It’s quite good and saves me the bother of having to analyse the reasons of ToT’s demise, the bitter tone of their farewell post or the subpar quality of Sunset. I don’t even have to talk about the awful financial reality of being an artist in any field. I can even steal the best screenshot from the article for my own.
Now that I’m liberated, I can quickly write a few thoughts about the the thing I find interesting about this. It’s the conflict that keeps happening at the borders and intersections between the territories of people who identify strongly with their favourite type of pastime.
There’s a contingent of games developers who are keen to expand video games beyond the challenge- and conflict-oriented territory games have almost exclusively dwelled in since their conception. The forays outside of this space have mostly been small experiments, art projects and very indie, like the entirety of ToT’s oeuvre. ToT claimed they wanted to depart from this and make Sunset a “game for gamers”, but evidently had no idea what that means.
Because gamers, especially the fundamentalist faction of gamers who are the natural enemy of the abovementioned group, feel that a tin should contain what the label promises. A video game should be a game, a thing of fun and challenge. A vaguely interactive art experience isn’t a game, right? And gamers seem to think of notgames that audaciously pose as games are a thing that should be derided and shunned. Even borderline cases are kinda suspicious. Gamers just want to have fun, man.
Elsewhere, video games themselves struggle with a similar problem.
Competitive gaming coined the term “esports” to describe itself, in part
to gain more legitimacy for the cyberathletes. Some traditional sports
fans are resistant to the idea of teens tapping keyboard buttons at the
speed of light being called a sport, as can be seen in the
hilarious Twitter feedback to American sports media giant ESPN’s recent esportsfeatures. These people are the hardcore gamers of sports audience, people whose self-identity ties into the identity of the thing they’re an audience of. When something foreign threatens to invade the territory of their favourite thing, it also threatens them. They are afraid that redefining their favourite thing dilutes its purity.
Does it?
I used to be tangled in a border conflict of my own. Years ago I wrestled with the classification of visual novels. What are they? Visual novels are at the intersection of many other media (including literature, comics, theatre and games), without really belonging mostly to any one of them. Most people seem to be on either side of the “video game” fence. Ultimately, I don’t think VNs are games, but I also make no value judgment about it. Whether they are or not has no actual consequence to me. I continue to make a conscious effort to use the verb “read” when talking about VNs, but whenever I accidentally say “play” somewhere, I don’t correct myself. It’s not sacrilege. I’ve seen more than one heated argument about the place of visual novels in gaming forums. Should they be discussed in gaming forums or games media? Clearly some people are quite invested in this question, as are the people who fight over whether sports media should cover esports and the people who think it’s an abomination that Gone Home was on some Game of the Year lists.
Being territorial and acting concerned about any perceived threats to whatever you like is very human but also very silly. All these borders are drawn in water and there has always been so much overlap, grey area and crossing over between the various media that even pretending your favourite thing is pure is ridiculous, whether it’s sports, literature of video games. Because the way of these things is that they all are shameless hussies who flirt with each other and every other thing every chance they get.
Question:Internet gave me impression that every Finn is a weeaboo. How big is Japanese culture in Finland? - Anonymous
Answer:
Maybe you only browse the weeaboo parts of the internet, so your exposure to Finns is exclusively through that?
I don’t think the Japanese pop culture here is any more or less popular in Finland than in, say, most other EU countries. I don’t have much contact with the age group that primarily consumes it, so it’s hard for me to say anything else than that it’s certainly a thing. I doubt it’s naturally blending in with media from other cultures that people have most exposure to (mainly US/British/Swedish in addition to our own) even amongst teenagers, but it’s getting there.
Question:Whatever happened to your podcast, The Epiloguists? Is there any chance that you guys will start it up again? And is there anywhere where I can download the old podcasts, since the site domain has expired? - Anonymous
Answer:
Died like many things like it do. Looking back, I feel the lack of a more focused mission made it difficult for us to figure out topics and actually create a discussion that could tease something salient out of them, especially in a way that’s fun to listen to. I mean, the four of us can get on skype anytime and chitchat about whatever we like, but I’m not sure whether we managed to do something that was super satisfying to people that are not us. I liked it, though.
There’s always a chance of revival, since I don’t think any of us disliked doing the cast. We’d just need some sort of motivational spark. As for the archive, Dan hosted the website so he should have them. Try sending him a buttcake as a bribe.
