manga for kids talked about a trans woman, almost 10 years before Wandering Son came out. that's not really something you hear everyday.

let's barcode

i started reading the manga and thought okay, this seemed interesting. then i hit the first trans affirmative scene and i realized "I Got Something". this was legit. sakura's a legit trans woman talking about trans issues. I Got Something That Needed to Be Told to Everyone. i wasn't sure how to proceed. i don't think i could write a post about this by myself. i started being annoyed about the TEXT format that i usually write in. this story about Barcode Fighter needed to be in video format. and i started cursing myself. and i'd have to research a lot too. i needed someone who i can trust to collaborate and do well to the series. it needed to be someone who can deal with trans issues and adult manga. it was then i DM'd my good visual novel content creator friend, Amelie Doree, about this: "do you by any chance know anything about the Barcode Battler"? to which she responded three hours later upon waking up "I know it by name and concept only, it's wild" amelie doree), for the uninitiated, is a trans video content creator who primarily focuses on visual novels with a queer perspective. she's done some great content over the year and i frequently collaborate on her stuff, providing her translations and some historical context pro bono. i just like helping out. "well," i said to her, "how do i put this. what if i told you it's connected to japanese trans history?" i think most people can tell what her response would be to that. and this was when i started talking about the trans affirmative scene that made me go "okay, i need a collaborator." in a pivotal chapter, sakura's gender gets revealed to the cast: she's a trans woman. a character named kai who was head over heels for her became disgusted and said she's an okama. the protagonist, retsu, defends sakura and says she's a woman and you should apologize to her. and both characters start piloting their barcode mechas to fight over trans rights. we were both losing our shit.

the research

it's not everyday i felt like i uncovered something miraculous from random internet archaeology i did. most times, it's just some dank subculture about clippy-like assistants with elaborate science fiction stories. i enjoy writing about visual novels and their dank themes, but that's to the extent i was willing to write about. but here, i think we felt like we just found some hidden part of a real LGBTQ+ media history that we were a part of. so i did some research. i read about how corocoro comics was created in order to house Doraemon, an already popular series of oneshots that was beginning to see some action and become one of the most famous manga of all time. then, i read an interview with the then-current editor who described the philosophy of the magazine as "Peepee Poopoo Fundamentalism". the way the editor went about goes like this: boys are tired and stressed out from their elementary school work. all they wanna do is chillax and read some manga. and what do boys especially love? piss and poop jokes. if you read Super Mario-kun for example, that's a manga where mario and luigi make butt jokes as they fight bowser. then, there's the long-running Pocket Monsters manga where all the pokemon talk, clefairy makes fucking weird faces, and charmander found a master ball and stretched it out for the world to see (it was red's scrotum). there's a lot of dick jokes because boys don't give a shit about LOVE like girls do. all they want is funny dick poop jokes and that's it. if the boys grow out of it and read "older" magazines like shounen jump, that's fine. corocoro won't go after them. instead, the editor said they believe in corocoro's mission: to shower a new generation with peepee and poopoo jokes. and that's why the magazine still lives on to this day. besides reading this insightful and wise interview, i watched various yukkuri channels on corocoro because all good research begins with reimu telling marisa some obscure lore shit. it was in these videos where i learned about a gag manga about aliens with a heartfelt ending about growing up with a goal to meet your friends, another manga where the protagonist wished for something that made him savestate into a disastrous loop where he keeps experiencing he and his family surviving an airplane crash, and how people read corococo in the showa era. this was all new information to me as someone who barely reads manga, let alone kids' manga. it was honestly a new world. the research here was very indirect to what made Barcode Fighter special, but it let me immersed myself into the thoughts of what a typical corocoro comics kid would be thinking about.

