Video Game Report
Have stopped playing Ten Desires so much because I decided it was TOO EASY and that bullet hell shooters needed to be combined with another difficult genre – the skyrocketingly popular platform hell game. Also rhythm action games sort of. Enter:
I Wanna Be the Revolution
This thing is seriously fun but seriously hard. My difficulties are like, 25% me being retarded and playing this with a bullet hell-style graze-everything mindset and 25% it just being incredibly tough though. The other 50% is having shift for jump. SERIOUSLY. Shift for jump is... physically painful to me. Part of it is my keyboard, yeah, but it's just so big and clacky, it almost feels wobbly. It feels both loose and spongy. I can't explain it. I feel like it isn't going to work half the time, and I can't press it fast for anything. I honestly don't understand how people can like it. Same with space for hard drop in Tetris. It seems like mapping your input to like, frying pan. Dang. Anyways I want to play or at least see the designs of a few of the other stages, but I can't unlock them. I can't even find videos of them online, nor can I find videos of people beating some of the other stages. Does this mean they just haven't been beaten yet? And maybe I will be the first? Very unlikely though.
In the Groove
Playing a lot of this lately too. Mad fun. Really determined to get good because my roommates that I play with are way better than me and it's vaguely humiliating. Right now I think my biggest problem is that I over-commit with a lot of steps and end up scrambling, which is very exhausting. Also I get up and down mixed up a lot, especially on jumps. I can pass most fives and a few sixes and I think like one seven if I'm playing well. I like uh “Utopia” and the Working OP and “The Beginning” and “Party Rock Anthem” and one of these things is not like the other! Just now I almost full comboed the six of “Utopia”. Hooray!
Recent Music
Kassa Overall – Stargate
This thing is really fun. Much more, uh, emotional than I thought it'd be. I was expecting like Big Baby Gandhi type silliness or at least Das Racist seriousness-behind-silliness. This has a few songs that seem downright sappy, and I dunno what I think of that. They'd come in with these soft-sounding beats and I was expecting parody but I see no real parody. A lot of these beats go really hard, though. I appreciate his willingness to go with the ol' major surface pop sample, people seem to be moving away from that 'cause it seems too easy but there's a lot of ground that hasn't been covered with it yet. His flow is pretty smooth and solid but definitely this level and not the next. Kool AD's verse is really good, and I was impressed with TECLA, I'll have to check her out. Best verse on the whole album is probably Heems' on the last song, which also has a really really great beat. Yeah so overall pretty fun stuff, lots of great lines and some good flows. I guess my biggest beef is that he's going too hard for actual songs, like, Kanye West sort of 50/50 hook/rapping stuff with a message I ultimately don't care about, when his best stuff is his most casual. Whatever though this is a really solid artist to have on the Greenhead roster, I could see him getting pretty popular since he seems to want to make the sort of songs that are popular. Glad to see At Heems get this sort of fresh talent.
Das Racist – Relax
I might actually like this more than Tomboy. Seriously! Gotta think about it some more though. As you can see I was pretty excited previously but now I think I'm actually thinking about it. I can't say it's just directly better than the mixtapes because it's so different. It sounds more like their non-mixtape work than their mixtape work, specifically a lot of their pre-mixtape stuff, making me wonder if “mixtape” was a more loaded definition than I previously thought. On those they went almost completely straight hip hop – the beats were classic, most songs didn't go out of the typical structure of a hip hop song, even the subject matter had hip hop as its primary cultural reference base. Here it has become the Jacksons and the music has expanded too. It's not about great lines, although there are a lot of great lines. They're taking the furthest steps in a trend of what I feel to be redefining rapping as just another style of singing. The line is becoming more blurred between this and stuff like Boy Crisis. The priorities are all changed up. Seems like #1 was producing a collection of perfectly produced and wonderfully catchy songs. Mission accomplished!