Question:What is your favorite Visual Novel, if you had to pick one and how does it compare to favorites in other genre/media. - Anonymous
Answer:
It’s Narcissu, the stage-nana classic from 2005. I like it a lot, but I can name dozens and dozens of novels and movies, even comics, plays etc that I think are better and like better. Still, it’s one of the very few visual novels that at least can stand its ground and and one of the only two I’ve read that I’d recommend without reservations to anyone (which I call the “mom test” because my mother is even more particular about her tastes in high-brow culture than I am)
Hanging out with delta is dangerous because it sometimes leads me to using my time in even more questionable ways than I normally do. TV anime’s state of abasement and our disinterest in watching anything middle-of-the-road has resulted to either of us watching only things that really surprise or leave an impression. This means something like the few actually great shows every year, shows that aren’t good but do something in an interesting way, and finally, some of the most disgusting, hackneyed disasters I’ve experienced in any medium ever. Or something like the three most important idol anime shows of the recent years.
It’s all Yamakan’s fault, really. Director and part time anime messiah Yutaka Yamamoto’s meteoric rise to stardom with Haruhi, fall from grace with Lucky Star and subsequent failure to ever make anything well received again is a well known piece of recent anime history. His modus operandi is to take a stock otaku genre, like light novel harem sludge with Haruhi, manga harem sludge with Kannagi or fantasy sludge with Fractale and inject it with some semi-realistic, down-to-earth warmth. Evidently, this doesn’t always work and it’s hard to say why, but somehow Yamakan’s projects always manage to squander his amazing talent and that of those working with him. So when he took upon himself to tackle the apex predator of otaku cultural food chain, idols, we were totally on board to see how he’d embarrass himself this time. Of course in our heart of hearts was tingling the tiny hope that maybe this time everything would fall into place and Yamakan actually would save the anime once and for all.
Of couse, Wake Up, Girls! was a trainwreck.
The eponymous Wake Up, Girls! are an up and coming idol team from the small city of Sendai, navigating around the pitfalls on the way of becoming top idols with the dual powers of doing their best and not giving up. Since the concept of WUG is ”Yamakan-flavoured idol show”, it flirts with a realistic portrayal of the idol business, especially the seedier aspects. It’s easily the realest out of the three shows here, but still ends up not having the courage to jam it all the way in. The cutthroat attitudes of show biz are taken to a comical extreme with the magnificently villainous rival idol group owner who frequently observes a militarily organized formation of dozens of robotically dancing idols from a pedestal, until announcing with a megaphone the discarding of the unworthy. The unknown idols-to-be have to sign up for jobs that consist mostly of getting humiliated while wearing embarrassing outfits, but this whole dehumanizing and objectifying culture is never really contextualized. Tensions within the group are mostly solved within the episode and the disastrous consequences and gloomy atmosphere looming over the heroines never amount to anything. Speaking of the heroines, they are mostly pretty low key in an attempt to avoid stock moe personalities that can be reduced to one word, but the creators forgot to actually give them much of a personality at all, which is a vital flaw in a story like this. That aside, the cast is likeable and while the story alternates schizophrenically between milquetoast and hamfisted, it at least tries to be a thing. Certainly, biting more than it can chew isn’t what sinks WUG, the biggest problem with it is how terrible it looks. The production must’ve been a catastrophe of cosmic proportions because the animation work is so incompetent that I literally can’t fathom how it can have happened. Sorry Yamakan, this wasn’t your year either.
WUG wasn’t really enough to make us interested about anime idols as such. I didn’t think it was good, but I liked watching it with delta and throwing spitballs at the shitshow that was both the anime itself and the idol circus it depicted. The step that really pushed us into a tailspin towards idol anime connoisseur-dom was appropriately degenerate. Delta made a Twitter bot that automatically posts maid themed anime art to spice up your boring Twitter timeline, but a problem arose when it turned out the ”highschool idol” franchise Love Live! makes up a decent percentage of danbooru’s maid-tagged selection. Upset that he had no idea about the context of all these delicious maids, delta asked me to find out with him, by watching the show.
My expectations going into Love Live weren’t exactly high, but amazingly, the show turned out to be quite nice.
In a world where amateur idol groups formed and staffed by highschoolers are somehow relevant to anything, nine girls decide to save their school from getting shut down by forming an idol team, winning a tournament of idols and having all their fans enroll into said school. The story is vapid but at least provides a solid overarching plotline for μ’s (pronounced as the word muse), a collection of really basic archetypes that somehow are actually quite precisely and well written. The cast manages to feel more than just the cynically calculated spread of moe attributes that it is, especially when the girls interact with each other. The show is enjoyable to watch just because of that. Not that there’s much else going on. Unlike the other two shows, LL isn’t about show business but acts more like a highschool sports anime where the sports club activities are mostly about singing electropop songs and shaking your assets around in ludicrous outfits. Hell, there’s even a tournament arc of sorts. On paper it’s a minus since it sheds the most interesting aspect of idols as a setting, but probably ends up being a net positive for the show, as it allows more focus on delivering cute girls doing their best, which is all Love Live wants to do anyway. LL is not profound or extraordinary, but it does its thing very effectively, and that alone can get a show pretty far.