i still don't get it

by this point, doree was already deep into reading the manga and editing the video. i was advising her on the script and translated a rather long sequence of dialog that would be dubbed in the video. this was the most Effort i've put into a side project that didn't really "serve" me per se but that's just because i care about getting the manga to a bigger and wider public. but i have to admit i still don't get it. the more i read into this world of boys' manga, the more i'm stumped how Barcode Fighter existed. this wwas an emotionally mature manga that the creator himself admitted stumbling upon. he originally wanted to make sakura a joke okama character but ended up procrastinating and realizing she was a real character that needed to be treated seriously. was it all an accident? it likely is, but when i was working on translating this set of dialog (among my other duties like my ACTUAL JOB), i was fixated on getting these lines right. the climax of Barcode Fighter happened right before it was cut: in an arc called "Let's Rescue Sakura!". without really giving the game away (i'd rather want people to experience it in the video format that doree made), all i'll say about this scene is about this one line. there's a scene where kai is able to talk to sakura as a trans woman. he still has a crush on her, but he isn't sure how to transcend the gender binary. remember, these two characters are still kids (single digit ages). especially in the 90s, they don't have access to a vocabulary that we do now. but kai wants to talk about gender to her. and he says these lines: だれだって話せないことが一つや二つあるもんや。ましてや、それがつらい悲しみを引きずっとったら話せなくて当然や。 for those who don't know japanese, let's just say i paced around my room trying to translate this. this is a very emotionally mature thing to say, despite having zero access to the words we have today and it's coming from a kid. here's some kid trying to explain to them that being trans is okay and being unable to talk about it is difficult esp if you got forcibly dragged out of the closet. i tried translating it previously as something like "i get you closing up like that", "you got dragged out into the open, of course you'd feel bad." but they all sound too sophisticated, too mature, and honestly "too lgbtq+" language. this was the 90s. kids don't know what "being in the closet" means, even if the japanese lines does indicate "dragging out". i stared at these lines for so long because i didn't really understand its function. and then i realized, he was talking about how vulnerable she was. the reason these lines stayed with me is because he intuits that sakura is feeling vulnerable over her trans identity. he's trying to conceive some Language to approach her and talk about this. i talked with len and ganbarimustang about this and we ended up agreeing with the translation i went for. i won't spoil what the translation is, but i think people would probably agree with my read on this line. it's a line i am very satisfied with and i would consider it my best translation as an amateur translator to date. the kicker is that i didn't have to translate this. amelie doree wanted me to translate the stuff after this line. but i didn't want to. i wanted to get this scene translated because it's so damn important. the buildup is too important and that's why the catharsis of the succeeding lines occur. i wanted this line translated by hook or by crook and the solution i found, i hope, makes sense for many people who want to hear trans affirming lines from cis people who don't know what to say to trans people. i still don't get how this scene happened by the way. it's too absurd to even exist. this is more progressive than any of the 2020s lgbtq content i've read. i fucking love it.

what if as endings

what's tragic about Barcode Fighter is that it ends right after this scene. the manga was cut because the console died to this thing called "Pokemon". no one cared about the console, so why continue the manga? there is a continuation of sorts, but what really struck a chord with me is about the "lost future" of the manga. much like why i'm obsessed about the Sakura Taisen franchise, i think about how Barcode Fighter could've been something more if it lived longer. what if it got an anime adaptation like all the other corocoro manga? what if kids all over the world got to meet sakura in anime or manga form? what if? to be quite honest, i don't think strongly about the non-lgbtq parts of the manga. i felt like i'm too jaded and cynical to enjoy the over the top content (I'M TOO MUCH OF AN ADULT). you gotta ask doree about that. but the lgbtq parts relating to sakura really, really impressed upon me. i just think, "What if I read this as a kid?" i don't talk about my GENDER much publicly because it's hard for me to talk about it. i had voice dysphoria and later became confused about this masculinity thing during my teenage years. i had a deep desire to be some girl. i didn't know what it was until i learned about trans people. and i always thought it was "too late": i only learned about them in college and just "coped". it was also way later that i learned that people would transition and do HRT at a later age, even at an older age than i am currently. it's "never too late" so to speak, but i also wonder if i would be even happy as a trans woman or if i were straight up born as a woman. i feel like i will always be dissatisfied with my gender expression because we live in some Gender Binary. which is why i joke about my gender being 闇 (darkness) and my preferred pronouns they/them. i don't think i could ever be happy about my own gender expression in this world. i came to this conclusion a while ago and i've been unsatisfied but at least not feeling like i betrayed my own feelings. still, i do wonder. what would happen if i read Barcode Fighter as a kid? perhaps, i would still arrive in the same conclusion, but i think i'd be happier knowing there were people out there feeling some similar shit. perhaps, i would realize that i'm nonbinary and shit. perhaps, i could be someone different.

