Rastagong's Secret Home

Looking Back on Two Years

Rastagong — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:45:00 +0100

Happy New Year, everyone!

This is probably going to be the most belated New Year/year-in-review post you’ll read this month; and to be frank, I was quite close to missing the end-of-January deadline as well…

It’s been far too long since I last wrote anything on this blog. I’ve maintained most pages here up-to-date, and I’ve improved the design here and there, but as for new articles, there hasn’t been much of anything at all.

What could urge me to finally dust off this place again? The shutdown of alternative social media platform Cohost late last year, for one.
Cohost was a beautiful, earnest attempt at doing social media differently, with some flaws alright, but losing it has nonetheless been painful for me.

In its wake, and while Twitter’s undead corpse keeps rotting inside out, there’s been a renewed push within alternative Internet communities to value the art of creating smaller, independent websites, outside of major platforms entirely.
It’s not an end-be-all to be sure¹, but it is a start to try and escape from the inferno of the modern Internet at our scale, all the while being a generally fun endeavour to boot.
Some of the artists, game devs, archivist and all-around media enthusiasts I follow (many of them being former Cohost users to begin with) have definitely taken up or resumed blogging on their own sites, when they did not already have a blog.

All this is to say that I felt it was time to dust off this blog with one big life update. This one turned out a bit introspective and not super happy, but I hope you’ll enjoy it all the same!

Be careful what you wish for

Where have I been all this time? I’ll get into it, but honestly, you’ve heard this story a million times before.

I’ve been largely overtaken by the new job (new position same workplace) I was about to start when I wrote my previous life update, at the end of summer 2022.
It hasn’t been easy.

I’ve had the immense privilege to discover the joys of understaffing and of unfeeling hierarchies in the public sector.

As we speak, Macron’s whims and antics —his refusal to admit electoral defeat or to face his widespread impopularity, the snap election he called this summer with disastrous results for all, and the enormous resulting instability— is still producing concrete ripple effects in my workplace, as in many other public institutions, making an already tense situation budget-wise even more unpredictable, and untainable long-term wise.

I’ve always known that an important thing about living with myself honestly would be to avoid trapping myself down dreary life paths where I’d be rewarded for efficiency but deeply unhappy at the core. You know the kind I’m speaking of.

I remember hearing about crunch in the video game industry as a teenager on Twitter and thinking this is so awful.
I remember reading about karoshi, albeit in the slightly orientialist bend the phenomenon was always described in back then, or about young London lawyers dying of a heart attack from clear overwork, and part of me, knowing my perfectionist streak, saw that and intuitely thought:
Oh… That could legitimately be me, I really have to be careful about not trapping myself within this kind of life by mistake just because this is something I could do.

So I’ve had a very meandering path, a lot of self-doubt; made choices which were not always the most lucrative or rational, but without too much overall regret.
In the end, I was able to learn a lot, to mostly study what I liked, and I did avoid myself trapping myself in this fatal way.

And in recent years, I thought, quite naïvely, that working in the public sector would shield me from part of of the violence from these inhuman environments.

It turned out as well as you can imagine.

A trap of one’s own design

As you may realise, what I hadn’t quite foreseen, is that burnout and overwork are just as common in the public sector!!
They just take a different shape than they do in other environments.

Where I work, it has to do with the trap of vocational awe, with the invisibilisation of “glue” work, and more prosaically, with chronic understaffing.
None of this is should be particularly surprising or novel; teachers, nurses, social workers around the world are much more familiar with the issue and in more dire ways than I’ll ever be.

I guess that quite naïvely, I did not expect it to find myself in a somewhat similar situation so easily, even though this general sense of exhaustion is pretty widespread nowadays.

It’s been better recently though, I don’t want to sound too grim either.

Stepping back from work a bit has helped a bit.
Some of the colleagues that I already mentioned in my previous post have become very dear friends of mine outside of work as well, and I feel thankful every day for having met their paths, and for being able to see them so easily during the week. A few colleagues from the new position are also close to me, and since we share the same experiences and gripes, I at least do not feel all alone in it all.

But maybe the most useful thing has been to recognise how much of this situation is, at least in part, a trap of my own design.

On Christmas Day, I finally watched Justine Triet’s Anatomie d’une chute (2023). Yes, a snowy, psychological homicide(?) trial was exactly my idea of a Christmas movie, why would you ask.

More seriously, I think every writer or artist should just watch it because it plays so well upon every creative person’s familiar anxiety of not being able to preserve time on their own terms to create.

At a late point in the trial, a crucial piece of evidence emerges as an audio recording of an argument, from just a day before the victim’s death. (I’ll refrain from major spoilers regarding the ending, but I will discuss in depth this particular turning point in the movie.)
The audio file starts being played out in the courtroom, and after the first few seconds, Triet treats us to the fully acted scene of the argument in a flashback; something which audience members in the courtroom can only imagine, but not see as we do.

The fight occurs between Sandra (Sandra Hüller), successful German-French translator and author, and her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis), the victim from the movie’s onset; a loving father, but in his own view, failed writer, who grapples with his guilt improductively.

In the scene, Samuel accuses Sandra of not taking her fair share of household chores, and in particular of lacking in her care-taking duties for their blind son, which strips him of crucial time to write. He believes things are “out of balance” between them.

But Sandra doesn’t see it that way.
While she doesn’t deny that each of them must do their fair share, something she asserts she does, she doesn’t think this is what Samuel’s grievances are about at all.

She knows Samuel is a writer, just like her.
And she knows, as Samuel should, that it is up to each writer to create for themselves an environment where creativity, and creative work are possible at all.

As for herself, she asserts, she can always makes time to write, by adjusting her whole life around that core; the need to write.

Getting deeper into the argument, she reminds him that it was his own choice to homeschool their son, to live in a remote moutain location, and to start an expensive home renovation—all things she had warned him about ahead of time: these were generous endeavours and beautiful projects, but all equally time-consuming, and they would steal more time away from his core creative aspirations.

There’s much I cannot cover from their heated confrontation, which is both a treat and an horror to watch, and to imagine a whole courtroom watching in silence.
But right before the end, after the uglier grievances have resurfaced, and the whole thing threatens to turn into physical violence (that Triet dares not film; the sound of it alone is far enough), Sandra circles in on the unspoken core issue:

It was “[his] own trap” that left him with so little time to himself to begin with.
His own “pride” and “fear of failure” that paralysed him. And now, “waking up at 40” with no published book to his name, he’s looking for “someone to blame”, turning what had been a beautiful partnership between two creative souls into a game of unreciprocated marital obligations.

On the outside, with little context, one can be struck by Sandra’s seeming coolness in the scene.
It’s part of the genius of it: the “evidence” alone is ambiguous, and the full meaning of the movie (and who’s really to blame for Samuel’s death from the first scene) is really derived from what you as a viewer bring to the movie.

The prosecution is more than happy to capitalise on it too. Adding in the ambiguous signs of violence from the end of the recording, Sandra’s great independence of character, her foreignness, together with her sexual history, unceremoniously extracted from the argument, there’s much to draw an unflattering portrait.

Though it’s not expressed as blatantly, the prosecution weaves a narrative along these lines:
Wouldn’t a more understanding wife have expressed true concern for her husband in his moment of vulnerability? Isn’t it proof that she really is not a much of a wife to begin with; isn’t it proof that she really could, and really did in fact murder Samuel?

I just love this scene so much!
I came out of the movie thinking that Anatomie would make such a perfect Ace Attorney case (with perhaps even more space for ambiguity than usual), and I could practically picture this scene in particular play out as a climactic piece of evidence.

But what hurts so much about it, other than the brilliant acting and crescendo, is the foreknowledge of the viewer, who knows it all ends with a dead man only a day later, and who watches initially mundane life frustrations and creative unfulfilment come to such a boiling point.

