Discussion on the eroge critique
The latest reply to sethjohnson is one of the longest yet.
“I musn’t run away! I musn’t run away!”
Also, if any of you are interested in more debate, expect late replies. Sorry bettynoire, I had quite a bit to say about what you did but sethjohnson’s comment piqued my interest more, and all the words have run away, and I’ve got a sore throat plus mild fever and need sleep. That is all.
sethjohnson: I don’t really know if you’re reading too much into what I’ve written with undeniably good intentions at making me see the error of my ways, or if it’s just this part that’s veiled ad hominem masquerading as dialogue when you said:
>>Why do you need to invent a subversive new phrase for it that suggests something different from what you actually mean? Youre trying to take a departure from realism, (note my insidious use of scare-quotes here, as I cleverly parallel the point Im making) and call it disingenuous.
How is that part in bold relevant in any way whatsoever to this discussion, if not to create an opening for you to further follow up later for attack, pray tell? Newsflash: if the term “character-identification” had came to mind while I was writing, there was the chance that I would have used it. Ever heard of Marxism, and how the terms attached towards the ideology came about? It was Marx trying to express his ideas in ways that existing words couldn’t provide for in sufficient capacity, and no, that isn’t another disingenuous metaphor trying to elevate the status of what I said; I found it in my capability at the time to distinguish “character” from “emotion” instead of choosing to combine the two — characters are the vessels that express emotions, and I was looking at the two of them as different entities with respect to that phrase, no matter how subversive it sounded. It wasn’t so much the characters that I identified with as it was the emotions that I felt were expressed honestly.
It’s a question of the meaning I’m attaching towards the term “emotional honesty” in the sense that I’m making a distinction of it from “character identification” — also, as a pre-emptive, neither am I trying to veer into metaphysics at this point — viewing the emotions as separate from the character here is important because H&C has been, at least for me, somewhat of a first in terms of how true-to-life and representative they were, and while this is abstract because I’m grasping at straws again, those emotions were genuine to me in a way I’ve only seen bits and pieces of in anime and manga so far — you could say that the meaning that I attached towards “emotional honesty” was also the sum of H&C, and what it stood for.
>>Your use of newspeak continues here. What youre providing isnt closer inspection which prooves something wrong; its an elaboration on your own terminology. Youre suggesting a conflict or victory where there is none.
So tell me, am I reading too much into your comment now, or were you setting up a straw man to claim that I was allegedly using one, too? Which is it? Your underlying assumption is that I’m doing this to substantiate my argument when I had no intentions of doing so, and your argument against that immediately crumbles when you factor in this second part of what you said — this is another question of semantics, and it’s pretty ironic that you bring that up when all I was doing was trying to explain that “plot driving character” and “character driving plot” just differs more from just the two words being switched around. Which means I was answering a possible counter-argument that would border on semantics, that someone might say “oh, [plot driving character] and [character driving plot] are the same things, it’s all wordplay”.
>>What? What mainstream? Dont you mean the set of works that you think are good? Normally when people talk about mainstream, they talk about what is popular. John Grisham is incredibly popular. Very mainstream. I believe the most popular anime in America (not sure about other nations) are Pokemon and Naruto.
This is really out of context now. You previously quoted me as saying:
>Fantasy and sci-fi are hardly the mainstream thing because a lot of books written have the plot as the focus, with their pretty technology and magic overwhelming the reader instead of focusing on the essentials.
This goes against what you’re saying — if you’re saying that mainstream is popular, then how doesn’t it fit that what I’ve just said? Let’s replace “popular” with “mainstream”, you get [Fantasy and sci-fi are hardly popular]. What exactly’s wrong with that sentence? I was saying precisely that, that fantasy and sci-fi aren’t mainstream, or popular since you like to nitpick on meaning, because (and here I’m repeating myself) “a lot of books written have the plot as the focus, with their pretty technology and magic overwhelming the reader instead of focusing on the essentials”.
Where am I referring to John Grisham? Definitely not in that sentence. That’s right, I’m referring to him right here.
