"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!" Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful." Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment." "Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."
Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
I'm just going to implore people to check out Umineko for themselves because if you're approaching it with an ounce of charity or goodwill you'll understand that it's pretty much impossible to believe that it's secretly a TERFy right wing game, and this particular critique of it is essentially built off the fact that some of Umineko's central themes are offensive to rationalists.
It's really good! I've read the manga and am working my way slowly through the VN. My brain does not mesh well with them unfortunately and so it is slow going--I get antsy. Still early in the first question arc.
As much as I like reading, I like gameplay in my games, the VN has to be like top tier to get me even interested, as well as cater to my exact interests which makes VNs I actually like pretty rare. At the moment there's like three or four I actually like enough to go though.
As much as I like reading, I like gameplay in my games, the VN has to be like top tier to get me even interested, as well as cater to my exact interests which makes VNs I actually like pretty rare. At the moment there's like three or four I actually like enough to go though.
Going to be honest, that's a major issue with VNs: you have to include good enough gameplay to justify not just making a novel, but also not have it detract from the story (via being bad or overly difficult). And while the tools are freely available to allow a single person to make an entire VN on their own, game design and writing are not the same skill. It's entirely possible to be good at one and bad at the other since proficiency at one doesn't have much impact at skill at the other. Same thing goes with visual art, you could replace game design or writing with that in the earlier section and it would still hold true. Basically, while a single person can make an entire VN on their own, the question should be asked should they. Especially since having one of those factors be absolute trash can drag down the others pretty hard with that format.
[C]ritique and criticism are still fundamentally just consumption. Critique is not some ancient tradition that forms the beating heart of human progress, or anything so ridiculously grandiose.
As for the rest, I think all I really need to say is that this observation about the Dunning-Krueger effect applies just as much to liking something, or love-hating something, or being indifferent to something, or literally anything else. There's no reason to suppose that criticism is special in this regard, and if criticism isn't special then what you're essentially saying is that there is no point about saying anything at all, and that we should either always shut up and trust the opinions of people smarter than us or simply not have opinions at all unless we're powerful enough to introduce them into the Real Discourse(TM). I... don't think this is what you actually believe?
This is the most unproductive effort/useful thought ratio I've ever seen in any kind of attempt at Marxist lit analysis, and that's actually really impressive in its own way.
Sure. Let's entertain this. Why not.
I happen to know from having conversed with you elsewhere that you believe that Felski and her compatriots are, fundamentally, correct, you just think they're 'batting for the wrong team'. That is to say, due to the infinite power of literary scepticism and how easily it can be applied and bent in various ways, criticism is fundamentally transformative and can be directed in more or less any direction the author chooses, if they're willing to read against the grain. You disagree with postcriticism in that you see reparative reading as a flawed response, but that's tangential.
By these metrics, who is the one spreading "conservative" propaganda here, Ryukishi or you, who has read against the grain to create this reading?
Or, you know, you could get a grip, but even under your own weird worldview your critique is bad.
Outside of that worldview, I can make a very wordy argument that literally any work is fascist if I'm bound and determined enough, it doesn't mean anything unless you're an overly credulous Twitter poster.
When did I ever say this? I said that Felski and her compatriots were fundamentally correct and just batting for the wrong team in the sense that she's right that critique is fundamentally, on some level, an act of cruelty and suspicion, which is hostile rather than friendly to the spirit of art, and that it expresses a certain degree of belief in the intellectual superiority of theory over the sensuous, sentimental, embodied, etc. reactions associated with good-faith, non-critical engagement with art: I just think that these things are Good, Actually. I never suggested that "criticism" is necessarily so transformative of the underlying work that it no longer speaks to what the actual work says, such that you can say that when I accuse Umineko of having conservative themes I'm actually blameworthy for promoting conservatism, and even Felski herself has never said something so absurdly extreme?
Also, like, I'm not even interpreting Umineko myself here? Like, with the exception of noting how the characterization of Erika and Bernkastel is uncomfortably redolent of a particular kind of anti-intellectual caricature that's prominent in conservative rhetoric and literature, I'm fully accepting everyone else's interpretation that Umineko's message, read "with the grain", is that warm, happy fictions can be better than cold reality, and all I am saying is that that theme itself, taken at face value, is innately conservative.
Yes, I agree that you do need to see the world with critical and rational eyes, that any appeals to a "gentle lie" are hence deeply troubling, and personally I found that pretty vexing in Hogfather. And of course, yes, Marx was all about how industrial societies are destroying the gentle lies that held up the feudal age, and this is enabling people to see their exploitation for what it really is, etc, so it is an idea well grounded in philosophy and discourse. Now I didn't watch Umineko so I couldn't say if this would vex me as well, but I suppose I get the sentiment, at least.
