But perhaps you might like to know what sorts of things I’ve been doing in my internet absence (still ongoing, at the moment). Yes, this is one of those posts, wherein the blogger simply provides a list of recent activities, but I’ll try to strain myself a bit and include some assorted thoughtful observations.

Let’s see, then. In recent weeks, I have:

• Finished Parasyte. Holy shit. Setting aside the plot itself, I’m beyond impressed with the technical aspects of this one, the pacing in particular.
• Continued to collaborate with Otouto-kun and OGT to put an Otakon panel together, said panel bearing the provocative title of “You Don’t Like Moe — And Here’s Why!” But I don’t suppose it will end up as combative as it sounds (consider again the list of participants). When I know where we fit into the Otakon panel schedule, you shall know as well. And if you can’t make it out (if you happen to live on another continent, for example), fear not; I intend to record the thing and make the video available to the masses.
• Moderated (with OGT) audio reactions to a certain infamous novel, though I wasn’t able to participate in the latest.
• Recorded and edited, at long last, my reading of Cuchlann, with Cuchlann’s aid. You’ll see this soon; look to his blog.
• Re-read Dune, which is still as fun as ever, but I always have to laugh at how much of a caricature Baron Harkonnen is.
• Read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which isn’t bad, but, in my opinion, suffers whenever Chabon succumbs to certain tiring lit-genre conventions. I expected a novel that is essentially Bakuman set during the American golden age of comics to be a little more innovative, I suppose.
• Re-read the first Shakugan no Shana novel, for some reason, and thereafter had some ideas on light novel illustrations versus the sorts of illustrations that show up from time to time in western young adult novels. Namely, light novel illustrations seem focused, by and large, on characters; when backgrounds appear, they’re more or less subsumed by dynamic personages. In western illustrated novels, however, scenery remains a significant concern — see this bit by Scott Westerfeld, for example. Perhaps this has to do with the artistic traditions at work, but I’m certain that there are literary ramifications to drawing attention to particular narrative facets by way of illustration. Light novels, after all, tend to be heavy on dialogue and physical activity, and keep lengthy exposition to a minimum as a result; they probably aren’t relying on their illustrations to get setting across, all things considered, so perhaps they’re the result of the fusion of prose fiction with a particular anime/manga tradition that prioritizes human dynamics over pretty pictures (that being a contrast to another anime/manga tradition, one in which pretty pictures are very important).
• Started reading Tigana, about which I’ve never heard an unkind word. I suppose it’s not bad so far, but I’m disappointed to find that, in some ways, both the writing style and the narrative itself are somehow “loose,” as if the editor half-assed it. And Tigana has reminded me of how bored I am with sex in fiction. I mean, we’re talking about something as fundamental to our being organisms as eating and breathing. In fact, eating, breathing, and sex can all be interesting, but it’s not so easy to render them so in prose. Perhaps this serves as a measure of the depth of my nerddom, but I’m generally much more interested in all the awkward business leading up to sex — that awkward business can make the terminal sex all the more satisfying, when it doesn’t drag on too long.
• On a whim, rewatched the first few episodes of Toradora!, which I suppose became a proper rewatch about two minutes in. My God is this show fantastic. I had forgotten how much I love these characters. But now I’m remembering. Remembering love. Yeah, you know.

Though I’ve not been idle in my absence, I suppose I’d better hurry up and get this internet thing resolved. After all, it’s about time that we dove back into Strike Witches…

People compare Scalzi to Heinlein, and for good reason. The basic gist of his SF universe is thus: the galaxy is full of habitable planets, but it’s also full of intelligent races, most of whom prefer mutilating one another over any sort of diplomacy (this includes our own humble race). In some cases, this is unavoidable; when two species simply cannot comprehend one another, and they’ve both decided they want a particular plot of land, what’s to be done? Even a fairly recognizable race of bipedal mammalians might prove culturally impenetrable. This lends Scalzi’s setting moral complexity, and that’s good; shades of gray are interesting.

