penny's atelier

Into the world of dreams

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:37:24 GMT

Been watching that new Kamen Rider lately. I like it.

While the exact mechanics of the dream world have yet to be revealed within ZEZTZ, it seems to take the form of a collective subconscious. Characters impose their own subconscious on the dream world, often to the point of having separate dream selves acting on their own. Since Baku is having a lucid dream, his powers give him some degree of control over the dream world.

Typically, dream worlds are within the confines of one character's mind. Obviously, this is how dreams work in the real world, so it makes the most sense. Plus, showing us a character's inner world is kind of a cheat code for conveying information to the audience. We can see exactly how they perceive things, what they want, what they fear, and far more.

I myself do not dream. I mean, I do, sometimes, but I take medication specifically not to and I have for several years. Obviously I remember how it feels, but it is not a part of my life unless I fall asleep without my medication. Maybe this is why I find such atypical depictions of dream worlds so compelling. As if the world itself can dream.

Obviously, plenty of works have parallel worlds. Parallel worlds (i.e. “multiverse” type stories) often, in me, induce a disconnected feeling. If there are tons of universes and timelines we can jump around, the stakes often feel lower since I have no connection to this parallel world. Not to say I dislike the idea, as it is present in plenty of things I enjoy. However, a dream world can harness this feeling of disconnection for its advantage. Dreams are already a scattered journey from place to place, where the dreamer tries to grab onto meaning anywhere they can. Fictional dreams in the mind of one person often make too much sense, and a world dreaming in fiction feels as messy and blendy as a real dream.

ZEZTZ often jumps from setting to setting with no rhyme or reason during fight scenes. Background characters are rare, making the standard toku fare disasters, bombings, and terrorism feel hard to process (as a victim of explosions myself, that is how it feels when it first happens indeed). When it transitions to the real world, our hero must keep on fighting regardless of his fear. To be a hero, he must disconnect himself and his feelings to fight for the dreams of others, using his power to make other's dreams come true.

While I am not done with the game, I have also fallen in love with the world of Dragon Quest VI. While the dream world is still rather coherent (hell, our game starts with Reck living in the dream world), as Reck's journey continues, he and his companions find out their real-world counterparts are missing and spread around the world, in vastly different positions from themselves. Reck's dream self is a prince, Carver's dream self is missing with his parents worried for his safety, and more is hinted at further. While your average Dragon Quest party member does not talk too much outside of party talk, characters like Carver are clearly shaken by such otherworldly encounters. Many of the changes between the real and dream worlds are played for laughs, but I find such moments of humor really effective for disconnecting the characters from themselves and their position. Captain Blade is called Rusty by his king and his cohorts after they discover the truth and Blade is clearly upset by being treated so different. When your place in the world is put into question, what can be said to be true about yourself? I also really enjoy the section towards the beginning when our heroes are invisible to the people of the real world. You can see everyone going about their day, but you feel really alone being unable to talk to all of them. You can't get a good sense of progression or direction like this. Even after you become visible in the real world, some new party members you find are invisible and struck with relief and new purpose once you note that you can see them. Ashlynn is kinda just climbing a tower because shes a bored, weird kid, but slowly gains purpose traveling with the party just to see something exciting. I can imagine someone would be scared of losing that new purpose, knowing there is a real-world version of you running around and that you are supposed to be the fake one. Once our party starts meeting their real selves, they slowly merge with their real selves, becoming their real self with only memories of their adventures as a citizen of the world of dreams.

A great emphasis is placed on allowing the characters of DQ6 to accept this ego death on their own rather than being forced into it. With the optional party member Amos, he cannot be recruited if you tell him of his fate before he can accept it. Amos is a hero of his village. He's saved the townspeople more times than they can count. However, he has contracted a case of lycanthropy, turning into the “Scrimsley Terror” he is supposed to protect the town from at night. It seems to be incurable, so the villagers decide to hide Amos's condition from him to let him keep playing the hero for the town. He does not take it well at all if you tell him the truth before he is ready to accept it, disappearing before he can be recruited.

I find the celebrated dreamy prose of Haruki Murakami to similarly harness this disconnected feeling for narrative strength. Particularly, it fits the metanarrative of his latest novel, The City and Its Uncertain Walls. This novel is a new version of an early short story he wrote by the same name. It also has many similarities to his past novels, particularly Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Our nameless protagonist, an older adult, has spent nearly his whole life looking for a girlfriend he had in high school who mysteriously disappears. His search leads him to the titular city, a dream world where his former girlfriend is still young, everyone speaks in riddles, and everyone works strange, seemingly meaningless jobs. The city itself has some of the most dreamy prose of any of his writing, appearing as a colorless, formless blob. His job in the city is to describe his senseless dreams, a seemingly impossible task Stuck in a rut, and missing his old life, our protagonist escapes the dream world and lives a life disconnected from most people around him. His only friends after a while are a ghost, a strange quiet child, and a coffee shop worker. He spends the rest of the novel recovering from these encounters. However, his stability did not last, as the young boy who visits the library eventually goes to the town himself. Our protagonist's loss has him recover his appreciation for the facets of the real world he has left. As an older writer, Murakami has nearly everything he makes nowadays compared to his greatest works from the past. The City even dares itself to be directly compared to two older works in particular. Feeling like he cannot grasp what made his works great, his past looms ever larger over his life. Only a shock to his system can make him truly move forward.

A dream world within ones own mind can let one stay in the delusions as long as they please. Ironically, it is the looming presence of a world's dream that forces one to wake up.

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My favorite "roguelike" (is made up)

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 07:04:28 GMT

One day, a friend at uni showed me this video:

I thought it frankly looked fucking ridiculous. Speedrunners are always getting up to shenanigans, and seeing this (at the time) low view youtube video of a guy on discord with his friends getting every single Pokemon in Blue Rescue team got a kick out of me. I skimmed through it a few times out of curiosity and was really impressed by the planning and time that went into this massive project, so I subscribed and largely forgot about the channel. One day, however, he started an even more colossal project which is still ongoing to this day:

youtu.be/m-wSbgsk4a0

Blue Rescue Team has a mammoth postgame, towering far larger than the game itself. This wealth of stuff to do is in no small part thanks to the slew of 99f dungeons the endgame. Casually, this totally sucks. They get really tiring after a while, so few even bother to attempt the two “level reset” dungeons: Joyous Tower and Purity Forest.

Joyous Tower is a little bit looser in its rules, you can bring a few items and stuff, but Purity Forest has no preparation required outside of mental prep. You are reset to level 1, no items or money, no saving, just your lil guy climbing 99 brutal and ruthless floors. Again, casually, this dungeon is infamous and hated. Any prep of vitamins and items and money and leveling gathered throughout the game is thrown completely out the window for a gauntlet of concentration, knowledge checks, resource management, and luck. With the ol' internet, casuals have plenty of tips and tricks to make beating this dungeon beatable within the first few attempts. Easy to obtain Pokemon like Charizard or the Abra line and the quicksaving exploit make this dungeon pretty smooth. So you beat PF, get your Celebi, and you're done! You don't gotta play the dungeon anymore, a relief for the majority of players who got far enough to learn to hate this place.

So, lets beat it with Sunkern.

Purity Forest is definitely bullshit sometimes. You can get no food for long enough that you die, you can step on invisible trap tiles stealing your resources or damn near killing you outright, spawns after going to a new floor can completely screw you with a room filled with screen nukes, and this is on top of the inherent randomness to Pokemon and to Mystery Dungeon itself. But I have found some truly admirable beauty in the designedness of this place.