But ultimately, that will only tell you "is", and you cannot derive "ought" from it. Not that it is inadvisable or bad to do so, you physically cannot. The idea that there is some holistic world order where you can do that is flat out incorrect. Ironically, the Enlightenment slogan of "The Beautiful, Good, True" is itself a gentle lie. There is no unity between any of the three.
So, congratulations. You now see the "is" better. But what you do with that is still completely up to you. The ought doesn't follow. Maybe you propagate your class interests, but they will indeed only be your class interests. You could construct a more universal approach for the good of all society, but that already wouldn't be derived from "is", but would in itself already add a new moral ("ought") calculation. It's like - you have discovered consequentialism as a rational metaethical approach, but whether you choose utilitarianism or philosophical egoism out of that, that is completely up to you. You can't derive it from anything.
Like, in most straightforward example here, Marx never claimed that there was or should be any sort of moral basis to society, he thought that socialist politics were an embodiment of the class war and purely an expression of the proletariat's own class interest, which is as much an "is" as saying that your interest includes eating food is.
Even if you're not willing to go that far--and for the record, I'm not either--there's entire rich intellectual traditions that show how you can derive both basic modern ethical principles and progressive/socialist/liberal/etc. politics purely from rational strategic self-interest! David Gauthier and Brian Skyrms are probably the most famous example for the former, and John Roemer along with Bowles and Gintis for the latter--I'd highly encourage you to check out all of the neo-hobbesian contractarians, the evobio altruism theorists, and the analytical marxists if you're interested in this kind of thing!
You don't though? Like your stonefaced allegiance to wildly destructive outcomes in the name of your personal version of praxis which few if any other people share is not a source of credibility, and never has been. Your insanely divergent takes on theory and desire to pick fights have never endeared you to others, and in fact have resulted in subforum bans and eating points on multiple occasions.
Like, take this one. You state your belief, in all seriousness, apparently unaware of the irony, that belief itself is bad. You do this immediately after, in all seriousness, without a hint of irony, going on a spiel about your belief in the probable transphobia of the author of Umineko, which is based not on observable fact about the author directly but about vagueries of gender, age, and ethnicity.
Your belief, and indeed your faith, ("I think that I of all people") are all over this discussion, but you say belief is inherently, inescapably right-wing with a straight face, sewing yourself up in the red-brown alliance of your own mind. It's weirdly, refreshingly self-refuting.
I really hope that you're not deriving all of this from assuming that my (admittedly inartful) use of a double "that" was actually a typo?
Like, I'm not claiming that all beliefs are conservative? That's obviously ridiculous? What I said was that the belief which Umineko promotes is conservative, not that the act of having a mental representation of the world is!
Also, like, I'm not claiming to be an especially credible or intelligent person here? Like, I didn't say that people should know by now that I'm right lmao, I said that people should know by now that I really am an obsessive ideologue who genuinely and in good faith draws his opinions about media from his political commitments, and therefore that I'm probably not just someone who dislikes Umineko for personal, media consumption reasons and is just reaching for an uncharitable political interpretation to discredit it? Like my point here is that I'm an insane and dogmatic person and people should know that rather than thinking I'm merely pretending to be dogmatic so I can say that your fave is problematic?
No, but I've certainly read an infamously long murder mystery novel where it turns out that the culprit is actually secretly the background character nonconsensual illegitimate child of the family patriarch, whose actions were a consequence of the life-denying and miserable consequences of an over-rationalistic worldview too exclusively concerned with literal truth being irresponsibly promoted by concieted, self-satisfied arrogant intellectuals, for which the presented answer is repiduation of nihilistic rationalism and trust in a christ-like faith in love and willingness to believe.--and I'm capable of basic pattern-matching!
Like, again, I'm agreeing with other people who have read the VN about what its theme is! What I'm saying is that said theme is clearly Bad, Actually, and the fact that Umineko is a good and nuanced and compassionate exposition of that theme only makes it worse!
I don't really think you need to justify anything of the sort. It's in the name, visual novel. Novels cannot have graphics, voice acting, sound effects, or any of the other many advantages that VNs bring to the table. You don't need gameplay to distinguish them. That's why there are quite a few visual novels which work just fine without any major gameplay systems.
It's not bad to have gameplay mechanics too but it's hardly necessary to be a VN. Much less a good one.