Not So Recent Anime
Steins;Gate
Started watching this, four episodes in. Really enjoying it. Wish I'd been watching it from the start but oh well. MC dude, forget his name, he's definitely very entertaining and really a unique character as far as I can tell. Rest of the supporting cast is great too if maybe a bit too cliched, but they all have room for development. Atmosphere very nice, well animated, good mix of comedy and seriousness and such. Some of the dialogue shows its roots a little much? Not sure if I can explain that very well. You'll notice I haven't mentioned the plot yet. Well, I'm not completely sold on it yet. The premise is great, I mean, mad scientist with his future gadgets lab, that's mad cool, but I dunno when you have a concept like this it's really hard to move past it properly. Already I'm seeing what I'd call “disc 3 JRPG syndrome”, where, like, the original dilemma has splintered so many times and has had so many other random sort of things popping up, “now we need this, now we need this, now this happened, etc”. It really hasn't happened yet, no, but I'm scared. They were after this computer and now they have it and I bet we see it in like three more episodes, tops. It's a really difficult thing to keep up this sort of plot, where the basic premise of the show is very high profile. Make developments too unrelated to the main plot and the impact is diminished. Make enough developments related to the main plot it makes the main plot feel stretched out and arbitrary. 20th Century Boys, Death Note, most JRPGs – hence my descriptor... 24 was the worst offender I've seen... Really, most stuff fails to this on some level eventually. The solutions are either to end it quick and magnificently (Madoka), make the base plot simpler (One Piece), lose the idea of a main plot almost completely (The Wire), or, and this is the big play that I think very few things have pulled off, manage to continue escalating and adding new elements without seeming tired out or irrelevant. I'd say Final Fantasy VII and VI did this. Also I feel like this is what Breaking Bad does but unfortunately I haven't seen that yet. And this is what I think Steins;Gate will go for, and it seems, from the INSANE amount of hype I've seen about the last few episodes, like it'll succeed, maybe. But even if it doesn't, well, look at what else I consider to have “failed” at this - 20th Century Boys is not a bad manga by any stretch of the imagination. Sure, the last few arcs made you raise an eyebrow with the ol' c'mon now attitude, but many awesome scenes involving the established characters you loved made the other eyebrow shoot up too – in delight! So yeah I really don't think I could start disliking it at this point.
Hidamari Sketch and moe as basically the only purely modernist thing left in art
I've been watching Hidamari Sketch a bunch and really enjoying it but there's been something very subtle that's off about it and in trying to figure out what specifically I disliked I may have realized what specifically I like about moe stuff in general. The thesis is right there in the title. Nearly every artistic movement seems to have moved into a time-transcending postmodern phase. Modern always seems like a, uh, modern or recent term, but I've always felt like it was “modern” as in like “current”. Most specific artistic movements have always progressed “forward”, techniques being passed down, things made as a reaction to previous things, etc, etc. A modern piece of art couldn't be made at any time previous. Nowadays “modern” is associated with all sorts of stuff, from the weirdest art installations and atonal space-symphonies to the most sophisticated, futuristic architecture to most of the music you hear on the radio. It seems to me that the only property in common with all of them is that they were made as, like, the latest and greatest. If you choose any of these examples you can see them as the latest step in a long journey since the start of the art form. Sometimes, as with classical music and painting, there's been a phase in the last hundred years or so where it seems like a long progression of advancing specific skills had reached some sort of limit, and they seem to have gone back several steps to eke out a new path where progress could be made. In other things, like a lot of aspects of design, a lot of newer genres of music, things like action movies and, well, moe, the march of strict improvement continues straight ahead.
Postmodernism, then, isn't so much what follows modern but what happens after you stop caring about being modern. The difference between the things created by this and those working in a modern mode and taking the, like, “alternate route” that Picasso and such did is subtle, but loosely definable. You can sort of think of it in terms of motivations, but I think that's pretty weak and unknowable for certain. I'd rather just analyze it roughly case by case. Stuff that I'd describe as “avant-garde modern” can usually be linked to the “traditional modern” immediately previous in some identifiable and usually pretty fascinating way e.g. seeing Dadaism as a parody of what were the currently established ideals of sculpture. Postmodernism, on the other hand, would be something like Pollock. Yes I know his stuff is lauded in Modern Art museums but modern art encompasses a lot of avant-garde postmodern art functionally even if (at least I'm trying to argue) the philosophy is different and noticeably so in the art. Pollock's stuff seems “timeless” and functions through emotions basically invariable in the human condition whereas something like Duchamp functions through a paradox established by the current conventions of art. That's not to say that postmodern art can't be contextual or satirical or whatever, just that it wasn't made as an effort to take a step further in any particular direction, not an escalation. Of course there's also escalation within postmodernist movements. Also it seems like I might be implying something like classicism to be postmodern, but that's more due to the fact that I'm presenting them as dichotomous supergroups. I'm getting over my head. This wasn't even supposed to be about postmodernism.