For me, however, moral grayness becomes problematic when it’s little more than a lesson in moral grayness. Old Man’s War seems to suggest that anyone who starts wondering whether it might be a good idea to come up with a moral code that doesn’t involve razing all the diverse cultures of the universe is either suffering a temporary lapse, deluded, or an asshole. I can think of one exception, and it isn’t the protagonist.

Look: this isn’t the era of Milton. This isn’t Victorian England. This is postmodernism — and, in fact, it has been for quite some time. I really don’t need to be told outright that morality can’t be reduced to a binary, or that “killing is bad” is an oversimplification. You may as well write a novel about how people can’t escape their circumstances, or about how the American Dream is dead, or about one day in the life of an “ordinary” but remarkably self-aware protagonist.

It’s not that I actively disliked Old Man’s War, and I’ll grant that, in just over 300 pages, Scalzi didn’t have time to do much besides set up his universe. The included excerpt from the followup book suggests that we might get a broader overview of subjective morality if we continue on. I’m just a little dissatisfied that Old Man’s War dwelt for so long upon the notion that we may want to stop and think before we hold soldiers responsible for returning fire when fired upon.

My point here is that moral complexity has been done to death, and while I’m highly skeptical of the notion that originality is automatically good, I do think that stories benefit from not repeating the same old lessons to the point of banality.

My preferred solutions to the “stark gray” morality problem are just that — my preferred solutions. But, with that glaringly obvious disclaimer out of the way, my position is thus: while the character who simply becomes accustomed to a morally gray universe feels like old hat, the character who rejects the notion of moral grayness through force of will or personal failure, who operates beyond morality, or who undertakes a nuanced journey through an established moral system has the potential to fascinate me endlessly.

I’ve only just begun Otsuichi’s Zoo, but the protagonist of the first and eponymous story in the collection is something like a moral adventurer — or, if he isn’t quite lucid enough to explore morality himself, he serves as a vehicle for our own moral self-exploration. He’s like a good Poe protagonist in that regard; crazy as he seems, we have to wonder whether we can really hold his objectionable actions against him, and, if so, to what degree. For much of the story he engages in a kind of act, filling a social role that allows him to maintain a certain degree of self-righteousness while avoiding whatever moral judgments he has made about himself, and this bizarre interplay puts the reader in a strange position. But I won’t go on for fear of revealing too much, as the story is well worth reading.

What I will do is talk a little about an especially fabulous Gundam villain who has recently earned a place in my heart: Paptimus Scirocco.

I wonder what it is about these complete bastards that so appeals to me. You may have noticed that I’m not one of those people who takes pride in being a dick. I usually try to avoid conflict altogether; when I take a stand on an issue, I often attempt to do so in a way that appeases all involved. Hell, I don’t even like to see conflict. Being so peaceable (yeah, let’s go with that), I shouldn’t be predisposed to enjoy characters of Scirocco’s ilk, but I am. With a vengeance.

Now, Scirocco isn’t quite the sort of villain I lovingly deem a “real fucker.” But he isn’t exactly an upstanding dude, either. Most notably, he has a talent for seducing every woman in a ten-mile radius, and he abuses this superpower to build himself a loyal harem of skilled mobile suit pilots. And he isn’t much concerned about who he has to kill to accomplish his goals — goals which, in the end, make him an interesting character, as he seems to want the same thing everyone else in Zeta Gundam wants, namely a more peaceful and generally better universe. Granted, his approach to the problem renders him almost Nazi-esque, but it goes to show that Scirocco isn’t operating in spite of a moral code; he’s doing things in accordance with a moral code of his own.

We don’t have to agree with Scirocco, to be sure, but it’s easy to see that, from one standpoint, he’s one of the good guys. The same could be said of everyone in Zeta Gundam, really. It’s not as if any of them simply wants to go around in an ugly transforming robot and cause some shit (well, maybe Yazan, but…). Morality only becomes “gray” when we let numerous individual moral judgments blur into an abstract bigger picture, and while a bigger picture is fine, I guess, I really prefer a more nuanced treatment of morality, one where each “pixel” in the gray slate is enlarged to allow for scrutiny. Someone like Scirocco — a character whose moral code differs vastly from that of the protagonists, but who is allowed to live for more than five minutes anyway — aids in the zooming process, demonstrating that the personal moral frameworks that contribute to the gray mass are not simply and uniformly gray.

