Risky heroics: Examples

Previously, I discussed the trope of heroes risking it all, and why I think it’s a bad moral value.  Now I want to discuss some case studies. I feel a bit embarrassed to talk about my examples, because arguably, if we want to talk about risky heroics we should be talking about popular movies. But I don’t watch those, and am unwilling to put up with one for a blog post. So instead you’re getting a couple obscure moments that happened to come to mind.

1. Yasna’s choice

The Invincible is a game based on Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel of the same name, although it contains an original story that merely echoes the original novel. It follows Yasna, a scientist who is stranded on the planet Regis III, where she witnesses a series of strange events. (I think it is a decent game, if you like narrative walking sims like Firewatch, but I’m not here to offer a review.)

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Risky heroics

It’s fair to say that the Scouts are obsessed with the mythology of the heroic rescue. When I was a teenager, they would regularly circulate stories of scouts rescuing people with medical emergencies, or who fell in the water.

It is also fair to say that this obsession with heroics is shared by our culture at large. Most of our stories–not just the superhero stories–are about people taking huge risks to save everyone.

However, I think there’s a major difference between the true heroic narratives as told by Scouts vs those told in fiction. In fiction, a huge risk means nothing because the outcome is decided by the author, not by probability. In the real world, encouraging scouts to take huge risks is basically asking for tragedy.

The scouting way is not to take huge risks, it’s to be prepared. In particular, scouts take lots of emergency response training. Something the training will say over and over again: don’t put yourself in danger trying to save someone else. For example, the Lifesaving Merit Badge emphasizes avoiding direct contact with a drowning person, because they can pull you into the water. Above all else, avoid creating a situation where now two people need rescue. First, call for help, then try safe methods of rescue.

For all my negative experiences with Scouts (not getting into it), I think the emphasis on emergency preparedness and safe heroics is laudable. In contrast, I do not think our culture’s emphasis on risky heroics is very laudable at all. This is a perpetual source of moral dissonance for me.

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Review: Umineko When they Cry

Umineko When they Cry is a 2007 Japanese kinetic visual novel with about a million words in it, making it the length of a series of books.  I spent the last 8 months reading it.  For many games and visual novels, people often say “trust me, it’s good, just go in blind”, but I don’t think that’s very helpful.  Therefore, this review will contain some spoilers regarding the basic premise and structure of the story, and a few specific elements that I liked.  If you’re totally avoiding spoilers and just want a five-word summary, it’s “Epic anime Agatha Christie metafiction.”

Recently, I wrote about the idea that mystery stories must be solvable.  This is not, in fact, true of most works in the mystery genre.  The solvability of mystery stories was promoted during the “golden age of detective fiction” (i.e. the early 20th century, with Agatha Christie as its most famous author), but it was not otherwise the genre norm.  However, in Japanese literature there was a revival movement in the 1980s and 90s, known as honkaku.  Umineko is clearly part of the honkaku tradition, or at least responding to it.

That’s right, Umineko, a visual novel with a million words, is a solvable puzzle.  How does that even work, without the reader feeling like they’re gnawing ineffectually at a massive jawbreaker for 8 months?

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Mysteries do not need to be solvable

In the past year I’ve gotten into reading mystery novels, and this has reinforced one of my strongly held opinions about the genre. There is a mistaken preconception about mystery novels, that the reader ought to be able to solve the mystery. This simply is not true. There are some mystery stories that are meant be solvable, but it’s a minority of mystery stories that I’ve seen. Solvability is not the primary appeal of the genre, or at least it’s not the appeal to me.

The reason I know this, is because when I was young, we had a “complete works of Sherlock Holmes” book, which had all the short stories. I didn’t read them all, but I read enough to know that Sherlock Holmes stories were not solvable. Usually, Sherlock Holmes would pull some clue out of thin air, that hadn’t been mentioned before; or else there would be an event that led to the mystery being solved. It was unambiguous that most stories were not even trying to be solvable. The mysteries were trying, first and foremost, to be stories. There’s something the reader doesn’t know (rising tension), and then Sherlock Holmes explains it (releasing tension), and that’s a simple but effective narrative arc.

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Games that are just books

Back in 2021, I was persuaded to play a little game called The House in Fata Morgana. It’s a Japanese epic visual novel that follows a series of tragedies across the ages, each with multiple twists and turns, and a mysterious thread connecting them all. Throughout that entire time, the player only makes a handful of choices.  We might say that the game is basically a book–and a fairly long one at that, taking me 35 hours to finish.

I enjoyed it enough that I would play a few other long visual novels over the years. I read a couple furry visual novels—Echo and Adastra—and the Japanese visual novel STEINS;GATE. I’m currently reading Umineko When they Cry, which has about a million words, the length of a whole series of novels.

Something that occupies way too much of my brainspace, are those snide comments about visual novels on gaming websites: “It’s not much of a game if you’re not making any decisions.” On the one hand it denies the legitimacy of the visual novels–and on the other hand, it literally does nothing of the sort. After all, visual novels can be legitimate without being video games. Just as novels and movies don’t need to be games in order to be legitimate, neither do visual novels.

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More on the purpose of readings

In my previous post (which you may have missed, since FTB was down for a few days), I asked “What is the purpose of a reading?” I discussed a reading of Elden Ring that baffled me. I could not understand the purpose of the reading, other than arguing that it was intended by the authors. And the article didn’t really do anything to convince me of authorial intent.

I wanted to keep things simple, but my thoughts were spiraling outwards from there. So, if you permit, some more scattered discussion.

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What is the purpose of a reading?

In media analysis, we speak of “readings”, or interpretations of what’s going on in a work of (usually) fiction. Readings are not factual, they are fictional, and mutually contradictory readings can coexist. Naive readers often think that there’s just one right answer, which is to say whatever the author intended. However, authors can fail to fulfill their intentions, or else create something that goes in directions that they never intended. This is what’s meant by “death of the author”: a reading does not need to align with authorial intent in order to be a good reading.

But like a work of art, a reading can still be good or bad. And authorial intent is at least sometimes relevant to making that judgment. So let’s talk about a little reading that I saw a couple years ago that baffled me so much that I still think about it today.

In Gayming Magazine, there was an article talking about a queer reading of Elden Ring. I’m already on board, of course. The article started by observing that in a couple endings of the game, the player character becomes the “consort” of Queen Marika or Ranni the Witch. And generally, the game doesn’t really care whether the player character is male or female. So if you have a female player character, you can become the same-sex “consort” of a queen or a goth, and the game doesn’t really treat you any different for it. So that’s neat. That’s not the article that baffled me.

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