Thoughts on the Conclusion of Umineko When They Cry

Video Version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQzffZTFy5c

Text Version:

Umineko is interesting for being a story about how some people experience trauma so great it renders them irreparably broken. An “ideal” way of life becomes an impossibility, and in order to survive, traumatised and broken people will resort to “less-than-ideal” environments, both mentally and physically. Rationalists – those terribly complacent bunch – hate Umineko, declaring, “How dare Ange not choose truth.” They cannot fathom the idea some people’s souls may be too fundamentally shattered to live “rationally.”

And really, even if the story was horrible, Umineko would already be a masterpiece for the atmosphere and OST alone. This game has hundreds upon hundreds of tracks, some of them only playing once, and every last one of them is perfect – genuine insanity. zts is a miracle of the universe.

…(Sigh) Still mad lastendconductor only plays once ever, for such a short time it doesn’t even have the ability to get to the best part.

 

(I have very complicated thoughts on Umineko, much more so than on its prequel, Higurashi. I plan on returning to Umineko in the future with a more expansive and deeper look into its narrative and philosophy. However, first I will have to re-read it, and that will probably be far off in the future, once I can read it in its original, untranslated form.)

Recommending Higurashi When They Cry

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x1hIOj5T5g

When people recommend the Sound Novel Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, or Higurashi When They Cry, they tend to give a general outline of the story alongside its thematic crux. However, due to Higurashi’s nature as a mystery, this attempt is often fumbled and, arguably, a fundamentally wrong approach to the matter—Higurashi is a story best experienced as blind as possible. Rather, I believe what draws people to Higurashi is not the immediate plot beats, but the atmosphere. Judging its aesthetic is what determines whether Higurashi is right for you.

In a valley surrounded by mountains lies Hinamizawa. Populated by a tight-knit community of 1200 people, its isolated, otherworldly proportions are accentuated by the story taking place in the bygone times of 1983—a world before it became digitally connected. In other words, once you lose yourself within this remote countryside, it’s hard to find an exit. …The incessant crying of early summer’s Higurashi drowns you in a whirlpool of noise, a throbbing in your ears increasing in volume until it threatens to burst your head apart.

One of Higurashi’s most impressive feats is managing to bring Hinamizawa alive, almost literally. Hinamizawa feels like an actual person, a character within the story, with her own impenetrable goals and unthinkable motivations. This feeling is underlined by the prose, which utilises numerous analogies rooted in various aspects of Hinamizawa’s countryside flora and fauna, untouched by the civilisation of the booming cityscapes—the girl’s cheerful greeting is FRESH AS THE MORNING AIR ITSELF. Characters’ actions do not stand by themselves: A person screams, and terrified birds take flight from the nearest tree—person or not, Hinamizawa is an active participant in the story. It’s only natural, as the narrative takes turns into the mystic, that Hinamizawa morphs alongside: A dead Higurashi on the road, foretelling the unimaginable fate at the end of your journey. What caused this tragedy? How could it have been prevented? Only the Higurashi know.

This tailored writing style extends to the protagonist himself, a 14-year-old boy named Keiichi who moved into the village two months prior. The story does an excellent job at bringing you into his head, in large part thanks to the prose. Ryukishi07 intentionally comprises his own vocabulary and eloquence, not out of incompetence, but because it befits this ruffian city boy who struggles to express his own emotions, never having learned how to do so. To solve the mystery, the reader is forced to work together with Keiichi’s narrowminded and immature perspective. It really makes you FEEL like you’re Keiichi, if you will.

In this fashion of deciphering the mystery, Higurashi, too, ludonarratively benefits from being a Visual Novel: At the end of each chapter, short “tips” are unlocked which expand on various details of the story, ranging from the reason everyone wears different school uniforms to police reports. The crucial point is that the game doesn’t require you to read through them in order to progress with the story. As Avinovel Workshop successfully argued, by being separated into a folder different from the main narrative, it implicitly signals their qualification of “case files to be investigated”—they spurn your brain into a detective mindset which may have wavered from the hours of moé Slice of Life scenes. By then being technically unnecessary in order to complete the game, yet you, the reader, nevertheless going out of your way to read them, you become an active participant in the investigation. Your own actions reveal more clues to help solve the mystery.

Unfortunately, I’d be remiss not to discuss the aforementioned moé Slice of Life scenes—“unfortunately,” not because I dread their existence, but because of how overtalked they are. Still, I must point out the fact that this is a story, above all, about the children living within Hinamizawa. At the end of Higurashi, you’ve become intimately familiar with them to the point you can tell what each character is thinking within each and every scene, even if the story may never directly tell those thoughts to you. To be interested in the world of Hinamizawa is to be interested in its children. Hinamizawa is a wonderful place because of the people who inhabit her.