To put it in D&D terms (because, you know, I do that), maybe I’m saying that I don’t really believe much in “true” neutrality, and that everyone probably acts according to whatever they consider “good,” whether that be societal improvement, personal gain, or something else entirely. Old Man’s War’s doing-what-needs-to-be-done justifications make sense, I guess; I just wasn’t satisfied that the novel didn’t give much of a voice to those characters who didn’t quite agree on what needed to be done. Only now do I realize that I may be complaining about the novel’s kind-of-anthropocentrism and resultant lack of moral complexity; a single shade of gray can only be so interesting by itself.

I’m aware there’s another episode of Durarara!! out, but I haven’t seen it yet; it may show up in my next bout of catchup posts, after my next post-schoolwork marathon. Or maybe that won’t be necessary — spring break is coming up, and it’s not as if I have any plans.

Katanagatari 1-2

From Twitter:

2.26.2010 5:08:20 Katanagatari 1: So, uh, what keeps them from just killing their opponents during those 5-minute speeches? Dramatically convenient bushido?

2.26.2010 5:09:20 Katanagatari 1 cont.: Stupid complaint, since it’s sort of played for humor, but I like plausibly brief fights to the death these days.

2.26.2010 5:39:41 One thing I’m coming to love about Nishio Ishin: really twisted romance.

2.26.2010 6:45:24 Katanagatari 2: Haven’t decided how I feel about the author surrogate thing, but I definitely like this enough to continue.

As it says. There’s enough for me to like about this — the art, the music, the humor and general delivery, the fact that Shichika is basically Sabin/Mash from Final Fantasy 6 — that I’ll be trying to keep up with it. But I do want to talk a little about the author surrogate issue.

I raise a brow at Katanagatari’s author surrogate with the understanding that, in my current fiction-writing project, I’ll need to introduce an author character some 35,000 words ahead of where I am. And I want very much to avoid turning him into an author surrogate, so it’s probably worth considering at this point what, exactly, constitutes such a thing.

Consider Stephen Dedalus — not the mopey one from Ulysses so much as the…somewhat less mopey one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen is, quite literally, a surrogate of James Joyce; the Portrait is semi-autobiographical. And he gives voice to a good bit of metafiction, some of which is probably concurrent with Joyce’s opinions on fiction and the writing thereof. But what keeps Stephen from being an author surrogate of the sort I mean here is that he never really comments upon the texts in which he appears. As far as literary art goes, he holds drama in the highest regard, so he doesn’t talk about novels much at all. Togame, on the other hand, remorselessly kicks the fourth wall down — and it can be funny, I’ll grant, but it can also be distracting, and the line between the two is thin.

So, what I mean by “author surrogate” is a character who (being written by the author) speaks with an authorial voice on matters of the text at hand, and does so in a moderately explicit way. This is problematic for me for two reasons. Firstly, until I’ve finished reading a thing at least once, I generally don’t want to know what it means to the author, lest my reading be affected. I’d rather not have my hand held. And secondly, I consider it a little irresponsible on the part of an author to indulge those readers who would limit their readings (and those of others, when possible) based on the author’s opinions — but, as that basically amounts to a complaint that writers too often give the majority of readers what they seem to want, I’ll accept that I’m being somewhat unreasonable here.

Or perhaps what I’m complaining about is simply the inward-looking text. A text’s commentary on itself is text, isn’t it? But a text can look inward, I think, without “reading” itself — without telling its reader how things should be interpreted. One reason I generally don’t read high fantasy anymore is the tendency of some authors in that genre to make all the requisite moral judgments for the reader. Perhaps, then, I’m leveling a complaint at unambiguous texts specifically. Or texts unambiguous in a specific way.

Suffice to say that I think Katanagatari is doing okay so far, but that I have my concerns.

