Jump to content

Gibberish

Backer
  • Posts

    1503
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    17

Reputation Activity

  1. Like
    Gibberish reacted to alpacaman in 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. 
  2. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Darbury in The Function of Ellipses in VNs   
    Nice blog post! And for what it's worth, I've grown somewhat more tolerant of ellipses over the years. Have they worn me down? ...Maybe.
    I suppose the key is using them with intentionality, and not as a typographical shrug that takes the place of finishing a thought or properly punctuating a sentence. To your point, it's hard for an ellipsis to do the important work of demarcating time when those same three dots are also being employed in a dozen other pointless odd-jobs throughout the text.
  3. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Zalor in The Function of Ellipses in VNs   
    This was in very belated indirect response to him actually lol. His arguments in that post has been in the back of my head for a while, and recently I ran into it again by accident. Which prompted me to write this. So yeah you're right on the money! 
  4. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Clephas in Why are so many Vampire protagonists self-hating?   
    I can see your viewpoint on the violent urges.  In particular, seeing bloodlust as being similar to drug addiction is a comparison often made... though not wholly accurate.  From what I've seen, it is an issue of how fast a vampire falls into a starvation state (the state where the need to feed completely overwhelms the ability to think).  In Western literature, this tends to be a few days to a week (often varying either mildly or drastically from individual to individual), and in Japanese literature it tends to vary from 'every night' to 'once a month' (a much wider variation, depending on the setting, than you generally see in the West, but most tend to edge toward the 'every once in a while' end outside of horror or chuuni stuff).  The issue here is whether the individual in question is intelligent/clever enough and strong enough of will (a questionable idea, I know, considering current understanding) to feed quietly and with restraint or is a messy glutton.  A glutton who leaves drained corpses in sewer drains is going to get himself killed fast, whereas a man who sips from a dozen different people in the shadows or uses a ruse to become alone with a target is more likely to survive.  Most settings where vampires look less human the more they feed are ones where this happens with age, rather than as a 'youth'.  You generally won't see that in a Japanese-made VN (exception is a few individuals in ones like Vermilion, who don't bother to hide what they are since they only show themselves to their own kind), but in the West's literature and media, that is more likely.  Older vampires don't seem to age precisely in most settings... it is more that their body language alters drastically and they become less capable of hiding their true nature behind a facade. 
    No, it makes perfect sense that you would feel that way.  Even if you logically understand the downsides, the fact is that humans learn their lessons most effectively from experience, not from intellectual/rational understanding.  I understand that I would probably come to hate the limitations in a rational sense, but my gut thinks it looks like a great deal.  I am pretty sure why I feel that way (I don't like people in the first place, so...)
    @PalasI can also see where you are coming from... but the fact is, when it comes to these issues, people don't think rationally or philosophically.  There are plenty of people out there that would reject the idea purely on religious or moral grounds, outside of fiction (the greater majority, probably).   However, a lot of modern humans don't think that way anymore... at all.  I never really considered vampires to be an 'evolution'... more like a mutated predator whose existence is entirely reliant on a much larger population of herd beasts (lol).  I also don't necessarily see anything wrong with vampires exalting or even being envious of humankind...  aesthetically, if you don't look at us on a macro scale, humans can be beautiful in some ways.  However, that seems to me to be something that would come up after you'd been one a while.  I can see one like Toshirou, who saw his beloved become a victim then became one to be at her side, hating/despising vampires and exalting humans (though in his case, it is more a denial of vampiric transcendence).  It makes a lot of sense... but it makes little sense to bewail your own survival to the extent a lot of protagonists do (since most are of the type that would have been dead otherwise).  Or rather, I dislike the way they start bewailing it immediately in so many cases.  In the case of the protagonist of Vampyr (the video game), it makes sense because he has to kill any human he drinks from, and it also makes sense to resent it in the anime Shiki, because they are basically a vampiric swarm of locusts mass-producing their own kind.  However, these are extreme examples... and it makes less sense in the examples that are less extreme (such as Yaneura no Kanojo, where the protagonist would have been dead otherwise, blood-thirst is relatively infrequent and doesn't require killing, and vampiric reproduction requires an act of will). 
    My objections are more focused on those less extreme examples... in fact, entirely so.  In VNs, the ones that bothered me the most were Libra and the aforementioned Yaneura no Kanojo, where the protagonist in both refuses to recognize the inevitability of his own needs and obsesses over returning to a humanity that is most likely never coming back for reasons that make very little sense.  In Western literature, I've encountered dozens of examples of urban fantasy settings where the vampire protagonist is either young and self-hating or old and self-hating.  Some of those were well-justified (SM Stirling's Shadows series, considering the vampires were inherently and actively sadistic as well as predatory) and others were less so. 
    I suppose, looking over what i just wrote, what bothers me most is holes in even the gut-level emotional reactions of characters in these situations.   The chain of reasoning and emotion is often full of massive holes.  Also, I hate being behind the eyes of whiners.  I especially hate vicariously experiencing someone who spends most of the story whining on one level or another...
  5. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Barktooth in Offensive ableist expressions you are probably using on your daily life   
    It would be l*me if Sana used them. You must be b*ind if you didn't see that coming.
     
