Pivotal.
Funny that this has "pistol" in the title when it erupts with the force and bombast of a shotgun by your ear, explosive and unyielding, leaving you reeling as you try to reorient yourself. Constantly moving, never wasting a single breath, ensuring you can't look away. Tragedy as banality as comedy. Love is rainbow.
Heisei Pistol Show is a work that I have both no words and far too many words for. Rarely can anything — anything — strike a balance between sorrow and joy this effortlessly, bouncing the audience back and forth between having their hearts rended and making them double over with laughter. Slaughtering your way through Heart’s former assassin colleagues and then having your pistol say “I’m Pistol” in the Microsoft Sam voice every time it talks is the sort of thing that doesn’t sound like it works when it’s described to you, but flows perfectly when it’s actually experienced. I’m tempted to say that it’s all over the place tonally, but it really isn’t; nothing ever drifts too far from the through-line, with these shifts being core to the holistic affair.
Most notable about Heisei Pistol Show, however, is how it handles queer characters in a way that’s nothing short of masterful. Heart is a wonderful, awful character, both a victim of circumstance and someone who causes his own problems. Heart suffers because he is gay, but Heart also suffers and he is gay. Heart is abused by his father not because he is gay, but because he reminds his father of his mother. Heart is exiled by his family not because he is gay, but because he isn’t religious. Heart loses his friends not because he is gay, but because he refuses to accept their platonic love for him. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and thus limits himself exclusively to his clients that he serves as a rentboy, none of whom love him back. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and he’s lived his entire life in a society that hates him and his kind, and makes every attempt to hide what healthy gay relationships look like. Heart suffers because he is gay. Heart suffers and he is gay.
I’ll echo a common sentiment I see shared about this game and say that it makes so many pieces of queer media look toothless by comparison, especially in more recent years. Many of these works are made by and for queer creatives, but so many fail to strike balance. Either queer trauma is used, is weaponized, is swung like a baseball bat to cripple and wound any gays in the audience so the straights can feel like they did something by "experiencing something hard", or queer trauma is ignored wholesale in order to keep up the "comfy vibes". I played The Big Con earlier this year and dropped it because it was billed me to as a solid piece of queer media and instead existed as this soft, mealy blob-thing seemingly designed for people who say “be gay do crimes” and “FALGSC” online and then get sweaty palms when they think about shoplifting a pack of gum. Nobody in that world had ever had a single negative thought, ever, about queer people in 90’s North America. I don’t mean to turn this into a rant where I’m just shitting on a different work, but it really illustrates how many worlds of finesse apart a creator like Parun was long before it was even remotely popular to be tackling subject matter anywhere even approaching this in video games.
I wouldn't dare erase the experiences of these other creators by suggesting that these aren’t accurate to lived experiences — there are enough dipshits out there doing that already — but it always leaves me a little raw to never see me on the screen. Characters who aren't living their saccharine, gumdrop lives where everything in their world is completely fine and without conflict, but neither are they defined exclusively by external traumas and hatred, never possessing the agency to do anything besides be abused. Where are the characters who have lived complex lives? Who have suffered, but have found joy? Even if it ends in tragedy, where are those who have found catharsis in themselves and their loved ones in the quiet moments? Are they all locked away in Japanese RPG Maker games from 2008?
The messaging can be a bit clumsy in terms of what it's trying to get across, even after some scrutiny; Tokimeki's song calls out to "Indians" in feather hats who all look like T. Hawk, "Slums" made up entirely of dark-skinned characters, and Koreans, whose history of being discriminated against in Japan has been well-documented for decades. I'm still uncertain if this is simply a bit of off-color humor inserted into the bit or if it's a genuine and well-intentioned call of solidarity from one oppressed group to a few others; knowing what I know about Parun and his other work, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. I'd like that to be the case, too.
After I beat the game, I saw Parun say that he liked reading fan theories of his work, and that he hoped the players of Heisei Pistol Show would come up with some for him to check out. I’m at least a decade and a half late to the party, but allow me to try, regardless.
The game is Heart's dying dream; a fantasy land conjured up in his final moments, flashing through vignettes of his life. Heart, in reality, is the rentboy Matsumoto tells his friend about, who contracted herpes, killed his friend, and committed suicide by cop. The dying dream itself is hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense. It's a simulacrum of reality that Heart escapes to — or perhaps is forced to escape to, his hallucinations resulting from his herpes meningoencephalitis — wherein he relives a version of his life as a musical, as kabuki theater. His friends are there, and he metaphorically guns them down, abandoning them in reality. His unrequited lover is there, and Heart actually guns him down, just as he does in reality. At the end of the dream, Heart is shot, told he's never known love because he was so desperate for it that he would latch onto anyone and everyone, and then he's out of memories. He imagines himself at the concert from his childhood once more, now the starring princess he always dreamt he would become, and he quietly passes away with a smile on his face.
At least, that’s the way I saw it all play out. I thought it was a remarkably straight-forward story once all of the ending reveals wrapped up, but then I got to a dev room where Parum’s authorial mouthpiece character told me that he thought I was dull if I believed that I had it all figured out after a single playthrough. He then gave me a list of Mulholland Drive-tier questions that I needed to answer if I wanted to have a real shot at deciphering everything that happened. It ruled. I wonder if I’m close to what he intended.
There's a bitter irony that the one person who might know all of this for certain is the one person that we can no longer ask.