I don't really think you need to justify anything of the sort. It's in the name, visual novel. Novels cannot have graphics, voice acting, sound effects, or any of the other many advantages that VNs bring to the table. You don't need gameplay to distinguish them. That's why there are quite a few visual novels which work just fine without any major gameplay systems.
It's not bad to have gameplay mechanics too but it's hardly necessary to be a VN. Much less a good one.
Illustrated novels are a thing, but that's a nitpick and doesn't cover audio or animated graphics.
I think sometimes-used categorization splitting distinguishes visual novels with no interactive choices at all as 'kinetic novels'.
Also, while it's definitely going to have skill distinct from single-narrative writing I'm not sure the skill of writing branch-choice multi-path VN is usually considered part of game design in general, and having that as the only 'gameplay system' seems pretty common in VNs?
The only visual novel series I'm familiar with is the Ace Attorney series. Speaking of which, we need AA7 soon, I want to see how they follow up Spirit of Justice.
Yeah. And the writing/translation is also important. Even though the "gameplay loop" of FHA is basically "go to location, read scene, repeat" the writing and the element of "damn what's going to happen next?" and the humor kept me wanting to back and keep reading.
I think you can be mean-spirited and offer meaningful critique. Being a hater doesn't preclude you from making valid criticisms, it's just that an immense majority of people think they're way funnier, smarter, and more incisive than they actually are when it comes to hating. I've got things I hate, I've got opinions on those things too! I don't think I'm Orson Welles when I give those opinions even though he'd totally agree with all of them.
And I think on top of the Dunning Kruger effect in play, I think people need to get over the idea that their own critique must be sufficiently meaningful and accept that they can literally just dislike a thing, they can just not vibe with the themes or the intent and they don't need a grand moral or meritorious backing. I'm not fond of A Little Life, even after learning of the author's intent with it and letting my thoughts settle on the matter. I just found it unsatisfactory even though I now felt I had a better understanding and appreciation of what it aimed for. I didn't think ALL was torture porn, or offensively presumptuous, or a damning condemnation of certain attitudes and perceptions, it was just a book that took a little too long, and didn't hit right. I moved on with my life, picked up the next book I wanted to read (which I believe was Private Rites by Julia Armfield) and let that be that.
I'm half recalling someone far smarter than I am when I say that in the present day, it seems consumption is the only true act of agency we have, so people ascribe importance to their consumption that doesn't exist, and I think the same is true of critique, and that critique and criticism are still fundamentally just consumption. Critique is not some ancient tradition that forms the beating heart of human progress, or anything so ridiculously grandiose. It's a way of eating your food, and sure, eating a wide variety will give you a better understanding of the flavours at play and how to use them yourself, and eating at a wide variety of venues is better for you than eating nothing but McDonalds, but you'd be insane to argue that you've performed something more righteous than the guy eating a Big Mac.
This is one of the smartest breakdowns of performative consumption/critique I've ever read and I have a literal Masters degree in Philosophy I am also incredibly stoned
Late reaction, but I have run into a few stories where escaping from one computer system into one that's safer or otherwise more desirable in some way was part of the plot. (Probably some about getting into artificial bodies too.)
The question is, how well is it going to land? Like, I guess you can ask what the actual goal is anyway, but I'd imagine no matter what it's gonna go kinda like this. (With the note that most of the people doing that kind of critique are not, as far as I'm aware, and admitting that I don't watch any of them, experts.)
I'm having difficulty wrapping my head around the idea that there's only one progressive position on an issue that's both highly contentious and highly personal. (Presumably by extension there's only one conservative position as well.)
I was going to bring those up. There's also some that end up in odd grey areas, like a certain work of my acquaintance where there's certain branches, but for the most part you're forced into a certain critical narrative path.
The whole 'you could just make a novel' thing does not land for me, because adding the stuff novels don't have changes the experience in ways that are probably what the creator was going for, if they went to the additional effort in the first place.
my dude, do you just expect everyone to know what the fuck this is?
i went and looked up these names and it turns out that the "confrontation" is a best ambiguous because our sources for it are second hand and even the speech reported can be interpreted in more than one way.
what exactly are you trying to convey by "Astray-Unamuno confrontation?" and what drugs are you smoking that you treat this as "obvious"?
like, i have no idea what is up with Umineko, not having read it, but this take is not so much bad as just alien. as in, i have a hard time understanding how a human being would write these words and expect them to effectively communicate meaning.
