So back in middle school social studies class they made me the novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. I don't remember if it's actually a good book or not, and I don't remember many of the actual details in it, but there's one part of it that I still think about from time to time these days.
(Disclaimer: Please forgive if the following summary of a book I kind of read in middle school is inaccurate.)
Throughout the book the character Siddhartha tries out a bunch of different lifestyles in pursuit of enlightenment. He lives as a traditional aesthetic for a while, then he moves on and lives a materialistic life in pursuit of love, and so on.
Early on, Siddhartha and his friend meet the Buddha Gautama. Both Siddhartha and his friend realize just how wise Buddha is, but Siddhartha choses not to join Buddha's followers because he does not think that following his teachings will actually get him closer to enlightenment. Siddhartha's friend kind of goes "what the hell are you talking about" and joins Buddha but doesn't actually get close to enlightenment until the end of the book when he meets back up with Siddhartha.
I always thought this part of the story was kind of odd. I mean, what kind of person thinks they know better than The Buddha? What the hell do YOU know?
And, well, okay I don't actually know how to actually bring up why I've been thinking about this again lately without turning this post into a complete farce SO-
Okay so in 2021 Tim Rogers released a six hour long review of Tokimeki Memorial. If you're reading this blog I bet you've probably already watched it or at least heard of it.
Tim's Tokimeki review was the first I'd ever heard of him, and both Tokimeki Memorial and galaxy-brained takes on media are right up my alley so this video really, really spoke to me. I remember at the time feeling like I was feeling the same kind of emotion that Goku felt when he saw someone with one hundred times his power level. I wanted to immediately hop in the hyperbolic time chamber and train for a year so that I could be on his level.
At some point in his review Tim goes on a big tangent about the extremely popular 90's television drama Long Vacation. I think it was about the context that Tokimemo existed in, and the romantic zeitgeist of the time. I don't remember exactly what he said about it, but I do remember Tim pointing how that the Konami logo appears conspicuously in the background a lot so obviously there's a connection between the two works.
So, as part of my general attempt to reach Tim Roger's power level I started watching Long Vacation after I finished watching the Tokimemo video. It's a decent show, though I didn't end up finishing it. Part of that is just that I'm bad at finishing shows in general, but another part of it was that as I was watching A Long Vacation I started to have this creeping feeling that...
"Wait, this doesn't have anything to do with Tokimeki Memorial at all!"
It started to seem like that Konami logo in the background was just a random billboard that happened to be near their filming location and not actually a sign of a cosmic link between this tv show and tokimeki memorial. (And by extension, to the big, galaxy-brained ideas Tim expressed in his video) I mean, yeah, both of these works were about romance and were made in the nineties, but... that was it?
It was around episode seven or so that I realized.... I wasn't actually getting any closer to enlightenment.
I had bought into Tim's ideas hook, line, and sinker, and I had thought that if I just followed all the things he said I could get closer to understanding video games and media the way he understand video games and media...
But, no. That wasn't the case at all. I could only realize after trying it, that it didn't actually answer any of the big riddles I wanted to solve.
I've tempered my expectations since then. I still really like Tim Roger's videos, and I still do think the way he thinks is really interesting, but I'm no longer the type of person who might go "No man, you've gotta watch Long Vacation to really understand what Japanese dating sims are about." I know better than to think that the answer to a whole subgenre of science fiction can be understood through the lens of a single expensive jacket.
While I'm still the kind of person who can sometimes get into big flights of fancy and think that maybe we can uncover some big deeper truth about ourselves or the world by getting really into really, really niche media, at the very least I've come to the point where I realize that if I want to find that deeper truth I'm going to have to find it myself. I can't just do what other people do, and I can't just repeat what other people tell me.
Siddhartha was right, I guess.
