This review contains spoilers
finished and thought abt it and i dont think it was worth it. i have to admit even tho i wanted to try this, stories centered around "what doth life" existential shit (you can tell me im missing the point of wittgenstein to call his work that but you know what im saying) arent my thing, so maybe this shouldnt be too surprising. but also feel like jabberwocky onwards is just not interesting at all. kind of hate the sol and not vibing w it makes the whole message abt finding happiness in fiction n fantasy fall flat for me. i expected otaku horny/in-jokes and siscon going in, but not to the extent that it practically felt like all youd be getting for comedy by that point (along w the exhausting homophobia). and the incest quasi or otherwise just being so insistently thematically positioned as "ideal" is way too rancid for me to want to pull a kinder interpretation on out of my ass, or to compartmentalize as eroge bs. on god would trudge thru however many more rape scenes if it meant hasaki disappeared from the story.
mixed feelings on end sky ii. i respect it as an assertion that the story is artificial, and how it makes it so that analysis of everything in subahibi has to grapple with that artificiality. like how that eventually leads the player to outwardly build a matroyshka doll of sense-subject, going from tomo->yuki->ayana to arrive at the outermost(?) metanarrative shell on their own, as close as it can be done without spelling it out--felt like what kept sca-ji from replacing ayana w himself is just the unspoken rule that inserting yourself directly is lame. but the ending being intentionally divorced from the story's drama just makes it clear that this lacks something for me to get attached to. i can appreciate parts of subahibi as a thought experiment with some honestly poetic diary-ish bits here and there, but its hardly got anything special going on in the character department, which is kind of what i wanted most. IMOI might be the best chapter despite my gripes for showing the most potential for this, but now it feels like it doesnt mean much at the end. idk. its all open to interpretation sure but the idea is to be happy living in a fiction, and this one doesnt bring that out of me.
mixed feelings on end sky ii. i respect it as an assertion that the story is artificial, and how it makes it so that analysis of everything in subahibi has to grapple with that artificiality. like how that eventually leads the player to outwardly build a matroyshka doll of sense-subject, going from tomo->yuki->ayana to arrive at the outermost(?) metanarrative shell on their own, as close as it can be done without spelling it out--felt like what kept sca-ji from replacing ayana w himself is just the unspoken rule that inserting yourself directly is lame. but the ending being intentionally divorced from the story's drama just makes it clear that this lacks something for me to get attached to. i can appreciate parts of subahibi as a thought experiment with some honestly poetic diary-ish bits here and there, but its hardly got anything special going on in the character department, which is kind of what i wanted most. IMOI might be the best chapter despite my gripes for showing the most potential for this, but now it feels like it doesnt mean much at the end. idk. its all open to interpretation sure but the idea is to be happy living in a fiction, and this one doesnt bring that out of me.
5 Comments
actually so late on this its like comical but I found some focus to write up a reply; put it in a pastebin to save the activity feed but to be brief the phrase ‘matroyshka doll of sense-subject’ really captures something I felt about this ending for a long time and helped me put my view on this ending in a coherent way, and your displeasure w/r/t to the drama & otaku bullshit is too true and also kind of why the text is pretty limited i feel. regardless hope the attending months since you wrote this have been at least ok, thanks for indulging on me this 🤝 🤝
@simondedalus i'm comically late to respond to this myself (and made alot of it about etherane) so apologies u_u but i really do appreciate what you've had to say abt this!! i do think abt the game sometimes despite how frustrated i am w it n you've helped guide some thoughts ive been having. i also respect that it doesn't aim to tie everything up neatly and knows (at least some) of its contradictions are striking enough left alone to invite your own ideas on them. and im not hard enough into wittgensteins stuff myself to speak that well on it maybe, but i do like that seeing him as a philosopher is kind of in line w how the scaji takes the stuff on language he's concerned with as personally existentially meaningful, along w the connection to cyrano de bergerac n speaking w courage. i still think it sabotages itself too much n is too satisfied with itself after all that to get too much out of it, but i do get that most other works don't have that panache so to speak, to take a step back from deferring to some authority to "properly" read the text, and to have faith in itself w/o fear of pretension or misread or anything like that. esp in games where its kind of a problem of lack of confidence n general intelligence tbh
