[Themes and Stuff: Baldr Sky]

But if it's a reaction, should't it at actually respond to the criticism rather than go "people sceptical of our vision of progress are part of or manipulated by a cult"? The man vs. man argument doesn't really work when the faction arguing against implanting children with experimental brain chips without oversight and employing a technology humans have no effective control over ist portrayed as cartoonishly evil. The good guys are the ones moving the fight from man vs. man to man vs. AI, AI just happened to be benevolent because otherwise the good guys would have created a monster and we can't have that because they are the good guys and only bad guys create monsters. It's circular logic. 

[Themes and Stuff: Baldr Sky]

11 hours ago, John Eldridge said:

Why do you think Seishu has high tuition? I don’t remember that being mention anywhere. It seems like it’s about as high as any average college, which isn’t exactly cheap in the first place but nothing out of place. 
 

Sorry, I don't remember. It's been almost four years since I read the VN. As for your other points: if the game had an honest discussion about the potential advantages as well as dangers of new technology and came out with a positive outlook, I'd have no issue with that. But there isn't. There's the good guys with the good technology who only have noble objectives and the bad guys with the bad technology who manipulate the masses into being against the good technology.

[Saya no Uta Review]

Great review! I'd love to read more of your thoughts about the themes as these are something most VN reviews don't really bother with. I wouldn't expect too much feedback though as sadly there isn't that much traffic on this forum anymore.

I have two points where I disagree with you too some degree though: Firstly, yes the side characters aren't fleshed out at all, but I'd argue this is on purpose since the story is very much told from Fuminori's perspective and he perceives anyone except for Uta as not even human and thus not really worthy of being acknowledged as having any depth beyond what you can observe on a surface level. Switching viewpoint characters serves mostly to exposition and develop plot and themes as well as grounding the reader. Even Uta is mostly portrayed as someone whose only purpose is to provide Fuminori pleasure. He doesn't care all that much who she is or what her gets out of their arrangement as he is too caught up in the pleasure/pain dichotomy you mentioned above. That's why Uta gets introduced with a sex scene and probably why there's the otherwise completely pointless rape scene with the neighbor but very few scenes where Fuminori asks her about anything not relevant to their immediate circumstances (at least if I remember correctly, it's been a couple of years since I read the VN).

Which brings me to my second point, the sexual content. I agree most of it gratuitous and pointless as well, the first scene with Yoh stuck with me though. It marks the point of no return for Fuminori in terms of morals. Each prior crime of his could be, to some extend, excused with him trying to protect himself and/or Uta. But in this scene he brutally violates someone not only without prior provocation, but he even chooses the one person from the other side who has remained the most sympathetic to him throughout his mental deterioration as his target or at very least readily approves this choice (again, it's been a few years). He figuratively and literally dehumanizes Yoh. He doesn't see other humans deserving of any basic dignity any more, and this is the scene where this shift becomes evident.

[Blog: Why is everyone reading Umineko the "wrong" way? [spoilers]]

I can't say I fully agree with this interpretation but a big part of what makes Umineko so amazing imo is it has room for so many possible messages you can derive from it without them getting arbitrary. It's like the game has a choice system, only the choices happen in your head while the text stays the same and the aspects your brain focuses on determine which route you pick. I guess every story has this to some degree but I don't know any other piece of media that intentionally plays with it to this degree. I think that is also what Beatrice being the witch of infinite possibilities is about. That while you shouldn't disregard objective facts, there is always some uncertainty in the space between them and it's this small space where "magic" happens, where your feelings come in. Umineko tells you to treasure this ambiguity. To apply this to a non-fictional example , evolutionary scientists should try to do their work with the aim of finding out more about and highlighting the wonders of nature and not to disprove the bible. On the other hand Christians shouldn't try to disprove a scientific theory that is 99,999% proven and try to use the remaining .001% to bring the 99,999% down to zero, but rather see this tiny fraction as where god's will manifests itself (being able to accept that others might fill this residue of uncertainty with something else than you would is also important).

[Blog: Why is everyone reading Umineko the "wrong" way? [spoilers]]

I don't know if I would go as far as the anon in my praise of Umineko. I agree with the general sentiment that Umineko has a narrative complex enough to hold up even when compared to some of the best pieces of literature though. I heavily disagree with his point about using the original sprites though.

On 10/22/2020 at 7:41 PM, Mr Poltroon said:

On the topic of my own replay, I leaned heavily into the mystery-solving aspect for my readthrough because I didn't try to solve anything my first way through, and by the end the game does give you the key pieces of info to put things together. Still, most of the more abstract scenes I do "ignore" from a mystery solving perspective even now, choosing to read them purely as character moments. I don't have it in me to try parsing them in any other way.

