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Such Metafiction

I recently found a link to a Youtube video with a translation of a scene from a recent Visual Novel. I already mentioned how this particular medium is well suited for these kind of tricks like metafiction and fourth wall breaking.

This one is a good example (beware sexual themes and general meanness):
Part 1 – Part 2

It’s Part 2 where the interesting stuff happens. Visual Novels are quite often relatively simple “dating sims” where you follow a scripted story and only get to make an handful of choices through the whole game. Usually these choices can be about choosing which one of the girls offered you want to date, and so you branch out from the main plot into a specific, parallel “route” somewhat dedicated to that one girl you picked. And then these games often demand to be replayed so that you go through every route/option and sometimes unlock a “true end” with more mysteries and revelations.

In this case the metafictional play is that one of the girls suddenly drops the pretense of the story and starts talking directly to the “player”. Becoming somehow “aware” of herself as a character and knowing that the player previously went through a different “route”, declaring his “love” to a different character. So she breaches the timeline where she’s trapped in as a fictional character and confronts *the player* on his own choices. The scene is powerful because it actually reaches for a deeper truth: the player is a liar, he promises true love to every girl. Then she goes wild and takes control of the game itself by “rewriting” the script and disabling the possibility to save the game or even “quit”. Like some kind of AI gone mad.

There’s nothing too original about all this, but it still plays with interesting aspects. Metafiction is powerful because it is deeply linked to “truth”. It’s the frame, the condition we are actually in. The game here merely “plays” a reality, and it becomes creepy because it cuts some of the safe distance between fiction and you. When the character starts speaking to the player, and on the basis of true affirmations, it not only breaks the fourth wall, but it threatens to close that distance. Move one step too close.

Metafiction isn’t just one silly trick in the Postmodern deck of cards, but the laying out of the structure we can’t escape. If fictional characters are trapped within their medium, “real” human beings are trapped in their subjective world. You can’t reach outside the same way a character ideally can’t break the fourth wall. Fiction being real, and reality being fiction is just the original sin, the premise of everything. One box within the other. The idea of “self” as something you can observe as if who observes is also the object of observation SPAWNS all possible variations on the theme. Fiction is just the same pattern, an object you observe that in some ways reflects you. It’s the way the mind works.

So metafiction isn’t just a literary device among many, but it’s the structure that contains everything else. The same way as “writing” isn’t one of many possible human activities, but the one that includes all human experience.

Postmodern “awareness”, or the “great postmodern uncertainty” as DFW defines it, is a very specific and precise description of the kind of world we are currently trapped in. It’s not a trend you subscribe to, it’s the authority of this world.

Postmodernism

It fits right in:

In-group Jargon

I spotted this excerpt from a DFW interview. It defines a pattern that can be applied to many different contexts. Politics, for example.

The simple way to put it, I think, is: Writing, like any kind of communicating, is complicated. When you’re writing a document for your professional peers, you’re sending out a whole lot of different messages. Some of them are the stuff you’re arguing; some of them are stuff about you.

My guess is that disciplines that are populated by smart, well-educated people who are good readers but are nevertheless characterized by crummy, turgid, verbose, abstruse, abstract, solecism-ridden prose are usually part of a discipline where the dynamic between writing as a vector of meaning—as a way to get information or opinion from me to you—versus writing as maybe a form of dress or speech or style or etiquette that signals that “I am a member of this group” gets thrown off.

There’s the kind of boneheaded explanation, which is that a lot of people with PhDs are stupid; and like many stupid people, they associate complexity with intelligence. And therefore they get brainwashed into making their stuff more complicated than it needs to be.

I think the smarter thing to say is that in many tight, insular communities—where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency and being able to speak the language of the discipline—pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one’s own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning. And that’s how in disciplines like academia—or, I’ve read some really good legal prose, but when it’s really, really horrible (IRS Code stuff)—I think that very often it stems from insecurity and that people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won’t be taken seriously and their ideas won’t be taken seriously. It’s a guess.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind


I’ve recently finished reading the manga version in seven volumes of Nausicaa by Hayao Miyazaki. It’s drawn masterfully and one of the greatest stories I’ve read. Miyazaki can be a bit repetitive with his themes and characters (and personal loves, like flight & planes), but one never complains when it’s always up to this level of excellence.

I think the reason why I decided to pick it up is that in April/May I was on Evangelion’s rut and I read that Anno considered the last volume of Nausicaa as Miyazaki’s true masterpiece, and so I was curious not only because of that opinion, but because there’s the theme of how you give a really satisfying closure to these hugely “epic” stories. A climax that is a climax instead of a whimper, as the thing comes crushing down under its own weight.

when Nausicaa was being serialized in Animage Anno used to visit Miyazaki’s office and ask to see the part of Nausicaa currently in progress; Miyazaki wouldn’t let him, so he would go in and look at them when Miyazaki wasn’t there. Anno wished that Miyazaki would stop making anime and focus on the Nausicaa manga. Miyazaki struggled greatly with how to end the manga; now, Anno completely understands how Miyazaki felt. According to Anno, Evangelion ended up being a cross between Devilman and volume seven of the Nausicaa manga. At an “ideological” level, Anno had to arrive at the same answers. Nobi was deeply moved by the Nausicaa movie when she first saw it, but less impressed after reading volume 7 of the manga. The darkness of the manga is eliminated in the film. However, for Nobi, Anno goes in the opposite direction, and is a kind of “black Miyazaki.”

In a way, you could say that Evangelion is an active dialogue with Nausicaa, so Nausicaa also offers an interesting angle to interpret Evangelion. I always do care about these undercurrents that link different works, that’s the real soul of every creative process.