Okay here's an attempt at a definition before I move on to the actual subject (which I don't even have a whole lot to say about aaaaah)
Modern art has an element of reaction or escalation of what was previously considered modern art. Even if the previous thing was called something else, like realism or romanticism or irony-core hip hop or slice of life comedy, I still consider it modern if it was reactionary or escalatory to the previous thing that was modern and oh my this is circular.
Postmodern art has an element of reaction to the idea of modernism.
Most things still have neither, however, the overall progression of an artistic movement can be classified as a modern or postmodern progression even if the art itself can't be said to be either.
Okay.
So moe is a modernist development
Yes.
It is hard to compare moe, which is like an emotional artform, with anything else, but here lemme try:
Consider Redline vs. the moeness of K-On!: Redline, while in many ways representing the pinnacle of several trends (not the least of which is the art I mean SEVEN HANDDRAWN YEARS, I really still can't get over that), operates with a sort of knowing simplicity that, while being sort of knowing and satirical of other plots, makes it's biggest plays in it's refusal to acknowledge it's disregard of modernism. Oh geez I don't know if that will make any sense to anyone besides me. Okay so Redline knows exactly what it is, it is not Evangelion and it is not Lain or anything like that. However, it doesn't lord the differences over you like Gurren Lagann does (GL is more like a deconstruction, which I'd argue is modernism??? oh man this is getting difficult). It goes out of its way to avoid any sort of contextual theorizing of satire or other commentary. It is an example of sinceritism, a word I just made up for stuff that is definitively not ironic in any way, and I'd say is a definitely postmodern sort of movement.
Okay enough confusing things about what it isn't get it on to whattitis.
Slice of life is as old as dirt. A lot of the very first, like, caveman era art can retroactively be seen as slice of life, but that's really just because they didn't have much of an imagination in those days. True slice of life as genre can be seen as a reactionary thing to the dramatics of the greats of the late Romantic era (if you want I can defend this at length, basically I feel like early SoLers figured the Russians were unable to really make their point if their philosophies could only be realized in exemplary circumstances like murders) and the precursor to both the neo-hyperrealistic stuff that was like the bold first overstep of today's realism and the surrealistic stream of consciousness stuff. Definitely modern, all of them. The former evolution can be seen in Calvino, the latter in Woolf and Joyce's Ulysses. Slice of life itself was given its first real masterpiece and still greatest example in Joyce's Dubliners, but you knew I'd say that. Much later, in... the early 90s I guess? another genre sort of sprung up as a modern escalation of teen melodramas, an attempt to real nail the feeling of realism, almost mundane, that allowed viewers to really relate to the characters. This stuff went back to a lot of the SoL staples: few big dramatics; deliberate “flaws” to pacing, dialogue etc for the sake of realism; repetition - elements that viewers could count on, etc. Modern sitcoms are also an example of this – Seinfeld as a reaction to increasingly unrealistically saccharine “family sitcoms”.
So slice of life shows took the shojo teen dramas desire for relatable realism and eventually realized the best way to do it was to drop the drama altogether. Things became more and more ideal, there was a long series of one-uppance where each show just abandoned unpleasant elements of previous shows, losing like, the mean character, actual stress over homework, etc, etc. This was due to the fact that they'd really succeeded in making the characters relatable – people suffered as their favorite character did. Of course, this came at the expense of most of the comedy. Defining moe is a whole lot of work that I don't think I'm up for now but you can see how it emerged from this sort of progression – people would want the characters to be happy, even at the expense of the show's quality, even at the expense of their happiness. The emotion causing this could be called nothing other than moe.