>”A plot-driven story has the characters move according to its direction and feels horribly contrived, as opposed to a character-driven story where the plot comes from the interaction of the characters, resulting in a more realistic story that readers can identify to, or what separates John Grishams writing from Alexander Solzhenitsyns.
I’ll put it in simpler terms since you can’t seem to connect to that one:
John Grisham = plot-driven story
Alexander Solzhenitsyn = character-driven story (unless you’re telling me the Gulag and cancer, to cite two of his works, made for something that was plot-driven, which anyone with a reasonable mind like you wouldn’t be able to think of)
Here’s more:
>>Are you just trolling for flames, man? No wonder lolikit likes your blog. Ill assume youre being serious for the moment.
I’ll overlook the ad hominem because I’m going to make one right now by wondering if you’re just trying to do an borderline troll intellectual approach, but these two?
>>First of all, what is an average otaku? Are you talking about a Japanese otaku? An American otaku? Those two cultures, just as examples, are significantly different, and they arent even homogenous. I think the word you are actually looking for here is philistine.
>>Well-read is a sly term. Well-read in what? Youre suggesting that to be well-read one must have read a great deal of whatever literature it is you consider classic. Youve already stated that you are not well-read in eroge, but that you are treating it as a genre and assuming the works with which you are actually familiar are emblematic, a point much debated by the other commenters.
Here’s something I found in my textbook on the chapter “An argument under the microscope”, it’s called the Principle of Charity, which you’re obviously not adhering to (take a look). No one else has bothered on these two points because it’s pretty obvious in this context which otaku I’m referring to: the ones reading this. And about the term “well-read”, no one bothered to address that either because it’s pretty obvious I’m not referring to people who read chick lit and Dan Brown, if you get my drift. So far all you’ve done is try to find fault in the little statements I’ve said by adopting the most unfair interpretation which you then proceed to argue against, and I’d say it’s not really working.
That being said and done, it appears that any “arrogance” you saw on my part seems to be something of your imagination. “vitriol and underhanded cultural assaults” too is cutting it a bit fine, if you ask me.
>>It also seems like you are also ignoring some of the nature of the anime format.
It also seems like by not mentioning something, you jump on the assumption that I’m ignoring it. My entire piece was written as an argument based on principle, and that principle, for me, was “character-driven”, which is a principle I’ve been able to defend with regards to my views in the essay so far. If you find it utterly unbelievable, that’s your choice; what I’ve been writing is in reference to how Kanon and Air doesn’t live up to that principle, which you have a hard time swallowing.
>>However what I wanted to get back to is the idea that animation is better suited for all of these things you seem to consider inferior elements of literature: action, erotica, big visuals, and gags.
And there’s another straw man for you. Not mentioning something does not equate dismissal, how did you come to that conclusion in a reasonable manner? Let’s see — with the exception of erotica (fanservice, or just plain hentai?), this spring I happen to be watching and loving Darker than Black (action), Gigantic Formula (big visuals), and Lucky Star (gags). “Character-driven” isn’t my one and only criteria for choosing and watching an anime, since I believe I did link to my methodology in the essay anyway, and I can quote that part where I did if you’re wondering.
You should realise at this point that I was evaluating the eroge as a genre so far in terms of how its story goes, and if you want me to sum the main conclusion of it for you, it would be this: Genre isn’t an excuse, in fact, it’s one of the lamest things to blame; if shounen, shoujo, and mecha can be character-driven, why can’t the eroge (adaptation)? In this case, Kanon and Air? The prevalent aesthetic in each genre of anime is one thing; the heart of it, or whether it’s a character-driven vs a plot-driven, is a different kettle of fish, unless you want to argue that being plot-driven is something integral to the eroge, which is something I won’t contest.
Mirrinus: Having focus on plot for gameplay still doesn’t mean that characterisation should be ignored — they’re not mutually exclusive, which is what I was stressing on. I’ve yet to play Planetarian though, maybe after my exams, which is like the 14th of June. Wikipedia calls it a kinetic novel anyway. Do bear in mind that I was commenting on eroge specifically. All eroges are visual novels, but not all visual novels are eroges.
