Est. Reading Time: 7 minutes
Policy
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Short heartfelt color book story VN about a girl that does a science experiment for enough money so she can meet her girlfriend.
There are 2 points in particular worth highlighting here. 1 is the style of dialogue, all of the dialogue here is in the NVL format, where dialogue stretches the entire screen. As opposed to ADV, where dialogue is mainly regulated to the bottom. The NVL format is not typically used in most VNs, especially not for the whole length of the game, so VNs like this that do by design bring attention to that fact. Here it becomes very appropriate to the theming of the story: disassociation, disembodiment, and trying to keep bonds through trauma. By having dialogue and thoughts screen the whole screen it reminds us of the fact that's what talking to people you love on the computer looks like to, dialogue that is continuous and endless rather than sequenced verbally. When you talk to people on the computer, the conversation stretches vertically and becomes a 'wall of text' with all the information starting to run in and become harder to decipher. In another way the internal thoughts seem to drown out the visual pictures in the background obscuring them from view which fits into the theme of disembodiment and anxiety. This all speaks to an alienated frusteration of digital belonging in the piece.
The other big point I want to bring attention to is that, without spoiling it, the story is built upon several Deus Ex Machinas happening to keep the plot going. Unreal interventions on the stories pace and sensibility from some 'outside' hand. Usually Deus Ex Machinas in stories have been seen as a story telling flaw, a terrible 'trope' that was to be avoided at all costs in part because of the fact the information is 'unfair' and 'unexpected' to the reader. However the Deus Ex Machina is only viewed this way in part due to secularization. Before secularization happened, this storytelling device had an air quite literally of divine intervention and reasoning, something that was important and hopeful to bring up in fiction to reflect religious convictions of those times, and to reflect the often inexplicable randomness of life.
By having several of them, i die a lovely life disrupts this by having a story built out of unexpected actions. By throwing away typical fictional logic of pacing and storytelling, it makes it so you are being taken along for the ride of the story, to be as 'disembodied' or 'disassociated' as the protagonist couple.
This is a very technical reading of the story, but only because I feel strongly this fiction is actually doing something worth mention. This is the debut story from lisa, but there are other recent short VNs over these struggles like Good Morning Is A Social Construct (2022), Momo's Diary (2022), and Blind (2020) that take similar approach. There's a structural novelty here in how experiences of trans discrimination, mental health, or substance abuse is being reconsidered in the realm of more subjective terrors. Such a relationship that I feel VNs are good at, calling back to movements focusing on emotionality like Romanticism, Sturm und Drang, or The Theater of Terror. It would be a real shame to miss out on these sorts of short stories just because of their unique multimedia elements and approach.
One final reason for explaining the positives of this in the way I did is because these stories also seem to function beyond basic allegory or metaphor. For example i die a lovely life has a lot for the moral critic to impugn, there's a lot of terror towards medical authority which reads as a 'bad look' post-covid. The religious elements could be read as bad storytelling or some form of fundamentalism. The fear of mental health medicine might be read for the moral critic as 'troubling'. This is an issue of 'moral optics' that is quite regular, and often tries to define itself in terms of seeing bad tropes like the 'predatory lesbian' trope or the 'Deus Ex Machina'. The problem becomes that for any well meaning and emotionally resonate reader this stuff does not work in cases like this, in part because this romanticism is usually not out to linearly justify the actions or condemn them. For the moral critic (which let's face it, is most people using social media) does not know what to do with a story like this.
That's why I believe it's vital to read these sorts of stories then, demoralizing the critical reference or at least seeing where that construction fails allows us to open the doors to other non allegorical or non moral readings of a works movement and meaning. For me, my reading of one night, hot springs and Curtain were so intense that they revealed alternative meanings. That is to say instead of seeing moral optics in these stories, I saw cultural distinctions and educational intervention respectively. I like to bring attention to art like this, because getting ourselves out of the habit of seeing art in terms of linear manifestos or propaganda we support is really important to avoiding an attitude of moral puritarianism that would rather lock up fiction that dares to be challenging. Consuming the challenging art first hand is a great way to avoid becoming book burners ourselves.
Less polemically, I'll conclude and say that everything that this work touches on are thing that I absolutely feel. I often worry I might never see the people I love in person again, that higher economic powers are going to keep us permanently disembodied from contact. This story shows to me that that's absolutely a real thing to worry about on the one hand, that the tragedy is you might be right. However, trying to change it through fighting for physical connection is a divine form of love, that being able to maintain love itself through the digital is itself a holy act. The soft and humorous way it went about it is exactly what I needed ;-;
Policy
---------------------------
Short heartfelt color book story VN about a girl that does a science experiment for enough money so she can meet her girlfriend.