Samuel’s fears and sense of being robbed of time can ring very familiar, but it’s the twisting of them, the assigned blame, the implicit appeal to traditional gender roles to restore a presupposed “balance”, that makes it all so much more horrifying to watch and to take in.

In the struggle, Sandra asserts to Samuel that she “sees him” as he is, that he is certainly smart, but that, however, he is not a victim. He was always free, and Sandra, being equally free, categorically refuses to take up responsibility for his own life choices.

Side note: If you've seen the movie: I think you should be able to see where I stand on the truth about Samuel's death. Click to unroll, major spoilers inside.

Of course, it was suicide.
I won’t deny that it is what I want it to be, but Triet drew a beautiful portrait of a complex, flawed man, and, just like their son says, when you really do try to imagine what could ever have happened, it becomes impossible to ignore all the signs.

In other words…

In other words… I think Anno said it best:

It feels like a trite cliché to say, but no one’s going to write your book for you. You are on your own in the end. And that remains fundamentally true regardless of structural constraints that apply on one’s life.

This isn’t to deny the fact that much of our free time is robbed from us, and that we’re not all equal at all in terms of the time that is granted to us; that this is grossly unfair, and that we should help others access creativity where they can in their lives.

But it is equally true that creativity is about shaping nothingness into shape in a way that is fun, that is joyful, that makes you feel alive; and that no one but us can create and protect these pockets of time where we find the space for it.

More to the point, this kind of epiphany readily applies to making certain life choices and feeling constrained by them later down the road… like say, working for an understaffed IT department in a public institution while knowing one’s worst compulsions to be helpful and thorough, and then wondering where all the time or mental energy or creativity went.

It was well-played of me to avoid the trap of the corporate game from the start.
It was naïve not to see that working “for the public good” can be as easily exploited in various ways, especially if you have the personality structure for it, and like to be helpful.

I feel like many of the tech hobbyists and tinkerers I admire online tend to fall in similar traps. More than one of them has been speaking about their open source projects overtaking their lives in a negative way.

Looking at their curiosity, their ability to communicate about it clearly, their willingness to explore an obscure rabbit hole to the end of the Earth, no matter how deep it goes, I’m not too surprised they would find “fun” such projects, and become pillars of their respective communities.

But nor am I so surprised when they end up swallowed by the rabbit hole altogether.

It’s hard to stress the point I’m trying to make without blaming it all on individuals. Let me tell you about another similar story that circles around it with some amount of care.

Cornelia the New Priest

In Umineko Tsubasa, the official Umineko fandisc released at the same time as the main story’s 8th and final chapter in December 2010, there’s a particular side story centered on a minor character known for her diligence, aptitude, and rigid demeanour.

Cornelia’s a member of Eiserne Jungfrau, which is more or less the prosecution side in Umineko’s metafictional layer of the story, tasked with piercing illusions in courtroom-style battles of wits within the mystery genre. Yes, Umineko is quite something.
In the main story, she’s the one to present evidence to refute the claims of the witch’s side opposite her, always using highly formal turns of phrase that display the officality of her role as a law clerk.

Cornelia the New Priest specifically focuses on the first days of Cornelia in the bureaucracy of the Court of Heaven, right after having proudly passed her examination with top marks, but before joining Eiserne Jungfrau.

The culture shock awaiting her upon arrival is rough to say the least, and she has the maybe the worst first office day I’ve ever seen.

She’s awed (in a bad way!) by the general idleness of her senior colleagues.
The first task she is entrusted, far from fitting her high-minded ideals, is to order delivery for lunch over the phone for her colleagues. But even this proves quite the ordeal.
Refusing to relax her stiff use of court language, that no one but her bothers with for mundane interactions, she completely fails to clearly communicate her coworkers’ orders over the phone, and almost no one ends up with the meal they’d asked for.

To try to make up for her mistakes, she takes on a large public outreach project, trying to refrain her colleagues from drinking and smoking on their free time, only to be rebuked by the intervention of the workers’ union.

A series of 3 screenshots from the story detailing Cornelia's failure to order delivery at lunch for her colleagues.

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“Sir, the orders are as follows. …One large order of duck. Tempura may be prepared in the Kantou style. As for the katsudon, if you would let me know which of the udon or the soba would be preferable…”

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“Corneliaaa, that’s why I keep on saying not to use court language. If you use funny phrases, the order will get messed up.”
“Um… Be that as it may, the noodle shop is located outside of the department. According to regulations, court language must be utilized…”

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“Hey, new girl, you doing okay?! Can you repeat the order?!”
“S-Sir, know that the orders I have humbly gathered are as follows. One large order of duck. One tempura prepared in the Kantou style. One katsudon.”

If “paperwork movie” or “office drama” were their own microgenres in visual novels as they can be in movies or TV, then Cornelia the New Priest would be a great representative of them.

It’s a fairly short read (30-45min) that satirises the trappings of administration, building upon writer Ryukishi07’s experiences as a civil servant², something he also did in Higurashi before from another angle.

But where Higurashi focused on community spirit in the face of inaction, Cornelia the New Priest’s centered on the naïveté and insignificance of newcomers inside the bureaucratic machine.

In typical Ryukishi07 fashion, Cornelia’s tribulations and bullheadedness are rendered with a good deal of pathos, but lead to a didactic epiphany, once she meets Gertrude, a current member of Eiserne Jungfrau (alongside whom she will work in Umineko’s main story).

By talking through things with her, she understands that for all her coworkers’ flaws, change can only be achieved by talking to them, and working with them, by their side. Cornelia’s productiveness and diligence are plainly wasted as long as she refuses to bridge the gap.

A series of 5 screenshots from the end of the story detailing Cornelia's final epiphany.

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Ever since the first day of my assignment… my expectations had been betrayed.
Even though I got the job I always yearned for… it was nothing like what I dreamed as a child.

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For that very reason… I ignored reality to keep chasing my dream.

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…Right. The perfect job that I imagined.... clearly only exists in the TV.

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That drama series about Inquisitors that I watched in my youth… I was so excited about the world of that show that at some point I had turned my eyes away from reality.

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“…Dreams, ideals. As well as their realizations… Know that these are not things that can be achieved alone.”
“......”

Although much of the story carries a mixture of hilarious satire and bleak dream-crushing, there’s a hopeful tone to the resolution, with Cornelia’s epiphany promising her more future belongingness, if she can dare work with her colleagues as they are.

It’s not a story of changing the world in the face of impossible odds; it’s one about adulthood and facing reality honestly.

I’m obviously speaking from a very different context than the early 2000s Japanese bureaucracy that inspired the story (I would be thrilled to work in a department where excessive idleness was the main issue of the day) but it’s more than possible to envision more critical ways to engage with immutable power structures³.

Still, Ryukishi really does excel at making his characters’ inner struggles come alive dramatically, and I couldn’t help but think of poor Cornelia and her disillusion when thinking of my own strange choices.

Our circumstances are fairly different (I’ve yet to mess up my coworkers’ takeout order by speaking in French civil law redactional style), and connectedness with colleagues has never been such an issue for me… but the quiet introspection, and the need to face reality honestly are more than real.

I guess this is all to say I’ve been trying to assess how much of my own tendencies are to blame for my predicament, without internalising too much either, since it is also, undoubtedly, a shared predicament. It’s a tough balancing act—it’s been a hundred years and I don’t think sociologists or novelists have quite cracked this one yet.

Part of me would like to get into the “why” here for fun and after all, this is my blog, so I very well could… But alas, I feel like I haven’t earned the degree of uninhibition that’s required for it and I’m recoiling at the edge.

But yeah, Anatomie d’une chute certainly made me very pensive, and that is where I’ve been lately…

Where does this lead me?

Alright, so where does this lead me for the future?

Speaking purely for myself, I’m not really one to make New Year’s resolutions, because I’m far too deeply wired towards perfectionism for that to be a good thing.