    Sure, some of them will feel limited, but some won't. It depends on the person. Rin in Katawa Shoujo is a good example, she doesn't think not having arms is a disadvantage to her at all.
    Even if one avoids these words around everyone else, they would still be acting this way for the sake of the disabled, so I think it may offend certain people regardless. Or maybe not, at this point I don't know anymore.
    In either case, while I can't speak for anyone else, to me the usage of the words you listed plays a big role in whether they are perceived as "ableist" or not. If I call someone crazy, I'm simply trying to convey that they are acting in an irrational and nonsensical fashion, not that they are mentally disabled, or that their behavior stems from having a mental illness. The expression might have originated from someone likening a person acting nonsensically to the behavior of mentally disabled individuals, but the way it is used now, I don't believe such a link exists anymore.
    In short, if you are mentally disabled but aren't going berserk on anyone, I won't call you crazy. However, if you're mentally healthy yet having a fit, I might just do so.
  6. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Norleas in Poll: my next blog post   
    I voted on the third only too see all the passive-aggressive lines that i use when i indirectly insult someone.
     
  7. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Darbury in A Working Definition of the Visual Novel (v1)   
    Even in the "common" novel, the text is a contributing visual. Set a beer down in front of me and I'll talk your ear off about typography. Depending how you typeset it, a given text can be received in surprisingly different ways. An author can also choose to be more explicit in their use of typography as visual — again, see House of Leaves. William Wharton also did this a lot in his novels, using multiple fonts for various voices and effects. Faulkner even wanted to chronologically color code all the text in As I Lay Dying. (There's a version published that actually does this, btw.)
    There is always a visual aspect to the rendered narrative. We just need to pick an arbitrary dividing line: where do visuals become so much a part of the narrative that they help us define something as a visual novel. And finding that line isn't science; it'll always be up for debate.
    Then we're arguing the same thing, since I also believe VNs are games. (I mean, hell — there are walkthroughs for most of them!) I explicitly called out hybrids in my definition, but I think my own shorthand was my downfall there. In my brain, "games" meant "all other entertainments more commonly recognized as games" and "VN" meant "the specialized sub-genre of games known as VNs." You've made some very good arguments regarding that distinction, though, and I plan to clarify that in future drafts of the definition.
  8. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Darbury in A Working Definition of the Visual Novel (v1)   
    We're in agreement. I want them to be considered VNs, too. Their interfaces are visuals, and that is the point. Diegetic visuals are still visuals in my book. We can take this to absurd lengths, of course — "My intentional lack of visuals are my visuals!" "The choice of Times New Roman is my visual!" — but at that point, we might as well just burn it all down and live in caves because we've decided definitions are useless.
    Is a box of refrigerator poetry magnets a poem or the potential for a poem? Again, I think there's a difference between a ludic text that allows for play and discovery within a structure — House of Leaves, I'm looking at you, baby — and something that has absolutely no form without play. Both are very interesting, but they're very different beasts. For the sake of useful conversation, I'd offer that it's best not to conflate them.
    You're basically arguing against genres. This is entirely defensible — and often useful in academic discussions. But for a working definition, which limits the potentially limitless so we can discuss it, it's not very practical. There is a difference between a VN and a platformer, and if I generally like one and not the other, I want a way to usefully signify that.
  9. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Darbury in A Working Definition of the Visual Novel (v1)   
    I think we’re in agreement here. The definition of “narrative” I used (borrowed from the OED) reads a bit narrowly and could stand to be broadened. A train of thought can still be a novel, as Joyce did a good job showing. But a list of unrelated words or statements picked at random? Probably not, unless you’re a diehard dadaist.