Ode to Effort

I'm tired of all these people smugly going, "Muh, knowing the amount of effort put into a work doesn't change its quality, it's only the output that matters." Screw that, the effort itself can be a part of the art, it adds a completely new layer of appreciation and awe toward the artwork, and to derive art of that form of enjoyment feels debasing.

From the artist's perspective, too. "You could have accomplished the same thing with less effort" doesn't automatically make your effort meaningless. The incredible stress and pain you exposed your mind to in order to reach your goal, the willpower needed to do so, that's something to be proud of. Don't belittle yourself at the face of America who only values efficiency and quantity, dammit.

...Though I can relate to the all-too late realisation that what you've been working on could have been done much easier, and the subsequent frustration. Efficiency has its place.

Thoughts on Fujimoto’s illustrative style and how it adds to Fire Punch

Likely the most interesting thing about Fujimoto‘s illustrations is their attempt to mimic film. Jokes are written as would be in a film script, the characters are moving supported by an inaudible soundtrack, and “Goodbye, Eri” goes so far as to base the entire manga on four evenly sized rectangular pages per page, like a storyboard. It’s enticing to write this style of manga off as nothing than a worse version of the medium it imitates—simply snippets of a film, no sound, no motion. As a friend of mine (likely disparagingly) summarised it: “His focus seems to be emulating films”

 

 

However, I don’t think that tells the whole story. Fujimoto is a huge film nerd who I bet constantly fantasises about seeing his work on the big screen, but that doesn’t mean he’s merely writing storyboards for the sake of a future adaptation. He loves film to the point his first serialised manga Fire Punch is fundamentally based on the theme of acting and cinema.

 

 

And just that is the catch.

Fire Punch is a deconstruction of acting, of adjusting your own values—at least on the surface—for the sake of the world which surrounds you, your whole life culminating on a grand stage; in short, it functions as a fundamental outline of the nature of film, or rather, what film means to people.

 

 

Through Fujimoto’s illustrative style, it then turns these thematic layers beyond the narrative itself, up to a meta-level. The characters become LITERALLY a part of the cinematic form of storytelling, metaphysically bending into shapes which befit the cinematic panelling. An examination of film not only through the immediate plot beats, but extending to the drawings themselves.

The next argument to be made from the disparagers, then, is that this doesn’t change the fact his works are mere imitations of film, and the meta-level of “being in a film” would have simply worked better if the characters really had been, well, in a film. Again, I don’t see it that way. By deliberately being a medium different from film, yet nevertheless being a commentary on film, it becomes MORE effective in its commentary than it would have been had it been another film in the first place. By being outside of film, Fire Punch directly forces us to confront its nature of imitating film.

When Agni has a clichéd superhero training montage that feels adapted straight from a movie, since we’ve all seen such scenes a thousand times, we are made to mentally include an imaginary soundtrack within the scene, which then abruptly cuts off when the scene comedically jumps to Togata making dick jokes, back to playing again when we get kicked back into the montage. We are unknowingly forced into creating an image of an imaginary film within our head, thereby FORCING us, the readers, to directly become a part of the creation of film ourselves. We are not only seeing Fire Punch examine film—by working our brain to fill in the blank spaces, we are examining film ourselves.

 

 

End of analysis, now to a tangent: It makes you wonder. Since all of Fujimoto’s works are drawn in this style, what about his works that aren’t centered around commentating film? Chainsaw Man, Goodbye, Eri, and Fire Punch are all supplemented through their cinematic form of panelling, but what about, for instance, Look Back, which recently received a film adaptation? Personally I believe the film is better than the manga – animation and most of all the incredible soundtrack give it a lustre which the manga lacks. Still, does that mean all his works, except those three mentioned earlier, will simply become irrelevant in the face of their superior adaptations? Honestly, I’m not sure. I can’t decide yet. Likely I will only be able to judge once the next adaptation of Fujimoto’s non-film-centric works rolls around. I need to see it directly, not just imagine it, to make proper judgement.

Fin.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwMiiOJahAo

Thought piece on SeaBed

SeaBed is interesting in part because it presents opaquely fluctuating motions that accelerate until reaching an omitted climax, then focusing on the after-effects of that omitted climax, and back to another build-up. It reaffirms its ideas of disjointed intangible ephemeral memory-dreams, hardly able to clasp your hands on a soap-bubble holding the weight of a life; a life collapsing from unconscious murmurs and ruminations, deciding on a path before even realizing; a mind wandering deep beneath the sea, strayed into caverns and obscure corners by waves, uncontrollable forces.

On a technical point: The lack of dialogue tags supplements the theme of dreams and memories; vague, half-forgotten and murky things, mingling and entangling with the past, future, and present, unsure of what is what, in an ever-changing kaleidoscopic shape. Don’t worry too much about “who exactly is saying what.” If it’s not stated then it’s something that is not necessary.