If I interpret Umineko's message somewhat correctly this approach qualifies just as much as reading "with love" as my attempts at decoding its symbolism does, because you're acknowledging the work and passion Ryukishi07 put into coming up with so many elaborate murder mysteries.  I feel a bit unhappy with the way I framed my argument around the terms "right" and "wrong" and how I used them in the context of Umineko because it comes across as if I'm trying to scold people for enjoying the mystery aspect of the VN, so I edited the paragraph after the Steins;Gate example to explain more precisely what I'm trying to get at. I hope the new version makes this clearer. I also put the "wrong" in the title in quotation marks.

[Blog: Why is everyone reading Umineko the "wrong" way? [spoilers]]

1 hour ago, Mr Poltroon said:

Not to discount your initial premise or the entire post, because I think what I will say won't disprove it or anything, but I'm somewhat willing to bet that the majority of people that read Umineko for the first time do not fit into the pattern you have described.
Many, including myself, who are fans of the mystery genre are not actually interested in solving the mysteries. The interest is in having characters be smart and do it all for us so we can be amazed. This particular type of reader is often kicked in the shin by Umineko which does not actually bother to solve its mysteries, and even when it does, it does not do so correctly*. Indeed, the novel itself dedicates many of its scenes to giving the readers clues and trying to get them to actually think and try to solve the mystery. Many of the scenes where meta Battler is alone introspecting or talking with someone else as an aside of the main plot it can often be them encouraging him to try and solve things or explaining why it's not an impossible task.

My guess is most readers fall somewhere in the middle between this and what I described above. I don't think we are very far apart on this actually and I admit I kind of failed to highlight the battle of wits aspect. It is definitely one of the things that make up a major part of the charm of the mystery genre. I'd still argue the fun in this kind of confrontation lies in the reader knowing the playing field and having a grasp on the basic rules and trying to figure out which "loophole" or which possibly tiny part of the puzzle the opponents are going to use to corner each other (I'm seriously jumbling metaphors here). It isn't just the "smart" part, it is that the solution is something you could found out yourself. The "ah, so that's what that clue was about" moment is very important imo. For example, a VN about Einstein fighting other leading scientists over the interpretation of certain aspects of quantum physics could be fun in its own way, but it would be very different from a Sherlock Holmes story.

[Umineko's opening scene]

The question is what "really happened" means in this context:

Spoiler

The scene is canon within the eight in-story games. If these are the truth you accept for yourself, then the opening scene depicts something real. If you go by the "Erika interpretation", Kinzo is probably already dead by the time this is all supposed to be happening.

The point I'm trying to make is the scene is set up to make you guess whether what you're seeing is real. Opening with an old man who is dressed like some sort of magician standing in an occult looking room while sipping a green drink and screaming at nothing in the hopes of summoning a witch makes you think you're reading a fantasy story, but then there's also a real life doctor examining him and wondering how he's still alive.

Btw., the medical exam is also setting up the ongoing theme of the "fact" faction trying (figuratively) dissect the fantasy. I can't believe I forgot to mention this in the actual blog post.

[Umineko's opening scene]

9 hours ago, Zalor said:

I'm interested in the observation in whether alcohol holds any consistent motif or not. Off the top of my head I know that Bernkastel is quite fond of good alcohol and so is Beatrice. In fact there are some pretty great scenes of Beatrice getting drunk. But I don't know if that's relevant to your curiosity around the use of alcohol. 

With Bernkastel's name it makes total sense for her to like alcohol (since she shares her name with a small German town mostly known for its wine), although I don't really know yet how it would fit into an overarching booze=fantasy motif since she's the antagonist to the pro-fantasy faction. Maybe there's more of a general drinks motif going on. There's also the thing with the tea Rosa bought for Kumasawa I had totally forgotten about and I don't remember what that was all about. I don't know, I should probably stick to reading and making notes for now before I make theories based on stuff I only half-remember.

[The Grisaia Series is Kind of Genius]

11 hours ago, mitchhamilton said:

and is this possibly the intention of the writers to begin with?

Of course it's their intention. That's why I called Grisaia cynical, not poorly constructed.

[The Grisaia Series is Kind of Genius]

I felt like the things you criticise about the sequels (which I haven't read) are already visible in the original. The girls all being in love with Yuuji and his cum/superpowers healing their mental wounds and so on. That there is no harem route in the original doesn't mean there is ever any doubt that he is the harem master.