Funny that this has "pistol" in the title when it erupts with the force and bombast of a shotgun by your ear, explosive and unyielding, leaving you reeling as you try to reorient yourself. Constantly moving, never wasting a single breath, ensuring you can't look away. Tragedy as banality as comedy. Love is rainbow.
Heisei Pistol Show is a work that I have both no words and far too many words for. Rarely can anything — anything — strike a balance between sorrow and joy this effortlessly, bouncing the audience back and forth between having their hearts rended and making them double over with laughter. Slaughtering your way through Heart’s former assassin colleagues and then having your pistol say “I’m Pistol” in the Microsoft Sam voice every time it talks is the sort of thing that doesn’t sound like it works when it’s described to you, but flows perfectly when it’s actually experienced. I’m tempted to say that it’s all over the place tonally, but it really isn’t; nothing ever drifts too far from the through-line, with these shifts being core to the holistic affair.
Most notable about Heisei Pistol Show, however, is how it handles queer characters in a way that’s nothing short of masterful. Heart is a wonderful, awful character, both a victim of circumstance and someone who causes his own problems. Heart suffers because he is gay, but Heart also suffers and he is gay. Heart is abused by his father not because he is gay, but because he reminds his father of his mother. Heart is exiled by his family not because he is gay, but because he isn’t religious. Heart loses his friends not because he is gay, but because he refuses to accept their platonic love for him. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and thus limits himself exclusively to his clients that he serves as a rentboy, none of whom love him back. Heart can’t find love because he is gay and he’s lived his entire life in a society that hates him and his kind, and makes every attempt to hide what healthy gay relationships look like. Heart suffers because he is gay. Heart suffers and he is gay.
I’ll echo a common sentiment I see shared about this game and say that it makes so many pieces of queer media look toothless by comparison, especially in more recent years. Many of these works are made by and for queer creatives, but so many fail to strike balance. Either queer trauma is used, is weaponized, is swung like a baseball bat to cripple and wound any gays in the audience so the straights can feel like they did something by "experiencing something hard", or queer trauma is ignored wholesale in order to keep up the "comfy vibes". I played The Big Con earlier this year and dropped it because it was billed me to as a solid piece of queer media and instead existed as this soft, mealy blob-thing seemingly designed for people who say “be gay do crimes” and “FALGSC” online and then get sweaty palms when they think about shoplifting a pack of gum. Nobody in that world had ever had a single negative thought, ever, about queer people in 90’s North America. I don’t mean to turn this into a rant where I’m just shitting on a different work, but it really illustrates how many worlds of finesse apart a creator like Parun was long before it was even remotely popular to be tackling subject matter anywhere even approaching this in video games.
I wouldn't dare erase the experiences of these other creators by suggesting that these aren’t accurate to lived experiences — there are enough dipshits out there doing that already — but it always leaves me a little raw to never see me on the screen. Characters who aren't living their saccharine, gumdrop lives where everything in their world is completely fine and without conflict, but neither are they defined exclusively by external traumas and hatred, never possessing the agency to do anything besides be abused. Where are the characters who have lived complex lives? Who have suffered, but have found joy? Even if it ends in tragedy, where are those who have found catharsis in themselves and their loved ones in the quiet moments? Are they all locked away in Japanese RPG Maker games from 2008?
The messaging can be a bit clumsy in terms of what it's trying to get across, even after some scrutiny; Tokimeki's song calls out to "Indians" in feather hats who all look like T. Hawk, "Slums" made up entirely of dark-skinned characters, and Koreans, whose history of being discriminated against in Japan has been well-documented for decades. I'm still uncertain if this is simply a bit of off-color humor inserted into the bit or if it's a genuine and well-intentioned call of solidarity from one oppressed group to a few others; knowing what I know about Parun and his other work, I'm inclined to believe it's the latter. I'd like that to be the case, too.
After I beat the game, I saw Parun say that he liked reading fan theories of his work, and that he hoped the players of Heisei Pistol Show would come up with some for him to check out. I’m at least a decade and a half late to the party, but allow me to try, regardless.
The game is Heart's dying dream; a fantasy land conjured up in his final moments, flashing through vignettes of his life. Heart, in reality, is the rentboy Matsumoto tells his friend about, who contracted herpes, killed his friend, and committed suicide by cop. The dying dream itself is hyperreal, in the Baudrillardian sense. It's a simulacrum of reality that Heart escapes to — or perhaps is forced to escape to, his hallucinations resulting from his herpes meningoencephalitis — wherein he relives a version of his life as a musical, as kabuki theater. His friends are there, and he metaphorically guns them down, abandoning them in reality. His unrequited lover is there, and Heart actually guns him down, just as he does in reality. At the end of the dream, Heart is shot, told he's never known love because he was so desperate for it that he would latch onto anyone and everyone, and then he's out of memories. He imagines himself at the concert from his childhood once more, now the starring princess he always dreamt he would become, and he quietly passes away with a smile on his face.
At least, that’s the way I saw it all play out. I thought it was a remarkably straight-forward story once all of the ending reveals wrapped up, but then I got to a dev room where Parum’s authorial mouthpiece character told me that he thought I was dull if I believed that I had it all figured out after a single playthrough. He then gave me a list of Mulholland Drive-tier questions that I needed to answer if I wanted to have a real shot at deciphering everything that happened. It ruled. I wonder if I’m close to what he intended.
There's a bitter irony that the one person who might know all of this for certain is the one person that we can no longer ask.
2 Comments
Phenomenal write up for a phenomenal game. Thank you for writing what I could never truly put into words.
DeemonAndGames
4 months ago