I wouldn’t say that I’ve “distilled it down to a science”, rather, I think I’ve just done what no one I’ve seen so far has the guts to do, which is say they dislike Kanon and say why it is they dislike Kanon. I’ve read a lot of retarded opinions on either pro- or anti- Kanon camp that can’t seem to put into words or justify their opinion, so I assume I’m the exception to the rule?
Let’s call a spade a spade. A lot of otaku don’t read books, and by books I mean well-written ones. In other words, I am to find a lot of people majoring in English and English Literature here, or bookworms whose shelves are full of shortlists or winners of the Booker/Pulitzer/Nobel Prize for Literature, as I am to find lesbians in an all-girl Catholic high-school. Which is rare, but still possible.
Why is it a danger to be objective? I find this an annoyance with a lot of opinions I read, where in the name of PC or in the name of not offending long-standing fans, anime bloggers and writers skirt around saying “this sucks and this is WHY” and just pen down a bunch of trashy circumlocution that goes “well, you might not like this IF…” instead of being honest and straightforward about it. And that’s what I’m doing.
My point of contention was that given how a lot of otaku don’t read, their perception of what a “good story” is is skewed. Tragically, this is a POV I don’t expect a lot of people to understand either because a) not everyone reading this will be well-read b) if you’re not well-read you won’t understand where I’m coming from, but while it seems like circular logic, this is one of those things you’ll have to be just to get it.
Are you also saying that I shouldn’t hold an eroge’s story to the high standards that film and books have? If that’s your opinion, well, I rest my case. The general idea of this blog lies on seeing the literary merit inherent in anime and manga, and Kanon and Air just didn’t make the cut, I’m sorry.
Mike:
>>I dont think that all great writing/literature is necessarily character driven.
That is correct. There are exceptions to the norm, like the two genres which require a structured aesthetic (horror and crime fiction) and experimental or arguably avant-garde works, like James Joyce’s. But you bring fantasy and sci-fi up as an example, which is interesting. Why is that?
LOTR, for instance, emphasised characterisation in addition to having a gigantic, well-modelled world, and ultimately achieved success because of that. I reject your idea of sci-fi and fantasy not having the emphasis on character, because while that is the case for a lot of both genres, that also is why the both of them have problems in terms of mainstream connection. The hardcore fantasy and sci-fi fan will love anything convoluted and massive in terms of plot (there’s this fantasy series that’s gone on for like 12 books, can’t really remember the name) but like I mentioned, a niche within a niche.
LOTR has the central theme of struggling with the evil within, where Bilbo Baggins can be seen passing on the burden, both metaphorically and physically, to Frodo. Who can’t identify with that? Heck, wasn’t that the theme of Spiderman 3 too, while we’re at it? I didn’t cry at LOTR or anything, but I’m sure there’s people out there who found the hobbit’s struggles pretty much like theirs in real life.
I can go into detail if you like. You brought up LOTR as an example and I feel it does fit with what I’ve written — I was talking about the accessibility of eroge at the end of my essay, I thought LOTR’s the perfect comparison because, for one, it breaks free of the niche structure that plagues a lot of its brethren. Fantasy and sci-fi are hardly the mainstream thing because a lot of books written have the plot as the focus, with their pretty technology and magic overwhelming the reader instead of focusing on the essentials.
Going back to what I said, there isn’t an LOTR of eroge (yet) due to the stifling emphasis of plot over character. It remains a niche within a niche because the genre itself hasn’t managed to break free of pandering to its fans and creating something only its fans will understand, as opposed to LOTR which broke fantasy conventions by, shock and horror, adding the core emphasis of character onto a massive, well-structured world! Feel free ask if there’s anything else I missed.
lolikit: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
Engage me, don’t tl;dr the easy way out. Also, God Knows.
Demian: I said earlier that all eroges are visual novels, but not all visual novels are eroges. You might call them the one and the same, but I’d like to make that distinction here, because I’m talking about the eroge specifically, and visual novels can include things like Planetarian, which definitely isn’t an eroge.
>>How can you seek to critique visual novels as a whole when you havent even played one?
I thought the subtitle said it all: a critique on eroge, with regards to emotional honesty and anime adaptations? I did rectify what I’d said earlier in that Air post about visual novels as a whole. The essay was with regards to the story, which I saw in an anime adaptation, and with regards to emotional honesty, which I found Kanon and Air lacked.