Let us start with whats against you: The Pokemon. Early floors are caked with low yield Pokemon like Caterpie who give single digit experience (exp is tied to the species of Pokemon rather than level or level difference. It is also increased if you use a move on them instead of regular attacks or items), stat-lowering spammers to make you weaker than your level one stats already are, and randomness like metronome spamming Togepi that can ruin any promising start. You need to clean these easier floors out to give yourself stuff to work with later on, but you will have your moves drained quickly by these guys.

Later on you have Exeggutor and the Swablu line, who spams multi hit moves (which are overpowered in PMD) and hypnosis, high fixed damage cross map projectile shooting Electrode, and dangerous agility users who can turn a room full of multiple enemies into a dead run instantly (agility makes you just act twice as often in PMD, and affects the whole room of the user's side). And of course, the nightmare 80f+. Parasect has strong tanky stats, self healing, and a 100% accurate sleep screen nuke. Shuppet sticks to you like glue, following you through walls and draining precious resources with spite. Camerupt has a nasty screen nuke that varies in power, multiple Pokemon have agility and multi hit moves. And of course, we have PF's true biggest villain in Venomoth. Venomoth's silver wind is a STAB (the highest damage modifier in BRT, higher than super effective) screen nuke that can give it an omniboost. This boost of course increases speed, allowing it to act again, where it is likely to cast silver wind again, possibly getting the omniboost again, and again and again, that is if you even can survive the first one. Loading in to a room with a red dot out of your line of sight above floor 86 is some of the most terrified I have been in a game, knowing I can lose my hours of progress if I click anything carelessly.

PF's items are from a pool spawning on certain floors, but they are very considered for nearly all Pokemon one could bring in. The TM pool is very considered in this regard, carrying strong moves learned by most strong pokemon like Earthquake and Ice Beam. More common is stuff like Facade and Hidden Power, still very worth your time as nearly every Pokemon can learn those. Your three biggest weapons among the TM pool are Rest, Attract, and Frustration. Rest stops you for a few turns but fully heals your health and status. Health recovers slowly in this game, and a go-to full heal is extremely reliable even with the startup turns. Status clearing items are nearly extinct (excluding some sneaky exceptions) and you can only clear your poison or burn reliably by getting to the next floor. Poison turns off your automatic regeneration, so the clock is ticking as soon as you get poisoned to get to those stairs. Rest, thankfully, makes this a non issue. Attract works on all Pokemon in BRT, as gender is not in this game. This makes attract essentially a temporary kill on anything in the game at point blank, letting you run away and hide from big threats or kill them slowly. Frustration is a fixed damage move that is supposed to go down as you use a game mechanic that is not a thing at all in PF, so it never goes down and stays as a fixed 45 damage which remains really good through the end. It is worth noting you can “link” moves which essentially lets you use multiple attacks at once and that you can learn multiple copies of the same move in this game, so two frustrations can turn into a 90 damage attack that kills most threats in the dungeon outright.

The items almost all have their uses, but I will cover the big three here. Warp Scarf is a cheap held item that warps the user to a random spot on the floor after a random amount of turns. Very often in PF you will be nearly cornered by a big threat looking to end your run and warp scarf will get you out of there easily without using consumables. You can even throw it to other Pokemon and have them use it in really tight situations to save yourself if you're near the exit. I have seen a lot of moments where Whom, the inventor of the challenge to beat PF with every Pokemon, on huge sprawling floors simply waits until warp scarf drops him off near the end. This is especially a livesaver when you are playing some garbage like Magikarp who learns no moves and cannot fight back against a thing.

On paper, pass scarf is the best item in the game. It will, at the cost of some hunger gauge, redirect most direct attacks in the game back at opponents. There are a ton of caveats, such as not getting exp for enemies defeated this way and not redirecting many of the most dangerous attacks, but it still invalidates most Pokemon in the dungeon easily.

X Ray Specs is, in my opinion, actually the best item. X Ray Specs allows you to see the location of all items and enemies on the floor. You can breeze through floors going to only the rooms with items, you can dance around in hallways to manipulate enemy pathing to never see you, you can throw consumables at enemies from miles away, you can avoid nearly anything with smart enough play.

Before I wrap things up, it is worth mentioning the energy of a PF climb is very different in the Rescue Team remake for the switch. In RTDX, you can recruit enemies and you have a second passive you can select before entering, making the climb on the whole much easier to prepare for and complete. Not a bad thing and I think it is more fun for most people, just not what I am looking for.

Obviously it depends which Pokemon you are using, but it is not as unfair as it seems. I have only scratched the surface, but I have rarely found a loop-based game that rewards you for your game knowledge as much as purity forest. I can see clear as day when a loss is my fault. Recently, I have lost a run for

-Not knowing that screen nukes hit yourself when you are confused
-Misunderstanding a minute interaction of the “slow” status
-not realizing that some Pokemon have abilities that make them immune to attract

-using a move with a burn chance to activate enemy Rattata's guts accidentally and dying to the damage boosted attack

and WON runs for

-using a pounce orb, an unassuming item that makes you leap forward, to jump into the water with a pokemon that cannot cross water, which causes them to teleport somewhere random

-using a grimy food (which gives a random status effect) and Shroomish's effect spore to clear poison and burn by intentionally inflicting yourself with paralysis, which clears both

-using a switcher orb to set up a cross map teleport to let me rob the store

-realizing the Skarmory on 15-17f are extremely high exp yield and grinding for exp on those floors when available

-using an item which makes me gain exp for the damage I take and a trapped tile that makes me take fixed damage to grind for exp by stepping on spikes repeatedly

and soooo much more. Game rules.

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Amagami and Self-Acceptance Through Love

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 21:22:09 GMT

Amagami kinda blew my mind.

My experiences with traditional dating sims, ones that are biblical to the stat raising and points based systems laid out in genre staples such as Dokyuusei and Tokimeki Memorial, are rather slim. I have watched dear friend of the blog Ophelia play both Tokimeki Memorial 1 and 2 (had I played 2 for myself, I likely would have written about that, because that game is amazing); I have played maybe one hour of Love Plus despite owning a Love Plus 3DSXL, and that is it. I have always been drawn to this gameification of conversation and socializing, even when it is really simple as it is in most games. But these dating sims have a shocking depth to them that surprises me to no end. In games like Tokimeki Memorial, you just pick what to do on your turn and pick what to do on dates, with the occasional random event or holiday spicing things up. It takes place over the years of high school's entirety, so a lot can happen and there are a lot of possibilities. In Tokimemo 1, you can ignore most of the girls and get into RPG battle gang wars with other kids to win the favor of the rich upper classman, who of course turns out to be a woman who is in love with you. I've heard of people getting randomly extremely ill during their playthrough and missing most of the year, I've heard of people encountering a mysterious stalker girl who shows up in the backgrounds of dates, etc. Tokimeki Memorial through multiple playthroughs gives the impression of a game with no end, an infinite breadth of dialogue and possibilities each time you start up a playthrough.

In Amagami, there is not as much crazy you can do in terms of gameplay, as the game is more focused on forming a narrative arc around the development between your character (protagonist Tachibana Junichi, though I named him after myself cuz I kinda like doing that for novel games with a bit more mechanical depth like this) and one of the women you can date in the game. While other dating sims make it more difficult and game-y to get an ending for a girl, it is pretty straightforward in this game. You don't gotta do anything too out there to see the most important and memorable stuff, and you don't have to date multiple girls at once to keep them from getting mad at you. Once I was doing a girl's route, I hard tunneled on only her event nearly exclusively until I got her best ending. For getting Love Best endings or Friendship endings or what have you, though there will be differences in any given playthrough, the major narrative beats of the relationship play out largely the same. It matters not if I met Nanasaki Ai behind the school or at the arcade, or if I walked Ayatsuji Tsukasa home the day she got attacked by a wild dog, they will still share their hardships and growth and high school struggles with you the reader.