Having watched two shows about one of the most repugnant aspects of otaku culture in such a short order, we spent an inordinate amount of time discussing what it means (and obviously, arguing about what are the best ships). For months, we flirted with the idea of getting to know the mothership of 2D idol franchises, Idolm@ster, to sort of close the circle. There’s probably some logical fallacy with a Latin name to describe this thought process, but eventually we did end up watching the 2011 adaptation, not the least because I said I’d write this post if we did.
It wasn’t a good idea. Idolm@ster is bad.
Im@s is an anime realization of the video game series of same name, where the player takes charge of an up and coming idol group and navigates the pitfalls on the way to producing top idols with the extraordinary power of positive reinforcement of emotionally dependent teenagers. Because Im@s doesn’t have to establish itself to the audience, it gets off to one of the worst starts I’ve seen in any anime by spending a full 10 episodes on atrocious, content-free episodes about characters it assumes (not unfairly) the audience already loves and doesn’t give a shit about what context they see them in, as long as it’s lovingly animated (and it is). Too bad this was nearly my first contact to the Idolm@ster girls and the first third of the show certainly failed endear them to me. I’ve rarely seen a cast this onedimensional. Each character has exactly one stock personality trait and exactly one thing they do, and when the early episodes aren’t meaningless filler stories, they consist mostly of a chain of scenes of Hibiki talking to animals, Haruka falling over herself, Takane eating and so on. Once the characters are thus introduced, the show becomes an idol show for real and starts throwing all kinds of monkey wrenches into the works. It works nicely for most of the remaining episodes, towards the end even showing really promising glimpses of what the show could’ve been it wasn’t Idolm@ster. The girls don’t really get much nuance or development, but when the baseline cast is made of unlikeable one-note characters with zero chemistry, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Idolm@ster is meant for people who already like Idolm@ster.
For a concrete display of how lame Im@s’ cast is, look no further than the lesbian porn section of pixiv or any sort of *booru. Despite Im@s having orders of magnitude more fanworks made of it than LL, it is so poor in character interplay that even the well-honed minds of people who draw gay anime porn all day struggle to extrapolate salacious material from the former while LL yuri doujins keep the lights on in half the printing presses in Tokyo. The reason for this, obviously, is that Im@s is a harem game/anime where the lynchpin of all character interaction is the male viewer proxy Producer-san (even when he’s offscreen!) whereas LL is forced to make the girls work off each other in absence of a harem lead. WUG can be disregarded in this comparison because nobody liked that show and there’s next to no fanart of it.
What sets idols shows apart from other moe delivery systems? None of this threesome really does much with the setting of (idol) show business. WUG makes a genuine attempt but lands short and Im@s spends most of its runtime on worthless filler, though it ends up kinda delivering in the end. Again, as LL isn’t about the biz at all, it gets a free ride out of having to deal with anything more real than Hanayo and Honoka having to diet to preserve their girlish figures. The thing with all of these shows is that they want to sell you the same idol fantasy that actual idols do, while also lifting the curtain to show what’s going on behind the scenes. These two goals don’t really go that well together. It’s hard to make an audience believe that any dream can come true if you try your best, when that dream is to become an exploited and objectified workhorse of entertainment industry. So you have to clean it up, after all this is not some exposé documentary and no one should expect so either. Sadly, it ends up with the shows just dancing around anything salient, mostly hitting good notes by accident. Many of the troubles faced by the idols are pretty softball, silly or otherwise have no impact, at most managing to get only a few steps above the God Empress of shows about fretting about nothing, Maria-sama ga Miteru. The problem with this kind of storytelling is that without anything bad ever actually happening, resolutions are less meaningful and catharsis is harder to come by. Marimite makes an art form out of solving this narrative conundrum, Love Live goes straight for the nuclear option of melodrama warfare by inserting a BIG DAMN emotional peak moment into almost every episode and both Im@s and WUG mostly fail to make me care at all about what’s happening on screen. When they do though, they deliver some of the best things seen in any of these shows.
