Author Archives: Abalieno

Final Fantast XIII-2 – Too big ideas

As it happened last year, this summer I’m trying to finish the follow-up, Final Fantasy XIII-2. This time the developers tried to address some of the many issues blamed on the first part but sadly the result isn’t very good.

From my point of view it’s the design approach to be wrong. The individual parts of the game are well done, but they lack coherence. In particular there’s a really big disconnect between the story being told and the actual gameplay and the result is a very ugly mishmash of parts. The developers tried to improve the individual parts, but this made even worse the lack of cohesiveness. Too quaint gameplay and storytelling.

There is a series of four videos (at the moment) that makes fun of this sort of disconnect (sometimes technically called Lugoscababib Discobiscuits) back at FFXIII part 1 even if sometimes it is a bit long in the tooth:
http://spoonyexperiment.com/2012/12/15/final-fantasy-xiii-part-1/
http://spoonyexperiment.com/2012/12/31/final-fantasy-xiii-part-2/
http://spoonyexperiment.com/2013/04/20/final-fantasy-xiii-review-part-3/
http://spoonyexperiment.com/2013/05/16/final-fantasy-xiii-review-part-4/

The premise of the game is actually very good. The previous game ended with a cataclysmic event, and this sequel is built on the “gimmick” of being able to jump between time portals so that the game can show you everything that happened afterward, leaping around in time and place and focusing on the pivotal scenes. Once again, for me the appeal of this game is about the mythology and the way it pushes its absurd ideas and utterly convoluted plot.

There are two ideas that aren’t directly part of the game but they are somewhat suggested by it, as if they didn’t want to push them all the way to eleven. I wonder what kind of game would have come out if they had embraced them:

1- The two protagonists of this game, Serah and Noel, jump between time portals and locations to fix some time paradoxes harrowing the timeline. When a paradox is solved it “disappears”, but there’s the interesting side-effect that sometimes people get stuck in these paradoxes, and when they realize that they don’t “belong” to that time and place, like ghosts, they also disappear. I’ve not finished the game, but I’m fairly sure this particular idea won’t be pushed to its potential. It made me think of Donnie Darko. The point is: what I just described should apply well even to the two protagonists. There’s a goddess, Ethro, that, as in the first game, “plucks out” certain people and forces them to accomplish a task. Serah and Noel mission is abut jumping through the timeline to heal this paradox that had a number of repercussions. It should be consequent, as in Donnie Darko, that when the paradox is ultimately solved also the agents-of-god would disappear with it. It describes heroic sacrifice, that is made even more bittersweet because from the external point of view of “reality” no one perceives the problem, neither the heroism that fixed it. These are heroes forgotten, that never existed. An unheard story of sacrifice. As the “witness!” idea Erikson uses. Which is also the purpose of “art”.

2- The other crazy-idea-that-is-not-there is about a possible link between this sequel and FFXIII that would have baffled the mind: what if the nonsensical plot of the first game was actually caused and manipulated by the events in the sequel? What if the fal’Cie gods are man-made and created by the same paradoxes that Serah and Noel actually triggered? As if in FFXIII-2 we are not seeing a “sequel”, but actually the origin story that will cause FFXIII, whose truth will be revealed at the end of the game. This is not in the game, since time travel only happens in the world post cataclysmic event, but it would have been interesting if this sequel would have embraced the whole breadth of the timeline, as a way to look at FFXIII convoluted plot, with reinterpretations and new shocking revelations. Those gods behind the plot of the first game, would become themselves the time paradox. Like in LOST the paradox about the compass. The objects loses its origin point, becomes recursively self-contained. Richard gives the compass to Locke, telling him to give it back to him when he’ll see him again. Locke gives Richard the compass in the future, then Richard goes back in time and gives Locke the compass. Where is the compass coming from? The origin is lost. Similarly, FFXIII plot may be nonsensical because of a privation. Some missing piece that was erased because of a paradox, and now can’t be retrieved. It’s like a story that lost one half and is caught in a horrible, unsolvable lack of certainty.

All this is interesting because of how one idea mirrors the other, if you think about it. Look at patterns. In the first idea the “real” world loses the story. The paradox itself is excised so that everything “makes sense” linearly. The trace of that paradox is also erased. No one will ever know that story. Instead in the second idea the opposite happens, it’s the story that makes sense that is excised by the paradox, and what is left is a timeline that can’t be explained, because the essential part is lost, not accessible. Like a book missing the most important chapter. So the two patterns fold together into one.

Weavewor(l)d

I got today a really nice copy of “Weaveworld” by Clive Barker. I was a fan as a kid, when I read Cabal and then proceeded to read most of the Books of Blood. Then I entered a new phase and left the “horror” genre behind. Now I’m back with my interest focused on the more “fantastic” side, Weaveworld and Imajica.

Nice copy, I said, with textured cover and seventeen black & white illustrations by the author inside. The book opens with a powerful quote:

…the spirit has its
homeland, which is the
realm of the meaning
of things.

-Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands

That’s tied always to the same theme. The dichotomy. “This” side we have language, meaning, symbols, gods and mythologies. The spirit is the realm of human beings, separate from nature. The “fantasy” genre has the power to paint it more vividly. Meaning-full.