For someone who’s trained themselves for years and years on end to suppress their needs in service of arbitrary, unrealistic external expectations they think they have to abide by at all costs, adding fuel to the endless self-optimisation engine can be the very opposite of a good thing.

I think if I adopted a yearly resolution to just identify, express and act on my actual needs in life and in my relationships, instead of denying them, to value these relationships in and for themselves, it would be enough for the rest of my life.
It’s hard work enough to counteract one’s basic programming in this way.

The “funny” (read: predictable) part is that when reviewing things I did achieve in 2024, there’s a lot to be proud of, whether in the amount of reading I’ve done, of enjoyable physical exercise, of chances I’ve taken on people, and so on… but it’s all a downstream effect from having finally prioritised what I found intuitively enjoyable.
The second I set these in stone as “goals” to be achieved is the minute I get into my self-made mental prison again, so I’ll avoid doing that!

Trying to keep hobbyist creative work as enjoyable in and for itself has been the one through-line through almost each of the articles on this blog, and I think that’s telling enough in itself; so I’ll stand by that.⁴

Part II incoming

That’s enough sappy stuff! This post is already far too meandering and self-indulgent…

I wanted to get into the fun stuff at the end; cool stuff from the past two years outside of work, in terms of creativity or not, and things I look forward to also.

But I think it’d make this post far too long, so I’ll split it in two here and there.

I often fall short of my promises on this blog, but have faith, part II will definitely come along… Until then, take care everyone!

The most obvious criticism of this push is its inaccessibility from a general public point of view, and the more general trap of over-idealising the 90s Internet while brushing over its flaws, especially its inherent exclusivity at a time of lower public access. But none of this undermines the aims of low-tech small-Internet communities.
I’d tend to say the value of working towards digital public commons is that even with its flaws, the work does stack up and is never truly lost: it can always potentially benefit other people working from very different contexts. ↩
Ryukishi07 gets into it in this 2007 interview kindly translated it by Rockmor on his ever-rich blog for any Ryukishi fan, Rena-Rena Toshokan. ↩
It would be so interesting to write a fanfic about an older, more experienced Cornelia growing even more disillusioned with her life choices, with the ethics of Eiserne Jungfrau and the Court of Heaven’s prosecution… ↩
Yeah… Other than the Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence mixtape and the Fata Morgana first impressions, I’ve only been yapping about that singular topic… ↩

A Long Overdue Summer Update

Rastagong — Wed, 31 Aug 2022 15:30:00 +0200

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while, I hope life’s been at least alright for all of you lately!

This is a long overdue update on things I’ve been up to, in life and in VN development. It might again be the last update in a long while, so I’ll try to take my time for this one.

Life stuff — Job, blog writing, etc

I was on a good roll of semi-frequent blog writing in summer and autumn 2021 and it felt pretty good, and then I started a new job in November 2021 and things came to a very brutal end. Life is life.

There’s still a part of me that wished I’d stuck with more frequent blog writing even while joining a new workplace, but deep down I know quite well it would have been fairly difficult. I said in my first post here I wanted to write without any self-imposed pressure, and I’ll stick to this— if blogging starts becoming a chore, then it’s not worth it to me, I want it to be enjoyable before anything else.

Starting a job tends to suck up a lot of energy away from everything else, and this time didn’t miss. In particular, I expected to be able to work in part remotely from the start, but the exact contrary happened: except for the Omicron surge of December/January 2021, I had no remote work until April 2022, and still very little after that. The awful state of train commuting in my area since the start of the pandemic hasn’t helped either.

It’s not all bad, though.
I’m complaining because I like to do so, but remote work policy aside, this was without doubt the most satisfied I’ve been with a job, in no small part thanks to incredible colleagues who I feel very grateful for. So part of life over the past year has been busy simply because I got very involved with this new work universe. It’s a completely different place than what I’ve been used to in the past (in the public sector, though I’m not a civil servant at all), and mostly very pleasant!

Unfortunately, this was a temporary position with a fixed term, and I finished this summer— I found a way to stay, but this involved joining a very different department. I’ll be starting soon in this different department, but it’ll be yet another very different job, so I expect to have to start from scratch on a lot of aspects, hence a possible lack of updates in the very near future.

I can’t wait to have reached a more stable routine again, after going through a lot of doubt and shorter positions over the past few years. I should also be able to improve my living situation if things go well, so fingers crossed!

An update on Blooming Chasm

I did find some time to work on Blooming Chasm over the past few months. Well, I had to prioritise creative writing over blogging if I want to release this VN someday lol. Let’s get to it.

General progress

Writing-wise, it’s been going OK!
Last time we spoke, I said I’d written 18 000 words out of 50 000 words planned. Now I’ve reached 36 000 words, but I think the total might reach 70 000 words instead…

The planned scope of the story did not change, I plan to have as many characters as before, and the story beats remain largely unchanged. I guess what inflated is the pacing of certain scenes, often through the amount of dialogue. We’ll see if it is entirely for the best when I start to edit the draft down the line.

The main hurdle so far has been finding enough mental space and energy to get back in the story again after leaving it aside for a while: I could get back to writing only in short, fragmented bursts throughout the year.

To help with this, I try to document my progress and my current state of mind thoroughly, by continuously updating a production diary with my thoughts throughout the development of the project. This way, I can always pick up from where I left off weeks ago fairly easily, understand what the point of the scene I was writing was, and so on.

A sneak peek of the above-mentioned production diary.
It’s a page with chronological entries and a clickable table of contents. I add an entry whenever I take a major story decision, or to remember important inspirations, to write down current doubts about the story, etc.

This production diary has been a real save, but it doesn’t change the fact that it requires enough mental energy to get back into it when it’s been a while, which has not always been easy.

That’s definitely where you see the value of shorter projects.
It’s not even so much the amount of work involved that makes all the difference, but the fact that with a shorter word count, the entire scope of the story can be easily visualised and worked through mentally, without having to be fragmented: in a 10 000 words-long story, the end is never very far from the beginning, so it’s easier to make everything cohere without having to resort to documentation to remember your initial state of mind.
Even if you do have to split work on such a story in fragmented sessions because of real-life obligations, it’ll always be easier to pick it back up than it would be with a story with a larger scope.

Outlining or not

The other hurdle I face is the fact I only have a rough outline while writing: I know the core story and emotional beats, but I haven’t drafted a strict scene-by-scene outline.

This is a big divergence from what I usually do!
I tend to like planning ahead, and I did so thoroughly while working on Sylvan Disappearance. Given this was an epistolary VN, and that part of the mystery involved concealing events occurring between different letters being sent, I had to strictly adhere to a certain diegetic timing between scenes, and to know exactly what I would tell next at every step.

However, it backfired.
I felt so constrained by my outline that I often didn’t allow myself to rework through scenes which didn’t ring right. Even when I couldn’t really feel them or visualise them properly, I just pushed through— which resulted in a weaker slice of life storyline in the seaside city. Had I allowed myself to pause with my doubts, I would have been able to restructure things.

By contrast, most of the better scenes in Sylvan Dissapearance were very late additions, which came only when I was well into scripting, and could allow myself to be freeer just because it felt right to do so. These scenes were also, by far, the ones I most enjoyed writing.

The True Epilogue from Sylvan Disappearance was a very late addition, like many of my favourite scenes in the story.

So for Blooming Chasm, I took that lesson to heart (perhaps a bit too much…) and decided that beyond the high-level outline and emotional core of the story, I’d allow myself to define what I want to write next at every step. I know all the major sights on the journey, but I allow myself to find out how I’ll go from one to the other.

The good thing is that this makes for stronger scenes overall; I write only what I fully visualise, so the atmosphere is always spot on, and characters mostly have the depth they deserve. The bad thing is that every few scenes, I have to spend time pondering what’s next now?, lest I start writing gibberish. I’ve skipped that step sometimes, and it never resulted in good work.

