Been a while since my last playlist post! A lot of things have happened! But also, seems like not a lot of things have changed. I'm still working on a research project. An expansion of the one I mentioned about in that post, in fact. This one's going to my senior's thesis, so after this is done I'll be free from undergraduate college! I'll actually have a degree! And then I'll really have to figure out what I want to do with my life! Oh no!
Most everyone in my city has already been vaccinated and the numbers of infection are low enough that it doesn't make headlines anymore. There's still less public activities and we still wear masks everywhere, but otherwise the pandemic has calmed down where I live. Nice! My family is already so used to working from home, though, so it makes basically no difference to our lifestyle. Hmm. Well at least I can be less worried when I visit the bookstore.
Playing games and reading books (and this month, anime) are still a fixture of my life, so here's some that's been filling it.
Genshin Impact
Yeah. Well. I just live here now. I've been playing more or less daily since the last playlist post. Sure, I missed a day or two. Sometimes I log in and just mess around without actually doing anything constructive. But nearly a year on and still daily-ish is significantly more time than I've ever spent on any other game.
I will make no excuses: I genuinely, earnestly, love this game. I click with it. I understand where it fails and where it shines, know to forgive it for its shortcomings ("Genshin's writing is never good!" I holler. "It's the worldbuilding that's excellent!") and praise it for the little details it gets right. I can feel the hands of its creators weaving its tales and visuals and gameplay. I genuinely believe that the people who work on this game also love it the same way that I do, the same way a thousand other players do. We share in our attachment to this silly video game.
But anyway. To the left in the image above is Tartaglia. He is the worst. Literally a bait character. He's a bad bad boy, straight up the antagonist and final boss of the previous story arc. Has very definitely killed men because he's a high-ranking member of a hostile's nation military and he has absolutely zero remorse about it because fighting is what he lives for. But he's cheerful and also a family guy and cares a lot for his younger siblings. And a good cook apparently? Literally a bait character. Rubbish. It is very inconvenient that I'm in love with him.
The black haired girl to the right is Xinyan, who is my daughter and if anyone hurt her I will hunt them to the end of the earth. She likes rock 'n roll and is shunned by most of the people of her city because of it, but she still plays her music unabashed. I love her.
The two has nothing to do with each other, has never met each other in the main story, has no reason to meet, really. But I got them both (relatively) early in my Genshin playthrough and they've been the cornerstone of my experience with the game. In my head they're best friends who really help each other out. (It helps that they work together well in gameplay, due to me trying to mitigate a bad roll by giving Tartaglia an Elemental Mastery build that would have been bad on him but was wonderful when paired with Xinyan. Emergent storytelling!!!)
In last month's event, with a canon short story attached to it, they stumbled on each other while exploring this new strange combat labyrinth and made fast friends. Xinyan even call him big bro! Boy, do I feel validated. They're canonically besties!! It's not all just in my head!!! I get to share this with other people too!!
Bungo Stray Dogs (the anime series)
Bungo Stray Dogs is so damn stupid. What if we take famous real life authors, actual literary heroes, and reimagine them as cute anime boys who are part of a detective agency/mafia/international crime syndicate, and then we give them superpowers. F. Scott Fitzgerald gain super strength the richer he is, Herman Melville has a giant flying whale he calls the Moby Dick, Edogawa Ranpo can solve any crime within the blink of an eye. And then they fight each other for some secret McGuffin or other. Cue explosions.
God but is it earnest about it. The plot and concepts might be high-level absurdity, but the characters feels genuine with their own fears and desires and relationships with each other. Despite the silly action anime tropes thrown haphazardly every episode, you can feel the sense of respect the writers had for the literary authors they're so flagrantly adapting. This isn't the result of someone looking at List of famous authors and just using it. This is the work of someone whose lifelong passion is literature, who just so happen to also like cute anime boys and nonsense anime action.
At the end, between all the drama and gunfights and Gravity VS Chtulhu epic battles, I take it as a story about being a good leader, of the relationship between mentors and their students, of fathers and sons, and also that perennially anime lesson of the power of friendship (or at least of working together). A leader is also a slave to his people. I still think about that line a lot.