The book also contains a very interesting introduction by Clive Barker. It has a number of parallels with Steven Erikson. I’ll quote the latter part:

It isn’t necessary for a storyteller to have answers to the questions they pose, of course; only to be interested enough to ask them. Weaveworld is full of unrequited enquiries. Why does Immacolata’s hatred of the Seerkind burn so intensely? Is the creature in the Empty Quarter an angel or not? And if the garden of sand in which it has kept its psychotic vigil is not the Eden of Genesis, then where did the Seerkind arise from? There are certainly answers to these mysteries to be wrought and written, but they would, I am certain, only beg further questions, which if answered would beg yet more. For all its length and elaboration, the novel does not attempt to fill in every gap in its invented history. Nothing ever begins, its first line announces; there are innumerable stories from which this fragment of narrative springs; and there will be plenty to tell when it’s done. Though I get requests aplenty for a sequel, I will never write one.

The tale isn’t finished; but I’ve told all I can. That is not to say my attitude to the work does not continue to change. In the past ten years I’ve gone through, periods when I was thoroughly out of sorts with the book, or even on occasion irritated that it found such favour with readers when other stories seemed more worthy. And in the troughs of my discomfort, I made what with hindsight seems to be dubious judgments about fantastic fiction as a whole. I have been, I think, altogether disparaging about the escape elements of the genre, emphasizing its powers to address social, moral and even philosophical issues at the expense of celebrating its dreamier virtues. I took this position out of a genuine desire to defend a fictional form I love, from accusations of triviality and triteness, but my zeal led me astray. Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation. Though of late my writing has concerned itself more and more with detailing that wounded, disappointing reality, as a reader I have rediscovered the pleasures, of unrepentant escapism: the short fiction of Lord Dunsany, early Yeats poems, the paintings of Samuel Palmer and Ernst Fuchs.

The author who wrote Weaveworld has, however, disappeared. I’ve not lost faith with the enchantments of fantasy, but there is a kind of easy sweetness in this book that would not, at least presently, come readily from my pen. We go through seasons perhaps; and Weaveworld was written in a balmier time. Perhaps there’ll be another. But its tender inventions seem very remote from the man writing these words.

—

Nothing ever begins.

There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that: though as the narrator’s voice recedes the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.

Nothing is fixed. In and out the, shuttle goes, fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.

Ah! That last line.

A Dream of Wessex – Christopher Priest

If you want a mindscrew here’s one, even though it probably goes against the criteria listed there and is good because of it. For once it breaks my habit of 800+ pages big volumes, A Dream of Wessex is a perfect 200 pages containing a well paced and well calibrated story with a definite conclusion. It doesn’t need one page more or less. More importantly, it is a significant milestone in the pattern I’m following, the fil rouge of this blog and post-modern spin (a pretense I put there and that is not in the book). As one could guess from the cover, it’s also not exactly a new release, though it is connected with new releases. It came out in 1977, thirty-six years ago, but with the time, even as a science fiction story, it acquired significance. It’s far more actual now than how it probably was at the time, and none of the ingenuity of old stories that try to imagine a future.

I could say it’s one of those “perfect” stories. I can hardly find a flaw in it. The writing is superb because of how it does a service to the story. Sometimes with sci-fi plots you have to fight the suspension of disbelief, as you have to try to make the reader accept the “gimmick” (I won’t use gimmick negatively here, I just mean sci-fi stories built around a specific “invention”). A Dream of Wessex is a story of the future, it has fancy technology, but the way it’s structured makes it all completely realistic and even conventional. The power of subversion and mindscrew need no fireworks, they hide behind everyday life. Christopher Priest, maybe the same as Philip K. Dick, writes in his own genre that he calls “slipstream”:

Slipstream does not define a category, but suggests an approach, an attitude, an interest or obsession with thinking the unthinkable or doing the undoable. Slipstream can be visionary, unreliable, odd or metaphysical. It’s not magical realism: it’s a larger concept that contains magical realism.

I’d add to this definition the “feeling” of slipstream, a sense of displacement from reality. As if you suddenly step through some invisible threshold and everything around you appears looking just the same, but wrong.

“Have you seen Tom?”
“Tom? Tom who?”
“Benedict. Tom Benedict.”
“Never heard of him.”
No one knew him. Later she found Allen, spoke to him.
“Did you treat Tom today?”
“I’ve been in Dorchester, Julia. Is he still ill? Who is it?”
“Tom…”
Then she found that she couldn’t remember his surname. She ate a meal with a group of the others, trying to think of it… But by the time the meal was finished she could not even remember his first name.
She felt a sense of great loss, and an overwhelming sadness, and a sure knowledge that someone she had loved was no longer there.

The power of A Dream of Wessex is not about “making you believe” in the plausibility of the gimmick. It’s not an Asimov novel (I’ll return to this). The power is to have the subversive layer of the story seep in your real non-fictional life. Like a virus, invisible before you feel its effects. It eats away your sense of reality and sends you to a sense of vertigo, as if suddenly your real self sitting on a chair and reading the book isn’t anymore as tightly bound to a concrete sense of reality. This book has a staggering power of abstraction. It’s not based on a neat, fun idea, but it feeds on some truth at the core, only disguised as “fiction”. And so it traps you through the fictional pretense and drags you on that other side.