Durarara!! 3-7

What was the last episode I wrote about? I guess it was the second, regarding all that interstitial mapping business. Which has more or less carried on as expected, but I haven’t felt the need to write a post for each episode telling Durarara!! to keep up the good work.

The third episode was good. But, I have to admit, the fourth put me off for a while. It occurred to me that I didn’t want any backstory for Celty — I didn’t want her to have a definite name, even. Episode seven gives another supernatural entity human roots, but I’m alright with Shizuo being half-human. Celty, on the other hand, is the ur-faerie. She doesn’t do extraordinary things with mundane objects; she doesn’t throw vending machines, or move quickly and knife people — she rides a motorcycle that’s actually a spirit-horse, and she pulls a scythe out of her smoking neck-hole. Somehow I wanted her to remain wholly magical, and by that I mean I wanted her existence to be a matter of “just because.” She’s less impressive now that we know how she got to where she is, and what she means to do there. But maybe that’s the point, as she’s made more human with each episode, it seems. We may as well let her be human, or humanized. It’s not as though we have anyone to blame for magic and myth but ourselves.

Speaking of ur-faeries and half-humans and such, I’m noticing a hierarchy of mysterious characters emerging. Toward the bottom, or human, end, we have Kida, who knows more than he lets on, but doesn’t seem to be actively involved in the unusual; the Dollars are somewhat higher up, and Simon, Shizuo, and Izaya higher still; and at the top we have, perhaps needless to say, Celty, the dullahan herself. With each episode the strange elements of Ikebukuro look more like a proper mythology.

With regards to its title, “Fate”, I found it to be apt in the way in which it worked to illustrate, by means of the larger picture, how going against it can sometimes be overrated. For want of better citations, I’ve noticed that this is where the East has traditionally broken off from the West when it comes to fiction–to the former, fate is not something to be resisted, merely something to be endured. Yes, you can row, row, and fight the power, but at the end of the day you’re going to be a hobo cracking open coconuts for a kid on the sidewalk, no exceptions. [Owen, "Fate/stay night, Fate Route"]

Even if my point of view is decidedly western, I’ve seen that trend as well. Allow me to whip out The Wind-up Bird Chronicle:

“… The point is, not to resist the flow. You go up when you’re supposed to go up and down when you’re supposed to go down. When you’re supposed to go up, find the highest tower and climb to the top. When you’re supposed to go down, find the deepest well and go down to the bottom. When there’s no flow, stay still. If you resist the flow, everything dries up. If everything dries up, the world is darkness.” [Vintage/Jay Rubin translation p. 51]

As much as I like it, it can be a difficult novel to deal with, as it lacks the immediacy of conflict that I’m used to. For hundreds of pages, we simply watch the narrator come to terms with the idea of doing what needs to be done when it needs to be done in accordance with the “flow” of things. He undertakes a kind of quest, but his real victory is learning to take things as they come without, say, losing it and beating a dude with a baseball bat. It’s not about overcoming odds, or forging one’s own destiny; it’s about living with such things, which play out as they do just because.

Perhaps the core of this difference between east and west lies in my side of the dividing line’s conception of fate as a simple thing, or as a single thing.

For the record, Fate/stay night as a title is nothing more than the offspring of a brain fart and bastardised English, for the only thing I can think of that explains it coherently is this. Unlike Tsukihime (月姫, Moon Princess) or Kara no Kyoukai (空の境界, Boundary of Emptiness) which make for straightforward translations, F/sn as a title is written in English, as is the route from which it presumably lends its namesake.

Maybe it’s Nasu’s frustration at Japanese having a ridiculous number of alternatives for the word itself, each of them subtly differentiated by means of context–there’s the ubiquitous 運命 (unmei), the more formal 定め (sadame), the Known To Be Translated Erroneously As ‘Fate’ Due To The Limitations Of English 必然 (hitsuzen)–and that’s just the more common terms that I’m listing down here. Don’t take my word for it though, look it up in WWWJDIC to see what I mean.