Grisaia isn't as much a subversion of anime/eroge tropes but rather a darker and edgier iteration. I don't buy that it's supposed to be a parody of certain clichés, as their overexaggeration rarely ever says anything about them. Yumiko trying to kill Yuuji does nothing to expose inherent problems with the "unapproachable heroine" trope or how it's typically handled through way of comedy, it just takes said trope and turns it up to eleven.

If anything I'd say Grisaia imo actually takes the whole eroge formula to its cynical conclusion. There are the incapable heroines, only this time they are total emotional wrecks. The self-insert protagonist is the only one capable of solving their problems, only in Grisaia he is a super soldier because because the development team realised that a high proportion of the target audience reads these stories to play out a certain kind of power fantasy and Yuuji embodies this completely. 

[Visual Novels are a Hot Medium]

2 hours ago, Zalor said:

I see what your saying but that's not exactly it. For instance literature was a textbook example of a hot medium according to Mcluhan himself, and reading can be quite abstract; such as symbolic poetry, experimental novels, etc. And considering that Finnegans Wake was one of hits favorite novels, he was definitely aware of how abstract literature could get. That's why for simplicity's sake I explained it as hot mediums demand more of your focus and cooler media allow you to approach things more casually. Since that seems to be the way he more consistently uses it. 

At the same time he says cold media are the ones that are higher in audience participation (at least in every explanation I read, e.g. 1 2 3). Hot media are the ones you can passively consume. Or to quote the man himself:

Quote

There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition." High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon is "low definition," simply because very little visual information is provided. Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener. On the other hand, hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or completed by the audience. Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the audience. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like radio has very different effects on the user from a cool medium like the telephone.

[...]

Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than dialogue. Source (chapter 2)

 

The immersion of actual VN reading vs. watching a playthrough in a youtube video is imo a perfect example of why VNs are a cooler medium than a youtube-video. The video dictates the pace and sequence of consumption for the audience, forcing them into a more passive role and making the experience more streamlined. The interaction with the medium becomes more superficial. From what I get, the terms hot and cold refer more to the effect a medium has on a society, not how immersive they are, which is admittedly pretty counterintuitive. Btw I would categorize VNs as somewhat lukewarm.

[Visual Novels are a Hot Medium]

I actually disagree with VNs being a hot medium. As far as I understand the concept of hot vs. cold media, it refers to density of information a medium provides. Thus hotter media require less "abstraction" on the consumer's part to construct meaning, not even in some metaphorical sense but like "what am looking at / hearing". For example a photograph is a hot medium, as it contains a lot of precise visual information, a sketch a cold one, as it's mostly lines and things are not portrayed in photorealistic detail. So compared to a live-action movie or even an anime visual novels are relatively cold. They are usually drawn in a stylized fashion, with the location of a sprite not even being the same as where the character is supposed to be in the room, only depict movement in a simplified way and the background sound tends to not be that authentic either. VNs are hotter than most manga or novels, but other than that I'd say VNs are closer towards the colder end of visual storytelling media. Which isn't a bad thing in itself.

[Rainbow Dreams (Western VN Review)]

Quote

Rainbow Dreams is a major step in the right direction.

Quote

Final Rating: 2,5/5

Oh boy...

Now I'm really curious what their other titles are like.

[The nature of an infodump]

20 minutes ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

That is a good point, but if you think of it as another method of "scattering" the infodumps to keep the complexity of the world without creating the walls of info in the middle of the story it should still be worth it. I also don't like encyclopedias if they contain information actually crucial to understanding the story – as you said, it can be cool for fleshing out your world, but it can't be a primary method.

Yeah, I think there are worse ways to do exposition than dumping it right at the start, and I know quite a few TV shows and movies that do this and are still quite good. It's just very hard to do in a way that keeps the reader invested enough that they remember the important information. As for the encyclopedia thing, I don't think reading an encyclopedia entry is worse than a wall-of-text dump or some character monologueing exposition, at least as long as it's not information that's new to the protagonist. Of course none of these options should be the primary way of expositioning, as imo a story should always try to tie every important piece of information to its characters' motivations or its themes or whatever makes sense through a scene where something actually happens imo, but if that's not possible or highly inconvenient, putting it outside the main text often is a better choice imo.

1 hour ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

...I might also be speaking from one specific trauma of an EVN with a world that was pretty much incomprehensible because of lack of proper exposition, and with encyclopedia which created more questions than it answered. A good prologue could've done miracles for that game.

Do you think this particular VN could have gotten a good prologue when the writers weren't able to write an encyclopedia that actually explains things?