What makes Amagami feel nearly as endless as other simulation/novel games is the way it presents its information to the player. During your turn, a colossal board of nearly 4000 spaces is laid out before you. Starting in the middle, you can select events in each girl's narrative four times a day to “move” outwards and unlock more events. Some events are forced upon the player, some take no time, some can only be selected at certain times, etc. By showing the limits of its scope, it strangely makes the game feel larger than if it were just picking who you want to hang out with that day from a simple list, even if it had more dialogue than it does in its current form. Sure, some of these events on any given random square are really out there with strange conditions, some are counted as parts of other events (i.e. pressing “attack” in conversation mode counts as seeing another square”) but given how much variation there is with choices within events, an absolute boatload of dialogue to see in conversation mode, later changes in dialogue with girls remembering your choices during earlier events (In Morishima route, a throwaway piece of dialogue had her ask me what I wanna be when I grow up. Detective seemed the coolest option to me, and wouldn't you know it, my protagonist was a detective in the epilogue!).

And these systems would be cool and all on their own, but they are elevated by the home run cast in this game. I love every girl here! They are all multifaceted, having interests far outside of what you would expect, their lives taking turns as they become closer to you. Conversation mode is such a gem of a system. Few games let me just talk about extremely mundane stuff and crack jokes with people. It adds a shitload of realism to a usually cartoonish genre. Fuck, it is a small thing, but I figured the “ecchi” button would just be stupid and always get the girl to hate you or something, but later in the routes girls actually can have normal feelings about sex and wanting to have sex! Around my third route, I used a bit of a guide for conversation mode, as I was having some trouble getting as many points as I want. Using the guide definitely got me more points, but it gave me a different problem that made me abandon the guide very quickly. Finding all good and great conversation topics with a girl at a specific turn, tension, and relationship level makes her say a stock phrase about how cool you are and then skips your turn, giving you a free point. Sure, you get the point, but I had far more fun intentionally fucking up in conversation mode to lower the tension and get different dialogue during this mode. Low tension is the only way I found out about the answer to Ayatsuji's cooking riddle from an earlier event, or how otherwise rather traditionally-minded Sae is a lowkey bisexual and fujoshi, and so much more.

Having such a focus on the granular, low-stakes conversation makes the moments of true change and understanding feel towering. It is a really small moment and I do not think it is handled perfectly, but a single line of dialogue changed what I figured would be a sour plot point into an understated moment of acceptance. Sakurai Rihoko loves food and eating, and the beginning of her route has the odd unfortunate line about how she is gonna get fat or is getting fat from eating sweets and food. I winced whenever they came up. One time the protagonist shares some food with her and says something along the lines of “You don't have to hide when you are eating from me. It doesn't bother me when you eat”. Combined with her friendship route where her attempts to diet have the protagonist say essentially “You literally look pretty and nice you do not need to diet for no reason”, and fuck it made me cry a little bit even though its really nothing much in the story. If someone I really cared for and respected told me that in high school and stuck with me it would have changed my life. Playing this route first was really lovely. Sakurai and protag are childhood best friends and have a really natural rapport. They joke, share memories, play small pranks on each other, and do little running bits. Plus, the way you and her start going on proper dates is just adorable. Your male friend who is a supportive rascal sits you two down and says “Listen. It is so obvious that you two like each other that I am making y'all talk about it so it does not drive me crazy anymore”. My first serious relationship started the same way so it got a smile outta me.

When you are not dating Sakurai Rihoko or any other girl (or doing a “friendship” ending), you can see their “estranged” events during gaps in other events. Sakurai is a hell of a lot more successful, becoming a rising star idol who gets on tv. This is really bittersweet if you already romanced her. One has to figure the brutal world of being a celebrity will make her body image issues far more of a struggle, despite her success. “More successful, but less happy or mature” is generally a theme of these estranged events. It puts a quiet yet important weight behind the relationships of this game. For instance, Nakata Sae is a younger girl who has been sheltered in the world of her old haughty school and her mountains of shoujo romance manga. Much of her main narrative when dating her is the push and pull between her desire for this perfect, storybook romance she sees in her manga, and the jaded older protagonist believing such a relationship to be impossible after he had his heart broken when he was younger. She is very traditionally minded, often doing things a wife or girlfriend would be expected to do (often in a white-picket fence nuclear family sort of way) because that is what she thinks would make the protagonist happy even when that just is not the case. The protag definitely really likes her, but must get through his own hang ups and dating trauma before she can have her feelings returned. When she is not dated, Sae becomes the president of the anime club, where she does cosplay and is revered by a bunch of otaku. While she is clearly successful and enjoys this position, she is in a spot where further lofty and unrealistic expectations will be placed on her. It is a really good balance of having your relationship feel important without making the girl seem like a lost cause without you. Even the relationships I have had in real life that have been sour spots in my life in one way or another have taught me something valuable about myself.

The protagonist grows from these relationships as much as the girl does, which just makes it all the more satisfying. Being rejected by his crush at the end of middle school is a big moment in the protagonist's narrative. He is pushed on by the universe, by his friend Umehara, by his love for the women around him, not to give up on romance. And of course, this is a video game after all, things work out in the end. Even if you really mess up and make a girl really upset, you can always load your save or press “return to morning” and make things work out alright.

After achieving an ending with the six main girls, Amagami's two secret routes open. The first of these strangely took me many attempts to get the ending. I am not sure if it is just jank, or if the PS Vita translation patch is buggy or what, but this struggle strangely added to my experience. I will get to that later. One plays the first hidden route (for the girl dubbed ? ? ? for most of the route, but her name is Kamizaki Risa so I will just call her that) as normal, romancing a girl of their choosing, though this time it occasionally cuts away to Risa, a stalker who has fallen for the protagonist after a random act of kindness he does way back in middle school, trying to sabotage your relationships. She tries to doctor photos of you cheating and show them to the other girl, mess up your date plans, so on and so forth. It is perhaps the most cartoonish the game gets in narrative tone. Risa finally works up the courage to give you a love letter. After meeting her, the atmosphere is incredibly odd. Risa tries to offer herself to look and act like the girls in the playboys that the protagonist likes, she tries to force the protagonist to call her by her first name, she has a conversation mode event where pretty much every answer is chosen for you and she is fast tracked to being crazy in love with you. You can accept her, if you would like, causing you to abandon your current love and stay with her. Her epilogue continues this strange tone. Fast forward to university, a friend asks you if you wanna go to a dumb little matchmaker event he has been planning, which you deny because of course, you have Risa. Even if she is strange, awkward, creepy, and the like, there is something strangely likable about her. I couldn't put my finger on it. Even if you reject her, your protagonist ultimately feels bad for her and wishes her success in her future.

Risa put into place the message the game was trying to tell me in its mechanics. She is trying to sabotage your relationships. If you date her, she reveals she fed your middle school crush a false change in location so she would not show up for your love letter. This was apparently to protect you, as your crush was planning to merely laugh in your face alongside her friends waiting nearby. Risa is this strive for a perfect, problem free adolescence. She is overprotective, like a player who follows a guide to get maximum affection points in a dating sim, or like a reader who reloads a save to pick the right option. Even if she cannot make the perfect romance from her crush from afar, the game and the player still love and forgive her. Amagami shows you its sprawling board not because it wants the player to do all of these events. It is precisely because it wants you not to. It encourages fucking up, saying the wrong thing, making a fool of yourself, because it is those moments that lead to the most important ones where you grow. It loves every moment in the game, having a sense of play with love and conversation unlike any other game I have played. By getting you to love these moments, the moments that make you you, it teaches the player to love themselves, including and especially their fuck ups. The second hidden route adds a lot to this too. You are just as much made by romantic love as you are familial love, being able to tell your sister to kick rocks because she beats you at monopoly and being able to support each other even when others cannot. It gives you a pep talk through the game's teacher character, saying that even she still fucks up, but that you are young and making mistakes is what being young is about. It is a pretty simple and cheesy message but one that hit me like a train. What lovely little routes, wrapping up all that the game wants you to learn.