as for etherane's games being similar, kkkkkind of? its discussion of hermeunetics takes a different tack n is not as broad, n i think their work leans a littleee more towards the "voice of god" side of the spectrum you bring up than subahibi, hello charlotte and (to a lesser extent) tomorrow wont come don't deny you backstory in the interest of fleshing out what'd be their ayana equivalent, for example. BUT i think it doesnt feel overly expository or patronizing, bc ane complicates the relationship btwn theirself and their work w/o being distantly mysterious, and that winds up inviting scrutiny n interrogation. ultimately feels like part of an implicit understanding that you are playing tug of war with an author--one with insecurities about what they share with their specific audiences--for what to take from the stories they tell; there's no serious insistence on how to interpret it but ane, partly to sharpen those interpretations against someone/something, won't let the author be killed off as easily as scaji would comparatively probably like to allow for you. its different from subahibi leaving the ball more stoicly in the audience's court, basically (besides the h-scenes n shit lol, the bratty cringe etherane does sometimes is its filter but its also way less extreme. and is better justified narratively 😤). also there's arguably some wittgenstein in ane's work too but it's MUCH less centered on him and doesn't directly quote his work as much, with one exception in twc.
as for etherane's games being similar, kkkkkind of? its discussion of hermeunetics takes a different tack n is not as broad, n i think their work leans a littleee more towards the "voice of god" side of the spectrum you bring up than subahibi, hello charlotte and (to a lesser extent) tomorrow wont come don't deny you backstory in the interest of fleshing out what'd be their ayana equivalent, for example. BUT i think it doesnt feel overly expository or patronizing, bc ane complicates the relationship btwn theirself and their work w/o being distantly mysterious, and that winds up inviting scrutiny n interrogation. ultimately feels like part of an implicit understanding that you are playing tug of war with an author--one with insecurities about what they share with their specific audiences--for what to take from the stories they tell; there's no serious insistence on how to interpret it but ane, partly to sharpen those interpretations against someone/something, won't let the author be killed off as easily as scaji would comparatively probably like to allow for you. its different from subahibi leaving the ball more stoicly in the audience's court, basically (besides the h-scenes n shit lol, the bratty cringe etherane does sometimes is its filter but its also way less extreme. and is better justified narratively 😤). also there's arguably some wittgenstein in ane's work too but it's MUCH less centered on him and doesn't directly quote his work as much, with one exception in twc.
no apologies needed twizz cool to see ur still jumping. glad to hear my spiel guided your thinking even a little bit, very kind of you to say. that tug of war ur talking about in etherane sounds like an intriguing dynamic--i've actually thought way more about crowds and "community" than I have interpretation these days and ane's games seem to get up in that mode quite nicely. specifically this part about "tug of war with an author--one with insecurities about what they share with their specific audiences" is particularly pertinent to me, because its an open admission of doubt about antagonism and distrust being papered over when maybe they shouldn't be. its more intuition than research speaking that point but I always think here about flannery o'connor's insistence on maintaining politeness&empathy even in the Jim Crow south, and i'm always like "hold on bitch, i dont think either emotion is very useful there 😂". but the emphasize on politeness&empathy is somethin we, constitutive, have picked up on, so whenever there's a work that calls that emphasis into question im geeked. its not something games usually pick up on either, off the top of my head only like doom slaughtermaps really think about this in a novel way. so i'm similarly interested in this dynamic in ane's work to see how that antagonism and distrust a) surfaces and b) is hedged for and against. but i really should hop to it before i speak on it further, this shit could all be tangential to what they're actually doing LMAO.
i think you put it a bit better in suggesting it tackles consensus than just dealing w interpretation on an individual basis honestly, but even after playing these games its tough to try to find the words to get at the core of what theyre doing, esp on the comments for a review of a diff game. but i hope it does something for you, if you get around it!
ludzu
2 years ago