    Here we disagree. It’s a visual novel. By its very name, it seems to demand some sort of visual accompaniment. Otherwise, a straight ASCII dump of Huck Finn could be saved out as a PDF and qualify as a VN. A definition so broad doesn’t help us usefully discuss VNs, which is why I’m looking for a working definition here rather than a textbook one.
    I’d argue the opposite, and I think by using the world “build” at the end there, you might just doing the same. The emergent can certainly be wonderful raw material, but someone still needs to recognize the potential underlying narrative, then structure the text to best frame it. Me dumping all of Groucho Marx’s letters on your desk is not a narrative. Me editing and ordering his letters to spotlight the delightful back and forth between him and his studio is something much different.
    As for your MMO idea, you’re butting up against the notion of a working definition again. If anything that generates text to be read on a screen can be considered a VN, then a VN stops being a useful thing to define (which I suspect is your intent). Back to my chair example, it’d be like you saying that anything I can sit should be considered a chair. I’d ask for one and you’d give me a dead mule. “It has four legs and a back,” you’d say, “just like you’d expect. Go ahead and sit. It’s really not comfortable, but how many chairs are, really?” Yet I’d still be wanting for a chair.
    I’d be interested in hearing you flesh this out more. It seems like you’re hoping to blur the lines between text as a framework for the ludic (in which a reader plays between the lines, so to speak) and the ludic itself (where the play *is* the text). I could be misunderstanding, but this sounds like another case where the line between "VN" and "game" becomes so incredibly porous that any definition becomes useless.
    Again, I suspect this might be your intent.
  10. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Chronopolis in A Working Definition of the Visual Novel (v1)   
    I think when you get into the MMOVN thing, the 'VN' part is just the fact that the information given to the player is provided in text form, in a controlled manner. However, once the player is aware that there are players on the other side, it becomes more like a game, practically speaking. But you can play a VN like a game (giving yourself objectives) if you want to.
    The difference is whether the author pre-created what's going to play out, or if the players themselves are going to create the emergent story. The latter would be a text-etc-interface multiplayer roleplaying. It could certainly feel like a VN because of the narrative and how each player sees the information, but I wouldn't call the whole thing a VN.  For prose generated from an underlying game system, what would matter is how much of what happens determined by the author. If it's just the order switching around a bit, then it'd still be author conceived. Otherwise it would be emergent.
    (If you call that type of presentation VN-style, then yes, the game would be a VN-style game, you might even think to call it a VN. But that would overlap with the current notion which has that VN's are something which authors conceive of).
    I suppose an examples of that would be a game where all you do is explore this big manuscript that you view within the game, and when you go to different places you hear different sounds and stuff.
    I have no idea what to call this. It's not quite the same as a set of real letters because you can incorporate sound and visual effects into it. Does controlling the order the player reads parts of the story make the work a VN or not? If you had a series of episodes viewable in any order, that would still seem like a VN. What about if you interacted in a point and click fashion to access the episodes? What about if you walked around a 3-d environment to access those episodes?
    It's just a categorization problem. You wouldn't be able to make a classification for every conceivable thing without being very minute and detailed. You can pick a relatively easy way to categorize works, or you could end up aiming for a categorization that's actually impossible, because our notion of what makes a VN would turn out to be contradictory once you explore the array of things which are possible using text and interaction.
  11. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Valmore in A Working Definition of the Visual Novel (v1)   
    This is a pretty good narrative between @Darbury and @Palas that I'm reading... on my computer screen... with the on-screen text matching their avatars... THIS ISN'T A BLOG! IT'S A VISUAL NOVEL!!!