>>Your basing your entire thought process on two rather lackluster adaptions.
Really? I offer my profuse apologies for not being able to cite sources, numbers, or hard facts at this point, but I based my essay on that for reasons I’ve already mentioned, which I’ll proceed to elaborate on here. Firstly, the issue of how well the adaptations were accepted by the community at large. Here’s a refresher course for you — how many people did you remember accusing Kanon ’06 and Air for not being faithful to the storyline? How many people loved it and how many didn’t, with relations to the source?
I’m using the assumption that the English-speaking community didn’t deviate too much in opinion from the Japanese one, and from what I read about the posts during that time with regards to Kanon ’06, those that played the game and watched it didn’t have any issues with how it was adapted (Hinano’s posts are one I remember, you could do well to check her archives). Show me your sources that said Kanon and Air weren’t great adaptations, because for that to be valid you’d need to cite people who played the games and then watched the adaptations.
The rest of your argument I don’t really know whether to reply to, because like I said, eroge != visual novel, and I don’t know if Nitro+, Demonbane, and Gekkou no Carnivale are eroges or visual novels. My focus was on the story, and a critique of it through the anime adaptation — the last time I checked the stuff Type-Moon did wasn’t really revered in the same way that Key’s works are. Also, did anyone cry at Type-Moon’s works like Kanon and Air did for them? One weakness I’ll readily admit to here is lack of secondary material (i.e. blogs that wrote about it) on which to base my choice for representation, because as it is it was easier to look for Air and Kanon reviews than Fate/stay night and Tsukihime. And about To Heart, I don’t know; no one ever said anything about its story and how moving it was, and how they cried over it, if you get what I mean. Which would mean that didn’t stand out to me as something extremely unique.
Choosing a candidate for this was tricky, and as it is Air and Kanon remain in a different league from the rest by virtue of aspiring, as Mike had said, to be character-driven. The only problem with them as I see it like I said, is while they’re obviously trying to break free of the mould that sets them apart from the mainstream, their focus on the plot outweighs any focus on characterisation that they’re trying to do, which is where my critique comes in and talks about the shortcomings, using H&C as an appropriate comparison as something they should be aspiring to if they want to truly break free from the trappings of eroge as it is currently.
>>You seem to keep dismissing the fact that VNs contain sex as irrelevant.
Your words, not mine. I didn’t say it was just plain irrelevant, I wanted something as far removed from the sex as possible by virtue of which I could then evaluate the story by, because I was talking about an anime adaptation, and in order to have an anime adaptation that sticks to its source material the most, and makes sense, you can’t have something with ties that bind it to the sex part, which is why Kanon and Air qualify.
How do you then reconcile Key’s decision to consciously de-sex their past three works, or do you consider Key not making “eroge” per se anymore? You’ve cited Clannad’s Tomoyo After before and I’m beginning to question the logic behind it, because that doesn’t explain how Key still makes money out of otaku despite Clannad itself having no sex. Wikipedia cites reliable sources as it having made it to #1 for two weeks — this despite it having no sex, and otakus that bought it with the full knowledge that there wouldn’t be any adult scenes. It was the third most widely sold game of 2004, behind Fate/stay night. Do you have an answer to this, then?
There isn’t anything wrong with sex in eroge, heck, that’s how the term was coined. I’m just of the opinion that it skews your perception of the game in a way I’m positive a lot of people with experience in it won’t want to admit — JP Meyer wrote something about identification here in the last paragraph, and I don’t know if I’m using it in the right sense here, but it’s pretty hard to knock an eroge when, instead of seeing things from a omniscient/third-person perspective, it’s you who’s been the protagonist, having being immersed with the game on a higher level than is usually the case for any other medium, and you might not be able to accurately assess its value as a story and not as an experience, as a result.
To cut a long answer short if you still don’t get where I’m coming from after all that, here’s Cliffs Notes to sum it up; I was focusing on the story. Sex doesn’t really do much for a story when it’s cut out in considerable amounts from the source. Kanon and Air, and Key in general happens to be moving away from sex and the traditional route of most eroges, and they made for good adaptations where the sex wasn’t too mixed up with the story in a way where the clean version would have to be altered significantly from the source material. And I don’t consider it a taboo at all, I don’t know how you got the impression from the two paragraphs I wrote.