And hoo boy, this emotion was marketable. This, more than anything, is what caused the slice of life genre to have such “Room of Spirit and Time” speeds of escalation. Making someone consider a character to be moe directly lead to them considering it a good thing to spend money on PVC figures of that character, Blu-Ray copies of episodes of that character's show, and pretty much any product under the sun if it had the character's likeness on it. Everything was optimized for this purpose, everything else scrapped. Now what qualifies as moe has become a Lovecraftian hydra that probably has a tentacled head in everything imaginable, including blushing tsundere Cthulhus (I hope. Brb gelbooru). It's so modern! Think of how when Clannad made so much money everything looked like it in terms of like, eye-size and hair colouring. Then Haruhi made a bunch of money and suddenly hair was more fluid and eyes were closer. Then K-On made rounder and chipmunky and shrank the appendages down. Next is... YuruYuri styled basic colors and, like, circle to curve designs? Or A-Channel's pure blobbiness? Of course there's also like, Raildex's branch of going classic anime design (and, unfortunately, classic anime QUALITY) and then just going ham with the character designs. Hmm.
Anyways, there's very few artistic movements that do things like this, things that basically amount to completely unabashed but very effective pandering. Console first person shooters also apply, I guess. If you happen to like the thing, the way I like moe stuff, you really have no place to complain. This is like someone driving a buffet up to your house. Yeah, it feels good to get up on the high horse and decry how easy the market but c'mon can't you appreciate just how hard they're trying to be the absolute moest? Isn't that amazing itself? Plus, there's been some real masterpieces that couldn't exist without the level of moe technology we have today. Like Madoka! Or:
Hidamari Sketch is a porcupine of moe
That's an evolution metaphor that I'm too lazy to explain, I think it's sort of understandable if not actually scientifically accurate? Madoka sort of uses some of the styles of H. Sketch, as does YuruYuri in the occasional scene, but for the most parts stuff like 20:3 faces or symbolic uses of characters (indulge me for a second: did you know that in a lot of the early drafts of Finnegans Wake, HCE and ALP and Shaun and Shem and Izzy didn't even have those “names”? Forreal they were just SYMBOLS, I think they were old alchemical symbols. And now we have Yunochi's X [that took me way too long to get, the -chi = X thing, by the way], Hiro's squid, etc, etc! Plus like... okay no that's actually the only FW/HS comparison I can think of) or scaling the rest of the limbs, uh, proportionally (instead of the “they would be falling down all the time” limbs of most other shows) or photo-inserts or whatever didn't see a lot of play in other shows. It's a shame, for the most part, because these are great ideas (except for the limbs thing. I'm sorry, I cringe when I see them walking in the opening credits. It just seems so wrong. How ironic.) and are very artistic, especially compared to the rest of the genre. However, they aren't moe. They're just a little off. And it's not like they're a little off-moe because they weren't established in the moe-canon and repeated ad-diabetes, they weren't established because they were a bit off-moe. And I can't really explain why that is no more than I can explain why other stuff is moe, which is an open problem in my book just behind “is there objectivity in art?” and just after “what is consciousness?”
Lots of other stuff in lots of other artistic movements have had stuff that's much more off than the stuff off here. Blu's new albums have this weird beat system that I don't think any other rapper is eager to try. Asano's photorealism and Ware's minimalism. Etc, etc. However, since the movements of those are already very beset with postmodernism, of all sorts of things being done because nothing needs to be done, stuff showing up with no steps being taken, just sort of popping in. It's the difference between hopping in a time machine and winding up in the Jurassic Age and walking down the street and ending up in a cow pasture. The latter is weirder, yeah. Not unpleasant. But weird. Especially if you were trying to get to the store.
I guess that's all I'm trying to say.
Oh speaking off all this, this is why Saimoe is so interesting to me: it's like evolution hyperspeed action!
Also why I'm so annoyed that Hakase and Ui both lost to some girl from some show I barely have even heard of!! WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE. YES, I'M MAD.
Hiro and Nori won their matches, though, so that's good.
Recent Anime
Will be in the next blog post~!!
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