It was odd how memory seemed to detach itself from experience; already, the sight of Julia’s boat heading out across the black, multi-coloured water seemed distant from himself. It was as if there were a false experience in memory, one given to him. It seemed that he had been walking alone through the boulevard all evening and into the night, with entirely spurious memories appearing in sequences to supply the false experience.
Memory was created by events surely?

At the bottom of it there’s no horror, but a sense of silent dread just hanging there. It plays subtly with perception, as if what you’re watching has its perspective slightly askew. A strangeness in the familiar. The plot is fairly straightforward and not too convoluted. Some fancy technology development allowed to build a virtual reality machine. It works like a participatory universe, where a number of minds are pooled together and “project” a universe. In the book this experiment has a scientific goal at its back: the imagined reality is set 150 years in the future and so it’s meant as a research on how the extrapolated future might be.

In the early days the reports the participants had made had reflected the spirit of the projection: that they were discovering a society, and speculating about the way it was run. As time passed, though, and as the participants became more deeply embedded in that society, their reports had gradually became more factual in tone, relating the future society to itself rather than to the present. Expressed in a different way, it meant that the participants were treating the projection as a real world, rather than one which was a conscious extrapolation from their own.

But there are no flying cars or A.I.s taking over the world. This imagined future is a social research and the premise is a technological stagnation that made the future not unlike the present. It turns out like a holiday resort with a hippie community living into an old castle. Being participative, this universe needs to extrapolate a coherent whole from all the minds projecting it, using the interesting property of memory (not explicitly stated in the book, but described as exactly this) of spontaneously smoothing whatever problem or inconsistency may come up. The unconscious mind spontaneously discards the parts that it can’t make sense of, unknowingly rearranging them to find coherence. Hammering down pieces that wouldn’t fit. Reality, past and present, is not static. It shifts subtly, or even more dramatically. Leaving only a fleeting impression that something is missing.

All this played out against the characters’ layer. We got here a “strong” female protagonist, really well written in my opinion. This is where the story always return and always gives a priority. Maybe I could nitpick that this woman still seems to draw her worth and strength in the way she’s able to oppose a male guy, and so she’s a female protagonist that still draws her strength from having a guy next to her, instead of just herself, as if that male figure remains indispensable. But this isn’t a problem in the book and it depends too much on a modern “bias” in the way we pretend stories should be told. Characterization here, outside of prejudices, is really solid.

I could say this book isn’t relevant for “what it says” but for “what it does”. It wouldn’t be correct, though, and that’s why it’s even better than I thought. This force that the book has and that I’ve described, does not bog the story down. Here I return to Asimov. He can write some great stories but sometimes the characters suffer. It happens often that in SF stories the characters are created to be in service of the idea at the core of the book. They are built to fit the story and to make the most out of that idea. So one could say that the characters are added to be in service to the rest. Objects more than subjects. Functions of plot. What instead Christopher Priest achieves here is that the characters remain at the apex regardless of the power of the story. When it’s all over and the power of the idea at the core already discharged, it’s the characters who remain and give a perfect (satisfying) closure. Even seen as a whole, that core idea still remains one step below of the significance of the characters, without overshadowing them. This priority is very strongly defined, and yet it doesn’t weaken the power of the idea itself.

If it was Philip K. Dick writing this he’d have probably sent the story spinning wildly out of control toward the end, in an explosion of blurred possibilities staggering the mind. Completely open to ambiguity and open interpretation. Instead Priest does the opposite. Just after the biggest charge is set off, it starts turning counterclockwise for the last 20 pages. The reader can run with the idea and give it more spin, but the book itself defines, and strongly, its “canon”. Most of the book was carefully “seeded” with small elements that Priest would then activate at the end of the book so that the many possibilities that suddenly opened would be instead suppressed. Instead of the open ended finale, for most readers annoyingly unsatisfying, this story clearly defines its official interpretation. It tries to make it as explicit as possible by expressing and then clearly negating doubts that the reader would voice. There may be a minor flaw in this, if one considers that the powerful climax comes too soon and that the last 20 pages instead only do the busywork of putting the pieces back together in a way that makes sense, but the result is that the book doesn’t lose the power of the idea while giving a definite conclusion that one doesn’t often get in these types of stories. No hanging questions left at the end, beside the haunting “slipstream” feel that stays with you a little longer.

There’s only a little door open toward the end. It reminds me the problem of “infinite regression”, or even Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the turtle. Whether you want or not, stories that deal with virtual realities ultimately fall into these cases of recursion. Turtles all the way down. What happens if while in the virtual reality you lose the link with the “true” reality. Can you lose the way back? And how do you recognize a true reality if you don’t have anymore a context where you can properly recognize the point you’re at? It’s like Wile E. Coyote using a ladder to go up, then pulling up the ladder to use it again and keep going up, even if the ladder doesn’t stand anymore on the ground. It happens in your everyday dreams. You know, viscerally, you were dreaming the moment you wake up. Like a hierarchy of dreams, you can only know with certainty you had a dream when you exit it. When you have a context to compare it to. But how can you be sure that the stage you are at, right now, awake, is the “real”, final one? Perception is one-directional, as if you are looking through a window that is transparent if you look from one side, and opaque from the other.

This is the first book by Christopher Priest I read, but not the last. Not simply because I enjoyed this one so much, but because from the start I had a plan. What I’m interested about is specifically his more ambitious and puzzling meta-verse. Some grander vision that ties together some of his most interesting works. It starts with The Affirmation and then continues with the more recent The Dream Archipelago (short story collection), The Islanders and The Adjacent, all of which got enthusiastic reviews:

This is a superb novel, written by an artist at not only the height but also the breadth of his powers.

So A Dream of Wessex fulfilled exactly what I expected it to be. An appetizer for all the good, mind-bending things to come. A teaser of one of the most genial writers out there, who still enjoys thinking the unthinkable.

The Otaku Tower

You thought the Malazan or Wheel of Time books all piled up are an impressive sight. Now look at this Epic Stack:

Edit: This picture is outdated. Look below for updated numbers and a good estimate in english wordcount. The Otaku Tower just grew some more. You can easily double what you see in this picture since it misses 12 more big volumes, 15 small ones of the City series, plus an handful of minor ones.

While not “technically” one series, it’s still a story in the same setting written by one guy (actually it’s a ‘she’, I think), and what you see is not even close to being done since the upper half is, accordingly to its writer, just 1/4 of the planned whole. The first half, from the bottom up and including the first bigger volume, is the first completed “series”, a sort of prequel, then from that point all the way up it’s a new ongoing one.

These being Japanese “Light Novels”. Or what you could (vaguely) consider as the Japanese version of “Young Adult”. Most of anime these days are either based on light novels or visual novels (these, too, of fairly epic length, since we’re talking about reading on screen for 50+ hours, with fancy music in the background and most of them also with fully voiced dialogue).

Usually they are dialogue-rich (terse on prose) and tell exactly the kind of stories you’d find in anime. School life mixed with fantasy stuff and so on, but also hybridizing with all kinds of genres. Being very long series with many volumes is the norm, though it’s rarer that the volumes are as big as some of those in the picture and you could expect the standard being around 50-60k words. Lots of these are also quite decent, or at least fun to read. And many are also available in English, one way or another (though it’s only a tiny amount of the total Japanese market).

One way for example is the Haruhi Suzumiya series, which is one of the most popular. The series is currently at 11 volumes in Japan and it will be complete even in English within this year. These are from “Little, Brown Books” and rather cheap even in the hardcover version (about $13 each). But in this case these are smaller “novels” of about 200 pages. Or ranging from 40-90k words. Basically the size of Neil Gaiman last “novel”.

The other way instead is thanks to fan translations: http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=Main_Page

For example all 30 volumes (edit: we’re at 40 now) of very popular “Toaru Majutsu no Index” are fully translated, available for free in a number of formats. Other stuff like the series written by NisiOisiN has instead more “literary” ambitions and harder to translate, especially because of excess of wordplay.

Edit: his most celebrated series, “Monogatari” is now being officially translated. Kizumonogatari was the first in English even if in Japan it came after Bakemonogatari. Bakemonogatari itself instead was split in two volumes in Japan, and three in the US.

01 Kizumonogatari December 2016
02 Bakemonogatari Part 1 December 2016
03 Bakemonogatari Part 2 February 2017
04 Bakemonogatari Part 3 April 2017
05 Nisemonogatari Part 1 June 2017
06 Nisemonogatari Part 2 August 2017
07 Nekomonogatari Black December 2017 -> LE Box set
08 Nekomonogatari White January 2018
09 Kabukimonogatari April 2018
10 Hanamonogatari June 2018
11 Otorimonogatari August 2018
12 Onimonogatari October 2018
13 Koimonogatari January 2019
14 Tsukimonogatari March 2019

At that current planned point we’ll be at 14 of 28 novels out in Japan, with more planned it seems. The catch-up will take some time.

Disclaimer:

NISIOISIN’s writing is pretty complex; the dialogue he uses contains a lot of Japanese wordplay (such as puns on different readings of kanji, that simply cannot be translated to English), layers of Japanese cultural references (anime, manga, TV shows, folklore, etc), and very little third-person narration to indicate who is speaking when, often leaving the reader to infer which characters are talking during long dialogues.

Bakemonogatari is also being adapted to anime by the best anime studio around, SHAFT, and putting together normal anime episodes to the actual movies, you are looking at something around 30 hours long total, or around 100 episodes total, since every episode is 20 minutes on average. (Kizumonogatari, the actual first novel to come out in the west is being adapted to anime last, as three movies, each part about 1 hour long, so three anime episodes bundled together)

Another nice schema on Monogatari complex structure, for both light novels and anime.

The bottom line is that while it’s all stuff targeted to a specific public, it also has a kind of fresh and insane creativity that you probably can’t find in any other medium. Though you’d probably have better luck going through the Visual Novel side, like Fate/Stay Night (expect about 60 hours of your time), or Ever17 (closer to 30) and Umineko (close to 80 hours, and beware the Steam version, it needs fan patches to add the full Japanese dialogue voices).

About the Epic Stack above, here’s a page attempting an introduction to the world, even if I think it’s more from the anime side, at least it gives an idea of the kind of crazy to expect: http://randomc.net/2012/06/30/kyoukai-senjou-no-horizon-retrospective-part-1-the-premise-the-world-episodes-01-06/

This is the cover of one of the last volumes, which I won’t comment:
https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=File:Horizon3C_cover.jpg

And this is another slightly more proportioned…:
https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=File:Horizon4A_cover.jpg

If you instead are ready to begin reading it, you can start from that tiny volume at the very bottom of that huge stack, right here:
http://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=Owari_no_Chronicle:Volume1

—
UPDATE: I’ll keep this updated section with new stats about this project.

There have been three different main series part of the same universe/project, that is actually structured into six phases. The phases in their internal chronological order are: FORTH – AHEAD (Owari) – EDGE – GENESIS (Horizon) – OBSTACLE (Hexennacht) – CITY. In the image you can see the first series to come out at the bottom (but City phase, so the last), Owari in the middle (but the first in the internal order) and Horizon in the top line (the last being written, but the middle one in internal chronology), but the image there obviously only shows the first 11 volumes of Horizon, and we’re now up to 29. And in the last year, ongoing along Horizon there’s also the new Obstacle series, that seems to shift tone toward a “magical girl” type of story.

This is the output in release order:

– “City” series (1996-2002) 15 volumes
– “Chronicle of the End” (Owari) series (2003-2005) 14 volumes
– “Horizon on the Middle of Nowhere” series (2008-2018) 29 volumes
– “Forth” (Rapid-fire King) series (2013) 2 volumes
– “Clash of Hexennacht” series (2015-2017) 4 volumes

Another image. On the right there are again the 15 volumes of the City series (top to bottom, in order), the highest pile is again the first 13 volumes of the main Horizon series (the lighting symbol), with 8 smaller volumes on top that represent the “Kimitoasamade” side stories. Then the 14 volumes of the complete Owari, and finally on the left the two volumes that up to this point represent the entire “FORTH” part of the story, released in 2013. So this image represents the full cycle minus the four Hexennacht volumes and 13 of the latest Horizon. and it’s also put in chronological order: Forth (2 vol) -> Ahead (14 vol) -> Genesis (13+16 missing vol) -> (Obstacle, 4 missing vol) -> City (15 vol)

Here instead you can see all the released Horizon series, all 23 volume of it. The front row is what is available in English fan translation.

These are some stats about wordcount. I’m using the English fan translation (e), for the rest of the Horizon series I’m using estimations based on averages and the number of pages (not accurate but pretty close). It’s likely that the whole thing up to this point is around 5.5 million words total.

City Series (English only)
1) Panzerpolis 1935 | 43k
2) Aerial City | 47k
3) Tune Bust City Hong Kong A | 50k
4) Tune Bust City Hong Kong B | 49k
5) Noise City Osaka A | 58k
6) Noise City Osaka B | 65k
7) Closed City Paris A | 80k
8) Closed City Paris B | 76k
9) Panzerpolis Berlin 1937 | 57k
10) Panzerpolis Berlin 1939 | 59k
11) Panzerpolis Berlin 1942 | 58k
12) Panzerpolis Berlin 1943 | 58k
13) Panzerpolis Berlin 1943 Erste-Ende | 65k

Current total: 765k

Owari no Chronicle (Completed in English)
1) 1A 78k 386(pages) (10 June 2003)
2) 1B 88k 450
3) 2A 67k 386
4) 2B 83k 482
5) 3A 71k
6) 3B 67k
7) 3C 88k
8) 4A 94k
9) 4B 96k
10) 5A 93k
11) 5B 101k
12) 6A 102k
13) 6B 104k
14) 7 165k (10 December 2005)

Total Owari: 1M 297k (e)

Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon (now using x164 for estimation)
1) 1A 116k (e) 543 pages (September 10, 2008)
2) 1B 148k (e) 771 pages
3) 2A 178k (e) 905 pages
4) 2B 220k (e) 1153 pages
5) 3A 136k (e) 737 pages
6) 3B 150k (e) 833 pages
7) 3C 158k (e) 897 pages
8) 4A 112k (e) 673 pages
9) 4B 135k (e) 737 pages
10) 4C 177k (e) 993 pages -17
11) 5A 118k (e) 712 pages -21
12) 5B 162k (e) 1000 pages -34
13) 6A 115k (e) 712 pages -24
14) 6B 116k (e) 840 pages -48
15) 6C 175k (e) 1064 pages -33
16) 7A 137k (e) 808 pages -21
17) 7B 141k (e) 824 pages -20
18) 7C 175k (e) 1016 pages -24
19) 8A 118k (e) 744 pages (February 10, 2015) -27
20) 8B 135k (e) 824 pages -26
21) 8C 172k (e) 1000 pages (June 10, 2015) -24
22) 9A 140k (e) 808 pages (April 10, 2016) -18
23) 9B 196k 1000 pages (June 10, 2016)
24) 10A 130k 792 pages (October 7, 2017)
25) 10B 151k 920 pages (December 12, 2017)
26) 10C 174k 1064 pages (March 10, 2018)
27) 11A 145k 888 pages (July 10, 2018)
28) 11B 158k 968 pages (September 7, 2018)
29) 11C 190k 1160 pages (December 7, 2018)

Total Horizon: 4M 378k

Clash of Hexennacht

1) 59k (e)
2) 60k (e)
3) 64k (e) (10 September 2016)
4) 69k (e) (8 April 2017)

Total Hexennacht: 252k

—
This was originally posted on Westeros forums. The interesting thing is that it spawned a discussion that turned down into racism and dismissing the whole genre of Light Novel as rubbish. Which is interesting because, once you take out the specifics, it’s the exact pattern you can see with “genre” versus “literature”. That’s the kind of effect I expected to trigger, and it did. Sadly a mod didn’t like it and wiped the whole thread. You can’t have subtle discussions on the internet, or even address that kind of racism. This is stupid. We HAVE TO talk about sensitive matters. Not simply ignore them like dust under a carpet. It’s EXTREMELY important to underline how prejudices we get toward “genre” are the exact prejudices that (many) “genre” readers have toward other stuff.

WE ARE NO DIFFERENT. We are no better. We just exchange one set of prejudices for another. We just belong to a different tribe, not a better one.

Anyway, this was my conciliatory post where I was tying back it all to the discussion of “genre” Vs “literature”:

—
Out of prejudices and expected canons, there’s surely a kind of dangerous line.

Most of these products are indeed filled with tropes, and they are targeted to very specific “genres”. There are hundreds of technical terms defining every possible variation, classifications of plots and characters. The “taxonomy” of these Japanese products would be alone an extremely fascinating topic to analyze. It’s like a whole sub-culture.

That said, you also can’t find anywhere else a similar amount of creativity and mixing of elements. There’s absolutely NO medium I know in western culture that comes close to the broad range you can find in anime (and by extension mangas, VNs, LNs). So that’s the dangerous line. It’s all filled to the brim with tropes and the rich taxonomy, but it also contains so many different elements that it surpasses every other medium.

So if you measure it all by quantity over quality, sure, it’s an ocean that is very hard to navigate. But it still has that fresh, wild creativity that makes it a very powerful medium. Targeting with very little prejudices, constrictions or filters the largest audience possible.

I was coming from one of the latest post on Bakker’s blog where he goes again with the debate about “genre” Vs “literature”: http://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/russell-smith-shrugged/

The bottom line is that genre readers have the tendency to be more eclectic with their reads, and coming from all sort of backgrounds (whereas “literature” secluded itself into predictability, rehash and complacency, getting dusty in their tightly compartmentalized world).

I simply generalized: a medium that closes itself (from the general public, also) becomes stale and can’t say anymore something relevant. It just rises its walls of canon and dies there. And that’s why I see the Japanese “young” market as extremely interesting. Its diversity is unrivaled if you pay attention at the whole range, and all its elements boil together in a huge pot, and so it all gets constantly mixed. A very good and innovative product can have a huge influence and produces an endless list of clones for many years, but the market is always ready for something that sets new trends again.

I’m just being coherent because I see how prejudices against “genre” aren’t that different from prejudices (or even simple difficulties at “getting” these strange products) thrown toward the eastern market of anime/manga/light novels/visual novels.

I personally come with no prejudices and do my best trying to “get” different things and markets. If I fail I blame myself, more than calling “shit” something I’m not getting. It doesn’t mean the stuff I linked here is “quality” and deserves your attention. At all. Most of everything is always mediocre regardless of what you’re looking at, and this is still a very commercial genre with an extremely broad (low? young? unpretentious? uneducated?) target, conceived for entertainment.

While the specific series in the image above looks at least like an interesting “mess”, I haven’t personally read it. So I can’t comment on its merits or lack thereof (though it looks dealing more with fancy battles than fancy boobs, as the covers would make you believe). I’m just pointing at an interesting medium because of how it’s built and how broad its public is.

The great postmodern uncertainty

On the bylines I’m 60 pages into “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity” by dear David Foster Wallace. I mentioned the page I’m at because this is a math book, but at least I can say I made so far without major blocks.

In fact this book is excellent. It’s filled to the brim, line by line, with ideas you can spin in every way. It’s deeply connected with everything I write about in this blog and that’s why it should be read. It’s not a book for who is interested about math, it’s a book for who is interested about asking radical questions on pretty much everything. For example it’s interesting the whole deal with the D.B.P. (abbreviation that DFW uses for “Divine Brotherhood of Pythagoras”). They deal with math as with a religion and their “discoveries” (or creations) become the foundation of what we are today. And then the V.I.R. (Vicious Infinite Regress), that recursive hell of infinite regression/mise en abyme. I’m reading the book while thinking about a different context, the stuff I’ve written about recently, and in many cases I was anticipating what DFW would write next. Circling again and again around similar patterns.

To apeiron, the primordial Void, the genesis of the world. This is a book about the mythology of math, and it is exciting to read. Often mindblowing. DFW selective gaze gives you what exactly matters, what makes your life different. It makes the mind race.

Maybe I’ll go quote intensive at some point. Right now I only want to copy over one I pasted over to Bakker’s blog because it repeats what was defined as “the widening gap between knowledge and experience”, and DFW describes this well:

Obvious fact: Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. ‘Us’ meaning laymen. It’s like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time. As in for instance we ‘know,’ as high-school graduates and readers of Newsweek, that time is relative, that quantum particles can be both there and not, that space is curved, that colors do not inhere in objects themselves, that astronomic singularities have infinite density, that our love for our children is evolutionarily preprogrammed, that there is a blind spot in our vision that our brains automatically fill in. That our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pâté. That we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, and hydrogen is flammable, and yet we are not flammable. We ‘know’ a near-infinity of truths that contradict our immediate commonsense experience of the world. And yet we have to live and function in the world. So we abstract, compartmentalize: there’s stuff we know and stuff we ‘know’. I ‘know’ my love for my child is a function of natural selection, but I know I love him, and I feel and act on what I know. Viewed objectively, the whole thing is deeply schizoid; yet the fact of the matter is that as subjective laymen we don’t often feel the conflict. Because of course our lives are 99.9% concretely operational, and we operate concretely on what we know, not on what we ‘know’.

Small addendum:
to apeiron is also the computational limit. This is linked to the idea of determinism and closed system. Here DFW talks of the relationship with god, as if math is the language of god, but it is interesting to think about this in systemic terms. There’s also this piece from Bakker and the speculation of math as the shadow projected by an unknown kernel.

And this:

The point being that the D.B.P.’s attempts to articulate the connections between mathematical reality and the physical world were part of the larger project of pre-Socratic philosophy, which was basically to give a rational, nonmythopoetic account of what was real and where it came from. Maybe even more important than the D.B.P., infinity-wise, is the protomystic Parmenides of Elea (c.515-? BCE), not only because his distinction between the “Way of Truth” and “Way of Seeming” framed the terms of Greek metaphysics and (again) influenced Plato, but because Parmenides’ #1 student and defender was the aforementioned Zeno, the most fiendishly clever and upsetting Greek philosopher ever (who can be seen actually kicking Socrates’ ass, argumentatively speaking, in Plato’s Parmenides).

Interesting on one side because that dichotomy is one I mentioned recently. And, more in general, because if we see math as the foundation of science, then it means we’re basically observing how the myth of reality, as we know it, came to be. The mythopoetic origin of science. The disguised gods we all worship in modern times.

DFW declares the ultimate “hope”:

Most of math’s definitions are built up out of other definitions; it’s the really root stuff that has to be defined from scratch. Hopefully, and for reasons that have already been discussed, that scratch will have something to do with the world we all really live in.

But in that interview he gave after the book was published he said:

Infinity was the great albatross for math. Really ever since calculus. Infinitesimals were horseshit, and everybody knew they were horseshit. But the limits thing used natural language stuff like ‘approaches,’ which math isn’t supposed to do. So it’s this great shell game. Weierstrass, Dedekind and Cantor close all those holes, and it’s beautiful, and at the same time they open what turns out to be a much worse one, and that’s Godel. . . .

After Godel, the idea that mathematics was not just a language of god but a language we could decode to understand the universe and understand everything, I mean, that doesn’t work any more. It’s part of the great postmodern uncertainty that we live in. Very few people know about it.

To me, that’s the fil rouge (main theme, common thread, guiding light) connecting everything. Godel paradox is fundamental in Bakker’s studies and theories about the brain, as it is for science and the way we conceive the universe. It’s the fundamental postmodern crisis we live in today. And it’s in the writer/creation relationship. Simulated worlds. The dreams and illusory worlds that you enter the moment you start sleeping and that the brain feeds you, barriers you can’t cross. All this is about the fundamental dualism, and Vicious Infinite Regress, due to the self-reliance and reflexivity, or “strange loops”. Explain one, and you’ve explained Everything.

to apeiron, is again the Greek term that defines the seed of chaos. Uncertainty. Uncertainty that encapsulates the world we live in today that was born from the seed planted by our Greek ancestors.

Anaximander (610-545 BCE), the first of the pre-Socratics to use the term in his metaphysics, basically defines it as “the unlimited substratum from which the world derived”.

Bremermann’s limit.

DFW again:

Note, please, that this lay ability to split our awareness and to ‘know’ things we cannot handle is distinctively modern. The ancient Greeks, for example, could not do it. Or wouldn’t.

The cartoon of religion

As many others, I also had a few exceptional teachers. One of them used to say that religions are “cartoons”. Yet often they can offer very good ideas. Not intrinsically bad. The real problem is that in modern times religions often offer models that are too juvenile and that can be replaced by better ideas. So if we get better models, why not?

I’ve mentioned Kabbalah a number of times, as well as my neutral stance toward it. I keep having an interest in it because it can offer many useful (and even “powerful”, with explanation powers) ideas. More often than not at least.

In the previous post I was underlining an universal pattern that applies to the general debate of literature, but not only. Openness is generally a good thing, positive for life in general.

Today I stumbled on a video about Kabbalah that explains this ideas of openness from their point of view. The basic (and maybe simplistic) thesis is that “Nature only knows how to progress through suffering”, but we can also choose to willingly go toward our destination, and so achieve that goal minimizing the suffering. Along with the maybe less directly believable idea that when you bring change to your personal life then this small change will also create a huge ripple through the whole world (a sort of inverse of “as below, so above”). In their view Kabbalah is the willing path that leads to evolution, minus the suffering.

It’s interesting what they say about the idea of “Jews”. You can take it literally or metaphorically. Metaphorically everyone is a “Jew” as long you share that Kabbalistic message and spread it. The “race” is only what you see if you look at the finger instead of the moon. But literally the idea is that Jews were “meant” to spread around the world, through a forced diaspora, so that they would then give the example of this connectedness and openness, so that the whole world would understand and willingly adopt it.

Since I come without prejudices, I believe that the core concept of Kabbalah, this idea of openness and connectedness, is a positive one. Not just in literature, but in all things.

So here’s the video where some of these ideas are explained in layman terms:
http://www.kabbalahblog.info/2013/07/how-to-develop-integral-thinking-jtimes-with-kabbalist-dr-michael-laitman/

P.S.
I should also point out that in all these lessons they put out, the specific aspect of “jewish mysticism” is almost completely absent. Mysticism means conscious experience of the spiritual realm, meaning that you access that type of dimension RIGHT NOW, in this physical life, instead of in some future spiritual incarnation. This idea is still present in modern Kabbalah, but certainly it’s not where they put the emphasis.

Genre Vs Literature

This is another of the old and recurring debates that was brought up again by R. Scott Bakker. I’m linking to it because I think there are patterns that go beyond the specific discussion, and have some universal validity.

What caught my attention this time was a little subversion applied by Bakker. Turning this:

There is a paradox at the heart of these complaints: They proclaim the artificiality of genre divisions while simultaneously demanding respect for a specific one. Are we to abolish genres or privilege one? Either you want a level playing field or you don’t.

Into this:

There is a paradox at the heart of these complaints: They proclaim the artificiality of racial divisions while simultaneously demanding respect for a specific one. Are we to abolish races or privilege one? Either you want a level playing field or you don’t.

This is more than a little revelatory because it’s what brings up that pattern that I think goes beyond the “Literature” vs “genre” debate.

In general I agree with Bakker’s position. Literature, with the capital “L”, is just another genre. It has its own canons and it is written for a specific audience. What makes it different is the claim of predominant position. Literature is at the top, the apex of writing as an “art”.

But concretely it repeats some simple tribal patterns. In order to distinguish itself from everything else, literature needs strict canons. Rules. Lines drawn on the ground. Boundaries. It needs to draw its limit so that it can find an identity and protect itself from infiltrations and bastardizations. Literature needs to put itself in the lofty position because the high ground is defensible.

What is interesting is that turning it metaphorically into a racial issue isn’t simply a way to make it more extreme, but to expose the basic pattern. Racists have similar tribal concerns. They fear infiltrations and hybrids. In order to keep their race as pure as possible they need closed confines, they need those barriers. The idea of identity needs to defend what’s on this arbitrary side from everything that is outside. In the end the goal is to keep everything as it is.

Hence Bakker’s accusation to highbrow Literature is consequential: it’s unable to say something relevant. It’s a dead voice. The more it needed to preserve its own identity, the more it drew around itself a Great Wall. Closer, narrower. It became the repetition of a very strict codified canon, and in that repetition art died. To preserve its purity Literature drew around itself a limit, and within that limit it withered. The same old people saying the same old things, drifting into complacence.

In general, art that becomes fossilized is dead art (that’s also why originality is celebrated in art). Art that doesn’t feed on something alive, dies. The Muse is strangled. The dichotomy brings out the universal pattern. A closed system doesn’t stay alive for long, it becomes just an echo. Stale repetition.

On the other side “genre” readers don’t have any blinders. Bakker says genre readers are the most eclectic. They don’t read “fantasy” but they usually breach genres and come from all different kinds of social groups and age ranges. That makes “genre” a genre that is far more open to hybrids. To barbarian incursions. Being more open, it’s also more alive, fresh, in continuous change. All its parts are engaged in a dialogue, not fossilized into a canon, even if obviously it’s not a so distinct dichotomy and you can see even in “genre” all the negative tendencies.

But again, this makes it interesting. A thing that is alive and in continuous evolution as long it remains open and free of prejudices. There are writers who will stay firmly within a genre canon and make the walls their home, but there will be others who will be more ambitious, dare more, trying to say something new and challenging. Tying together tradition with subversion. Lighting the spark of revolution. Keeping up the enthusiasm.

This pattern is as old as life itself. When human beings reproduce the genetic material gets mixed. That’s how life stays alive: through change. Walls can keep you alive, but they can also can kill you if you start to believe that they are the point. Diversity is something to be celebrated, in literature as in culture and between “races”. Including diversity between each human being. That is what makes us rich, and keeps us alive and healthy. The exchange of parts.

In modern life our purpose isn’t anymore just to reproduce. Culture has also a lasting impact on human life and the whole world. But in the same way sex and reproduction are based on an exchange, so is indispensable for culture the exchange of parts. Literature being just a very small, but still essential, piece.