this kids' manga about kids obsessing about barcodes has made me think about the possible Gender Futures i could've led. it's a very strange thing to contemplate on when there's many good lgbtq+ manga out there that goes straight to the source and people feeling like their lives had changed upon reading them.

but here i am, thinking about some kids' manga that could've made an impact on me and so many people if it became anime and was translated when it came out.

conclusion

if you're interested in the actual manga itself, i recommend amelie doree's video (also, an uncensored patreon version exists). it's a good forty minute video with some impressive editing and even voice acting.

if you're coming from doree's side of the equation, uhhh i don't have anything more to add lol.

but i hope this longpost was useful for people interested in this side of LGBTQ+ history. i was very lucky to have found this manga, so i'm doing my best to share my joys over it. i'd like to see more responses to it because sakura and kai are precious characters to me and i want to see people learn about it.

also, anal justice is an incredible eromanga and people should read it. even if it's Problematic to the extreme. it's just funny as shit.

最果てのイマ (Saihate no Ima) Everyone Everywhere All At Once

2022-11-18T00:00:00Z

The Internet as the Global Village

There's something very exhausting about accessing the World Wide Web. It's likely because we now treat it as a chore. We romanticize the days before the internet and feel nostalgia for the early days when it felt like a playground full of possibilities.

But now, we are bombarded with new obstacles hampering socialization every day.

With every step made toward advancing communications technology, we stray further from the people we know. Not only is it deeply ironic but this pattern is now a mainstay feature on social media. We use these services like Discord to find friends only to alienate ourselves; we don't know actually how to communicate in this new era after all. Instead, we're overwhelmed: there's too much information, too many social cues to follow, too many people. The internet is strangling us, but we need it.

If we couldn't access the internet, we would be cut off from the entire world. Imagine not being able to access Wikipedia: all that information at your fingertips would vanish. Sure, you can still research without the internet -- but reading books and watching documentaries can only go so far. You will become outdated because new updates on the latest research are being discussed on Facebook. The "word-of-mouth" and water cooler talk are replaced by Twitter threads and SEO-friendly articles.

And for many young people too, their first deep exposures to subject matters that won't be explored in schools (ex. sexuality, gender) aren't from books but on carrds and Tumblr reblogs. They explore issues affecting them in fanfiction posted on Archive of Our Own and get to taste criticism for the first time from watching media analysis content on YouTube. Streamers and VTubers are the new counselors of today's ailments. The fear of missing out is amplified on the web as everyone gathers around on Discord to talk about the latest movies and shows...

Everything is happening on the World Wide Web. We can't live without the internet. And yet, we despise it.

Sanctuaries of the Dispossessed

If the above soliloquy means anything to you, then you may be interested in reading more about the themes present in this particularly inaccessible 2005 title: 最果てのイマ (Saihate no Ima) by Tanaka Romeo (CROSS†CHANNEL, Kana ~Imouto~, Jinrui wa Suitaishimashita). Clearly meant for a specific subset of people who spend their days doomscrolling and reading blogs on Substack, this prescient title speculates and tackles the ongoing technological developments that affect how we perceive ourselves.

It does this in the form of blog posts that read like Wikipedia.

The work follows seven misfits who've founded a sanctuary (聖域), which is actually an abandoned factory in the middle of nowhere. Led by Atemiya Shinobu, this Breakfast Club-styled group doesn't share that many affinities with each other -- all come from different backgrounds and have unique personalities. But this sanctuary, this safe space is where they feel they belong. They can chill and express themselves. People eat snacks, talk about random shit like world politics and barbecue, and even camp there if they're tired from their family and school. Everyone came to this community because Shinobu was nosy enough to make people join his hideout. This fragile community space may dissipate someday, whether through the passage of time or major historical events, but he believes it is one worth preserving.

However, the question becomes “How much would you do to save this?” Would you sully your hands by getting into the mess of interpersonal relationships? How much research would you do in order to feel like you can lend a helping hand? Are you willing to invite your friends into a new kind of hell?

And incorporate all of that into one space?

At its core, Saihate no Ima has a simple yearning: you just wanna hang out with your buds, but you don't know how. And yet, this yearning is actually a mosaic of ideas and concepts that give birth to more of such mosaics. Questions lead to other questions. No simple answers exist when it comes to the human condition. Only complicated ones. You have to enter into rabbit holes that seem tangential to the subject matter but are ultimately necessary to answer the most fundamental of questions, "Why do relationships matter?"