  12. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Darbury in Gone Home is a visual novel. Deal with it.   
    Thanks for some very thoughtful points made by some very thoughtful folks — Palas, Zakamutt, maefdomn, Decay, etc. (But not Rooke. Never Rooke. )
    If it wasn’t already clear, the above blog post was 70% me playing devil’s advocate, 10% me being serious, and 20% me just wanting to talk about hot dogs. I’ll happily admit I have Gone Home tagged as adventure in my personal games database, and that’s exactly the genre I’d expect to find it under were I looking for it in a store.
    But after I finally got around to playing Gone Home — backlog ahoy! — it occurred to me to ask, “Well, why couldn’t this be considered a visual novel?” The meat of it was inherently literary, and the extratextual gameplay almost non-existent. Then I realized almost all the obvious counter-arguments I could think of stemmed not from a positive definition of what VNs are, but from a negative definition of what VNs shouldn’t be. “Gone Home lets me explore in a way that VNs don’t.” “Gone Home gives me a sense of immersion and agency that VNs don’t.” It’s akin to arguing that tomatoes must be vegetables because fruit stands don’t sell tomatoes. 
    And that’s the part that really interests me. There’s a pervasive sameyness among VNs; maefdomn does a good job addressing some of the reasons why. The answer to “What’s a visual novel?” ends up being, “It’s something that’s like the visual novels I’ve played,” rather than a more useful discussion about what the essential elements of a VN are and aren’t. (Chronopolis’s VNBD definition is a good start, but only a start.)
    Without knowing where the outer edges of the art form are, both mechanically and creatively, we can’t fruitfully explore those edges. And that leaves us with wave after wave of lookalike kickstarted VNs whose main selling points are the number of romanceable characters they have and whether or not they feature imoutos. There will always be a place for that, of course, but there's room for so much more.
  13. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Fred the Barber in Gone Home is a visual novel. Deal with it.   
    I realized halfway through the blog post that I was eating a hot dog while reading it (with mustard, of course). It rated somewhere around a 2 on the "surreal moment scale".
    I have absolutely nothing of substance to add to the conversation, though.
  14. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Valmore in Getting My Feet Wet   
    Awesome. I'm always interested. When the time comes around send me a message. I should be able to send samples of things (I have a project I've slowly developed as well).
  15. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Darbury in Visual Novels and the Bechdel Test   
    Yup, and I think that's pretty damn awesome. I have a background in literary theory — quite nearly ended up pursuing a doctorate in non-linear narrative theory before I changed course — so I always tend to view VNs through that narrow lens. Getting a view from a games-as-narrative perspective is a refreshing (and much-needed) change of pace. 
    So yeah, as long as we can agree that VNs are good and pumpkin spice lattes are crap, I think we'll get along fine. 

  16. Like
    Gibberish reacted to Zalor in Zalor - The Analyst   
    Thank you so much, I truly feel honored for this post! I'm glad my work has been appreciated. 
     
     
    This whole thing truly did begin with that idea. For those curious about the back story, in early 2014 or late 2013, Tay had this idea for a VN literary journal, and I was one of the people who applied to write for it. My article was going to explore the complex relationship between Mai and Sayuri in Kanon. The VN journal ended up not happening. My activity on the forums also gradually faded for a while, and then when I returned I felt really guilty as I remembered that I was partly responsible for the VN Lit journal not happening. So I finally sat down and rewrote the previous draft I had (I ended up scrapping most of what I previously had). It took a week or two of repeatedly rereading Mai and Sayuri's routes, writing and rewriting, and listening to the Kanon OST (for inspiration), and on June 30th I finally finished and published it on the forums. The first thing I did afterwards was pm Tay an apology, and I ended the message saying something along lines of "I hope you believe in the adage 'better late than never'". Since then, when a VN truly speaks to me I try to organize my thoughts of it on to paper (well, digital paper). Anyway, once again thanks for this post!  
×
×
  • Create New...