Twitch: I think the funniest thing about your comment here, is that it’s ironically structured in the exact same way as your comprehension skills and underlying assumption that you’re using in order to denounce what I’ve just written. First of all I’d like to apologise if it appears like I’m making fun of your English if it isn’t your first language, because I just simply don’t know how you could say what you did here:
>>but you really lose points when you say that Scryed is like Les mes, or Deathnote has interesting characters.
Now, where did I say that, again? No one came to that conclusion in the comments except for you, and I don’t know how you came to the other fallacious bit of thinking that I’m comparing Scryed and Death Note to Kanon, because this is what my sentence was originally, and I don’t think anyone found issues with it except you:
>as an example of how I see things, Ive always thought of Scryed being one huge homage to Les Miserables, and Death Notes internal monologues and reasoning to having a parallel in Crime and Punishment.
Let me bold the important parts for you, because you missed it:
>as an example of how I see things, Ive always thought of Scryed being one huge homage to Les Miserables, and Death Notes internal monologues and reasoning to having a parallel in Crime and Punishment.
You’re calling my reasoning illogical, yet you’re putting words into my mouth with your poor reading skills so much so that you thought I was comparing Kanon to Scryed, and Death Note? No, I don’t “choose random anime”, I see what I see in an anime and then proceed to write about it, not the other way round. Also, yes, I can’t please everyone, and 27 posts and over 5,000 hits later there’s definitely going to be someone who doesn’t agree with my writing style, so suit yourself. I suppose that also makes everyone’s who’s said anything good about what I’ve written so far, idiots, since they’ve been praising illogical and badly-written and arguments?
My writing was structured on several viewpoints which I used to attack the value of an eroge’s story, in this case Kanon and Air, through their adaptations, and while some of them were linked in premise, most of them stand alone and aren’t dependent on each other for a conclusion. A guess of mine’s how since you have problems reading a simple sentence in English and struggle with the words “homage” and “parallel”, in addition to several connecting words, you mistook my reasons for a conclusion, or the other way around. Neither could you elaborate at any one point about where you thought my viewpoints were “baseless” or “plain wrong”.
I could go on, really, for several more paragraphs about how you messed up your entire argument by basing it on the simplest of sentences a kid in grade school could understand that you then twisted into something way out of its original meaning, but I’ve been making fun of you enough and that spark should be put to better use. I invite you to take any or all of my posts and dissect them (on your own blog, since you do know how to make logical arguments, right?) for the world to see; I’ve always been able to justify my opinions, let’s hope we can have you do the same too.
The bottom line is that I shouldn’t have really bothered replying to your borderline troll material because it made my head hurt wondering why I was making the effort, but hey, you should compare Darker than Black to Naruto to be able to see the difference that’s the chasm of understanding between your reasoning and mine. That is all, good afternoon to you.
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I won’t try to argue since I think other people are more than able to do so and I don’t think my english is good enough for this. But I consider eroge/visual novel like any other form of litterature, I enjoy a good story that manage to entertain me no matter what the source.
For the Clannad and Tomoyo after bussiness, Key didn’t make Tomoyo after ero to please the discontented fans but because it felt “appopriate”, Tomoyo after is a direct continuation of Tomoyo route in Clannad so her relationship with Tomoya is already very strong and mature. Basically the ero in the game doesn’t feel out of place.
To finish I’ll say that one shouldn’t take their entertainment so seriously, eroges/visual novel are still very weak in the west but in japan they art a booming bussiness so of course like the great majorities of anything 90% of them suck but the few that are good are really good.
A couple of points:
1) faithful does not that it is the same. Kyoto adapted the visual novel well, and you could almost say it was the best way in which it could be adapted, but in no way is the anime (a visual work) equivalent to the visual novel (a written + musical work). I laughed when you used LOTR as an example of characterisation, considering that there was little to no “characterisation” in the movie version, apart from one or two of the main characters (Frodo and maybe Sam at a stretch).
