/jp/ - Otaku Culture

umi milf monday

>>39125435
I love fucking older women

does this count as #tea?

>>37432512
>posting
No. Communication is by no means escapism.

>>37025915
I haven't finished it yet, so I can't really comment too much, but I'll try. I was looking for something Gothic to read, which can be dicey because it's a very prostituted genre, so to speak; but Baudelaire and Wilde loved Melmoth the Wanderer, and the former is maybe my favourite poet, so that was a strong endorsement. It is something like an English Faust in its immediate themes, yes, but it's very much a *novel* rather than a dramatic work, which is probably the main point I'd emphasise.

One of the things I like about Gothic art (and which is neglected in its tackier iterations) is how pioneering it was in its psychological dimension and how it used the supernatural as a means of depicting mental phenomena. I think Baudelaire appreciated this in Poe as well, another writer who blended the febrile and dreamlike inward sensations with horror and mystery. At any rate, what has immediately struck me about Melmoth is that it takes that same approach—baroque, circuitous, psychological prose, horror and mystery, spiritual/religious overheatedness—and marries it to a nested structure of stories within stories, as John Melmoth hears a series of tales from different people about a Faust-like figure who is apparently his ancestor. Despite obviously being a product of the 19th century in its prose style, the mix of intense inwardness and subjectivity with a patchwork structure makes it feel very modern; it's not a collection of tales like Chaucer or something, but a collage of experiences. At least, that's my impression so far.

To tie this into Umineko: an innovation of the VN that impressed me was how it went beyond just providing 'unreliable narrators' for the purposes of dramatic writing, and tied the subjectivity of the characters into its epistemological inquiry itself ('How do we know the truth when these limits exist?' etc.). I reread And Then There Were None before Umineko because I heard it was referenced during the VN, and what I noticed in comparison was that Christie's prose was far more terse and plainspoken—it's clearly a mystery first (in the sense of a puzzle) and a novel second. On the other hand, Umineko almost seems to want to marry mystery to a psychological novel in which no position of objectivity can be discerned. It's funny how the idea of the European manor is romanticised in Umineko because it's basically absent in Christie: the manor is barely described, while Ryuukishi constantly goes over the sensory pleasures of absinthe, expensive blends black tea, rose gardens, etc. That approach of persistent arbitrary detail and attention paid to the vacillating mental state of characters is part of what makes Umineko a kind of self-demonstrating thesis for its central assertions regarding the necessity of the 'single element' of love to know the truth. The question of subjectivity and the limits of induction are much more the focus in Umineko than in Melmoth, of course, but the Gothic and Faustian elements combined with the impression of psychological realism and narrative's nesting structure, made me draw the comparison.

>>36781240
Not him, but
>Umineko was a very "novel" in the sense that it brought in different elements from several genres and places to create a very interesting game. However, I would say that execution of thematic elements/characterization trumps everything else and that is where umineko failed
I completely disagree with this. That anon emphasised the 'game' aspect of Umineko, but personally, it's the characters and thematic development. of Umineko that I found so compelling. What makes it so effective isn't merely that it's a game, but that it becomes a kind of test for the reader largely because of how R07 situates his character psychologically. I made a post about Eva a few threads ago >>36615283 which is a great example of this in microcosm. He's a divergent, digressive writer rather than a linear, convergent one, and this makes his characters full of arbitrary tangential detail that gives them a sense of social and psychological 'embeddedness', for a lack of a better word. They're mutable psychologies, and R07 presents them at their worst and at their best, and then asks Ange/the reader to draw their own judgement. What makes it unique isn't that it's a game, but that it's a Rorschach test. What you believe happened on the island, and what you believe about the characters, says something about *you*.

I like Fate, but it's been nearly ten years since I last touched it, so I'll use Tsukihime (which I prefer anyway) for a comparison. In Tsukihime, you have Kohaku and Hisui. Great characters. There are some very clever details about them: even the choice of the girl 'outside' (Hisui) vs 'at the window' (Kohaku) represents a psychological one between Shiki's freedom from the familial sin of Tohno, as in Hisui's ending, or being embedded in the house, as in Kohaku's. The way these two are drawn is extremely effective in a dramatic sense: their respective roles as 'good girl' and 'scapegoat' is a familiar abuse situation, and all the details of the characters serve to illustrate those roles. Hisui is persistent, romantic, longing for escape; Kohaku is cunning, self-sacrificial, unable to escape. With the former, Kohaku's plan succeeds and Shiki escapes. With the latter, it fails, and he's entrenched. It's very good.

However, to compare, I'd like to talk about Rosa, one of the most well-drawn characters in Umineko. There are two moments I love about Rosa that occur to me as actually superfluous: when Rosa rants at witch Maria in the meta during EP4, and when Rosa confesses to Kanon in EP6. The level of detail in the former—Rosa talking about wanting to drink like a young woman, covering herself with makeup in the morning, looking at her daughter on Parents' Day with spite—is so specific, so beautifully mundane, that I can imagine R07 heard it in social work. The latter, when Rosa explains that she's always felt like a ghost in her own life, living without a self, is heartbreaking, and along with her tendency to split Maria white/black, suggests she has some borderline qualities. I've heard people say that Umineko felt more like a regular novel than most VNs, and this is probably why. Novels (as opposed to a more dramatic story such as in the prose narratives that used to be called romances) focus on the mundane and arbitrary, the little digressions of thought and ephemeral feelings. I didn't need to know that Rosa felt like a ghost, but the only thing that comes close to that with Kohaku is when she talks about being unable to love around the time of the h-scene, and rather than a real person making an off-the-cuff confession to a stranger like Kanon, Kohaku's self-description serves more of a dramatic role, as the lover of the protagonist and also one planning on betraying him.

Re: theme, I read Subahibi a few months before Umineko, and was a little disappointed how its philosophical themes ended up amounting to an existentialist/subjectivist argument with some world-soul implications, and the assertion that the world is 'empty', without inherent qualities. It also develops theme linearly, only revealing its full 'hand' at the very end, which I think is a mistake with such thematic material. Umineko makes a positive claim in a monologue in EP2 that love is the single element of the world, and much of the story is dedicated to variations and developments on that theme. I am more sympathetic in general to philosophical idealism than to existentialism, but even so, it wasn't like e.g. Kanon or Clannad where the sense that ideas or mental phenomena precede existence were implicit or only arise in the endings; the metaphysical assertion was given right at the start, and then applied to a range of epistemic issues, from truth and knowledge in general, to magic and imagination, to how to know if your partner loves you when the blue truth (i.e. inductive reasoning) falls short, as with Erika. I don't think I've seen a VN develop a thematic motto like 'Without love, it cannot be seen' as well as Umineko did.

>>33122742
Ehhh it's probably Natsuhi that killed everyone.
really felt bad for kanon he should have married jessica

[ ] Rosa
[ ] Kyrie
[ ] Natsuhi
[ ] Eva

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