So we finished Void Stranger last week, after playing it nonstop for several weeks straight, and we're pleased to report that it's very, very good! Almost unbelievably so, in fact. It embodies so much of we value in art – things seldom seen in commercial games, nevermind ones as big as this one – it's like it was made for us.
It's strange, then, that when I sat down to write about it... I couldn't do it.
That doesn't mean I have nothing to say, of course. Saori and I have thought a lot about the game's obvious influences, its puzzle design, the novelty of seeing this kind of yuri outside of manga, and so on... but none of that felt substantial enough, at least not for the standards I hold myself to. These are little more than scattered observations on isolated aspects of the game; they don't cohere into a whole, much less represent how good we think the game is. How could this be? The most "us" game that has likely ever been made, and I can't write anything interesting about it?
Well, it's not like I have to write about every game we play, so I could've simply gone "oh well" and moved on — in fact, that's what I should have done, since we're currently supposed to be taking a break from our work. But... no! The fact I couldn't write about the game at all bothered me, regardless of whether I actually ended up doing it or not.
So I decided to write about not being able to write about it instead. Naturally.
Why couldn't I write about Void Stranger? To answer that, I'll need to analyze my critical process itself, including how I think and write about things, as well as why I decided to become a critic in the first place... which, as you can imagine, means this post is quite personal and introspective. Probably a little incomprehensible to anyone not literary theory-brained, too. Above all else, though, it's without doubt the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written.
But hey, last week was also our 31st birthday, so I think I deserve a treat. Think of this as an anniversary thing.
Anyway!
Thinking about art
Hyouka (that is, the KyoAni anime) is one of the works to have captured my imagination recently, which shouldn't come as a surprise, given it's literally about art criticism. We're still only 10 episodes in, but I'm already fascinated by how it likens the processes of reading a text and solving a mystery, using each to comment on the other.
A common refrain is that what Oreki needs to find is not the truth of whatever mystery Chitanda presents him with, but rather, an explanation that'll satisfy her curiosity. You might think this would lead to a sense that the truth isn't important at all, but it's actually the opposite — because the process of coming up with something she'll be happy with always leads him to the truth anyway! Indeed, the one time he's fucked it up so far is when he was motivated not by her sparkly eyes, but his own burgeoning detective's ego.
Why look for the "truth" of a text, then? Well, according to Hyouka, you shouldn't be doing that in the first place; not for its own sake, at least, and definitely not for your own. Instead, engage with the text itself earnestly and sincerely. Be curious about it as it exists in front of you – why it is the way it is – and everything else will follow.
...which is a very funny thing for this show to tell me, because that just so happens to be exactly why I started doing criticism all those years ago! I may be all about abstract theory these days, but back then? It was as simple as me being a kid who wanted to know why the games and anime she liked were the way they were. Why does this game control like this? Why is this shot framed like that? Why did this story develop in this and not that way? I was curious! So I thought about those things, read other people's thoughts, thought about them some more, wrote those thoughts down... and well, here I am now.
Writing about art
That said, I'll admit my goals as a writer haven't always been so Chitanda-y. Some of my posts are undeniably intended to present a different or introductory perspective on an unfairly-maligned work, with the Onimai episode 1 post being the perfect example of that... and yet, even when that my explicit goal, it's not something that comes naturally to me. Like, I did intend for the Onimai post to also be my pitch for anyone who hadn't watched it, but that meant summarizing any scenes or moments I wanted to talk about. And without fail, every time I try to do that, in the back of my head I'm thinking "Do I really have to mention this? Isn't it... obvious?" As a result, it's far more common for me to write in the same way I did about Hyouka in the previous section: assuming you know what I'm talking about. Which... uh, now that I think about it, that part was probably a bit confusing if you haven't seen Hyouka, huh. Sorry! I can't help it. But also, why haven't you seen Hyouka? It's really good! You should watch it.
My point here is that I'm always writing primarily for myself. It helps me organize my thoughts, and remember them more clearly afterwards as well. Conversely, though, this means I'm rarely compelled to write about things I'm not interested in, such as what literally happens in a scene...
Or an idea I've already seen before.
That's why I couldn't write about Void Stranger, then. Simply put, none of its tricks were new to me.
Thinking about thinking about art
I'm not throwing shade at the game here. As I said at the beginning, Void Stranger is absolutely fantastic, and we had a blast with it! It'd be difficult to imagine a game more tailor-made for us.
As much as I enjoyed it, however, not once during our entire playthrough did it truly surprise me with something novel. There were smaller surprises, sure; the sheer breadth of its influences, for one, or how it manages to execute many of the elements it's taken from them better than the originals themselves had. But it makes no effort to hide what these influences are, and wouldn't you know it — we've played almost all of them.
Now, I'm well aware of how backwards complaining about this might sound, considering what I just said about the game matching our tastes. And really, it's not a problem with the game itself; if anything, this is one of its charms! You don't often see a work wearing its artistic lineage on its sleeve this proudly, and I think it's adorable.