2) Most people, I think, find Key’s works special not because it has a brilliant story, or brilliant characters, or even brilliant writing (I rate Clannad’s writing very highly though). It is the unique “atmosphere” that makes it special – it has an emotional quality that makes it surpass many technically more rated works, and makes the whole of the parts far greater than its sums. It has “soul” – something for which I am highly critical of the 2nd season of H & C for lacking. Plus the music helps too in this department.
3) Hinano’s posts are more factually accurate than mst, but it would be a huge fallacy to depend on her thoughts and impressions, because I personally don’t agree with the majority of them.
4) It’s a funny thing you bring up Type Moon, because a) it is revered, perhaps even more highly than Key works, just in a different way – you made a huge mistake in thinking quality/emotion=crying, and b) for what its worth, the Heaven’s Feel path of Fate is almost blatantly the type of character AND plot driven story you seem to crave. Though it tends to be that it is the slightly older age group (post-adolescent) who tends to appreciate it more.
Would you prefer “Brevity is the soul of wit!” to tl;dr? Actually I read most of the original post, but not all of the comments thread, so perhaps I’m rehashing critiques already made by other people.
In true blog-commenter-form, I’ll take some selections entirely out of context and flame…I mean critique…
“Ive always loved Honey & Clover for being emotionally honest. The concept of the term emotional honesty, if it doesnt exist in some capacity out there already, would be defined as the ability of the viewer to connect with the range of emotions portrayed by the character(s) on-screen due to how the emotions portrayed are genuine and indeed representative of real life in some capacity.”
I think emotional honesty is a bad term. You’re talking about character-identification. Why do you need to invent a subversive new phrase for it that suggests something different from what you actually mean? You’re trying to take a departure from “realism,” (note my insidious use of scare-quotes here, as I cleverly parallel the point I’m making) and call it disingenuous.
“Choosing to justify a critique of eroge after watching two Key adaptations seems like a reasonable decision to me…”
Well, this is probably fine for most of your essay, but Key’s works are only representative of a particular genre and format of eroge. Eroge can refer to any game with erotic intentions / content.
“The difference between the plot driving the characters and the characters driving the plot seems like an argument of semantics at first, but closer inspection proves this wrong. A plot-driven story has the characters move according to its direction and feels horribly contrived, as opposed to a character-driven story where the plot comes from the interaction of the characters, resulting in a more realistic story that readers can identify to, or what separates John Grishams writing from Alexander Solzhenitsyns.”
Your use of newspeak continues here. What you’re providing isn’t “closer inspection” which “prooves” something wrong; it’s an elaboration on your own terminology. You’re suggesting a conflict or victory where there is none.
This critique is tangential to your main points, but goes toward the character of your essay (more later).
“Fantasy and sci-fi are hardly the mainstream thing because a lot of books written have the plot as the focus, with their pretty technology and magic overwhelming the reader instead of focusing on the essentials.”
What? What mainstream? Don’t you mean the set of works that you think are good? Normally when people talk about mainstream, they talk about what is popular. John Grisham is incredibly popular. Very mainstream. I believe the most popular anime in America (not sure about other nations) are Pokemon and Naruto.
“Im of the opinion that this is true, but only because the average otaku isnt well-read theres plenty of good and bad anime out there (a tad subjective, but by good and bad Im referring to story) yet youll find both having equal amounts of viewers. The average otaku, and by average I mean average average, not anime blogger average, more often than not prioritises fetishization, fan service, and wish fulfillment over actual content and story.”
Are you just trolling for flames, man? No wonder lolikit likes your blog. I’ll assume you’re being serious for the moment.
First of all, what is an “average otaku”? Are you talking about a Japanese otaku? An American otaku? Those two cultures, just as examples, are significantly different, and they aren’t even homogenous. I think the word you are actually looking for here is “philistine”.
“Well-read” is a sly term. Well-read in what? You’re suggesting that to be “well-read” one must have read a great deal of whatever literature it is you consider classic. You’ve already stated that you are not “well-read” in eroge, but that you are treating it as a genre and assuming the works with which you are actually familiar are emblematic, a point much debated by the other commenters.