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Insecurity

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:43:40 GMT

Typically, I do not like a lot of the insecurity that plagues modern works of art. Films lampshading and undercutting themselves, triple A games embarassed to be games and trying to act like movies, etc. I know, real original opinion. But on the rare occasion, a work dripping with insecurity will stick in my brain. Not because I necessarily enjoy that aspect of it, but because something about it haunts me.

I don't really like Hello Charlotte much, a fact that makes me rather sad given how those closest to me hold it so dear. I found the bulk of it listless and confused. The cast felt very wispy and flat. The third act is for sure a strong shift in tone and purpose (it feels like it has a lot more of one for what its worth), but more as a cynical unpleasant slap to the reader.

Episode 3 is a work which hates its fans. And sure, I mean I get that people online were and still are really annoying about this work, probably amplified tenfold if you are the author but it just comes across really... petty, grimy, small, hateful, empty, angry... I could go on. And in many ways it must have been damn cathartic to write. It is raw and personal above all else. It makes the already rather dismal in tone series even more pessimistic. Dark topics like suicide and violence are romanticized heavily or just inserted into the lives of these characters,,, for what? To crap on anyone who was weird and parasocial about the cast in the first two chapters? To try to further the already extremely dark tone of the work? Even if this is something larger than life for the author and probably a huge moment of self reflection for a lot of the fans this work is so clearly aimed at, years removed from it from afar it feels so small. It is also really presumptuous about its reader. I am not one of those people, so what is the point of even reading this? Putting these meta discussions of the relationship between artist and audience next to the aforementioned tragedies just makes me roll my eyes, as if these are supposed to be equivalent topics in tone. While HC always had metafictional elements and forth wall breaks, this feels really immature and fumbled in execution.

Yet I do think about the work a lot. Granted, I hang around a lot of people who hold the series dear, so it will just come up in my brain. But there is something to this work that has grabbed me in some way. For what its worth, it is presumptuous of me to assume I know what it is like to experience the author's small amount of internet fame. Every bit of recognition from a crowd of strangers online I have ever received has put a dense terror into my heart, perhaps moreso than the several near death situations I have been in. I always thought that was why I loved public speaking so much, I can see my whole audience, see instant reactions to what I say, perhaps even talk to people who come up to me after I present. But I find a great fear in that unknown of the anonymous audience, even for all the good it can bring. I can feel a relation to etherane's feelings presented in this work, when I think about it like that. It screams at its audience that “you don't know what I've been through”. I am sure as hell not a confrontational or angry enough person to do that. I just ignore or block or even delete it if I find the swaths of attention too great if I made something. But that way of being, in its own way, lacks confidence. HC3 is confident about its lack of confidence, at the very least, and I can kinda get behind that as a growing artist myself.

Hello Charlotte was especially on my mind when reading The Flowers of Buffoonery, Osamu Dazai's less discussed prequel to No Longer Human. Well, it technically is a prequel, but that is not really what it is about. Dazai tells the story of No Longer Human's protagonist in the hospital after a suicide attempt. As the story goes on, Dazai himself interjects on the story. A lot. He talks about the writing decisions he made about the book during the book, often making fun of them or just hating them outright.

"I should quit while I'm ahead. The more I say, the less sense I make. It feels like I haven't even scratched the surface of what really matters. And that isn't much of a surprise. I've left out a great deal. Which only makes sense, really."

“This novel is a failure. It has no climax, no denouement. It seems I paid too much attention to the style. As a result, the story is a heap of purple trash.”

To be nice to it off the bat, this kind of meta writing was probably unheard of in 1935 when this book came out. But fuck if it is not exhausting to read. Like if you think the book sucks so much and you want me to agree, why am I still here? Like Hello Charlotte, Flowers of Buffoonery was an early work for Dazai, and I find I can forgive a lot of it knowing that he does become a much better and more confident writer in his later novels (I really should get around to etherane's other works because I am sure I would feel the same way with those). I do not like how it plays out in the actual novel, but I find something compelling with the parallels drawn between the actual plot of the book and Dazai's feelings on actually publishing his works at all. He views his own work with great fear, wondering if it is even worth publishing if the average person will not understand the feelings at play. Similarly, the novel's protagonist along with his friends and family visiting the hospital dance around the topic of suicide for the majority of the novel, as if it would be too awkward or damning to bring up. I find this story potent enough on its own without Dazai's interjections bringing it either right in front of my face or right into the trash because he does not like it. But it does make for a fascinating read as someone who is otherwise a fan of his novels, not to mention the severe feelings of loneliness like no one understands you line up with the lived experience of depression for many. I just felt a little bit like Dazai was treating me like an idiot by being so forward about it all. It plays a lot better when the semi autobiographical writing is something you the reader have to dig for yourself in his later novels.

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Using every tool in the gamedev kitchen

Sun, 11 May 2025 03:17:48 GMT

I am not sure if there is a term for this phenomenon, but it is something I have become rather fascinated with. Game consoles (especially dedicated handhelds) always have strange and unique features, though they are typically forgotten past the initial excitement of their respective gimmicks (i.e. many of the Nintendo 3DS's later models and games outright did not include 3D support). What intrigues me are the games which use all these odd tools in their toolbox without being outright commercial tech demos (so something like 1 2 Switch does not qualify for this article, lol).

As mentioned prior, the 3DS and Nintendo handhelds are the leaders in this weird arbitrary category. Bravely Default inspired me to write this article. Sure, I could have waited for the upcoming remaster, but I am very glad I am playing the original. While the combat has plenty of its own unique mechanics, Bravely Default's main advertised appeal was that it was essentially a 1990s Final Fantasy game with more modern visuals and sensibilities. I do adore the game but we are here to talk about the other shit. When you start the game, Bravely Default has you play the opening cutscene as a VR video projecting on to your table. Full voice acting and the effect of void like chunks being taken out of your table give the scene a really striking effect. After the rather predictable destruction of the protagonist's home town, a seasoned RPG player would expect to merely move right along to their quest for vengeance. But the starting town is not ignored! The bottom screen has access to the town viewable whenever you are not in battle or viewing a map! The town can be rebuilt through an idle game, which runs even while the console is in sleep mode. Rebuilding the town does not unlock anything wholly necessary, but it is packed with cool customization, quality of life, and combat tools. New limit breaks are unlocked, you can add modifiers to your limit breaks like increasing stats or adding elemental properties, you can buy unique armor and weapons from town, you can unlock the ability to buy healing items at save points, and more. Getting new workers for town reconstruction happens as you StreetPass other players who own Bravely Default (works strangely well with Agnes' character arc about learning to trust again)! StreetPass features don't just stop there. In combat, you can “record” an attack or ability used in battle. When you StreetPass another player, your recorded move is sent to them and they can use it once per battle. Thankfully, the game gives you like 3 constantly updating bot players so the StreetPass features are not completely dead nowadays.

The Metal Gear Solid series wholeheartedly embraces this phenomenon. We got all the classics everyone already knows about, but I gotta mention them. You got Psycho Mantis reading your memory card, you got the guy in 3 who you can kill by waiting like two weeks, 3D being disabled in MGS3 3D after the interrogation sequence... between Metal Gear, PT's use of the PS4 microphone, Death Stranding's online features, and Boktai's solar panel stuff, Kojima might be the king of this very specific category.