[The nature of an infodump]

3 hours ago, Plk_Lesiak said:

If it flaws properly with the story, I wouldn't even call it an infodump. I think when people talk about those, they mostly mean the first kind you mentioned: just walls of information bringing the story to a hold for a significant amount of time. But for this reason, I kind of feel an infodumping prologue is underutilized in VNs. You can quite easily avoid putting clunky exposition in the middle of your game by explaining the basics of the universe at the beginning. Maybe devs avoid it because it's cliched to do a narrated introductions like that, but particularly in EVNs, I feel like a lot of storytelling issues and confusion could be avoided that way... 

I think infodumps at the beginning are rarely employed because there is no in-story-conflict yet readers can connect it to. At least to me they feel more like homework than useful information most of the time and I tend to get bored before the actual story even begins.

A way of infodumping that's rather unique to VNs that can be rather effective is adding opportunities for expositioning outside of the actual story. For example an encyclopedia can be a good way of explaining things characters in-universe wouldn't talk about normally without taking you out of the story for too long. 428 utilizes this feature brilliantly, adding funny side stories to its exposition and even secretly setting up plot devices. VA-11 also has an approach I really like where you read news stories and internet boards inbetween story-sections (although admittedly it's used more for world building than infodumping).

[An attempt at classifying protagonists]

I haven't read or watched anything from the Fate franchise, so I can't really comment on that.

As for comedy heavy VNs, if I remember correctly, at least the few ones I read had MCs who mainly acted as "straight man" characters, meaning someone who is more or less normal to contrast the absurd of the comedy and keep the audience from getting to accustomed to it. The useful idiot category kind of implies that the character's incompetence or ignorance is what drives the plot, which most of the time makes them part of the absurd (Phoenix Wright is a notable exception). There probably are useful idiot protagonists in some comedy VNs, I just imagine them being hard to include in anything with heroine routes, as heroines tend to be flashy as well and the risk of losing the comedic balance would be high. 

You could argue that Rintaro from Steins;Gate fits the category as well (although I put him in the strong protagonist column in the diagram). It's mainly his chuuni persona and his curiosity driving the plot in the first half of S;G until at some point he is made painfully aware of the fact that he got himself into something way beyond his control.

[The Different Treatment of Sex Scenes: Japan vs. America]

I think it has more to do with a different approach to fiction than being more open minded about sex. Most western magazines for women below a certain age contain sex advice and some cheap erotica like Fifty Shades of Grey can become a mega-seller in western countries. Japanese culture values personal space very highly and prying into someone elses business is considered impolite, so people don't complain about fiction they are not the intended audience for. And Japanese media seems heavily targeted at certain demographics. So when companies release a game or VN they think more about what the target audience wants than what is socially acceptable. Most Japanese young male shut-ins (as seems to be the way eroge-readers are seen) like porn scenes with their waifus so developers include them because they lead to higher sales and nobody who is not part of the target audience is going to complain, like it would happen in western countries. That doesn't mean there is no social stigma towards these things in Japan, it's just that it affects consumers (by getting socially isolated) of such media, not the creators.

As to why some voice actresses do porn scenes, my guess would be that it's hard to make a living in this job in Japan if you don't do it.

 

edit: Reading my post again I think I didn't get my point across that well. What I was trying to say is that in Japan disapproval against certain content doesn't show itself through public outcry since that would mean openly shaming consumers which would be considered overstepping your boundaries. Instead these consumers suffer from social stigma which has more subtle consequences. 

[Revisiting an old memory]

People get drawn to types of media for several reasons, a possible one being that they share their personal views and values. As you pointed out, most eroge are sexist to some degree, some of them completely objectify women, so it's only logical that some fraction (even if it's really small) of its fandom likes the genre because of all the sexism, not despite all the sexism. If people who share these views get into an environment where they feel enabled to express them, you quickly get a situation like the one you described.

[Cooking with Zaka: Lazy-ass pork wine stew]

Every dish that is basically just meat cooking in its own juice is tasty as long as you don't add too much of the wrong ingredient because it contains plenty of everything that makes food taste satisfying: salt, fat and sodium glutamate (the bouillon only amplifies this in your recipe). And adding more complex notes like red wine or something smoky or spicy can turn a dish that's just satisfying into something really tasty.

[Cooking with Zaka: Lazy-ass pork wine stew]

42 minutes ago, Narcosis said:

This looks kinda... bland

It's basically a simplified version of beef bourguignon so it should probably taste just fine. Adding some tomato purée might taste good and would probably make the liquid a bit thicker as well.