This kind of arrogance annoys me. I don’t really have a problem with you trying to elaborate on your opinion of what makes a good book, or what you didn’t like about Kanon and AIR, but is it really necessary to pepper it with vitriol and underhanded cultural assaults?
It also seems like you are also ignoring some of the nature of the anime format. A novel has a lot of space and flexibility in what it can do. A TV show is *serialized* and must be packed into a digestible format. Furthermore, making visual media that does not take advantage of being visual, is, IMO, silly. So if the goal is drama, then the creator needs to figure out how to make better drama now that they have visuals. For live-action, this is as straight-forward as it ever was. Human faces convey a lot of complexity. Animation, however, does not have this. Caricaturization is common in animation because subtlety is *very difficult* in an animated face and body. I think this is one reason that bgm is such a big deal in anime. Hachikuro made very excellent use of its bgm. Music goes a long way toward creating mood. However what I wanted to get back to is the idea that animation is better suited for all of these things you seem to consider inferior elements of literature: action, erotica, big visuals, and gags.
I get the impression you had misplaced expectations from Kanon and AIR. You perhaps heard other people talk about how “ZOMG SOO REAL” the sadness / emo / drama was in them. Whereas you felt the sadness / emo / drama in Hachikuro was “ZOMG SOOO REAL,” and were disappointed when they weren’t of similar cloth.
“Speaking of story, the supernatural element prevalent in Kanon and Air, and eroges in general made me wonder if its due to the genuine need for it, or just as an excuse to invent convenient clauses that try to compensate for the eroges lack of proper characterisation. Misuzu was a good example of a character that didnt make sense from a purely idiosyncratic point of view how many teenage girls would ask a guy in his late 20s to play and then invite them home to stay when they realise that said guys an unemployed drifter? Hold on, shes under this curse thats made her friendless since childhood, of course shed throw caution to the wind and just talk to anyone!”
Ever hear of suspension-of-disbelief? Maybe since you don’t like “genres”, you have trouble with it, since s-o-d is often made easier by genre conventions. Let’s try a “classic” example. Romeo and Juliet is about star-crossed lovers; the circumstances leading to their demise are incredibly ridiculous, but this is intentional. A lot of stories are driven by what-ifs and unlikely scenarios. If all you can enjoy are stories based on hardened realism, then I can tell you that you are in quite a minority across all forms of literature.
All things said, I would have been more interested in an even-handed approach to your subject that wasn’t so subversive (and not in a fun ironic way). It seems like you had a negative reaction from readers; the way you structure your writing is a lot of the source of this.
lawl
Owen, I’m too drunk (had to do something to make Lucky Star bareable) for a full response right now, but the primary thrust of my comments came from noting that this essay on eroge felt to me as if it took on a markedly different (more aggressive) tone than your other pieces on this blog. I had enjoyed previous entries and felt like they were well composed. It is very easy to become overly excited about a topic and write in a way that unconsciously provokes people, which is what I felt you were doing here.
If you were consciously provoking people, well, it worked.
Can’t sleep, ugh, this sucks. Seth, for the record, I didn’t write the essay for the sake of reaction (there’s plenty of other ways to go about that). I suppose without the context in which I was writing it (I wanted to see if anyone else felt the same way, honestly) and things like emoticons to temper the tone of voice it might have came off as aggressive, but I had no intention of it being perceived that way, to be honest. It was genuinely my opinion, and nothing else.
As you can see with the comments on every post that I’ve made, I’ve always been willing to justify my opinions and this was no exception, albeit one that needed a lot more justification than usual even though I had all the bases covered. After looking through my replies to those who commented on the essay I guess I could’ve made the original a lot longer, like twice or thrice the length. I was lazy, and you guys have my apologies for that.
Oh, and I took 3 days off updating to write it actually. If I ever do anything like this again I’ll definitely take longer, given how I was deliberately vague in parts thanks to fatigue. That’s about it.
Blog comment threads are imminently unsuitable for this kind of response (mostly due to lack of quoting features), but I’ll give it a shot.
Just assume for the moment that my suggestions about what you mean are actually guesses and not straw man assaults. It’s the difference between a dialogue and an argument, if you like.