I've got two more games I wanna discuss. First, I have to mention the Zelda games. The player draws maps on the bottom screen to solve riddles (child-me just REFUSED to draw a damn dolphin on the bottom screen and that island took me like 40 minutes), screams into the mic, closes the DS to stamp a letter (sorry 2DS players)... sure, it has the big downside of a very clunky control scheme being the only way to play, but I can forgive it for being so damn charming.

Listen I know I just complained about Phantom Hourglass's controls but I will not tolerate The World Ends With You slander. It only has two gimmicky sorts of features worth noting: First, you can play the touch screen minigame Tin Pin through local wireless and trade with others, which is kinda silly and fun. But the other one, despite being not ideal to most players, I actually rather like. Food gives you stat boosts in TWEWY, and you need to wait real world time for your party to digest the food. It is rather annoying to anyone marathoning this game. But I found it a really cute, yet not too intrusive way to push the games themes! You are rewarded for going out there are expanding your horizons beyond just the game, but not in a way that feels patronizing or demeaning towards the player. You can beat the game perfectly fine with no food stat boosts, I have done it plenty of times. I also think it has used the control schemes of its respective console releases wonderfully. Our protagonist cannot connect with others and shuts himself out, so you gotta do really clunky gameplay with both DS screens, touch and buttons. It has a kinda steep learning curve, but it is fun to get used to even if you gotta stumble and start over with new party members. Just like being social and meeting new people! On the switch version, I think two player is the ideal way to experience this game. It is really goddamn disorienting with two cursors swiping all over the place and two anime boys screaming and the jpop soundtrack blaring away and probably also you arguing with the other player about the boss puzzle. But it works beautifully to replicate the two screens set up with this disorientation. You and your second player are disconnected, and you gotta clear out the bad thoughts, listen, and work together. It rules so hard.

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Annoying girl traps you in a room with her and talks about 3DS games (my Etrian Odyssey loveletter)

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 09:53:14 GMT

Ok so in Etrian Odyssey 3 Zodiac, the traditional mage class, has this as its ultimate spell:

Meteor	Call down meteors to deal strike damage to random enemies.	Bash

Now any seasoned RPG player might see this and say, “who the hell is every going to click this expensive physical damage spell on their premier elemental damage dealer?” and yeah, I mean most players will and should just try to hit those elemental weaknesses with their big buffed stats. But lets humor the game on this one. How about we subclass our Zodiac as a gladiator to get the damage on this spell to be HUGE.

Berserker Vow	Sacrifice HP to raise physical attack power for three turns.	Support Skill

Charge	Use one turn to increase damage on the following turn's attack.	Special Skill

Stack a few other buffs for physical damage and some glass cannon gear and congrats! You will almost certainly two-shot most threats in the game at worst. But well, alright. That is a lot of asterisks. You're making the already squishy Zodiac into a glass cannon that is constantly damaging itself to get those big numbers. Well, it is not too big an ask to get a healer and a tank and just make them babysit the Zodiac the whole time. Those classes have other utility. But even then, meteor is a damn expensive skill! Sure, you defeat everything in sight, but you can only do two or so fights until you are outta TP. Well, a Ninja in your party subclassed as a Zodiac has a solution for that:

Dark Ether	One row of allies will be able to use skills at no TP cost.	Special

Keburi No Sue (Mystic Calm)	Ninja skill that reduces TP used. No attack penalty from back row.	Class

Not only can you reduce your meteor's cost to zero, the ninja passive will make that reduction itself cost a mere one TP at max level! This is how I played EO3 the first time I played it. I saw this stupid meteor skill and thought it was funny and made a big spreadsheet to make this build fully centering on supporting the flagrant spam of one goddamn spell. It was so, so fun, especially in the tougher early boss fights where I only had the party half put together due to a lack of skill points or not having subclasses yet.

To someone unfamiliar with the series this may sound like one stupid gimmick strategy that no one should do when they could just play a well rounded party that can do everything decently. Do not get me wrong, EO is still my favorite game series even when played with the safest, most responsible party one can make. You can make a lot of interesting decisions within the battle too! Few gaming feelings match fucking up a puzzle in EOU2, running into a yellow or red ring FOE and pressing that force boost button and hearing this god damn Yuzo Koshiro masterpiece come out of the 3DS speakers.

youtu.be/-rWgTtq1qk4

But I bodily need to make the games weirder by spending time in the wiki and spreadsheet mines before I even start the game. If you see the lines you can craft a party out of nearly anything (in fact, since I heard EO4 was the easiest game in the series, I chose my classes and subclasses at random). I have not done this build myself, but likely the most famous EO video on the english speaking internet is this build involving a skill that scales off of the total overheal of all party members.

youtu.be/46Ny7gIyf04

As the series goes on, they had a lot of fun with the skills scaling off of weird shit. The class Hero in Etrian Odyssey Nexus has three I'll mention for example: a skill uses a cutting attack followed by a volt attack, where the volt attack scales off of the cut resistance of the target; a multi hit single target skill that scales the number of hits based on the other enemies you are not hitting in the fight; a fire attack which always goes last and scales off of how much damage the rest of your party did that turn. All of these can be used for tomfoolery in one way or another. Maybe I will make a run off of one of these stupid scaling skills in tbe future. I probably will.

My current run of Nexus has a way cooler Hero build. Hero's class identity centers around afterimages, temporary party members automatically created whenever a Hero uses an attack skill. The afterimages use the skill that summoned them (on the same target if possible) and then they disappear. Cloning skills and the like are pretty much always broken in EO games. The afterimages draw aggro, deal damage, retain the passive skills of the original hero, and constantly are nearly at full health since they get resummoned so often (my next EON run might be a hero only run with the skill that makes afterimages last more than one turn, just to see if it could actually clear the game on a hard difficulty). However I have a different way I prefer to use the clone army. More skill points invested into the afterimages increase their max health, up to matching that of the original hero. I actively wanted the clones at lower HP. A ninja passive that is usually a complete joke is Nikudan, a once per battle skill that launches an extremely powerful firebomb at the enemy who kills the ninja. The skill does in fact work with the afterimages, even better in some ways since the constant recycling gets around the once per battle restriction, though it does not proc when they disappear naturally. Though, level one afterimages are at a pitiful fifteen hp, and with some passive skills to draw more aggro, the little bombs are dying on cooldown and printing damage.

Nexus is a celebratory title, reusing a lot of the best dungeon gimmicks from throughout the series. I figured on a replay or retread of these gimmicks, I would end up getting tired of them. But they keep finding new ways to use these mechanics! The shrines plus the last dungeon all play with elevation, and each one has something fresh in addition to combining the new mechanics with the ones from the old shrines. I played an indie game inspired by a lot of old school dungeon crawlers recently and I think I got too spoiled by EO's fantastic hand crafted puzzles and dungeons cuz I just could not hang with the procedural generated dungeons.

If I am not playing Etrian Odyssey I am thinking about it. I already want to replay EO5 to use its cute little sprite editor to make more of my original characters. I wanna make like a billion gold off of the restaurant management sim in EOU2 again. I wanna try the original 1 and 2 for DS since I started with the untold games. I wanna do the human side route of EO3. I wanna do the robot route of EO3 again but this time make a full party of robot girls to launch missiles at Norse deities. I wanna play through EON again and tell more of my dear friends whenever I do a dungeon event and the character I made of them drinks poison for fun. I wanna play those stupid Persona spinoffs. Writing this was a bodily need for me. If you have spent any time around me in the past few years I have probably trapped you in an annoying conversation about these games. I'm sorry. It will happen again.