Scripting and/or writing

I tend to rely a lot on sounds and music for atmosphere’s sake, but that’s difficult to plan ahead while writing without also starting to script the scenes in-engine: you have to see it come alive on the screen to know if it works or not.

But I’ve avoided scripting anything beyond basic UI tests, because I just know I’ll never get anything done if I start implementing scenes I’ve already written in-engine without making actual progress on writing.

Screenshot of an UI test for Blooming Chasm (that scene no longer exists in the story). I wanted to have an NVL presentation for certain scenes, but still wanted a character portrait to be displayed when minor characters without full-body sprite are speaking. Little is scripted beyond specific tests like these. The portrait used here is only a placeholder; it comes from CLOSET, a site offering free resources for RPG Maker VX. The background is based on a photograph by JR P licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 2.0.

This means I’ll have much editing to do in-engine down the line, when I have backgrounds, character sprites, sounds and music to test everything.

For certain scenes, this might help a lot: I think I have a tendency to overwrite and to forget what it’s really like to read through a horror story in VN format, where music can add so much atmosphere-wise. So there’ll be a lot rewriting involved down the line, and much of it will probably involve cutting words down instead of adding them, which is always for the best!

Horror is so cool, everyone

When I first got into game development as a teenager, I remember that the time I took to learn programming and to work on game experiments often took precedence over the time to experience art. I often didn’t allow myself to experience media I know I’d enjoy out of guilt, and so I kept returning to work instead.

I did have a lot of formative experiences anyway, but still sometimes I wonder whether my entire world wouldn’t have been split apart by experiencing more of the things I enjoyed much earlier in life.

This is hardly a purely personal problem of mine either— having no time to play games because one is making games has got to be one of the most frequent gamedev complaints I see on Twitter. And I’ve already spoken about it, but I just know Fujimoto (and countless mangaka) would find it all too relatable as well.

This is all to say that this dilemma is definitely a thing of the past for me. I’ve made a dedicated effort to take more time for experiencing horror media I was interested in (in VNs, film, literature) this year, and it’s been the very best. Horror is so cathartic for me and I couldn’t live without it at this point.

Besides all this, it is just so much richer to create things when you can also take the time on the side to experience what made you fall in love with art in the first place. Retrospectively, it was the same for Sylvan Disappearance as well, and it contributed a lot to the story’s atmopshere. It doesn’t even have to be simultaneous as the process of creation either, all that matters is to take the time to replenish oneself without feeling guilty for it.

Gosh, it sure seems like every post out of three on this blog is about freeing oneself from unattainable productivity standards, and still finding ways to make the creative process enjoyable. Sorry if I ramble so much about it, but I guess it matters a great deal to me, I see so many others struggle with it, and I’d really like to convey the sense that it doesn’t have to be this way.

I hope other creative people elsewhere may find some comfort in it, and have a well-deserved rest as well.

So… what’s next?

I’ve had free time in late August, so I’m trying to make progress on Blooming Chasm before starting work again. I have a naive hope that I might be able to keep a bit of mental space for writing throughout the autumn given I’ve been on a good roll, but overall, I think reality will be harsher and I’ll have to make slower progress.

Blogging will probably have to take a backseat again.
Potential blog post ideas involve: an August travel diary, my (super belated!!) final thoughts on Fatamoru, another music mix acting as Blooming Chasm atmospheric moodboard, more about my production diary and note-taking system, a recent horror media roundup, and another roundup on a favourite mystery trope of mine.

… Yeah, I’ll have to make some choices if I want to write anything at all.
We’ll see, I can make no promise in advance.

Until we see each other again here, take care everyone!

50 minutes of magical, relaxing music from anime, VNs and games: a Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence mix

Rastagong — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 18:00:00 +0200

I’ve published one of those relaxing anime/game OST mixes on YouTube! It’s inspired by the main theme from the 1983 movie Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

I realise this is a strange Halloween present given the song evokes Christmas, but I hope you enjoy it all the same!~~☆

Edit History

29 October 2021. Initial upload on YouTube.
14 September 2022. The YouTube video was unlisted because of a copyright strike, so I uploaded an audio-only version on Soundcloud.
12-23 April 2023. Also re-uploaded the video version on Mega.nz, since the video version displays contextual information on each track: a nice cover, the track title, the name of the composer, the name of the source media and its release year.

Listen to the mix

The original upload was on YouTube, but due to a copyright strike, may or may not be available for you anymore depending on the country you live in:

Direct link to the YouTube video

The video version is now also available on Mega.nz:

Direct link to the full video on Mega.nz

An audio-only version is available on Soundcloud:

Direct link to the audio-only mix on Soundcloud

About Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

The theme from this movie is well-known for its nostalgic, magical atmosphere, and it’s been covered many, many times, in a lot of contexts. As a result, it’s easy to build passive familiarity with it, and it’s quite common to see people online wonder where they first heard it, or why it seems so very familiar.

I mean it, people wondering where the theme may come from is practically a genre of online interaction of its own:

And these are only examples I could find because the poster did eventually find out the name of the theme. A much more common occurence is to hear it in a context where you cannot even identify it, and to be left puzzled about it for months —I was myself in this exact position some years ago:

Yes, this is a bit of a self-own.

This has all become, apparently, a potential source of ridicule for more well-versed music fans:

The simple truth is that a lot of media in Japanese and Chinese pop culture use similar patterns and instruments in their soundtracks for their more “emotional” themes. I’m not learned enough in music to analyse how in more details (although Sakamoto has spoken about it in the past), but that’s definitely something I’d love to read about someday!

In addition, Sakamoto’s theme may have had quite the influence itself. The Ghibli theme that people most often associate or confuse with Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is The Path of the Wind, composed by Hisaishi for Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro, and the similarity is definitely there.

About the mix

I’ve been obsessed about this music piece (and by the movie itself too), ever since I finally learnt about them, and I’ve been building a playlist with similar music themes ever since. This mix is an attempt to share it in a presentable way, with proper attribution to the original creators.

Other than Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence itself, it contains music from:

1 other live-action movie
1 ambient music album
2 anime movies/series
2 visual novels
5 games

They’re from the mid-80s to 2009, with a peak in the 2000s (3 media from 1999, 2 from 2000 and 2 from 2006).

I did include an instrumental version of the Path of the Wind, but because Ghibli does not allow YouTube videos to reuse it (even if you demonetise your upload), I’ve had to use a different arrangement; otherwise, I would have had to mute that segment.

I hope you enjoy listening to this mix as much as I enjoyed creating it!