As a result, the title is structured intentionally like a haphazardly written personal blog or a poorly written Kastel post unedited by Len. As you read scenes depicting Shinobu's everyday life, you will encounter hyperlinks that lead you to articles explaining concepts like Minakata Kumagawa's understanding of jashi or even fully fleshed out scenes that are part of the chronology of the game -- and these may also link to another article or scene altogether. The game is just full of <a href>s: every digression and digressions-within-digressions are unleashed upon the reader without a check in place. You are stuck in this worldview envisioned by the blog, with no compass telling you when or where this scene takes place in. It's like you're stuck in the middle of a Wikipedia article and you want to crawl your way out. Its worldbuilding appears and disappears within hyperlinks, euphemisms, and throwaway lines that would only make sense on a second reading. But chaotic and headache-inducing this may be, this is representative of how we in this internet age perceive the world.

The title is deliberately confusing because this is how we structure our lives alongside technology. Example: we are reading microblogs (i.e. the fragmented musings of everyday people detached from time and space). When we reply to someone pontificating about something, we aren't thinking of the contexts (the life story of this person) but on an idea that intrigues us. There is always the possibility of talking past the other because we aren't thinking exactly the same thing -- and technology aggravates this dissonance. And when worst comes to worst, the parties involved may feel hurt over the miscommunication. Nothing feels as bad as being incapable of translating yourself to other people correctly.

But we (and this title) still strive to communicate anyway, even if we are prone to misunderstandings. No one can truly live off the grid. We are forced to participate in the internet and thus seek reprieve within this new technological medium.

In a way, yesterday's blogs and today's Discord chats are the sanctuaries of the weak. The community it fosters is as vulnerable to harm as Shinobu's sanctuary. We gather in the comments section and praise or criticize before going on our own ways. From afar, it looks disgusting and sick -- the bartender character in The Silver Case comes to mind -- but it is the necessary act of catharsis for many online-brained people. We want to be understood and these sanctuaries are the manifestations of that very desire.

The Eroge is the Message

I bring up the eclectic ideas of Marshall McLuhan not just because the title clearly owes huge debts to his works but also it provides an avenue in understanding why the title is so preoccupied with the interplay of technology and alienation.

Though McLuhan is most famous for propagating "the medium is the message", there is a more eminent quote attributed to an unknown person that he would often use and it clarifies what he's actually getting at: "Water is unknown to a fish until it discovers air." A more dry and academic explanation by the man himself appears in War and Peace in the Global Village: “One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in." In other words, fishes won't realize they've been in the medium known as water until they're out of the fish tank.

And like these fishes, we can't really gauge our environment. We’re looking at technologies like social media in the lens of the past, leading to this dilemma we all face. In Medium is the Massage, McLuhan called this the Age of Anxiety: "the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools”.

What does this mean exactly?

We can search the near past and see what he means by "yesterday's tools". McLuhan theorized in Gutenberg Galaxy about the impact of the written word and how it was transmitted. Literate people began to lose their communicative abilities to appreciate movement, sound, and touch in favor of the visually written word. A massive social transformation had taken place. This writing tradition took on a life on its own and immersed its readers, still unaware that they're in such a medium, into new modes of thinking.

But many thinkers were unaware of how communication technology had changed them because they're stuck in the past. Concepts like nationalism could not have existed if people weren't writing and sharing their thoughts about what said nation is -- Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is very enlightening in this regard. Using this print era as a case study, McLuhan argues that it is therefore worth considering how the manners and technologies we use to communicate could change the way we perceive the world.

Such an argument may look crude if examined with detail and I think there's flaws to this historical narrative. For example, one could raise their eyebrows on the technological determinist slant, dubious sketches of indigenous people and their cultures, its espousal of certain Orientalist and cultural nationalist ideas to distinguish The West from China and the Global South, the questionable distinction between literate people and non-literate people, ambiguous definitions of important concepts like the "global village", spurious connections to random thinkers, obscurantist lines of reasoning etc.