Compare this to English, where fate becomes less of a question of “Which one are you talking about?” and more of a concept that anyone with a decent vocabulary can easily grasp. The general understanding behind it is that of something so steeped in unavoidable inevitability that nothing can change it, an irreversible force of nature that only superhuman feats or deeds can overcome. [Owen, "Developer's Diaries: Fate/Meta Narrative"]

See here. Of course, none of these means exactly “fate” as we understand it in English; these words mean what they mean, and I wouldn’t claim to have a good feel for any of them unless I’d lived in Japan for a while. With that in mind, to which “kind” of fate should we say the title refers? The English kind? One of the synonymous (or partly so) Japanese concepts? I’m sure we could discuss the “Fate” route using several of these terms; perhaps we should view the title as a synthesis of all varieties of fate that might come to mind.

Even in English, where synonyms for and variations upon the idea of fate are somewhat more limited, it’s a rather abstract concept, the sort of thing a good postmodernist might deny has any real meaning at all. Of course, having no “real” meaning allows it to encompass any honest interpretation. That’s the essence of deconstruction, after all, that everything-and-nothing simultaneity. We might conclude that フエイト/feito, an English word written in a Japanese way, a kind of canal between one linguistic pool and another, represents just such a recognition of the nature of fate: it’s whatever we say it is, whether it be God or nature or bullshit.

…‘fate’ as a metanarrative allows us to examine the concept of free will within a universe whose boundaries have been so clearly delineated but with such blurry precision at the same time. What is free will, anyway? Is it the freedom to have a choice? Or is it the freedom to react to the consequences of your choice, assuming that you can’t pick your choices? What if it’s an entirely different thing altogether? [Owen, "Developer's Diaries: Fate/Meta Narrative"]

This is what I’m saying, basically. “Deconstruction” as a term is used pretty loosely now, but F/sn does what I’d call “complete” deconstruction with the idea of fate; it doesn’t rob it of its meaning, it calls its meaning into question by presenting numerous possible meanings, any of which could be true given the right circumstances and perspective. I’m not referring to dictionary-definition meaning, of course, which is easy enough to figure out (once we settle on which “fate” in which language to look up, anyway); I’m talking about the peripheral concerns, the qualifiers and caveats. Who or what imposes fate? Can it be overcome? Is it, as Murakami’s character suggests, a necessity, a river to be navigated but not dammed?

Like the game itself, I’ll leave it for you to decide. I need to talk about structure before this post gets out of hand.

I’ve noticed this before with other visual novels, but here – possibly because the text is ‘in front’ of the images rather than segregated from them – it’s more prominent: the sentence is king. At any given moment there’s never enough text on the screen to build up a really meaty paragraph, which means there’s little opportunity for the constructive, building-block hypotaxis I expect from modern prose. I wonder if it’s fair to call this prose at all – but whatever we’re going to name it, this form of writing relies on the well-tempered sentence. [Emphasis mine] [IKnight, "Fate/stay notes"]

Now there’s an interesting question. I certainly think a visual novel is more written fiction than video game, assuming the rudimentary choices it offers its players/readers aren’t enough to render the experience very game-like in terms of interactivity and setting. It may be more akin to a light novel than to film, as its images are largely static. It’s a hybrid of all those things, really. I’d be inclined to say that we can’t deal with it as we deal with traditional, printed prose fiction, as we’d be overlooking too many of its qualities, but that prose fiction is certainly a part of the experience — granting that the presentation of said prose is somewhat unique. The one-line-at-a-time presentation must impact the way we read somehow.

With only sounds, a limited array of visual effects and dramatic-yet-positionless sweeps of coloured light to rely on, I find myself gripped. The frustrated desire to know what’s going on, and what particularly gruesome kind of wound Shirou will sustain this time, drives me through the text. [IKnight, "Fate/stay notes"]

I’d say the game’s handing us narrative a few sentences at a time adds to that sense of lack of information. When in the middle of a novel, we know there’s more to come; we can see it, skip ahead, guess at outcomes based on the length of description remaining and the presentation of words on the page. Fate/stay night doesn’t offer that minor luxury. We’re essentially plowing ahead blind, and, if my experience is any indication, our sense of suspense is heightened considerably for it.