Full Tracklist

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence [メリー・クリスマスミスターローレンス]
Composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto [坂本龍一]
From the 1983 movie Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence [戦場のメリークリスマス]
Directed by Nagisa Ōshima [大島渚]
Sunset [日没]
Composed by Bun Itakura [板倉文]
From the 1988 movie Kaisha Monogatari: Memories of You [会社物語 Memories of You]
Directed by Jun Ichikawa [市川準]
Beautiful Memory [美しい想い出]
Composed by Kaoru Wada [和田薫]
From the 2000 Inuyasha anime series by Sunrise
Maple Syrup Factory [Maple Syrup Factory メイプル・シロップ・ファクトリー]
Composed by Hiroshi Yoshimura [吉村弘]
From his 2006 ambient music album Flora 1987
Sunflowers and Illusions [ひまわりとまぼろし]
Composed by Shogo Sakai [酒井省吾]
From the 2006 video game Mother 3, by HAL Laboratory and Brownie Brown
Snow White Ground [白雪地]
Composed by Sky God Corridor
From the 2007 video game Rosenkreuzstilette by [erka:es]
pure snows
Composed by Shinji Orito [折戸伸治]
From the 1999 visual novel Kanon by Key
Track 08
Composed by Keita Haga [芳賀敬太]
From the 2000 visual novel Tsukihime [月姫] by TYPE-MOON
The Place Where the Sun Sets [日のあたる場所で]
Composed by Osamu Murata [村田理]
From the 1999 video game Shenmue [シェンムー一章横須賀]
Directed by Yu Suzuki [鈴木裕]
To All People [すべての人へ]
Composed by Riei Saito [齋藤理詠]
From the 2009 video game Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon [フラジール～さよなら月の廃墟～]
By Namco Bandai Games and Tri-Crescendo
The Path of the Wind (Instrumental) [風のとおり道 (インストゥルメンタル)]
Composed by Joe Hisaishi [久石譲]
From the 1988 animated movie My Neighbor Totoro [となりのトトロ]
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki [宮崎駿]
Track 09
Composed by Keita Haga [芳賀敬太]
From the 2000 visual novel Tsukihime [月姫] by TYPE-MOON
Last Regrets (Full Chorus Version)
Sung by Ayane [彩菜]
From the 1999 visual novel Kanon by Key
Gentle Rays
Composed by Naoshi Mizuta [水田直志]
From the 1999 video game Parasite Eve II by SQUARE
Father Christmas [ファーゼル・クリスマス]
Composed by Ryuichi Sakamoto [坂本龍一]
From the 1983 movie Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence [戦場のメリークリスマス]
Directed by Nagisa Ōshima [大島渚]

The Very First Devlog

Rastagong — Wed, 20 Oct 2021 15:30:00 +0200

As I mentioned before, I’ve been working on another visual novel for a little while now! I’d like to start raising the curtain on it little by little, starting with this devlog.

This new project is called Blooming Chasm, and I’d describe it as a “class reunion Gothic mystery visual novel”! I’ve created a landing page for it, which is also acessible from the sidebar. Please check it back from time to time, I’ll update it throughout the development! Here’s the synopsis, copied directly from that page:

Synopsis

A hot summer day in the suburbs of Paris. In the park of the prestigious Lycée Laclos, the class reunion is in full swing, but Stella Sawadogo remains apart, a single thought in mind:

None of this needed to happen.
This isn’t the reality we should be living in, we’re in the wrong place;
we got the worst deal of them all.

Four years ago, twenty graduate students dropped out within a single night. No one seems to know why, nor what became of them afterwards. Even Estée d’Orville, the most talented student of her year, was among them —and not one person has heard of her since.

Stella’s the only remaining one out of twenty. Wasn’t she very close to Estée? They say her eyes haven’t been the same since, that she’s had to rebuild her whole life anew, somewhere abroad.

No one expected to see her again on the day of the class reunion, but there she is. Insisting that none of this needed to happen, that this shouldn’t be the reality we live in —that we got the worst deal of them all.

A class reunion story?

I really love mysteries, and I love using some kind of frame story to tell them even more: Upon a Darkening Flood relied on a defendant’s testimony during a criminal trial, and Sylvan Disappearance was an epistolary VN.

Blooming Chasm is no different, but this time I wanted to use a class reunion setting to retell events set in the past.

During the first lockdown of 2020, a friend got me to watch the classic 2012 Korean drama Reply 1997, which is set in a high school reunion dinner during which friends reminisce on their teenage days. It’s well-known for its humour and nostalgic depiction of late 90s Korean fan culture, and although I didn’t warm up much to its romance¹, I was really impressed by its usage of flashbacks and present-day scenes to sustain a mystery on a love triangle’s resolution until the very end.

A few weeks later, when lockdown ended, the first outside people I got to meet again were high school friends, but we were brought together only because of a much sadder occasion. After coming home at night, to unwind, I watched the Ghibli movie Ocean Waves, which is also set during a high school reunion. It’s remained a huge favourite ever since, on a lot of levels, in part of because of the context for watching it. Like Reply 1997, it’s a really nostalgic story, features a love triangle and sustains a little share of mystery about it.

I’ve been meaning to write a similar story ever since, but by shifting around the slice-of-life and romantic tone of these two sources of inspiration to something more mystery-focused, and with a hint of supernatural!

What kind of story will this be?

Blooming Chasm will be a much more conventional mystery than what I’ve done in the past! I never ended up writing any postmortem on Sylvan Disappearance (I still want to even after all this time!!), but I’m still very fond of its atmosphere and presentation.

The plot and characterisation, though, were… all over the place. The horror and mystery genres are places I feel very comfortable playing around with, even in a self-indugent way, so I do not mind, I’m glad I got to have fun in the first place. I think I’d even be fine endlessly writing “the same story” so to speak, with the same tropes, just because it’s fun, and because the more you do it, the more creative you can get within these limits.

Still, I’d like to write something with a more focused plot, and with a more conventional resolution this time! The Gothic aesthetics will be familiar, although this time I’ll be taking bits from Tsukihime and Shinsekai Yori.

Blooming Chasm is also going to be a bit more personal, and with a more familiar, contemporary setting than things I’ve done in the past.

What’s next?

I’m still in the middle of writing! The full story should be about 50 000 words long, and I’ve written ~18 000 words since starting in May.

Since I’m not an artist, and don’t want to commission any assets before having finished writing, I won’t have visible results to show before a while. I have worked on the UI a little bit to get the atmosphere right, but I’m leaving all scripting aside until I’ve finished writing.

I’ll be using photographic backgrounds again, and I’m planning to take some of my own photographs this time! So I might share about this aspect from time to time; taking little photo research trips in the area is going to be fun!

At least for now, I won’t impose any marketing- or result-oriented pressure on myself to produce interesting devlogs regularly: I want to make the process of writing about this project as enjoyable as the writing of the story itself has been so far. Updates here may not be so very frequent, though I promise to write everything with a lot of heart!

Until then, take care and enjoy October, everyone!

P.S. I’m not forgetting my next Fata Morgana post! I ended up reading it through the end and loving it, so I think I’ll just write a post with final thoughts on the main story, before proceeding with the side stories.

On the other hand, I’m a huge, huge fan of Reply 1988, the 2015 drama with the same concept but where the past is set in the late 1980s! ↩

Fata Morgana Diaries #1 - Doors 1 to 3

Rastagong — Fri, 03 Sep 2021 19:45:00 +0200

It’s been 5 years since I first started seeing everyone in the visual novel community rave about the House in Fata Morgana. In a Discord server I’m in, many people read it over summer 2016 and summarised their experience with “suffering”. Since then, as the fame of the VN kept increasing, I’ve learnt of so many aspects I would be sure to enjoy: Gothic horror, a metatextual layer, an historical setting, thematic similarities with Umineko… yet as always I’ve been putting off reading it for no particular reason at all.

Part of the reason why is that I grew distantly familiar with the story through mere osmosis: a couple times due to accidental spoilers, but mostly because of the sheer number of people I know and follow online who love it and talk about it a good deal.

From bits and pieces there, I started to unconsciously build up a version of the story in my mind which went more or less like this:

A bunch of assumptions I had about Fata Morgana before starting (including some major spoilers)

I assumed that Fata Morgana would be a love story between Jacopo and Morgana, told through a number of interconnected stories, with a frame story connecting them. I thought that the person listening to the story was Jacopo and that Morgana, the witch, would be the narrator, who'd wish to enact some kind of revenge on him for killing her.

I was familiar from the start with the names of many characters but had no idea in what context they would intervene.

I assumed the house would be kind of magical, and maybe that its true location wouldn't be so straightforward to understand. A friend once wondered if I would get certain 'clues' more easily because I come from France?

I knew the individual stories making up Fata Morgana would take place in different time periods. I assumed there would be reincarnation shenanigans.

I’m sure a lot of these expectations are fairly mistaken, or lack context to make sense, but I prefer being honest with myself before going further!