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An ode to/autopsy of Ueshiba Riichi, my favorite manga artist

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 18:44:21 GMT

Do I even need to say anything! Look at this stuff!

Whenever I'm reading something this guy has put out each chapter takes me forever. Simple panels remain extra simple, usually the character surrounded by midnight black. But when he goes all out it is absolutely unique and jaw dropping. His art style has changed a lot over the years, especially with his two newest and most popular works (Mysterious Girlfriend X and Ookumo-Chan Flashback respectively, which I won't cover here cuz a ton of people have already talked about them online). In Discommunication, his art is at its most amateur, but it fits the themes of the work like a glove. These two total weirdos love each other and they don't really know why. Matsubue asks Togawa for strange favors, though none of them are traditionally romantic or sexual whatsoever. Each character does not really emote too strongly, making the reasons why they are the way they are even harder to decipher. Togawa fumbles around in the dark, trying to grasp on to something she can explain to herself, much like the reader tries to decipher the gorgeously maximalist scattered religious symbolism splayed across the busiest panels. We view all of Matsubue, all at once, and its kinda overwhelming, but theres really no other way to do it. Matsubue has superpowers but that is only confirmed by a side character and it honestly rarely even comes up in the early chapters. Even though these two are more than a little unorthodox, it is really clear that they love each other through it all, and the artwork serves this narrative perfectly.

Once you get further into Discommunication, the actual plot starts happening and it shows a lot more of its cracks. Tis an unfortunate case of the mystery being a lot more fun when it is actually a mystery. The main two start making magic clones of each other and bullshit like that and many of Riichi's... tendencies start coming out. To be upfront, unfortunately as is the case with many good manga artists, Riichi has a lolicon streak. It is not as prevalent here as it is in the sequel manga we are going to talk about, but it definitely stains the later chapters a bit and just generally does not feel within the tone of the work before that point. It is a lovely read as a weekly sort of series before the plot starts doing its thing. Later on in the series is the appearance of fan favorite character Touko, a weird alcoholic spirit powers girl who befriends the main two. She is the protagonist of the sequel series Yume Tsukai (which strangely has an anime even though Discommunication does not; the anime is not very good).

Yume Tsukai's art is more stunning than ever. More and more of the maximalist tapestry pages are present here. Oh right. The story. Touko and her younger sister who Riichi is way too ok drawing extremely naked Rinko work with outright lolicon Hajime and new girl Satoka use their dream superpowers (which involves transforming toys in the real world and themselves into superweapons) to destroy nightmares and solve mysteries in the dream world. The first case takes a majority of the manga's runtime. Middle school girl Eri, hopelessly in love with awfully written trans woman Youko, enters the dream world with the ritual of fire. Youko reveals she has led 24 other girls into the dream world, at which point they reveal they are all pregnant. Youko and Eri have sex and Eri turns into a mechanical penis monster that eats Youko. As this happens, Rinko and friend of the two Kei show up to see what the hell is happening with all of this. And THAT is just the first half of chapter one. Yume Tsukai takes its dream logic as extreme as can be, showing something horrifying or strange or disgusting or beautiful nearly every page. It is kind of exhausting to read. Whenever I actually can understand what is going on its usually something pretty awful or at least awfully written. Thankfully the fan translation has lovely translators notes that can explain at least some of the symbolism this series is rife with. Sometimes a chapter will solely focus on one insane scene or idea, like the entire school getting trapped in magic bubbles containing gender swapped versions of themselves they have sex with. For what its worth, the first arc is definitely the strangest one by far, and the series takes itself a lot more seriously with the second arc (thankfully so, since it is about abuse).

I'm torn by Yume Tsukai. On one hand, this art haunts my mind even to this day and I read this manga years ago. I reread some choice chapters every year or so just because there is no other feeling like being drowned in this manga. The artwork is some of the most incredible shit I have ever seen for a manga the plot of which is disorienting at best and outright offensive at worst. Mysterious Girlfriend X is almost certainly his best work. I think it hits the best middle ground between being weird and still having the absolutely jaw dropping artwork that made his first two works even worth talking about. So if you wanna read anything from this guy just read that and call it a day. But if you wanna dive into the unknown, sifting through sand to find sparkling gemstones of pages, these two manga are waiting to be pried open.

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Villain Protagonists in Horror

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 04:03:22 GMT

Spoilers for:

The Babadook (2014 film)

Mouthwashing (2024 game)

The Only Good Indians (2020 novel)

I titled this post “Villain Protagonists in Horror” but it is really about misdirection in horror, and I noticed they all happened to be protagonists themselves in the end, in some fashion or another. Get misdirected IDIOT

My opinion on The Babadook changed several times throughout viewing. The titular hatman children's book entity stalking a broken family is quite stupid and hard to take seriously. I damn near burst out laughing whenever the monster popped out on screen. If it was not for the honestly very effective prop and good acting, I would have written this movie off partway through. However, the babadook is not the true monster. Amelia, a grieving mother gets slowly more and more fed up with her son acting out in school and at home. Sure, the kid is loud and misbehaving. But hes just a normal kid unable to express his developing emotions over the loss of his father and the seemingly random and cruel actions of his mother. Sure, the kid is scared of monsters in his book (I was scared of the damn I SPY haunted house skeleton so he is way more justified than me), but the story is infinitely clearer when viewed from his perspective rather than the moms. Hes scared that the one person who is supposed to love him cannot stand him seemingly at random. Not that the film is saying that mental illness and trauma irreversably breaks a person or anything. Amelia is the protagonist and the film is very sympathetic to her, mostly taking place in her own head. The babadook himself is her anguish and hurt festering within her, and hence what the kid is scared of. I do feel the film makes the metaphor a bit too real by making the babadook seemingly a real thing within Amelia's house that she has to feed bugs or whatever the fuck lest she tries to kill her son. When presented in this way, the film portrays the depression and anguish central to it as cartoonish, the way a shitty parent might brush aside their child's mental health problems because they think the kid is just being lazy or over-dramatic. However, living in the mind of this child, experiencing his fear and broken trust, made viewing the film more than worth it.

Mouthwashing views Jimmy, the player character for most of the game, in a far less compassionate light than The Babadook does to its protagonist. I probably do not have much to say about this very beloved and praised game that has already been said, but its narrative did touch me and stick with me. The characters of the space traveling delivery ship in Mouthwashing are all doomed, with a scant few cryostasis pods to let the crew potentially live. At the root of this is a traumatizing, horrific sexual assault of flighty ship doctor Anya by the protagonist off-screen. Jimmy hates nearly everyone on the ship, viewing them for their lowest moments and in the harshest of lenses. He is the protagonist, the one to escape, because he demands to tell the story, lest anyone know the whole truth of what he has done. Anya is doomed to be a side character, a thorn in the side of this putrid man demanding to be the hero of the story. Other entities in the ship are at play, sure, but much of the horror lies in the different ways Jimmy exploits and ruins the trust his crew places in him throughout the narrative.

I save The Only Good Indians for last because it has perhaps the most interesting view of this type of protagonist. The novel jumps between different perspectives of the Elk Head monster's victims as they die. The second perspective follows Lewis, a man who left his friends at the Blackfeet tribe reservation after a traumatizing night of hunting to settle down with his later-wife, an outsider. He tries to assimilate to life in a predominantly white area, but finds trouble, especially as he is reminded of his past. A series of illusions (viewed, through the eyes of the narrator and genre savvy reader, as very real and threatening) lead to him viewing various people in his life as a vengeful spirit bent on revenge. Something that is in part true but not in the way he thinks. These illusions eventually drive Lewis to kill his wife and close friend (someone who the spirit acts as later in the book). In many a horror story, this is where it would end, open and shut. However, years pass, and you get to see Lewis's friends back home react to and reminisce on the murky and mysterious events of Lewis's final moments before the police kill him for his crimes. Some assume the best of him, some think he really did go crazy; it lingers on their minds for the rest of the novel, informing their decisions.

