There was a large part of this novel I absolutely despised, yet it would be unfair to advise against reading it mainly because I was not probably the target audience for its contents. To tell in short, Fata Morgana answer the need of feeling constantly depressed, reminded that life is a never-ending stream of suffering, much like reading Wuthering Heights or Judas the Obscure but with a more mundane, easily accessible, japanese-ish anime-ish narrative.
At its core, The House in Fata Morgana is a bizarre yet somehow familiar story made of mystery and supernatural tropes that are neither foreign to Japanese and Western literature, as it really does read as a – inferior – gothic novel from the 19th century with a more modern take on character interactions and fantasy. It directly borrows from medieval folklore and superstition and it mixes it with mildly historical contents and a long tale of guilt, revenge and forgiveness.
My main issue with Fata Morgana was not with its overall plot though, rather with the weird delivery of its content. There are many ways to describe how the narrative works in this novel, in Japanese it is called ‘utsuge’, which directly translates in the English language as misery lit, or misery porn. What this means is that most of the time the reader will be presented with an endless stream of depressing and graphically brutal content, often missing any sort of convincing delivery behind the suffering of the characters. Sure, there are many movies where the point is to witness the desperation and death of a character, notoriously there are the Passions of Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, but we are comparing relatively short movies to a 30 hours long novel, where the satisfactory reward will not show up until the last three to four hours of gameplay.
In Fata Morgana you are asked to root for characters that apparently do not know what happiness is in life, or rather, there are happy times in their life but they are mostly treated as a justification to the pain and misery, as footnotes necessary to understand the story. The most striking example of this might be a character who supposedly lived just three years of their life as the most beautiful and blissful, and whilst these three years are often mentioned during the long depictions of grief the character has to go through, they are almost never actually showed or described, and if so in very brief detail.
Then there are random complaints about the characters themselves. I appreciated their depiction as flawed and complex human beings, but this depiction was ultimately biased: there are maybe two characters you have to actively appreciate, as they are pristine, faultless, immaculate, Mary Suecough I mean, fundamentally constantly good people. They are also the worst written characters as most of their traits and dialogues can be summed up with dumb anime tropes and jokes that may seem reasonable to read in a YA novel. Then there are all the others characters, a nice mixture of either sympathetic of plainly despicable human beings that might have worked as a believable depiction of humanity worst sins, but ultimately failed to be so. These characters are presented in black and white, firstly you have to know about them being horrible people and then the story will reveal that they do have – questionable – motivations to act as they did. This biased presentation prevents the readers from forming their own opinion on the story and the characters, it leads your judgment because the story is more interested to deliver shock and cheap twists to the readers than actual human portraits.
Moreover, thorough the latter half of the game, there is a huge chunk of the same events being told from different perspectives but with very little added to the overall narrative, giving unnecessary padding to a novel already long as it is. Not to mention how most of the story takes place during different historical periods yet all the characters seem to talk using the same pattern, particularly during a section in the Middle Age where the dialogues are made of unbearable anachronistic onomatopoeias. So much for the immersion, I guess.
All in all the story was compelling and interesting, but the structure could have been done much better.
Technically, Fata Morgana was nothing short of sublime. While the art may have had its ups and downs with some weird looking facial expressions and overly complex drawings, the eerie atmosphere given from the sound design, the photographical backgrounds and the beautiful musical score all helped in providing the mansion a magnificent aura of both magic and obscurity.
If one were to wish buying Fata Morgana, my only advise would be to carefully consider how much unending, and many times superfluous and pointless, suffering could be endured before reaching the payoff, otherwise on a similar note I’d recommend reading Umineko (much, much longer to read and greater in scope) or Cross Channel.
At its core, The House in Fata Morgana is a bizarre yet somehow familiar story made of mystery and supernatural tropes that are neither foreign to Japanese and Western literature, as it really does read as a – inferior – gothic novel from the 19th century with a more modern take on character interactions and fantasy. It directly borrows from medieval folklore and superstition and it mixes it with mildly historical contents and a long tale of guilt, revenge and forgiveness.
My main issue with Fata Morgana was not with its overall plot though, rather with the weird delivery of its content. There are many ways to describe how the narrative works in this novel, in Japanese it is called ‘utsuge’, which directly translates in the English language as misery lit, or misery porn. What this means is that most of the time the reader will be presented with an endless stream of depressing and graphically brutal content, often missing any sort of convincing delivery behind the suffering of the characters. Sure, there are many movies where the point is to witness the desperation and death of a character, notoriously there are the Passions of Jesus Christ and Joan of Arc, but we are comparing relatively short movies to a 30 hours long novel, where the satisfactory reward will not show up until the last three to four hours of gameplay.
In Fata Morgana you are asked to root for characters that apparently do not know what happiness is in life, or rather, there are happy times in their life but they are mostly treated as a justification to the pain and misery, as footnotes necessary to understand the story. The most striking example of this might be a character who supposedly lived just three years of their life as the most beautiful and blissful, and whilst these three years are often mentioned during the long depictions of grief the character has to go through, they are almost never actually showed or described, and if so in very brief detail.
Then there are random complaints about the characters themselves. I appreciated their depiction as flawed and complex human beings, but this depiction was ultimately biased: there are maybe two characters you have to actively appreciate, as they are pristine, faultless, immaculate, Mary Suecough I mean, fundamentally constantly good people. They are also the worst written characters as most of their traits and dialogues can be summed up with dumb anime tropes and jokes that may seem reasonable to read in a YA novel. Then there are all the others characters, a nice mixture of either sympathetic of plainly despicable human beings that might have worked as a believable depiction of humanity worst sins, but ultimately failed to be so. These characters are presented in black and white, firstly you have to know about them being horrible people and then the story will reveal that they do have – questionable – motivations to act as they did. This biased presentation prevents the readers from forming their own opinion on the story and the characters, it leads your judgment because the story is more interested to deliver shock and cheap twists to the readers than actual human portraits.
Moreover, thorough the latter half of the game, there is a huge chunk of the same events being told from different perspectives but with very little added to the overall narrative, giving unnecessary padding to a novel already long as it is. Not to mention how most of the story takes place during different historical periods yet all the characters seem to talk using the same pattern, particularly during a section in the Middle Age where the dialogues are made of unbearable anachronistic onomatopoeias. So much for the immersion, I guess.
All in all the story was compelling and interesting, but the structure could have been done much better.
Technically, Fata Morgana was nothing short of sublime. While the art may have had its ups and downs with some weird looking facial expressions and overly complex drawings, the eerie atmosphere given from the sound design, the photographical backgrounds and the beautiful musical score all helped in providing the mansion a magnificent aura of both magic and obscurity.
If one were to wish buying Fata Morgana, my only advise would be to carefully consider how much unending, and many times superfluous and pointless, suffering could be endured before reaching the payoff, otherwise on a similar note I’d recommend reading Umineko (much, much longer to read and greater in scope) or Cross Channel.
2 Comments
luiz mito acima
maradona
3 years ago