But cut away the fluff and the crux of the argument remains intact: We are affected by our technological environment in ways we don't expect. Or to put it another way, in the background, technological innovations are hosting services and processes that's screwing with our lives. Humans are always within these mediums. The people of the past weren't directly affected by the printing press per se, but they were enveloped in the environment that the press conjured. A more modern example may clarify this further: traffic jams and car pollution don't come from the fact that we're car-dependent but rather that we're actually highway-dependent. Television (and later, social media) connects people spontaneously through audio-visual and participatory elements while reading remains a private matter. Mediums define us as much as we define them; this defining is the environment. It may not be surprising to learn then that McLuhan and his followers called their discipline "media ecology": the study of how the cumulative effects of media technology, understood as an environment, influence our thinking.

Hence, the medium is the message.

But this insight came with a warning: we too are being changed by the media environments we're in. What McLuhan fears is that we're actually 19th century human beings facing the wrath of 21st century technology. If we want to treat technology as a medium seriously like him, then we must admit we're willfully unprepared to apprehend how technology will affect us. We haven't thought about this enough. Just like the fish that won't know they've been traveling in the medium of water, we won't know what medium we're in until we're out of it. A passage from Gutenberg Galaxy elucidates us on this aspect that is especially pertinent to Saihate no Ima:

The highly literate and individualist liberal mind is tormented by the pressure to become collectively oriented. The literate liberal is convinced that all real values are private, personal, individual. Such is the message of mere literacy. Yet the new electric technology pressures him toward the need for total human interdependence.

This may read like a text predicting the rise of social media and Discord groups, but the title is a 1962 work and McLuhan passed away on 1980. He's been on the money, predating ARPANET (i.e. the first workable prototype of the internet) by around seven years.

The Internet as the Age of Anxiety

And so, we are now at the heart of the matter: the internet is a scary place that fascinates our imagination. It is a global village where we are connected to each other. While McLuhan wasn't alive to see even the earlier consequences of the internet, his insights remain far-reaching.

McLuhan specifies technologies as extensions of our bodies in Understanding Media. The clothes we wear are just extensions of our skin. We step on the gas pedal and the car becomes our body. Even expressions like "the heart of the city" suggest a deep organic connection. The computer age is especially remarkable for connecting our nervous system to the electrical systems of computers. We are one with computers. We think in and within computers and now the internet.

Or so, we like to think.

As McLuhan notes, the way we associate with one another has been sped up. Our older modes of communication could not adapt to this lightning speed. We "begin to sense a draining-away of life values" as we try to save this sinking ship. Technology will always be "extensions of our physical and nervous systems to increase power and speed", but we can't keep up -- not with our antiquated frameworks.

The internet is thus too much. Too much shit flung onto our faces, to be more precise. When we talk about information overload, we aren't actually describing it metaphorically but rather literally and sensually. Numbing is of utmost necessity in McLuhan's view; otherwise, our extensions will shock our nervous system to death. This coping mechanism has brought him to the conclusion that "the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and apathy." This is bad news, especially as we're becoming more connected to other people. But like bad Wi-Fi connecting and disconnecting our laptops, our half-assed connections are causing us to shock each other. We cannot deny other people's existence anymore because we can see and hear them.

Think about it: we enter big Discord servers full of members talking to one another and feel like we can't talk. Our words enter into a void. We feel responsible for not being connected. Technology is supposed to help us and extend to new frontiers, but it has failed us -- or rather, we don't know how to use it and we have failed it but that's a truth that hurts too much for our ears.

Our mishandling of technologies has trapped us in this fragile interdependence. We haven't figured out how the basic principles of the internet and other technologies have changed our lives for the better or for worse. How can we even hope to communicate with others when we've only just started to notice other people exist and we can hurt each other?

Technology Against Technology

With this understanding, we can now return properly to the themes of Saihate no Ima. In later sections, the title contemplates about sense-perceptions being invaded by new technological mediums. After the reader has gone through all the character routes, they are suddenly thrown into an arc all about a war.

What war?

Technology.

How do we fight against technology?

With technology.

An unconventional panopticon has arisen in the title's version of the internet. Everyone is, in some sense, connected to each other in the most terrible of configurations. Like our minds are sutured into a cyborg Twitter. Besieged within this new media/environment, people loudly wonder if free will or individual agency even exists.

Social media in the Saihate no Ima universe isn't just for marketing but a technological chimera we can unleash upon others if we have the right training. There's no need for nuclear weapons when we've volunteered to become weapons of mass destruction.

It is therefore unsurprising that everyone desires some liberation from being part of this literal hivemind.