I’m not necessarily too concerned about spoilers of stories I know nothing or little about, but it’s very different once you start building passing, ongoing familiarity with a work from the outside, before having a chance to experience it on your own terms. It can make it very daunting to approach.

I think a lot of VN fans feel like this towards Umineko because of its fame, and it’s also why I try to be gentle with my love for it when discussing it with other people —I’ll gladly talk to anyone about it, especially when I feel like they have some interest in mystery or intergenerational family drama, but I’d hate for anyone to feel obliged to read or like it either. Ironically, I think it’s assumptions that I myself carry over from Umineko which led me to build a whole rendition of Fata Morgana in my mind, instead of allowing it to be its own story too, ahaha.

With that out of the way, I’m very glad to say I finally managed to push beyond these vague expectations and to start reading the story! I’ve been using the recent Switch release.

It’s been really, really nice so far and I thought I’d use this blog to give occasional updates on my progress! I’ve never really done this but it could be fun.

These aren’t going to be in-depth reviews or anything. Consider these posts like the informal readthroughs you may see on Twitter or Discord, except I write up summaries after finishing chapters instead of livetweeting. I apologise if the tone’s off sometimes!

Also, please keep in mind the assumptions I started with and mentioned above —even if they end up completely inaccurate, I’ll have them on my mind throughout my read, so I may accidentally refer to upcoming reveals I’ve heard about when figuring out everything.

Since this article is long because of screenshots, I’ve added a table of contents on the left sidebar (on the top menu if you’re on mobile).

Prologue

The prologue played out much as I expected it to! I knew the basic premise of the Maid waking up an amnesiac Master.

The prose is really, really nice to read, and suitably atmospheric. I think I remember reading somewhere about some of the deliberate translation choices in terms of style, e.g trying to evoke certain kinds of antiquated, Gothic prose. It definitely works well —I’ll try and find those comments from the translator again later.

First Door

That was very, very good… I fell in love with everything about this door. Unfortunately I did not take many screenshots, but really everything about it was just excellent.

The Maid makes it clear from the start that this tale won’t have a happy ending, and that innocence will be lost. All I could ever ask for! I got suspicious about Nellie liking Mell from that first scene and yeah… it turned out as well as it could have.

They look so happy but… this is going to be a tragedy from the start, isn’t it?

Mell is a nice protagonist. A bit of an oblivious, somewhat self-centered young aristocrat, who still mostly means well, but doesn’t necessarily get it, but that’s part of his charm! It was fun to follow his downfall.

I like the backgrounds of this time period a lot! I think most ared based on actual photographs, right? They’re so heavily processed it’s hard to tell sometimes, but the result is very fairytale-like and charming.

It seems the Maid is intentional about obscuring the exact location of the manor at the time of the flaxen-haired family. From the backgrounds, and from part of the musical atmosphere, I initially guessed Spain or Portugal (I vaguely recall once hearing about Portugal in the context of Fata Morgana too, may be mistaken), but Nellie’s mention of watching Shakespeare at the Globe theater suggests otherwise. I didn’t try to do any research myself to see if Elizabethan England fitted with the other hints dispersed throughout the narrative, but I’m going to assume they do.

Nellie’s birthday party is an excellent scene! I have a thing in fiction for scenes set in large social gatherings, and it works really well. Poor Nellie though, her brother can never fully empathise with her, but I’m glad she gets to dance with him.

Mell’s flirting approach is one for the ages.

I really like pretty much everything about the romance between Mell and the “white-haired girl” (she isn’t named, but due to her character archetype and witch references, I can only assume her name is Morgana). It’s a very endearing rags-to-riches fairy tale, and there is definitely something very sweet in Mell’s awkward but firm adoration. The background of the white-haired girl is super intriguing as well; I like her tale about the girl locked in the tower a lot.

Nellie is obviously a highlight! You can tell from afar that her infatuation won’t end well, without knowing how or when.

Which leads me to the climactic opera scene which is so hard to read through. It has everything, the hope for the white-haired girl, the Cinderella dress, and the creeping feeling it will all go wrong.

I didn’t take any screenshot of Mell’s angry pose at his sister, but… I can’t help but feel horrified at him, all the while understanding why he was protecting the one he loved. It’s sad that he was able to choose the path he wanted out of life, to say he would do anything to marry the one he loved, even in spite of her family background, but that Nellie was never afforded the same choice in the first place because she was a girl. And it hurt that he isn’t able to see this injustice. Of course he’s not responsible for the events of the following night… But it’s still so, so well-done.

The events from the following night are… well, they are what they are.
It’s been a little while now, so my initial reactions have faded from memory a bit, but I definitely didn’t expect that painting twist. I like the theme of forbidden relationship and fate a lot —no wonder that Nellie couldn’t bear to see the brother she loved fall in love with his half-sister. I have lots of questions about the painter father of the white-haired girl, wonder whether he has true divination gift, and if we’ll see him again in the future. Likewise for the white-haired girl, it seems like events following that night could lead to a true witch transformation, and maybe to a revenge later on. It seems like there might be more to the painting than just revealing the girl’s true lineage.

Overall, door 1 is a very, very enjoyable tragedy. I really like its atmosphere of courtly aristocratic love, and the way it plays with fairy-tale and tragic archetypes —the hidden heir, the girl locked in the tower, Cinderella. It makes you hope for the best, all the while reminding you that you will not get a happy ending.

It is super interesting to see the Maid spell out the moral of the tale explicitly to the Master. Mell wants to embody a prince and to devote himself to the one he loves no matter the cost, but fails to notice what’s happening in the background with his sister, or to discover the girl’s lineage in time, causing his ruin. Even at the very end, he seems to refuse the truth revealed by the painting —that he loves his half-sister. He certainly means well… but that isn’t enough. Perhaps a perfect happy ending was always impossible. Being able to grasp your happiness but seeing it escape from you is grade-A tragedy.
Overall, getting to root for the happiness of the characters you like, all the while understanding perfectly well in what way they about just come short is a very enjoyable kind of suffering… Thank you Fata Morgana.

I feel like rereading through this tale because I missed a lot of tiny details. At least it’s been a few days since I read so I forgot much of the thoughts I had while reading.

Second Door

More suffering! Ditch Cinderella, we’re going Beauty and the Beast this time!

As I suspected, the manor is a magical entity and seems to switch locations throughout eras. So perplexing, there was definitely no mention of the manor overlooking the sea in door 1. And as expected, the Maid is seemingly immortal, but without a Master, she seems to wither. Interesting…

I definitely couldn’t guess the new location of the manor from the start at all, but I eventually assumed Spain from the mention of the word bestia and of local oranges.

I like the new atmosphere from the beginning a lot! Very slow-paced and isolated, still very fairy-tale-like, but in a completely different register —now we’re getting threatening Gothic castles with monstrous owners. The eeriness of the manor becomes the main feature.

Bestia’s quiet days are really enjoyable to read through. But since this is still Fata Morgana, happiness is short-lived, and he ends up feeling reminded of his condition by a merchant’s comment. He gives in to his resentful, murderous impulses and murders all the visitors he gets at night. So much suffering ensues. At least until the white-haired girl’s reappearance.

Due to the the amount of time which passed between both doors,
it seems this really is a case of reincarnation.

The relationship between Bestia and the girl is very interesting too. At first, it looks like a Beauty and the Beast-inspired healing romance with themes of ostracism, shame, and sense of self. It’s very encouraging to see Bestia regain humanity, though there are disquieting moments too —namely that he is entirely dependent on the girl’s attention, and degrades rapidly after killing the “other” beast.