Re: The term “emotional honesty”
It’s not the “emotional” part that bothers me, but the “honesty” part. I understand why you are using it, however its use implies that works you feel lack emotional honesty are *dishonest*, that they are false in some way. It’s a negative that seems divorced in meaning from the actual negative you wish to make.
But it’s quite possible I misunderstood. If your implication is that a work lacking “emotional honesty” is lying and deceiving its viewers with its emotional appeals, then I suppose your term is apt.
Re: Newspeak and strawmen
This, like most of my comments, was a remark on the tone and character of your writing.
Honestly I’m going to skip the rest of the response and just explain some more right here. Primarily because I’m lazy.
You implied in your last comment that a longer essay would perhaps not have required so much defense. The reverse is true.
Your essay draws straw men because it is long. People read parts of it, skip the rest, and respond to the parts they read.
It draws angry criticism because it pre-emptively assaults its readers.
I felt like I understood the primary points you were trying to make. I don’t even necessarily disagree with a lot of them. But if you take a bullet point, and give it body by pre-emptively assaulting criticisms that have not yet been made, then this is what happens.
The anime blogging community is a culture of micro-content that has a perpetually short attention span. Naturally, you can make any kind of blog you want, but if this is your audience then this is your audience, and you will be subject to their expectations and habits.
One more thing. If you wanted to rewrite the essay, I’d suggest taking your response to drm’s tl;dr, and figuring out what the key difference is between that and what you’re actually saying, and make that the essay. That’s all the self-defense you should need.
Also add funny pictures.
Ah, you could’ve just said so from the start or something. Noted. Also, I was really being sarcastic with the tl;dr that I gave drm, “H&C > *” isn’t really what I was talking about, as was the rest.
Funny pictures are overrated. Thanks for the feedback.
I…don’t really know most of the stuff you’re talking about, or the other people around here either, but I could still understand the reason why your last essay got some serious lashback.
I don’t think it’s possible to gage emotional honesty, and that argument was the base of your last essay. It’s a bit like how fans of literature keep on talking about the aesthetic experience, and theorists sometimes build their entire *career* on them, but really, you can’t measure it. It’s something that continually eludes people, which is what you’ve admitted indirectly: if you just get used to better stories, you don’t value ‘lesser’ stories in the same way people who don’t, well, do.
Some things about art can be analyzed. Craftmanship can be analyzed, methods can be analyzed. Even what *shapes* that aesthetic experience can be analyzed. But what ultimately makes a piece of art worthwhile to a person is a blank space, a leap from one point to another. Taking one example from lit: people praise Proust and people have pointed out that the praise for Proust is deserving because his work has been analyzed and proven to show excellent craftmanship. But does everyone enjoy Proust? Does everyone *literary* enjoy Proust? Who is sufficiently literary?
You think that Honey and Clover is emotionally honest (well, compared to Kanon), but I didn’t like Honey and Clover at all (boringlah!), and there are plenty of pretty smart and well-versed guys who enjoy Kanon. Still, Honey and Clover meant something to you — it moved you — and Kanon disgusted you. Ultimately though, there’s no real *rational* reason why my taste is better or worse than yours, it’s just that Honey and Clover moved you, but did nothing for me, and likewise for you and the other people who enjoy Kanon.
The essay was basically an argument on principle like I said somewhere, if you can’t accept the principle behind it (I don’t remember saying it was a rational reason) it’s just a huge amount of words in the end. Accepting the principle (e.g. the backbone of my post) allows you to look at the main conclusion in a much better light.
>>Ultimately though, theres no real *rational* reason why my taste is better or worse than yours, its just that Honey and Clover moved you, but did nothing for me, and likewise for you and the other people who enjoy Kanon.
You completely went off-tangent there — this isn’t my opinion v.s yours, it’s my opinion presented as a theory justifying the reasons behind why I arrived at the opinion. Not to mention how you’re stating the obvious, and how you haven’t even seen Kanon or Air, so, yeah.
I’m worn out from writing the past few days, and I’m equally worn out from my exams, so I’m closing down comments till further notice. And by further notice I mean when I feel like opening it up for people to comment again, which is after my exams are done.