Going to be honest, that's a major issue with VNs: you have to include good enough gameplay to justify not just making a novel, but also not have it detract from the story (via being bad or overly difficult).
The simple fact that a single Visual Novel can have multiple different-but-equal endings is enough to justify making them on their own.
Like Saya no Uta is almost a kinetic novel, and it would be a much weaker work if you made it pick just one definitive way for it to end. Particularly the first available ending where Fuminori gets cured, as it obviously cannot stand on its own end to the story as it doesn't answer any of the story threads and is a bit of an anticlimactic mess. But at the same time serves to highlight that, no matter what Fuminori had gone through up to that point, he did still a point at which he could stop and avoid all the shit that happens in the other two scenarios. Without it, you could argue that he had "gone too deep" and "he had no choice", and the story cuts those readings away by literally giving the reader a choice.
That is the absolute bare minimum of gameplay, and yet it is something that will make the work lesser if you removed it. What you should instead cut out is all the sexual assault.
All ethics/morality is a set of oughts. Hence all moral/ethical arguments are about "ought", too. And I think it is fair to say you have made a whole lot of moral/ethical arguments. As did Marx, actually. Yes, he repudiated utopian socialism and instead insisted on a framework of material conditions creating clear, inescapable conflicts of interests between classes - but then he did take the extra step of saying that the class interests of the proletarians are morally good, actually, and made a whole lot of moral arguments about that. He did also write the Communist Manifesto, after all, and not just The Capital, but you can also see that in basically every work of him.
Though I admit, while I have a passing familiarity with Marx, all the other philosophers you named I have no idea of. So it might well be that whatever I say was already covered by them. But even so, it seems to me that you did much the same as what I said Marx did - you do rail against the rentier class in a clear show of conflicting class interests, but the arguments you used were in fact moralist, proclaiming that to not just be your particular interest but a general, common good for all of humanity. Which, of course, makes sense. One needs a moral argument to create universality. Nobody will rally behind just "interests", interests which could very well differ from their own - after all, class conflicts are not the only conflicts of interest, even material interests, between groups.
But it seems to me, that is taking that extra step then.
Oh, we're still talking about this? Well, I don't think there's as much contradiction between dream and reality as is suggested. To, ya know, progress you've got to have eyes clear enough to see things as they are, but also be able to imagine things as they could be. Is imagining things as they could be solely the rational next step to seeing things as they are, or can you use imagining things as they could be to provide a new perspective that lets you more clearly see things as they are?
Speaking on the Umineko discussion, wow, I can't believe the story that literally every single one of my trans friends view as a foundational work that helped them find affirmation and self-acceptance of who they are is actually secretely an ultra conservative and TERfy piece of drek!
When did I ever say this? I said that Felski and her compatriots were fundamentally correct and just batting for the wrong team in the sense that she's right that critique is fundamentally, on some level, an act of cruelty and suspicion, which is hostile rather than friendly to the spirit of art, and that it expresses a certain degree of belief in the intellectual superiority of theory over the sensuous, sentimental, embodied, etc. reactions associated with good-faith, non-critical engagement with art: I just think that these things are Good, Actually. I never suggested that "criticism" is necessarily so transformative of the underlying work that it no longer speaks to what the actual work says, such that you can say that when I accuse Umineko of having conservative themes I'm actually blameworthy for promoting conservatism, and even Felski herself has never said something so absurdly extreme?
Also, like, I'm not even interpreting Umineko myself here? Like, with the exception of noting how the characterization of Erika and Bernkastel is uncomfortably redolent of a particular kind of anti-intellectual caricature that's prominent in conservative rhetoric and literature, I'm fully accepting everyone else's interpretation that Umineko's message, read "with the grain", is that warm, happy fictions can be better than cold reality, and all I am saying is that that theme itself, taken at face value, is innately conservative.
...A rather large part of the point of postcritique is that reparative readings and other forms of interpretation can be just as theoretically valid and as grounded in the text as the hermeneutics of suspicion. Otherwise, you know, there'd be no fucking point. Fuck, I'll even quote Felski herself here:
Article:
Finally, the idea of a suspicious hermeneutics does not invalidate or rule out other interpretative possibilities—ranging from Ricoeur's own notion of a hermeneutics of trust to more recent coinages such as Sedgwick's "restorative reading," Sharon Marcus's "just reading" or Timothy Bewes's "generous reading." Literary studies in France, for example, is currently experiencing a new surge of interest in hermeneutics (redefined as a practice of reinvention rather than exhumation) as well as a reinvigorated phenomenology of reading that elucidates, in rich and fascinating detail, its immersive and affective dimensions (see Citton; Macé). This growing interest in the ethos, aesthetics, and ethics of reading is long overdue. Such an orientation by no means rules out attention to the sociopolitical resonances of texts and their interpretations. It is, however, no longer willing to subordinate such attention to the seductive but sterile dichotomy of the critical versus the uncritical.