I love Pauline a lot! It is so, so hard to read through the flashbacks of her relationship with “the merchant” all the while initially assuming that he died at the hands of Bestia… Again with the classical folk story archetypes, the faithful sailor’s widow is just too cruel…

I like these two’s relationship a lot (initially)! The memory of her meeting with him in her hometown is especially sweet. It’s unclear from which French town Pauline is from, but I’m going to headcanon her as coming from Marseille (the biggest harbour on the Mediterranean coastline), though she could be from Normandy (Le Havre), or from Bordeaux. I initially didn’t realise or get the hint about her husband’s origins from the dress he offered Pauline, but was intrigued by his obsession with his homeland from the start.

Uh… Does Pauline reincarnate too? Does she inherit memories somehow?

Bestia being Yukimasa… is so, so painful to realise. What an horrible end for Pauline. So much tragic suffering, this is worse than door 1 for sure.
I half-expected Pauline to be slayed by him because of the earlier slaying of the “other” beast, but I was still fooled. There’s something interesting about the white-haired girl being once more the “intruder” who disrupts the established relationship between the story’s male lead and another woman, with the jealousy felt by Pauline in her last moments.

Using a beast sprite to represent Yukimasa’s self-image was very effective. It was obvious that something was up with it from the start, and it’s interesting that the Maid’s narration is responsible for this concealment of reality. This is definitely reminiscent of Umineko, but in a darker way. Wondering what her true purpose is by doing this.

The additional twist that Yukimasa was always concealing his murderous intents is… fairly cynical? It changes so much about the themes of the story up until this point, from something about shame and self-image to the story of a man who refused to confront his darker side. What kind of relationship would he have had with Pauline if she’d been able to stay together with him…

There’s a lot going on here, Yukimasa.

I’m really interested in the fact that part of his murderous intent comes from being Japanese but estranged from his homeland. This reminds me of a certain character in Rose Guns Days. You get the feeling he really treasures his katana, and (what he thinks is) his traditional samurai heritage, and places a disturbing amount of pride in that.
I don’t know much about Japan’s self-isolation from the outside world in this time period, but I wonder if there were many Japanese traders living abroad back then, and what their relationship with the homeland was.

Again, the Maid’s comments on the story here are very explicit and in-depth, and, dare I even say… Resentful? At least, they’re admonishing, and address Yukimasa directly. Makes me wonder for a moment whether all the male characters don’t reincarnate too, whether they’re not the same person… but the Maid seems to acknowledge Mell and Yukimasa as their own persons.

Still, we get the same structure as in door 1, with a male character who falls short in some crucial way, and brings tragedy to the woman he loves. But the Maid’s resentment, or at least disappointment is so much more palpable here. Mell genuinely loved the white-haired girl, but couldn’t see the extent of the obstacles they’d have to face. Yukimasa merely referred to her as “his peace”, and never examined his murderous intent. There was never any hope to begin with (though I suppose the same could be said of Mell’s relationship because of their shared bloodline).

Still, this brings such a more cynical end to the story (especially with the destruction of the village). This tale is much, much bleaker than door 1.

Mirror Interlude

Oooh, so I finally meet Giselle and Michel, two characters whose names I’ve heard online, but know nothing about.

It’s hinted the Master has something to do with them, and has white hair, from seeing himself in the mirror for a second.

I start wondering whether there may not be two white-haired characters who reincarnate, Michel could be linked to the painter from door 1. We could be Michel.

I also get some confirmation about a witch being named Morgana, though I still know so little. Exciting, this means much is to be discovered!

Third Door

There he is! The one character I knew by looks before even starting reading this story, the VN sphere’s most fragile male ego, the one and only Jacopo!

The manor transferred to America, yeehaw!
What a change of atmosphere. I can only admire the attention brought to speech mannerisms and historical mood behind each door, everything here was so believable.

Of course, he is casually racist.

To be honest, after the scene was set and Jacopo’s most distasteful traits were introduced, I wasn’t sure whether I would end up caring for such a magnificent bastard. We were clearly heading down the abusive marriage route and well, this would be an uphill battle.

And yet I ended up really loving this door a lot too.

This was the saddest iteration of the white-haired girl yet, and there was little hope she would be able to attain any happiness. It’s interesting to see how her specific circumstances may change, but she always retains the same traits —isolation, a tragic past— and yet she still places some initial amount of trust in her male partner (I’ve been going through door 4 while writing this, and it makes this aspect even more explicit).

The 19th-century setting makes Jacopo so much more real than Mell’s chivalrous spirit or Yukimasa’s adventurous background. I’ve seen countless men like him in fiction —hell, I’m pretty sure I’ve met people in finance with that vibe. He’s the first modern man of the story, and it’s easy to see where he comes from and even to relate at times.

There is something endearing about the one moment of romance he shared with his wife. It’s terrible and very painful to see her hang to that distant memory… but I get it all the same.

The Sicilian Mafia background makes a sharp change from the fairy-tale atmosphere of the previous tales.

The re-encounter between the girl and the Maid make me think that she could be the Master? After all, she continuously loses her memory behind the doors, much like the amnesiac Master in the manor. I was initially thinking the Maid was (covertly) antagonistic to the Master, but this may be more complicated.

This was without doubt the hardest door to read yet. The abuse is fairly unbearable and ever-increasing, and at first you can only greet your teeth, thinking this can only end one way.

The Maria twist took me completely by surprise, much like in door 2… At first, it seemed very cynical, almost like a kind of bad deus ex machina: by putting the blame on Maria, “fate” or bad luck would become responsible for the white-haired’s descent to hell, and not Jacopo.

But the turn taken by the story ended up being more interesting and nuanced than expected! Mostly because of the amount of attention brought to Jacopo’s angst and insecurities:

Maria does an awfully bad job of portraying his wife as unfaithful in the letters she alters. The white-haired girl is incredibly specific in her love, and mentions memories Jacopo should intituively recognise. He should have realised they were forged immediately, had it paid any attention to their actual content, instead of dwelling on his fears. So much of the tragedy stems from his inability to trust her and move beyond these fears, in spite of the genuine feelings he had for her. You get the sense that it was possible for Jacopo to do better, in spite of everything.

The discrepancy between the final dates each of the spouses has set as ultimatum works so well for the same reason: while Maria’s responsible, the fact that Jacopo’s resolve took this long to reach this basic point is very, very obvious.

The Maid is as explicit as ever with the moral of the tale, and Jacopo’s final epiphany that he is the one to blame for his wife’s utter suffering and breakdown is just perfect. I think I get the appeal behind the character now, his angst is far too good. It hits even more than Mell’s own unfortunate love, because Jacopo truly becomes aware of what he lost for seeking only pride and power.

Again here, I’m influenced by reading door 4, but I like the theme of love’s healing power. There’s little to salvage from Jacopo and his wife’s relationship as it stands, but you still get a sense that something different really was possible, although he squandered it all. It’s very, very different from the endless suffering I expected from the first scene.

Returning to Maria for a bit, I have a lot of questions about her discovery of the curse. The mention of bloodlines seems to suggest that two different people are to be marked and ruined, but not the person invoking the curse. This seems to track with door 1, where Nellie invokes the curse on the half-siblings, and with this door, where Maria plays the same role. She even seems to share the same motivation, since she hints that had she been a boy, she could have carried on her family’s tradition, instead of simply giving in to resentment and revenge.

Does the curse mean that Mell and Jacopo share the same bloodline? I’m not sure and mostly doubt it, but at least the pattern is very clear.

What comes next?

I’ve been reading through door 4 and I like what I’ve seen of it so far! I’m not sure fully sure when or how I’ll update next —formatting this post, transferring screenshots and remembering my thoughts from previous doors was surprisingly more involved than I expected.

Maybe I’ll focus even more on screenshots, or I’ll make sure to post shorter updates after each chapter. Hope this was interesting to read! I like everything I’ve read so far, and I’m excited for what’s to come next!

Don't Look Back in Anger

Rastagong — Sat, 31 Jul 2021 21:00:00 +0200

I read Fujimoto’s one-shot Look Back last week and it affected me a lot!