But rejecting today's technology and the global push can feel a bit wrong. Anti-globalization efforts are politically and ethically questionable by themselves, even before the rise of the internet -- and yet, we know the effects of globalization are harmful anyway. Not only are we averring technology but we are rejecting the mode of socialization the ruling classes have picked for us. Saying no to our Facebook-ization means we have opted to ostracize ourselves. We are alone, betrayers of the human race for not signing up for the service.

If you don't join the war/social media, you are not a good soldier/poster. You're helping the enemy win against the humans.

But is it truly morally wrong to feel like we want to avoid this military draft, this duty to participate the war between technologies? Do we really want to sacrifice our autonomy in the name of globalization? In other words, are we hesitating to entrench ourselves further into this alienating space, this global village?

This war of technologies feels so grand and incomprehensible to the reader and Shinobu. And like most wars, there seems to be no good cause. The salvation of humanity feels so empty when so many people die or end up feeling cut off from the world.

All we feel is that we're missing something. The more connected we are, the more we just don't understand each other. Our environment becomes alien, our communities ruptured. Is that really the war we want to stage today?

The Alienation of Today

That is the mode of alienation this title is investigating. Without a doubt, it is a massive undertaking that will bore and excite its readers with each new scene and insight.

Saihate no Ima is not a plot-driven narrative but a battleground of ideas between Romeo and McLuhan. It is obvious that the former takes the latter's ideas seriously, but he still wants to find the humanism within this alienation, this age of anxiety. Romeo agrees with the general insights raised by McLuhan and even supplements them with social scientists as diverse as Malinowski and Levi-Strauss. Yet, he can't accept that we're all regressing/advancing into a global village. He can't see everyone ceding their human freedoms and signing the social contract to today's Leviathans at all, not even through the power of media. The main forces behind globalization may try to flatten the world through communications technology, but the world remains spiky. People must always feel the need to resist that tries to make them into one coagulation -- one giant mainstream.

In other words, Mark Zuckerberg and his staff might be able to incorporate many into their walled garden of Facebook systems -- but there will always be resistance. Globalization is merely a politically expedient way of saying neo-colonialism. It alienates people by connecting them to more people who are also alienated at the expense of other alienated people. As a result, there will always be rebels against this colonization of everyday life. They are seeking to abolish social media in order to build a better environment that respects, not gentrifies, the communities and sanctuaries we belong to.

Their hope (and Romeo's too) is their firm belief that the failure to globalize isn't the end of humanity -- or rather, the global project of humanity may have declined but it isn't the end of what is human about us. We have to think differently and perhaps perceive differently too.

Technology, in the end, is supposed to serve us. Whatever comes after our innovations defines our actual human essence. We are always searching for this speculative definition.

The Solace of Tomorrow

Perhaps, it could be found in the spaces Saihate no Ima calls sanctuaries.

These artificial and problematic constructs -- communities, UseNet groups, IRC channels, clubs -- are still bonds we desire. They may be affected by media/environmental influences, but they remain sources of respite. Predating the overall message of Caligula Effect 2 by many years, the title sees sanctuaries and other safe spaces as areas where members could roam freely and experiment. While not foolproof, these sanctuaries are at least far away from the hubbub and buzz of this ever globalizing world. Such subcultural spaces allow us to recover from traumas of an over-connected world and heal our wounds back up.

This is obviously a compromise -- even a cop-out -- regarding the issue of a global village, but sanctuaries are the current medium that we little fish are swimming in. We may not be aware that we privilege such spaces in the first place, but we absolutely need them to survive.

In this light, the real accomplishment of Saihate no Ima then is how it not only highlights this longing for a community but becomes that sanctuary. It is a sanctuary of people unsure about the value of sanctuaries. But we can go further: it is also a sanctuary of sanctuaries for all the people unsaved by the apocalypse of a technology-induced solitude. The title wants readers to realize their dependence on sanctuaries and also, like the nosy Shinobu, invite them to stay in its space.

Its raison d'etre is thus very simple: McLuhan talks about how art functions as an "anti-environment" and a "radar" of the future. In War and Peace in the Global Village, he expands on the role of the artist as

the only person who does not shrink from this challenge. He exults in the novelties of perception afforded by innovation. The pain that the ordinary person feels in perceiving the confusion is charged with thrills for the artist in the discovery of the new boundaries and territories for the human spirit. He glories in the invention of new identities, corporate and private, that for the political and educational establishments, as for domestic life, bring anarchy and despair.

To summarize: art is intended to remind people technology affect us. The artist is a courageous explorer of the new and weird -- they pull the reader into the current times. The sanctuary of Saihate no Ima works exactly like this and Romeo/Shinobu is dragging us/friends to experience the present once more.

There is a hint of Romeo-esque solace in this abolition of the past: we may be working toward the present, but we're actually preparing for the future. Understanding today is really about getting ready for tomorrow. Engaging with our modern gadgets and thinking through their implications means we can actually predict the future.

Art thus allows us to peer into the future and Saihate no Ima certainly fits this bill.

A Conclusion Beyond Tweets

But all this armchair philosophizing by an untrained pseudo-academic aside, what do I actually think about the title itself?

To be quite honest, I don't like Saihate no Ima that much.

It is frustrating and unsatisfactory to recommend to anyone but the most dedicated of Romeo fans. Notably, Romeo was unable to finish the middle chapters; we can only read the beginning and end. It's a title better approached as a collection of thinkpieces and essays on various social science fields rather than a story with cathartic moments. The chronological sequence of events is hard to follow due to plot reasons and I have, at times, thought about doing something else. I only stuck around because I'm just a stubborn asshat.

If anything, I feel like I've undersold how dull this work can be. I am a yuributa after all; I need them cute girls hugging and kissing each other. My exasperation is immense, man.

However, perhaps due to its unconventional nature, the flights of fancy and sparks of imagination it offers are unparalleled among all visual novels. There is much to criticize, but there is also much to be awed by. While I could've deservedly rattled on about the inaccessibility of this title, I cannot hide my admiration for this work.

I've been in online spaces for ages and these themes resonate with me a lot. I've seen rises, falls, gossips, libels, love, harm etc. sprout in the many sanctuaries I've wandered into. Reflecting on my own alienation is a past-time I engage in too much. I've thought long and hard about philosophical movements like Xenofeminism, which argue that we should use this alienation as a jumping point to fight for new futures. My online-poisoned comrade, curry, in fact thinks that Romeo has actually enunciated what they've always wanted to express and do -- indeed, curry specifically recommended me to read it because we share similar internet brainworms. The work has definitely made an impact on curry and me, having taken the time to meditate on its ideas. We have slightly different interpretations, but we both agree that we want to reprioritize what we want out of our social relationships.

And so, we come to this moment: I originally procrastinated on finishing this essay months ago because it's such a dense essay to edit. But with the possible death of Twitter looming over us, I figured this essay on social media should come out now.

Reading this again, I affirm Saihate no Ima is by no means the best Romeo work -- that's still Jintai for me -- but I see it as the foundation of everything Romeo's humanism stands for. He cares deeply about the alienation manifesting from technology, capitalism, and us being us. There are no good solutions to this fundamental problem, but he respects what all of us do in order to remain connected in an over-connected world.

And as I write this, people are writing about how Twitter will fade from existence soon. I know friends are packing up their bags to go elsewhere or they're staying put till the end. It seems clear that a paradigm shift in social media is happening.

But as for me?

Saihate no Ima taught me that I don't really care about social media. Sure: I've made friends, found a partner, and even learned new things from Twitter and elsewhere. But those joys are long past me. I don't think I've become a boomer in this regard; I just think social media is pretty pointless and dehumanizing. Unless there's good reason to sign up, I'll pass.

Switching to another social media platform for the sake of it feels like I'm postponing the problem: I want to find sanctuaries. If I can't find sanctuaries, I'll build them like Shinobu. There's no need for me to immediately join Co-host, Dreamwidth, Reddit, Discord public servers etc. for that matter. I may find like-minded individuals there to invite to my sanctuary, but that's it. All I'm interested is building a sanctuary, a comfy space that I can call home.

What will that sanctuary look like? I don't know, and Shinobu clearly didn't either. That uncertainty is what makes it exciting and perilous: building a community space like that is tough and that's why we go to social media platforms in the first place. We believe that corporations could do the tough work for building communities and perform the necessary moderation for us.

But Twitter has declined because it couldn't. It never did.

It's up to us to build the sanctuaries we've always dreamed of -- to find what is truly human about us.

2020-11-10T00:00:00Z

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