Idols are the limit break of otaku culture: beings of pure objectification. They exist solely to create value through merchandizing and brand loyalty. Since the concept is to make the faces and bodies of cute girls the actual brands, having the idols be fictional is a perfect plan: it allows the polishing of every blemish, every kink, every shred of humanity off the product to maximize its desirability. When the fiction is spun around these characters, it runs into same conflict that makes real-life talent agency producers control their protégées so tightly: there are great stories somewhere in there, but they can’t be allowed to be told because that’d make the idols too human.
As a bonus, because shows of this kind are only as interesting as the characters in them and because the idol circus is all about finding your very own special favourite girl and cheering on her forever or at least until she retires and gets married (which fictional idols never will, that’s why they’re genius), here are the most memorable characters from each of the three shows:
Kaya
I like characters who aren’t just semisapient moe golems so the antithesis of moe, a cognizant and emotionally independent girl, is what often gets me going. You could ask me what the fuck I’m doing watching shows about idols then and I wouldn’t have a good answer, but in WUG this preference is best embodied by the responsible big sister of the group, Kaya. Granted, all the girls except one are likeable, somewhat balanced and grounded (it’s that Yamakan touch), but Kaya especially so. What really elevates her to the status of ”best” is her involvement in the regrettably best arc of the story where the crew travels to her hometown to find out what being an idol is really about: tenacity, hard work and inspiring hope for a better tomorrow, exactly the most positive qualities expressed by the people of Japan after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that within this story, ravaged Kaya’s home and killed her love interest. The show even invokes 9/11 later on for similar parallels, to the maximum terror of self-aware writers everywhere. But what’s important isn’t this dreadful hackery, it’s Kaya’s levelheaded approach to resolving issues within the idol group. In this case the problem is Nanami, who is actually so much more talented than anyone else in WUG that she thinks they’re holding her back. Of course because this is an idol anime, she ends up not leaving the group in a heartwarming moment of friendship and feelgood fuzziness.
Nozomi
A career schemer and troll, Nozomi enjoys putting on mysterious airs, pushing others’ buttons and ultimately being a puppetmaster of sorts. She manipulates the social fabric of the group by instigating pillow fights or revealing embarrassing secrets, all in an effort to strenghten the bonds of friendship between the girls. Nozomi does this to alleviate her own past loneliness and awkwardness, a backstory that supports the idol dream thematic, but in trade fails to provide her with a good character arc. Instead, like with most everyone in the show, what really makes Nozomi shine are her interactions with the rest of the cast. She acts as a good cop to Eri’s bad cop, a friend who won’t let the aloof Maki to isolate herself from the others, a much-needed reality check for the narcissistic Nico and more holistically, the levelheaded advisor of the group. Unfortunately Nozomi is also the frequent assailant in some casual girl-on-girl molestation fanservice that in the absence of a male character reminds us who Love Live is made for.
Miki
Miki is not likeable, but she stands out in a crowd full of onedimensional 2D girls. She’s annoying, vain and lazy, which her creators decided to balance out by making her be naturally amazing at everything. Miki is a Mary Sue, knows it, and isn’t afraid to take advantage of her plot superpowers or others’ infatuation with her. Since most of the time Miki acts like a shallow and thoughtless child, these tiny glimpses of self-awareness she has for contrast are her best side, even if they last only for a nanosecond. They extend to her issues too. The drama and problems with Miki are caused by her immature personality and selfishness, not some external plot nukes. She’s a bratty little shit, and when someone puts her foot down and doesn’t immediately give her what she wants, she’s forced to face it and actually grow up a little… for all of 30 seconds since no one in Im@s can be allowed to experience actual character development. Plus Miki still is a Mary Sue, so the show keeps pushing her down your throat until you’re nearly guaranteed to be sick of her guts. Still, even later on her flirting with the audience proxy male isn’t enough to completely sink Miki’s character, but I sure could’ve lived without it. Or even better, the show could’ve actually resolved the issue and have Producer-san take Miki aside and tell her it’s not okay. Now that would’ve made for a good story arc. But of course something like Idolm@ster wouldn’t even dream of doing that because then it couldn’t milk the same joke over and over anymore and what’s worse, it would alienate its audience by refusing to pander to their dream of being the object of a 14-year old pop idol’s affections.
Question:If Steam relaxes their stand on explicit content that would allow releasing Katawa Shoujo on Steam uncensored would you do it? With Steam Achievements of course! - Anonymous
Answer:
Why not. Anyone is free to distribute KS as long as it’s 1) unchanged and 2) for no money. Steam (or any distribution thingy) is no exception. If the process isn’t too bothersome we’d probably manage to summon the energy to do it.
Achievements sounds totally nonsensical for a visual novel though, but whatever, when in Rome…