It’s actually the first story of his I read, so I have no idea what his more traditional shounen work is like, but I enjoyed it a great deal! As multiple people said, it definitely felt very Asano Inio-esque, in a good way.

Besides the story about grief and the brutal callback to the KyoAni arson attack, what struck me is the very bleak outlook on the creative process. Towards the end of the childhood arc, there’s a part where Fujino (the protagonist) gives up on trying to improve her drawing technique in frustration at the sheer level of her rival. During that time, she starts going out with her friends again, and enjoying spending time with her family. Like any child her age would do.

But when she finally meets her rival, who admits to being inspired by her drawings from the very beginning, the urge to draw comes back, and all the social time she’d started to enjoy disappears to make way for drawing. All the panels about the drawing process from there on contain no words, only Fujino hunched over her desk in silence. In the course of her career, her setup may change from a simple, cramped table to a professional drawing tablet, but even on the last page, she keeps drawing alone.

When looking back on years spent grinding on creative skills, it can be hard not to be consumed with regret and to wonder whether it was worth it at all, and Look Back makes that ambivalence very clear. Knowing that Fujimoto himself is only 27, and that he got started as a teenager, it’s easy to see why he could feel frustrated about what he lost by taking on such an early career.

Of course, you don’t even need to have a particularly successful career in art to share this frustration.

I haven’t had this kind of conflicted relationship with visual novel development myself, but it’s hard to look back on the early years where I my entire self was directed towards dreams of game development without a lot of frustration. I found a more comfortable creative place only by leaving games altogether, and turning towards visual novels, which had different attitudes than games towards development, and which I found more respectful of my time too.

Still, creative burnout is so widespread that at times it feels everyone just swims around it. Of course the issue is on my mind because of the endless scandals of worker abuse in the games industry, but despite their alternative branding, I don’t think indie creators are spared from it either. Even leaving aside indie games studios, it’s something that individual webcomics artists, alternative game devs and VN developers alike know all too well. It’s been lurking in the background of all the online creative communities I’ve ever frequented, and I don’t think it’s about to stop soon. The pressure of social media engagement, the arbitrary nature of algorithms and the publication rhythm imposed by newer platforms like Webtoon makes it ten-times worse.

The good thing about Look Back is that it tries to go beyond that initial bitterness to think of the people at the heart of the creative process.

A Japanese user noticed that by taking words from the very first panel, the title of the one-shot and the final panel together, you got the sentence don’t look back in anger¹, which seems to summarise fairly well the outlook the one-shot.

Fujino may feel initially alone, and blame herself for the path on which she set her friend, but it doesn’t erase the moments they shared either, or the joy which inspired them both. These are life experiences too, and real relationships, as real as any others.

This outlook speaks a lot to me, though Fujino’s epiphany remains very bittersweet.

Looking at the final panel, you get a sense that it’s not as if things were fundamentally going to change for her. She may not grind to improve her skills endlessly anymore, or regret what she accomplished, but there’s no doubt that the publication rhythm of her serialised manga will still require as much effort.

I hope we can all eventually get to a point where beyond looking back with acceptance at our creative experiences, even the darker ones, we can also make the creative process genuinely more enjoyable for everyone, and less alienating.

In the meantime, I’m thankful for Fujimoto’s reminder that we are not alone in this, and I hope it can lead others to wonder about why they create art, and if the way we do it is really the only way there is.

Kastel noticed & translated this tweet in English here. ↩

Finding a Voice Again

Rastagong — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 22:44:00 +0200

I’ve been meaning to reopen a blog for a little while, and I’ve been working on that for a few weeks now. I’m very happy to welcome you to my secret Internet home today!

One of the things I lost over the past few years, but especially since 2020, is a willigness to put myself out there and open up, both in online contexts and in real life. It is pretty much thanks to blogging that I learnt to enjoy writing in English, and it’s an online activity I’ve been missing lately.

It’s been slowly going better on the real-life side of things, thanks to friends. At the same time, I’ve come to realise that there are needs I will only be able to fulfil online, and discussions I will only be able to have online at all. And this should be OK! I’m not sure why it took me so long to accept as much. So I’m trying to keep a better balance between these two realms now, and I hope reopening a blog will help with that.

As for online communities, I think I’ll be much more comfortable doing my own thing with a blog than exclusively on Twitter. I’m hardly the first one to point this out, but I’ve been missing the homeliness of long-running blogs dedicated to singular passions, and the feeling you get when a personal text post from your favourite mutual shows up on your tumblr dashboard.

More often than not, expressing myself genuinely on Twitter feels like chopping up a limb, trying to make it fit into a tiny, tiny jar before throwing it into the void, and then hoping it will make any sense at all to my followers. 2020 in particular made me realise that there are fundamental facets of myself I’ll never be able to fully express on Twitter, at least not without endless addendums and postfixes.

This is probably a shared frustration for many Twitter users, but I think it’s especially felt by people who are both from outside the Anglosphere (or the West altogether), and themselves minorities within their own country. Of course this is not a universal constant, but it is always among people from outside the West, or with diasporic family histories, that I’ve felt the same frustration bottle under the surface.

For a lot of us, joining English-speaking online spaces has been salutory to find a community, but it’s also a very frustrating process once you realise that US-centric spaces will never really be able to meet you halfway, no matter how much work you put in to be able to communicate freely. Facing this wall, you end up having to translate basic, simple facets of the way you experience the world, when the very reason why you joined these spaces was to find connections unavailable in real life.

Being both French and racialized, it’s a wall I keep encountering again and again, and I’d like to finally have a space to just be and express myself more freely. I also really hope I can reach more people with similar backgrounds through this blog. It’s largely the writing of people with families or personal histories outside the West that has tided me over during the pandemic, whenever I felt estranged from its treatment by newspapers, colleagues and friends here in France.

My hope is that using this blog as a “home base” will make it easier to share my interests and thoughts elsewhere, in a tweet or in a physical discussion, without alienating anyone or pressure to overexplain myself. I’ll be able to write posts about what I care the way I see fit, and then to just link to them when needed. The simple act of using this blog as a semi-public diary will probably be very healing in itself; I should be able to articulate more clearly the things I care about if I have written about these things once before.

On a more pragmatic level, I just think a blog is a much more comfortable space to talk about all my interests without feeling like I to have to segment parts of myself, as I often do on Twitter.
I always worry about cluttering my followers’ timelines with a myriad of unrelated interests. My Twitter nowadays is very fandom-oriented, with occasional VN development things, but I’d like to be even more open about different interests, without cutting out any of them: I want to talk about When They Cry and visual novels and lit criticism, and programming and online subcultures, and international solidarity and creative digital labour… And more still! No one has to read or enjoy all of it, but I think having a blog will make it much easier to be open about these interests without alienating anyone either.

In this blog, you can expect to find, among other things:

Visual novel development logs. I’ve been slowly getting back into VN development again, and I want to be more open what I write as a process, without any result-oriented pressure;
Fairly personal diary entries, like this one;
Short mini-reviews of things I’ve watched or read;
Semi-personal, semi-public thoughts on weird interests or politics;
From time to time, more public-facing, presentable articles on specific subjects.

Everything is subject to change; my only certitude is that I want to write freely without any self-imposed pressure.

Since part of the writing here will be personal, and part of it more public, I’ve also decided to include short contextual notes at the start of each post, to explicit its intended audience and the context behind it. You can read more about that here.

I hope you’ll forgive me if the writing a bit clunky or weird; my blogging voice is still rusty, but I hope to find something comfortable to use again soon!

Thank you for reading this lengthy, roundabout way of re-introducing myself. I know it was perhaps a bit gloomy, but I promise I’ll have joyful things to write about in the future as well! That’s part of the point, too.

I’m Rastagong, pleased to meet you!
Welcome to my secret home, and please enjoy your stay!