No, the problem's with me. I now realize I've come to hold novelty in too high a regard, with works that present me something new appearing disproportionately better in my mind than ones that don't — even if I'd otherwise consider them lesser! But wait, you might say. Isn't this just... normal? Yes, I'd actually say so. Our brains tend to focus on new information while filtering what's familiar, so it follows that fewer and fewer things will surprise us as we grow older. (Disclaimer: I'm not a neurologist.) And we have been doing this for almost a decade, so... is this really a problem? Isn't it perfectly okay to appreciate a work on a technical level, even if you're not all that emotionally excited about it?
Well, if you're a normal human being, then yes, absolutely. But look at me. I've spent all of this week writing auto-metacriticism! That's not something anyone who'd let this slide would do. So yes, this is a problem — because it means my experience of a text is far more subjective than I previously imagined. I've always dismissed "objective criticism" as both impossible and undesireable, of course... but on some level, I must've figured that, even if I couldn't find the truth of a text, I could still find my truth. That my thoughts were internally objective, at the very least. So the idea that they are, in fact, completely subjective even to myself... never occurred to me.
Interacting with art
Dear reader, are you one of the aforementioned normal human beings for whom this being a concern makes no sense? If so, thank you reading this far! I appreciate it. Also, I'm sorry, because it's about to get worse.
You see, for some time now my primary interest has been how art is interacted with and understood, both practically and abstractly, and I've even developed a theoretical framework for it over the years. I'll refrain from detailing the specifics of it, or else I'll never finish this post; suffice to say, my personal experience of a work being so fundamentally subjective as to be neither constant nor consistent with even my own intellectual understanding of it is a major revelation, and making sense of it will require me to rethink my basic conception of what it is I'm reading when I read a text. Where does this subjectivity come from? It can't be from the text itself. After all, it's entirely possible (and, indeed, probable) that I could read it twice and have two different experiences each time. It must be coming from me, then, during the reading process — but how?
Well, here's an idea. Suppose that, when you read a text, what you're reading is not the "real" text as it exists in reality, but an impression of it, created in the mind. This impression is... "lossy", to put it simply, because not only is human memory limited in its capacity, you might not know (or be able to discern) which parts of the original are important enough to commit to memory in the first place. But you'll automatically fill in those gaps, using information from your own personal context at that moment, thus completing your imaginary copy of the text. It is this version of it that you'll then engage with — not the original.
I think creating this copy is a skill you could get better at, too, like by retaining more of the original, or knowing how to fill in the gaps coherently. But no matter what, it'll never be completely lossless; you'll always influence how it appears to yourself to one extent or another.
And that's what happened with me and Void Stranger. Due to my preexisting familiarity with its narrative toolset, it appears as lesser than its influences to me, even if I think otherwise.
Okay! I'm sure this can still use some (...or a lot) of work, but it's probably good enough for now. Oh god, I'll have to read about semiotics, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, etc. aren't I.
Anyway, yes, I think this is everything I had to say. Thank you for following me in this journey, everyone! This has been some of the most fun I've had writing in a long time, which is a nice change of pace. See you next time!
Thinking about Void Stranger
Wait wait wait sorry actually this post is about Void Stranger after all because I just realized something about it. Having both played it ourselves and watched many others play it as well, one thing that's struck me about it is... how thoroughly it resists being made sense of? Or, in the terms of the framework I just described, it's like it goes out of its way to render the player unable to tell whether their mental copy is any good or not.
The game's structure is just completely bizarre, making it impossible to discern what order, if any, you're "supposed" to do things in. Saori and I originally assumed we did a great job of approaching it on its own terms, even managing to reach the true end with little external assistance — yet the path our attention-focused, note-taking mindset took us through ended up making the emotional arc of the story worse? Not to mention it also caused us to miss a non-insignificant amount of optional cutscenes, all of which we only learned are in the game at all from seeing certain friends – who had a much more difficult time than we did – run into them. Huh?? Oh, and hell, are you supposed to go through New Game + with items or not? I still don't know.
Similarly baffling is the story. It's perfectly comprehensible on an emotional level, masterfully using the elliptical style of storytelling we love so much to create an even stronger, more painful sense of these women's feelings for each other... and this is all the more impressive when you consider how that very sparseness of detail makes the plot (as in, the literal events of the narrative) unusually difficult to grasp, even on its surface. You'd at least expect things to become clearer as you approach the end, but no! The opposite happens! Somehow, every single reveal only raises further, increasingly absurd questions, as if they were specifically designed to complicate the player's understanding of what's happening.
Not only do I not understand this game, I'm honestly unsure whether it's even possible to understand it. But still! That's exactly what makes me want to try!
Void Stranger resists being understood not being because it doesn't want you to make sense of it, but because it does. Its difficulty is an invitation! It wants you to reach out, to try figuring out what it's saying even if it's impossible... or maybe, because it is impossible.
Is language inherently imperfect? Is my understanding of a text doomed to be flawed, a mere echo of the original message? Can we ever truly communicate with one another?
Here's a better question:
