stuff i write

ALL YOUR SHINY NEW TOYS

Since the dawn of awful internet discourse, a question has plagued the world: Are video games art? This question would promptly be followed by the sound of nerds frothing at the mouth, pretentious classicalists smelling their own farts, and me blowing my brains out the back of my skull with a shotgun. Stop asking this question and go stare at a urinal for 5 hours.

I have never loved Silent Hill 2. I had been led to believe it was one of the greatest games ever made before playing it and, upon my first experience, I thought it was pretty good! The game part of it was nothing to write home about, but the story had a strong enough emotional core to it that I could see why it struck such a powerful chord with people in 2001. I’ve never gone back to it since the first time, though.

Remakes have existed for a long time and so has complaining about remakes. As such, I don't want to waste too much time upfront on that and instead want to focus on an idea which comes up often around discussions of remakes: the idea you should only remake media that was deeply flawed or outright bad when it first saw the light of day. For the longest time, this struck me as a well-meaning intent. It sucks when a movie or game with fascinating ideas squanders that potential with poor execution. Remakes, by and large, have never existed for this purpose. Remakes are IP. A corporation making what is a sure bet. Perhaps my greatest fear is how many people out there hold the belief in that well-meaning intent, without the realization of the latter point. The creeping sensation pop culture has fostered the idea that old media needs to be revamped to modern standards every 5-10 years.

Any medium can be art, but can a remake be art? This too is a pointless question to ask if you take into account the former point I made about the ideal functional purpose of remakes. A talented creative team can take poorly executed ideas and turn them into their own statement. The better question to ask is, “Can capital’s conceptualization of a remake ever be art?” I don't think there is a more emblematic answer to this question than the Silent Hill 2 Remake. Silent Hill 2 is a survival horror game whose small creative team used every facet of the medium they worked in to create what is widely considered one of the greatest video games stories of all time. FMV cutscenes are interspersed with in-engine cutscenes to tease at the uncanny valley. Level and enemy design is exercised as metaphor for a descent into the dark recesses of a human mind. Voice actors are directed syllable-by-syllable to deliver performances so unnatural they become hyperreal. Hardware limitations are turned into positive attributes with a fog coating the town in ethereal mystique.

The remake too is clouded in the same ethereal mystique. But these are not limitations of the canvas anymore. Modern graphics allow the remake to tease at the uncanny valley. But so do all modern triple-A video games. Level and enemy design is still exercised as metaphor for a descent into the dark recesses of a human mind. But this metaphor has practically become exhausted by every horror game released in the wake of the original Silent Hill 2. The remake presents us with what is widely considered one of the greatest video game stories ever made. But we've seen this story before.

Why does this story require a shiny new coat of paint? I could feign ignorance and ask a bunch of rhetorical questions about accessibility, games preservation, or the imperfections of the original games, but I'd just be belaboring the point. This story required a new coat of paint because it's a sure bet and Konami needs the money after the brief global shutdown brought about by COVID-19. I am sure that plenty of people whom worked on this game feel a great passion for the original and I'm glad they have developed A Good Videogame, but the adoration and reverence for Silent Hill 2 is exactly why few, if any, horror games have ever surpassed it as a high-water mark.

The Silent Hill 2 Remake is not your precious Mary; it's an echo of the piece of art you loved or heard so much about from your friends. A legacy turned into a shiny new toy for you to gawk at and leave behind.

The Disintegration Loops

After the end of The Cold War, author Francis Fukuyama postulated that capitalism had been left with no true challengers and thus we had reached an era that he coined as "The End of History". The threat of Nazi fascism was defeated, the Iron Curtain of Soviet Russia had collapsed under it's own weight, and the US government had thoroughly stomped down the political dissidents on the home front. While I'm pretty sure Fukuyama didn't say that last part, all you need to do is look at what happened to every civil rights leader in the 1960s and the Black Panther party in order to infer it as part of his thesis.

Ostensibly, the guy had a pretty solid theory on his hands, at least to any American living above the poverty line during the 90s. We're going to put a pin in the word "had" for now because I gotta read an obligatory wikipedia excerpt to show that I put some kind of research into this script and didn't just type a two-thousand word tirade about living through the decay of an empire. In the 1980s, avant-garde ambient music producer William Basinski recorded found sound sources, shortwave radio, and delay systems onto an ancient technology known as "cassette tapes". A decade and some change later, while transferring those tapes to a digital format, he noticed that the tapes had deteriorated, as physical things tend to do after a couple decades. I, as a physical thing in her 30s, can already feel my body rapidly crumbling around me as you will too if you haven't already. There's some technical jargon about the recording process the article talks about here, but the long and short of it was Basinski thought the slow decay of those tapes was cool and decided to record the process of audio decay in a project he titled The Disintegration Loops. He finished this project while in his New York City apartment on the morning of September 11th 2001.

That same morning, the U.S. population as a whole was collectively traumatized by what was, in the grand scheme of human tragedies, a relatively miniscule act of terrorism. Consider, if you may, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and every instance of genocide before you get mad at me for saying that. Like, it was absolutely a tragedy, but at the end of the day humanity has committed some truly heinous actions in comparison to 9/11. That quite mild tangent aside, Basinski filmed his view of those deteriorating towers as the sun set, using stills from the video as album art, and played the first album of this project for a group of friends in his apartment the following morning. Considering that he dedicated said album to the victims of those attacks, Basinski probably retroactively views the work quite simply as a piece of mourning for the lives lost. However, it's hard to look at The Disintegration Loops and see them as anything but a succinct portrayal of what was and would continue to be the ongoing slow decay of late-stage capitalism.

Even when it was at it's "strongest", our economic system hasn't been some joyful romp, like the upbeat jazz of another notable piece of decaying art, Everywhere At The End of Time; instead, capitalism is a recursive, brooding, and oppressive four bar loop. You're listening to The Great Depression. The destruction of marginalized communities under Reganomics. The continuous bailouts of corporations deemed too big to fail. The housing crisis of 2008. The astroturfing of serious sociopolitical movements by well-established institutions.

Finally returning to Mr. Fukuyama, it's immediately easy to see how wrong he was about that idea. Now, it's not because we had a new existential threat to capitalism via Al-Qaeda. We all know at this point (and, quite frankly, we knew in the moment) that they weren't an actual threat. They were a guerilla organization armed and trained by the US government during our previous Middle Eastern affairs that just happened to get lucky. And by lucky, I mean that our new conservative regime at the time had intel pointing towards an incident like 9/11 happening and decided it'd better suit their interest to let the dice roll. They certainly weren't wrong. Shoutouts to whatever CIA agent was watching me through my smartphone as I typed this out. It's almost like how conservatives nowadays complain about antifa destroying the western world, when really it's just a trans polycule hanging out in their apartment popping MDMA. In fact, I could probably go on like a long tangent here comparing the way that Bush Sr's presidency setup a lot of the dominos that would lead to the The War in Afghanistan and Iraq to how the lack of both education about LGBTQ+ people and access to HRT for gender-questioning kids probably led us to what feels to conservatives like an epidemic of "transgenderism" in our country, but I'm pretty sure comparing myself and other trans people to actual terrorist groups is a horrible idea. It’s also just basic cause and effect. Sorry, I lost the thread for a minute there.

Anyways, our leaders at the time brute forced a war which, at best, only the most grief-stricken, money-hungry or bloodthirsty people wanted to see happen. The families unlucky enough to be related to people unlucky enough to be caught in the crossfire of an avoidable attack on a national landmark. The lobbyists and politicians that leech off those aforementioned people looking for any excuse to prolong our presence in the middle east and continue a stranglehold grip on a natural resource whose usage only accelerates the rot of the only planet we can safely occupy. The bloodthirsty psychopaths looking for any opportunity they can get to pick up a rifle and vent their pent-up anger and frustrations in M-40 rounds, be it from a justified but misdirected dissatisfaction at what the system has done to their only life on this planet or just a unmitigated hateful pit in their heart. Or maybe their support systems died in that tragedy and all they can do is sacrifice themselves to the war machine to keep themselves afloat. Regardless of whichever category those who supported the war fell into, we all watched as our leaders sank billions of dollars on the loss of human life, flailing like a shitty child drowning in the shallow end of the pool. Kicking and splashing into nearby countries that we dipped our toes into a decade and change beforehand. Across the ocean. Across presidencies. Across political party lines. Across time. Still slow burning in the background, but only getting further away with every consecutive year. The carnage becoming more obfuscated even for those who pull the trigger. Now, they sit behind computer monitors like they're blowing up a 12-year old in Call of Duty.

Putting aside everything I previously said about "the end of history" being a bullshit concept. Even ignoring the fact Fukuyama himself admitted to it being bullshit in lieu of COVID (and proceeded to double back on it's validity shortly after), history is happening around us everyday and we just don't think about it. The US spent maybe half a year reeling at what felt like significant changes. A democratic socialist seemed like he was a shoe-in to win the democratic party nomination. A major pandemic ground our toxic work culture to a halt, seemingly shutting down the factory of capitalism's eternal machines. Major protests and riots nationwide against police brutality were only reinforcing capitalism's desire to close shop and protect their assets. These were historically significant events with a real momentum behind them. But, at the end of the day, this economy and the people that truly profit off of it don't give a shit about Newton and his laws of momentum. It doesn't matter if there's oil in these cogs or if we have to watch this factory burn to the ground, workers and all. There was one thing that Fukuyama got kind of right: There is no true enemy to capitalism on a global scale anymore. Nearly every economic system is tied to one another, no matter the political ideology that rules those countries. We outsource most of our factory labor and call center work to East Asian countries. We economically and politically fuck over any other country that operates under an ideology that doesn't adhere to ours as soon as they show the slightest inkling of independence. Fuck World War 3. Capitalism DID win and all we're doing now, as individuals who don't want to live under its grip anymore, is trying to work towards establishing support systems in preparation for its inevitable collapse. Not in a libertarian prepper kind of way, but a “the only way my friends and I will afford to live decently moving forward is to lump our earnings together” kind of way.

Capitalism is not an eternal machine though. it's just designed to make you feel that way. Instead, it's more realistic to think of it as the world's worst Rube Goldberg machine. a meticulously crafted chain of suffering that ends in something stupid like dropping a sugar cube into a cup of coffee or mistakenly obliterating a wedding procession with a military drone. Outside of a few key landmarks, the aforementioned collapse has never felt like the end of the world. It's just an IV drip of misfortune. The loop slowly falls apart, still recognizable, only slightly worse now. 9/11 happens every day now and we cannot stop it. We can only watch it rot. That is the true legacy of The Disintegration Loops. A funeral dirge for late-capitalism and an ode to the decay it embodies.

Akudama Drive

The following is a collection of sporadic thoughts I've had about this show that I planned to turn into a proper essay, but probably never will. Enjoy?

It’s kind of impossible to talk about this show without setting up some context around the studio and creative director behind crafting it’s scenario. Kazutaka Kodaka grew up a lonely nerd that watched anime all the time and eventually became a lonely nerd with a major in film studies. In an interview with Famitsu, he notes that he originally wanted to be a film screenwriter, but, because he desired so much to make something original, he thought he’d have an easier time achieving that in the medium of video games. Which if you know anything about this man’s career, you’ll know that when I read this I lmao’d. Anyways, after doing some minor work on a couple DBZ games and Clock Tower 3, he ended up getting a job at Spike Chunsoft where he was the planner and scenario writer for Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and good god did that game explode. It landed in the perfect nexus of time where the Ace Attorney trilogy had since concluded and internet culture needed a new quirked out hybrid visual novel/point-and-click mystery game to fill the void. Danganronpa garnered a rabid, both in fervor and at times aggression, fanbase in the East and West thanks to its cast of ludicrous, manic characters and disgustingly sincere embrace of anime tropes. Aevee Bee, of We Know The Devil and Heaven Will Be Mine, beautifully described this effect as “pure Anime [that’s with a capital A], reality cartoonishly distorted in ways that will make feel real.” The characters bounce around the screen, spinning wildly revealing that their two-dimensionality is not simply their bizarre trope-laden characterizations, but also literal as they are physical cardboard cutouts.

And then one of his producers looked at him and said, “Hey, that was cool, can you do it again?” And Kodaka was like, “Uh, yeah sure.” And he did! And it was also great. However, he would continue to make Danganronpa again for the next 7 years. After the release of Danganronpa V3 in 2017 (which is another phenomenal piece of art that I’ll almost definitely talk about at some point), Kodaka proceeded to leave Spike Chunsoft and form Too Kyo Games with composer Masafumi Tokada, illustrator Rui Komatsuzaki, Zero Escape director Kotaro Uchikoshi and other ex-Chunsoft employees. Shortly after announcing the formation of said studio, they announced a few different projects, including a television anime titled Akudama Drive. And from it’s opening moments, you can feel a new found energy from the creative team, probably bottled up after years of doing effectively the same thing. What an amazing aesthetic and art direction. The Danganronpa creative team have always been undeniably excellent at that aspect, so it should've been no surprise, but goddamn does it pop off right out of the gate.Phenomenal cast of characters that have a great energy that play off each other super well. AMAZING OP captures the raw rebellious energy of the show so well and is RIFE with symbolism that ends up being incredibly pertinent to the series.

In an interview, Kodaka stated that he always planned for the Akudama cast to die just by nature of them being criminals. Almost like a karmic retribution being repaid for all of their past wrongdoings. But I gotta ask, how much do you actually believe that, Kodaka? Far more empathy is extended towards these criminals through the series and the arms of the law (both the normal cops and enforcers) are effectively made clowns of by the end. The head of the Executioners gets a brick to the skull and the police chief unalives himself; I know nothing is ever black and white with Kodaka, but that feels explicitly in the criminals' favor.

When we think of it as a show that is primarily about control, I think an important structural thing to note about the story is how all the characters behave in the first half versus the back half. In the first half during the heist portion of the show, the main cast has no control over their situation due to the bomb collars. They MUST utilize their individualism for the mission. However, when you get into the back half, they are freed from that control and do as they want. This ends up illustrating both pros and cons (mostly cons) of having that kind of control over people. While individuals like Swindler and Hacker can commit to a noble cause like trying to rescue the kids. Other folks like Cutthroat and Doctor use this freedom to inflict that control onto other people.

The final Brawler and Executor Fight as a microcosm for the struggle of the show. Although Brawler ultimately was only in it for the fight, this only serves to highlight how important this sequence is to the theming of the show. Brawler was a character who simply wanted to live his life to what he saw as the fullest in every moment. Complete control over only his life. Meanwhile, the Executioner only cared about following the law of the land to a T. Control over the lives of others. Execute criminals regardless of what gets in his way. The true Chaotic vs. Lawful dynamic. Additionally, this fight introduces the idea of death not being a lose state. He ultimately accomplished what he wanted, even if it cost him his life. The same could be said of Hacker, Hoodlum, Courier, and Swindler.

On that note of control, the idea of controlling the narrative is another vital factor of the show. In an incredibly apt way, you don't notice immediately that the Bunny and Shark are more than just little snippets of world-building. They're also literal propaganda crafted by Kanto. Even in the metatextual sense, Kanto has control of the narrative. At least for most of the series. Once Swindler starts utilizing social media to cause uproar among the populace or even film her own death by the Executioner's hands, she's able to take control of the narrative being propped up by the media.

Let's talk about the myth of inserting "politics" into mah pristine Japanese animes. I'm no expert on the history (or lack thereof) of government/police brutality in Japan, however I think you would have to be an absolute dunce to believe that this show isn't a scathing critique of those authoritarian structures that can so easily slip into violent riots against their citizens the second they seem to move in ways they don't like. And by god, did the 2010s have examples of that out the ass. Most prevalent of those examples, thanks primarily to the explosion of social media at the time, being Ferguson. I do not have the time to go into all the exact details of this incident and good god me a 33 year old white woman on the internet is far from the most knowledgeable people to try and speak on the long-standing brutalization of black communities by police and the government in the U.S.. suffice it to say that, an innocent teenager was murdered by a police officer in broad daylight and the community of that town was rightfully fucking pissed. They held peaceful protests. Police fired tear gas and "less-than-lethal" rounds at them to break-up the protests. This did not work. Protests escalated into completely justified riots. More examples: Arab Spring and the global news coverage helping prevent widespread violence in some regions. Hong Kong Independence movement.

Would one argue that outside observers seeing these real political movements and supporting them is "projecting their filthy gaijin politics" onto these different cultures? You could maybe argue that they don't have the full localized sociopolitical context as someone born and raised in that culture, but, if we're taking people in good faith, one can strip away that layer and get to some core resonating aspects of those movements. More often than not it's something simple like "I don't want innocent people to die" or "I don't like my government oppressing me, so I'm pretty sure those folks on the other side of the world don't like it either." Y'know…empathy. So why are anime and video game nerds always just champing at the fucking bit to throw this accusation any time someone throws so much as a lukewarm analysis at one of their precious darlings? The easy answer is that these are simply forms of entertainment to them. And that's kind of fair. Would I want someone butting into my conversation about how much I love The Raid with statistics about police brutality? Not necessarily, however the response to that shouldn't be pretending that these factoids don't exist or aren't relevant to the portrayal of authority figures in fiction. Which if we started really investigating that reasoning of "well, it's just entertainment", we might discover that Japan, the country itself, is effectively an avenue of entertainment to them. Not to imply that these individuals have never been to Japan or interacted with native Japanese people in their life; simply that their primary relationship with this different country is entirely done through entertainment. Pop culture. Media that is typically designed to be easily marketable and consumable. Art that more often than not doesn't challenge the audience in an ideological or intellectual way. Kinda like how when in anime the portrayal of Americans is hamburgers, blond bikini girls, and guns. That is the image that we export and project to the rest of the world because of the pop culture that we produce. Thus when something falls out of that typical mold, it becomes easy to assuage that as the result of some outside influence. Bridget is trans because of the woke moralist's meddling. They removed the vagina bones because the feminists want to live in a puritanical society where men get electroshock anytime they pop a boner. The elves are black because BLM antifa soldiers are going to throw Molotov cocktails through Jeff Bezos' window. And that's just when the media itself has those elements, not even when a fellow fan takes an analytical lens to those pieces. Now, you might ask, "Why are we talking about all this tangential bullshit when Akudama Drive never really got that kind of backlash?" And I think it's precisely BECAUSE it didn't get that kind of attention that it's important to bring up this question. It's an exception that proves the rule and it's only really an exception because of just how hard coded politics is into the show's DNA. It is, at its heart, a show about politics.

The duality of the phrase "light at the end of the tunnel". Seeing a light at the end of a tunnel can be used to describe dying, go towards the light. More commonly used to describe good things coming after a period of strife. This use becomes a running visual in the final episode of the series. Swindler, in her final moments, sees the snow falling above her, but that's not all she sees. In that vision of the snow, she sees a premonition of the kids finally reaching the end of their journey away from this terrible system. It's a shaky, unstable vision, but it's there regardless. This is where the duality shines. She's passing away, but she knows that what she did meant something and will lead to some kind of good down the line.

Adam Curtis is an English documentarian who in an interview said this in regard to the concept of "real change": “...this is the forgotten thing about politics, which is that you give up some of your individualism, to something bigger than yourself; you surrender yourself, and it's a lost idea.” In the penultimate episode of Akudama Drive, Swindler (who started the series as a "normal citizen" that, by pure happenstance, became branded as an Akudama) finally embraces her individualism as the Swindler to pull one final truck on the Executioners. However, the swindle she pulls in the final act is declaring on a live broadcast before she's executed that she is "a innocent civilian". Which isn't necessarily a swindle. How many of the lawfully "wrong" things she's done throughout the course of the show aren't acts that you or I would do in those situations? But because she lives in the context of those laws, she is trying to swindle the powers that be. She is sacrificing her individual identity as Swindler for what she perceived to be the greater good. Which interestingly allows for a more nuance take on Curtis' words from earlier. It's not simply that the individual must sacrifice the identities and truths they live with as a result of those identities in order to help bring about real change. When most marginalized folks are approached with that kind of framework, it's understandable to defensively prickle up and worry that this thought pattern seeks to cast aside lived truths. Instead, what Akudama Drive tells us is that your lived truths hold value; however, they are worthless in a sociopolitical context if you are not utilizing them in tandem with everyone else in the struggle with you. There's no point in weighing who suffers the most when we all suffer and simply seek to lessen that collective suffering at the hands of those who wield power. In her final moments, Swindler casts aside whatever bitterness she should rightfully feel at the shit luck of her situation and instead uses it as a silver bullet to help put down the Executioners. She strips herself of that individualism she had built up over the course of the show and allows the people of Kansai to see themselves in this wrongfully-executed woman. Now, instead of the rabid vigilante violence towards the ever-changing label of Akudama as deemed by the police and state propaganda, there is now a directed and righteous fury aimed at those in charge who let that seemingly innocent woman die. Authoritative powers, who suddenly shifted the goalposts during the last public unrest and executed citizens simply acting out in the way one would expect when raised under generations of propaganda.

The importance of human life over the status quo. The ultimate success of our heroes throughout is due to their dedication to protecting the lives of those being taken advantage of by the system. Instead of just allowing them to become future cogs in the machine of status quo, they sacrifice everything to free them from that fate. The downfall of the authoritative figures in the story, primarily Kanto and the Executioners, is their absolute dedication to preserving the status quo. Instead of being willing to let their empire fade, Kanto genetically engineer the kids to become immortal houses, metaphorical of the ways in which indoctrinating the youth is one of the most surefire ways to normalize unhealthy patterns in sociopolitical norms. Additionally, the Executioners strive so much to preserve a sense of normality in Kansai that, when mass uprising begins to occur, they immediately label everyone that's part of the movement as criminals and kill them, regardless of the actions they commit. This eventually leads to the second uprising that is targeted directly at the Executioners. We don't see the final results of this, but one can assume that their organization did not make it.