A writing trick like this is far from new, despite what the release dates of these works may lead one to believe. I know it is nothing special, but moments like these particularly stuck with me as a horror fan who has been around the block and as someone who had their trust massively violated very recently. Anticipation and suspense and terror seem to hit me far harder when they come from somewhere I once viewed as a harmless place.

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Justifying my Occasionally Garbage Taste

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 08:35:42 GMT

Or, Penny tries to explain why very unpopular endings to fiction do not always ruin the entire experience

Or, Sometimes it's actually up for interpretation I swear
Or, coping to a near unhealthy degree

this essay will spoil the following works:

I Like Bats (film from 1986)

Kurau Phantom Memory (anime from 2004)

A Midsummer Day's Resonance (game from 2002)

Now and Then, Here and There (anime from 1999)

in order. A section break will be placed between each discussion.

I recently watched the film I Like Bats, a silly name for a rather serious film about societal views of sexual promiscuity. The ever-gorgeous Katarzyna Walter plays Izabela, a vampire struggling with her condition. Vampirism in this film is a clear stand-in for sexual desire. Izabela's mother acts like her daughters condition never exists. Izabela seeks out psychiatric help, and in the facility she has some killer lines. “I’m a nymphomaniac. When a man likes variety, he’s a Don Juan. Women… are put in clinics.” Her words are reminiscent of The Book of Margery Kempe, a manuscript written in the sixteenth century. Kempe struggles with guilt about sex to the point of psychosis, seeing Jesus judge her for the way she lives her life. Her husband takes great issue with a vow of chastity Kempe makes, saying that he would need to cheat on her to maintain happiness in their marriage. Unfortunately, I Like Bats really fairs to deliver much in the way of relief and understanding to most viewers. Izabela falls in love with her psychiatrist after months of killing her victims during sex. Once she is married, she is able to see herself in the mirror and her mother is more opening and understanding with her than in the past. This awful ending, implying loving monogamous sex with a man turned her into a “real woman” rather than a monster, goes against the excellent themes built earlier in the film. However, I don't think it is as black and white as the film initially presents itself, and that's for two reasons. Izabela's “cured vampirism” shown in the mirror is contradicted by bats (which follow her throughout the film) smashing the mirror she sees herself in for the first time. Her husband holds her and prevents her from breaking down, but she is clearly shaken. The psychiatric institution, which also acts as her traditional Christian marriage via her husband, has far from “cured” her as they claim. She is merely shoved in a box where she can appear to conform before those she interacts with on a daily basis. A second, more interesting decision showing an unclear ending lies within the child she has with her husband in the epilogue. Once her child is a toddler, she uses her vampire fangs to kill a family friend of Izabela. While this really muddies the initial metaphor at first, I view it as more of an addition to the metaphor. Her child is more of a part of her haunting her, just as she was for her own mother. Her own mother, implied to be a former vampire herself, tries to hide her past from her daughter rather than embrace it. It is possible she won't do the same, making greater peace with her past than her family ever did.

Kurau Phantom Memory has an extremely clear reason to point to for its troubled ending. The show was clearly rushed under troubled production into the ending. After various arcs where Kurau's relationship with her clone/situationship/sister and her estranged father develop in a very satisfying and natural way, the show kinda nosedives. Two random monster of the week dudes (whom my girlfriend and I termed “the blowjob brothers”) are fast-tracked into being the main villains of the whole damn show. The last episode has our protagonist settling down and getting married to a nameless faceless man who never appears in the series after losing their memories. Christmas, Kurau's partner, lives on sadly until she finds out that aliens like her found a new world they can live in after lifetimes of oppression in our universe. A new younger Kurau then pops out of Christmas' chest and they embrace, ending the show. It is about as unsatisfying to watch as it is to have described to you. Some dialogue tries to explain away this choice coming out of complete nowhere but it doesn't work that great. Watching this back it seems so clear that they had something specific in mind, and upon finding out they couldn't finish the story in time, the writers triple backflipped into something resembling the ending they intended. I think the arc with the main two girls is pretty much done around episode 17 or so, and I wouldn't say the last seven episodes are a waste of time or anything. Recurring villain Ayaka gets an amazing story in this ending. If I ever show the anime to other people, I will probably lightly spoil the ending just so they know what to expect. I do not think the ending is paramount and there is still so, so much to enjoy in this. I just can't recommend it in good faith without this asterisk. Witch Hunter Robin, another show written by the same writer, has a very similar problem of needing more time to finish what it wanted to say, so it seems this is a problem for this author. But writing is hard and shit. I can appreciate some good writing even if it isn't all the way there.

A former girlfriend and I had a strange day once that we called “Yuri Day”, in which we played a ton of short yuri visual novels all in one sitting while eating pizza. It was a good time. The second game we played that day was A Midsummer Day's Resonance, which caught my eye because it was old for a yuri VN and I like weird old stuff. The ending made my partner more than a little peeved, however. An interesting science fiction story in which three women are mysteriously connected via glitched cell phones becomes a quaint love story for our protagonist, who is shockingly turned down by her crush shortly after finding out the two exist in separate, slightly different realities where they can never meet. After a while, the glitch fades, and the protagonist becomes unable to contact her unrequited love. The end of the game plays a sound effect which sounds similar to the connected call sound effect which plays whenever the two call each other. This is confirmed in an epilogue... well, kind of. The author writes “does this mean the two are reconnected, I don't know” which is a bit of a slap in the face. If one goes in expecting a romance as we did, it is a really damn disappointing game. But I have thought about this story a whole lot ever since I first read it those years ago. Sure, back in the early 2000s when this sort of romance story was pretty much nonexistent in the novel game landscape, this was kind of a strange choice to make. The game is listed in many resources as a very early video game about lesbianism. But man, if this ain't how it is sometimes. So much of queer art is about the suffering of it all and I get how it can be tiring I really can. I just love sad ephemera like this and I can't help myself. I see my younger self so viscerally in Kurasawa's teenage thought patterns throughout the narrative. Every light heartbreak feeling like the end of the world, every connection feeling fragile within my hands. Sure, it seems really teenage and immature but I feel as if this game is telling me that even if much of the world gives a shrug or an eye roll or an I-don't-know to these lost, lonely feelings, that they are real and life shaping.

Ok. This is probably my seventh or eighth time trying to write something about Now and Then Here and There ever since I started writing essay things, video or written.

NATHAT's ending is actually rather loved by most viewers of this show. It looks brightly towards the future as the show ever does, no matter how cruel and fucking depressing shit can get sometimes. It's really nice. However, for most people there is a blemish on this show. And her name is Sara.

When asked what my favorite anime is, I typically say something that is not this show. I wouldn't say I am embarrassed that I get so much out of it or anything, but rather that I think it isn't very complicated or grand or insightful when compared to any other show I really love. I cannot talk about why I like it without bearing a rather uncomfortable part of my soul about it. A warning should be placed that Sara's story deals with rape and body autonomy. Though it will not be detailed, it is still a part of the discussion.

Sara Ringwalt is an American teenager who is captured and isekai'd into Hellywood, a battleship looking for water to power its pointless conquest across a barren post-apocalypse. She is taken due to her mild resemblance to Lala-Ru, the main girl and the only one who can use a magic stone to summon an infinite amount of water, a task she does not do for most of the show as she does not feel like humanity deserves a second chance.

Though it is made clear very quickly that Sara is not who they are looking for, she is not set free. Her first encounter with Shu, the plucky bright eyed protagonist sharing a prison cell with her, goes horribly several times over. Sara is terrified of anyone who comes remotely near her, attacking Shu outright several times and flinching at nearly every gesture. Sara is later taken away to be a personal slave for a high ranking military officer aboard the ship. After being raped several times by this officer, she fights back and kills him. Disguising herself in his clothes, she escapes the battleship into the desert where she walks off into the night. She cuts her hair short to keep in disguise, throwing it to the wind (in a scene that is stunning even without context).

Sara ends up in the care of Sis, a woman who runs the orphanage in the city of Zari-Bars. She hates nearly everyone involved with Hellywood, even Lala-Ru due to her inadvertantly causing Sara's predicament. She feels that she is unable to go on, attempting to take her own life at one point. Sis and Shu convince her to stay, and not blame the unborn baby for the pain she has been through. Sara decides to keep the baby after much hardship. In the ending when Shu is returning to earth, Sara makes a rather baffling decision to stay in Zari-Bars and help rebuilding efforts in the war-torn world instead of returning home.

I have heard a lot of shit thrown this characters way. Perhaps the most common criticism of Sara is that her decision in the last episode undermines her character arc about moving on past her hatred. Another common one is that Sara is some strange pro-life motivated storyline included by the writers. I wouldn't blame someone for hating this character for this or her irrational decisions and mean, flighty attitude.

Sara's keeping the baby remains in my mind as more of a metaphor to me. Obviously, it reflects her hatred of Lala-Ru who did not cause what she had to go through. When viewed as a metaphor, her going home would read like her getting rid of her traumas by going home like nothing ever happened. She wants to prevent anything that happened to her from happening to anyone in that world. I understand it, as someone who had to avoid physical contact for years for various reasons myself. As a symbol, a fictional character, her decision fits her story far more even if it reads poorly upon the real life social issues it evokes.

I am rather alone in this, as Sara remains hated. But whenever I feel like I am never going to get better, I watch this show. Even if it is late at night, or if I am better served resting in a healthier way, I will watch this show. Sara's story touched my soul, not in a way that healed it, but in a way that grew it. My therapist once told me that such deep, scarring pain is like a scratch on tree bark. It never goes away, the mark may even get bigger or become warped and changed. But by growing and reflecting, you can work to make your scars a smaller part of you.

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Grappling with Mystery as a Genre

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 03:51:44 GMT

I've been watching many films on Tubi as of late. Nearly everyone in my household has an account on some streaming service and I am rather savvy about the piracy stuff, but it is somewhat of a hassle to plug my laptop into the HDMI and switch it over and get my USB mouse and all that. So I make do with the ads and watch films on there. Watching more films has become something of an unofficial new years resolution of mine, and I made the choice of starting with many films from the 30s and 40s, for the base reason that most of them are on the shorter end.

The first of these I watched was a mystery film (my gut tells me it was The Outrage from 1964 but that is the wrong time period and also I kinda hated the film). Tubi's algorithm has thus decided that old mysteries are what I'm here for, thus opening the app gives me nothing but old mysteries to click when I'm in the mood for a film.

Mysteries are a genre I have a somewhat strange relationship with. People often ask what sort of things I like or look for in any given piece of art, a question I have trouble answering. In my music journalist days, I tried to avoid having a mindset like this, as it felt somewhat silly to have an internal list of boxes to be checked as the sole element which determines if I like an album or not. Such a mindset is contrasted by a statement I've made a few times when experiencing more narrative works: Even if I don't get a lot from any given story, I will usually like it a lot if I really like even just one character.

Traditionally speaking, the genre of mysteries treats its characters rather oddly compared to much of the rest of fiction. We have our central detective, typically a strong character in their own right, but most of the rest of the cast merely serves the mystery above their own character. Characters will die by the killer's hands to further the stakes and danger, providing more key evidence. Or, they may be witnesses to key events and little more. To solve the mystery for one's self, often a selling point of the genre, you kinda have to emotionally remove yourself from the situation. That nice character could be a deceiving murder, this character may not be telling the truth because they're in love, and so on. I am not saying I hate mysteries as they're traditionally told and presented or anything, but I suppose I am just rather picky.

I had a similar experience when I was first getting into reading novel style video games, a genre which (at least in the English speaking world) has mostly mysteries as the most popular releases (i.e. Ace Attorney or Danganronpa). These games have fleshed out characters, yes, but the mystery solving is the main attraction.

In novel games, I find myself trending towards the stories in which the mystery is very present and often fun to think about; yet the character moments, relations, and interaction stand as the clear main meat. Seabed is one prime example. Much of the experience of Seabed is actually (probably) less enjoyable if you have been spoiled, so it will not be here. But the presentation of the game itself is the mystery. The player starts asking questions once the prologue is over more than the characters ever do. Takako has questions about her missing memories. Yet, rather than solving them with wit as a traditional detective would, she talks through her emotions with the people around her to “solve” them instead. Conversations Sachiko has with her nurse Narasaki about hallucinations feel like someone googling their problems trying to find whats wrong with them. The process of thinking through the mystery is done between two characters, heavily interweaving their own personalities into the meat of the plot. When big reveals and changes happen, they are so related to the core of the lives of these characters that one cannot possibly remove themselves and their emotions from the situation. Additional scenes in Seabed are unlocked as the reader continues reading. They often give crucial pieces of evidence to the mysteries at play within the plot, yet those are never what I remember when I think back on those scenes. I remember Sachiko's pure grief as she spills her heart out to Narasaki over her memories. In these scenes, no character sprites are shown, so you don't get to see anyone's face. But the pain in her words wrings tears out of my eyes every damn time I see them. The mystery is secondary, serving the wonderful plot and characters first and foremost.

I think perhaps my favorite of the films I saw have been The Third Man (1949) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). The Third Man's primary mystery has kind of a stupid answer, and one that is rather obvious past a certain point in viewing. However, much of the fun is in seeing the mental wringer the main two characters are put in. They both have a strong attachment to the case, with the protagonist having been “saved” by a job offer from the victim and the main girl having been in love with the victim. They both sorta know the answer a certain point through, but they can't admit it to themselves because it is killing them. They make awful decision after awful decision because of how hurt they are. It gives the film this strange aura. The score is nearly comical, as if laughing at the main two for their situation. Alida Valli, the main girl, is tortured mentally by her waning love and her desire to protect the villain in spite of everything. She is given an out, a way to escape a dangerous situation for her which is slowly creeping up and she just can't bring herself to care because of how detached she feels from everything at this point. It rules so hard.

The Lady Vanishes has its main villain using emotionally fuckery as the main weapon against the protagonists. Margaret Lockwood totally owns in this movie. She has a close friendship with an old lady on the train after being treated like pure dirt by every man in the movie up until that point. The woman is gone after Lockwood's character takes a nap. When she asks where her new friend has gone, everyone in the train acts as if her friend never was on the train, and that she never existed at all. Michael Redgrave's character, the deuteragonist, is kind of a meathead, and only sticks with the main girl because he has a crush on her and likes fucking with her. Iris, the protagonist, is totally alone, and she is clawing and screaming for someone to just take her seriously. I adore that she gets her out when things get hairy from a nun lady who couldn't give two shits about the plot, and from a lady who thinks her husband is a total moron for lying to the protagonist. The bonds between women are a threat to the men in the movie, who work to stop her. It's a really damn good film. Women sweep.

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