In any case the ending of Nausicaa is actually quite excellent. I found the very last page a little “cheesy” but the important aspect is that the whole last volume is a crescendo that does a number of things right. One is that there actually is that crescendo. I noticed a couple of aspects about it. The first is that there’s a sense of leaving things behind. As characters approach the apex of the story, they lose a lot of what they care about. This gives the ultimate journey a sense of inevitability. And the other aspect is that this sense of inevitability also hooks into a series of progressive revelations that “rewrite” the perception of the world. So the story rises toward its conclusion while it also sheds its mortal spoils. Every step forward manifests the impossibility of ever going back from where you started. This is both story and knowledge. Once you “know”, you can’t pretend you don’t. Life changes, pushes on.

On the other side, though, I think Miyazaki asks all the good questions, but the final answer is the wrong one. Without spoiling so much I’d say the explicit “message” of the manga is about the celebration of life over the controlled manipulations of men. This is essentially at the core of the last volume, with Nausicaa becomes like an “angel of darkness”. Which is obviously a shifting point of view.

Anno: Another [major influence] was the seventh volume of the Nausicaa manga.

Takekuma: That [volume] is incredible. It reversed all the values [that had been in place].

Anno: I felt like it was the same as what I [was doing]. After that I couldn’t help but make [the work into] Nausicaa, to treat the same themes as the seventh volume of Nausicaa.

Oizumi: Nausicaa was unable to live as one of the ancients.

Anno: She rejected coexistence [with them]. She bloodied her hands so that her own people would survive. That was good. This karmic punishment that required [her] to destroy [them] with the abhorred fire of the God Warriors – that was good (laughing). [Good] because the true views of Hayao Miyazaki were expressed, and there, at least, he took off his underwear [and showed himself naked]. In the manga he took off his underwear, and his penis was erect (laughing). I am hoping that he will do the same in Princess Mononoke.

My problem with Miyazaki’s final answer is that the work is presented as the conflict of human beings versus nature. In the end Nausicaa becomes a messenger from Nature itself. She speaks as a goddess (so the messianic undertones). The problem is that once again this brings up the conflict in Cartesian Dualism. Man versus nature. But the point is that human beings rise from that same nature. Scott Bakker put it in a great quote:

the terrifying prospect that they themselves are merely more nature, not nature + x

If we are merely more nature, then we are part of that cycle, not fighting it. Whereas in Miyazaki’s vision men and nature are on two different shores, facing each other. This is the explanatory gap in science and religion. Knowledge and experience. So a vision that is total instead of partial needs making the two into one. If human beings exist it is because Nature is staring at itself. This is an actual quote from Nausicaa (or Nietszche):

if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

But the actual point in Nausicaa is that “life is change” and it can’t be bridled. She literally destroys the gods and refuses their gifts. Even if built with the best intentions and out of idealism, those gods were still a fixed form that, being fixed and unchanging, was contrary to life. She takes down the gods even if accused that hers is a nihilistic perspective that will destroy all life (and it’s not just a threat). I guess one could say that men’s plan can be utterly delusional, but they can’t be considered “contrary” to life. That’s the big picture: either human beings are part of the flow of life and no different from every other life form, abiding to the rules of life, OR whatever “evil” that humans have embedded in them still has to come directly from Nature itself. In Nausicaa instead those are at opposite ends. Men’s plans defy the course of nature, and are to be defied in turn.

From the point of view of ethics it’s hard to see human beings as some kind of alien anti-Natural species. Is it ethical to grasp our power to bend Nature? Either we see human beings as part of the same Natural system, the bigger picture, and so everything in our power still sits within the domain of Nature, it’s Nature giving that power to us and we use it because we are in that system, OR we think “ethically”. Why this distinction? Because either Nature has its own laws and forms, and so, being immersed in it, those laws represent our domain, the dome that we cannot breach even if we wanted to. So we are system, and not anti-system, or extra-system. And so everything we can do is ethical already, because Nature is the law, and whatever we do still comes from Nature and is not distinguished from it. OR, again, “ethics” are not “natural” and are instead man-made. So we personally, subjectively judge. It becomes “choice”, and the responsibility that comes with that choice. We can’t anymore rely on something external that tells us what’s ethical or not, it’s simply our own arbitrary choice.

All this bringing back to the problem of Godel-defying reflexivity. The abyss that stares back at you while you stare at it. The maker is made, the observer is observed. Or: the rules are continuously redefined. The fundamental principles rewritten. A self-changing, adapting thing that is always in flux. But this again risks being just another optical illusions that sees itself as a whole just because it doesn’t perceive all the connections.

So I see all this as a problematic theme in Nausicaa because of the contradiction at the core. But this could also be somewhat addressed within the work itself: Nausicaa is seen as a kind of angel that appears at the right time. She has her mechanical “wings” and she exploits people’s delusions, but even if there’s (almost) nothing magical about her, metaphorically that role fits on her. She becomes just another natural force that appears to oppose what came before, and doing so she celebrates just that spontaneous self-correcting property of life and nature, without breaching the system. She is one life force that restores a balance.

Along all this there’s also the other perspective that is much simpler and more solid: parent/child relationship. In this case the emancipation is really part of life’s process. Parents devise the ideal way for their children to develop, moved by those hopes and idealistic desires about their children and their future. All product of “goodwill” but that can really turn for the worst in spite of it. There’s a moment where the child has to rebel about whatever pattern was imposed on himself, rightly so. You, thankfully, just can’t control this aspect of life.

So, Nausicaa deals with all this and more. It does it excellently for the most part, even if it falls a bit in that Cartesian Dualism explanatory inconsistency. I guess we wait for Scott Bakker to be radical about it.

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.

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 165k (e) 1000 pages (June 10, 2016) -31
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 347k

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 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.