There are 2 points in particular worth highlighting here. 1 is the style of dialogue, all of the dialogue here is in the NVL format, where dialogue stretches the entire screen. As opposed to ADV, where dialogue is mainly regulated to the bottom. The NVL format is not typically used in most VNs, especially not for the whole length of the game, so VNs like this that do by design bring attention to that fact. Here it becomes very appropriate to the theming of the story: disassociation, disembodiment, and trying to keep bonds through trauma. By having dialogue and thoughts screen the whole screen it reminds us of the fact that's what talking to people you love on the computer looks like to, dialogue that is continuous and endless rather than sequenced verbally. When you talk to people on the computer, the conversation stretches vertically and becomes a 'wall of text' with all the information starting to run in and become harder to decipher. In another way the internal thoughts seem to drown out the visual pictures in the background obscuring them from view which fits into the theme of disembodiment and anxiety. This all speaks to an alienated frusteration of digital belonging in the piece.
The other big point I want to bring attention to is that, without spoiling it, the story is built upon several Deus Ex Machinas happening to keep the plot going. Unreal interventions on the stories pace and sensibility from some 'outside' hand. Usually Deus Ex Machinas in stories have been seen as a story telling flaw, a terrible 'trope' that was to be avoided at all costs in part because of the fact the information is 'unfair' and 'unexpected' to the reader. However the Deus Ex Machina is only viewed this way in part due to secularization. Before secularization happened, this storytelling device had an air quite literally of divine intervention and reasoning, something that was important and hopeful to bring up in fiction to reflect religious convictions of those times, and to reflect the often inexplicable randomness of life.
By having several of them, i die a lovely life disrupts this by having a story built out of unexpected actions. By throwing away typical fictional logic of pacing and storytelling, it makes it so you are being taken along for the ride of the story, to be as 'disembodied' or 'disassociated' as the protagonist couple.
This is a very technical reading of the story, but only because I feel strongly this fiction is actually doing something worth mention. This is the debut story from lisa, but there are other recent short VNs over these struggles like Good Morning Is A Social Construct (2022), Momo's Diary (2022), and Blind (2020) that take similar approach. There's a structural novelty here in how experiences of trans discrimination, mental health, or substance abuse is being reconsidered in the realm of more subjective terrors. Such a relationship that I feel VNs are good at, calling back to movements focusing on emotionality like Romanticism, Sturm und Drang, or The Theater of Terror. It would be a real shame to miss out on these sorts of short stories just because of their unique multimedia elements and approach.
One final reason for explaining the positives of this in the way I did is because these stories also seem to function beyond basic allegory or metaphor. For example i die a lovely life has a lot for the moral critic to impugn, there's a lot of terror towards medical authority which reads as a 'bad look' post-covid. The religious elements could be read as bad storytelling or some form of fundamentalism. The fear of mental health medicine might be read for the moral critic as 'troubling'. This is an issue of 'moral optics' that is quite regular, and often tries to define itself in terms of seeing bad tropes like the 'predatory lesbian' trope or the 'Deus Ex Machina'. The problem becomes that for any well meaning and emotionally resonate reader this stuff does not work in cases like this, in part because this romanticism is usually not out to linearly justify the actions or condemn them. For the moral critic (which let's face it, is most people using social media) does not know what to do with a story like this.
That's why I believe it's vital to read these sorts of stories then, demoralizing the critical reference or at least seeing where that construction fails allows us to open the doors to other non allegorical or non moral readings of a works movement and meaning. For me, my reading of one night, hot springs and Curtain were so intense that they revealed alternative meanings. That is to say instead of seeing moral optics in these stories, I saw cultural distinctions and educational intervention respectively. I like to bring attention to art like this, because getting ourselves out of the habit of seeing art in terms of linear manifestos or propaganda we support is really important to avoiding an attitude of moral puritarianism that would rather lock up fiction that dares to be challenging. Consuming the challenging art first hand is a great way to avoid becoming book burners ourselves.
Less polemically, I'll conclude and say that everything that this work touches on are thing that I absolutely feel. I often worry I might never see the people I love in person again, that higher economic powers are going to keep us permanently disembodied from contact. This story shows to me that that's absolutely a real thing to worry about on the one hand, that the tragedy is you might be right. However, trying to change it through fighting for physical connection is a divine form of love, that being able to maintain love itself through the digital is itself a holy act. The soft and humorous way it went about it is exactly what I needed ;-;