Let's talk about what critique even is, beyond the limiting frame of 'paranoid' or 'suspicious' critique specifically.
Reading a book (we're technically talking about a visual novel, but for ease of language I will discuss this in the context of reading a novel) is a uniquely personal thing. The text engages in dialogue with the worldview, preconceptions and thoughts you bring in to produce your own personal experience and reading, of which no two can be identical. If you wish to contend this and argue that one true reading of a text exists, we left the New Critics in the middle 20th century, go back there if you want.
(This is not to say all interpretations are equal: the terms 'with the grain' and 'against the grain' would not otherwise exist and textual and biographical support would be meaningless, this is a complicated topic and I'm simplifying it a fair bunch.)
Critique, then, is the act of communicating this experience to the world. It is sharing the insights you have into what art has to say and the insights that art gave you with the world. This can at times be scathing — certainly, I have no kind words for works like The Sword of Truth, which is more or less a naked organicist screed — but it is still an inherently subjective and transformative thing. Even if you try and communicate the work's themes 'as is', by passing through you as a medium it is still fundamentally and irreversibly altered by your own worldview.
That is to say, it is a transformative work based upon the original work.
Contrary to how the essay I quoted above is often read by people online, by my eyes Felski is not actually calling for an end to modern critique, but rather an expansion of it. Too often is modern critique turned towards finding things 'problematic', something that you can do to anything. Even beyond Cardinal Richelieu's famed idiom, this is something self-evident in an examination of deconstruction: an infinitely powerful form of scepticism that when applied with sufficient rigour can find inconsistencies and self-contradictions in any holistic message, theory or interpretation. Literary theory's own 'Godel's Incompleteness Theorem', to make an analogy that will offend everyone with a literary degree reading this thread.
And that's just as applicable to your own weird fucking own-brand sort-of-Marxist critique as it is any other form of critique. It is a subjective thing born of the communication between yourself and the text, not some transcendental truth. Fuck, you've completely failed to offer any textual or even biographical support, so I don't see why you think your read should be at all privileged or even why people should bother to read it. It's the same as any other random-ass "media critique" on the internet, of the type that is genuinely not even worth the effort to read. Kind of like Booktok.
Well, okay, no, there is one thing that sets your critique apart from Booktok:
You haven't fucking read the work in question.
"Ah but I'm just taking themes that everyone else agrees about" oh fuck off, themes and thesis statements don't exist in a vacuum and you're not going to get anything interesting, insightful or even convincing out of regurgitating someone else's opinion with your own bile-filled nuggets of ideology included in the vomit.
This is quite genuinely the most unserious attempt at Actual Media Critique I've seen on SV. I refuse to call it such, even, it's every bit as much or moreso of an ideological screed as The Sword of Truth, rather than any kind of examination or even an attempt to engage with what a work might have to say. It's ludicrously disrespectful, ludicrously egotistical and ludicrously fucking dumb.
The more extreme your opinion on the work, the more you need to have actually read it to state it.
I can confidently say that Worm is a tad too dark for me from the first few chapters and what I've read on the Wiki and in discussions and that I strongly prefer Fanon-Worm, but I won't judge the writing quality too much because, well, I hadn't read the entirety of it.
And "Emanating Hitler Particles" is as extreme as it gets.
Oh, we're still talking about this? Well, I don't think there's as much contradiction between dream and reality as is suggested. To, ya know, progress you've got to have eyes clear enough to see things as they are, but also be able to imagine things as they could be. Is imagining things as they could be solely the rational next step to seeing things as they are, or can you use imagining things as they could be to provide a new perspective that lets you more clearly see things as they are?
I think that I of all people should have enough credibility to be believed when I say that I dislike a work not because of any vibe I have with it but because I insist on a totalitarian political loyalty to progressivism and genuinely believe that any art with even an iota of conservatism must be annihilated utterly.
I don't care about whatever political righteousness you imagine yourself to have. Suggesting the annihilation of entire swathes of art because it might modestly imply something you don't like isn't happening, and especially not in the extraordinarily disruptive and inflammatory way you've done here.
@ChineseDrone has been infracted and permanently threadbanned.