NEO: The World Ends With You (the game)
The World Ends With You, a DS game released some 15 years ago, is without a doubt the single most formative game in my life. I played it when I was, what, 13? And it blew me away. It taught me both how far video games can go, and how far stories, fiction, narrative, can take you. It's a story about, basically, opening up to others, wrapped in a package of intricate urban fantasy worldbuilding and a wild, ridiculous cast that still manage to be down-to-earth. I can still feel the game's influence in everything I've written since.
NEO TWEWY is its direct sequel only released this year. With so many years that have passed, it's inevitable that the game will be different. I have changed a lot too. I read an article about how the game's real life setting, Shibuya, has changed in the years since and that this game reflects part of that.
Playing NEO TWEWY feels almost exactly like meeting an old friend you haven't seen in over a decade. They're distant now, barely recognizable. They've picked up new habits and tastes that you don't really like, got into things you didn't imagine they'll be into. But then you get to talking and realise, yeah, you can see how they're still the same person you met that long ago. You can see how that old memory of them has grown into the person you're seeing now.
I'm still in the early hours with the game and I gotta be honest, I still can't get a full hold of it. There are still some things about it that bother me, but I'm slowly getting to know it, and I think I can understand all the weird decisions it has made. I already love this mostly-new cast of wacky characters (Fret is my son now. I've already adopted him) and the game's stylish presentation already won me over. The gameplay is honestly amazing too, one-of-a-kind, really impressive in how it adapts the essence of the original TWEWY and makes its own thing instead of just blindly copying it. We'll see if it holds up to the end.
Shin Megami Tensei V (a game not in my hand right now)
*shakes fist* I decided not to buy it on release because my money went to NEO TWEWY instead. But, soon™.
*realising I still haven't finished The Great Ace Attorney 2* Soon, mark my words!
Dune (the novel)
"Dune is a mess," I laughed, hysterically, as I finished Part 2 (of 3) of the novel.
Yes, I admit it, I started reading the book because the movie came out and people started talking about it. I haven't watched the movie, didn't think I'd wanted to since I've always been more comfortable reading anyway, but while reading the novel I keep thinking about how it would be really nice if I can see this visualized on the big screen. It would be cool.
Dune is, hmm, Dune is a mess. It's big, you can feel that the world is big, but it's not sprawling the same way most fantasy novel series are sprawling. It's not like how a JRPG is sprawling. It's slow, like crawling on sand, on four legs, and yet it manages to be exciting, suspenseful. Part of it is the way it flits between perspectives. One paragraph you're reading the mind of the Duke Leto, how he plans to manage his country to avoid an assassination, and the next, literally the next paragraph, you're reading the mind of the person he's talking to who's planning how best to betray him. It's like seeing pieces of the tragedy assembling itself.
I like Dune best when it does this. Intrigues within intrigues, feint within feint. I do not like Dune when it goes into trippy drug-induced future sight mumbo jumbo, or when they're just struggling to walk forward. Yes yes Paul, you're worried you're going to raise an army fanatical enough to fight god for you, can we get back to how the villains are quietly trying to stab each other since they thought you were dead? That was fun.
Also not a fan of whatever the hell "race consciousness" is. The characters' obsession with bloodline and strength through genetic lines is also Concerning, to the point that I suspect it's not all fiction and more a belief that the author actually held. *nervous laugh* Dune is a mess.
The film wasn't the only thing that made want to read Dune. There's also this article about the Muslimness of Dune. It's a fascinating read. Just be warned that it's a bit more academic than most web articles.
OPUS: Echo of Starsong (a game)
You know what, I'm calling it. OPUS: Echo of Starsong, this often-overlooked indie game by a small Taiwanese studio, has far better, and bigger, worldbuilding than Dune has shown me so far. The scope of this, of whole solar systems and a mythology-history of gods who were suns and planets, filtered through a history full of conflicts, history is written by the victor, resulting in a complicated socio-political system that's not a blind carbon copy of what already existed in real life. But its fantastic worldbuilding aside, at its center Starsong is a love story, really. Three youths met each other by chance and faced adversaries together while each having to deal with their own complicated pasts.
I'm still on Chapter 3 of 5. I suspect I'll play it more if it's available on the Switch, but alas, the game only exist on the PC and considering the size of the studio, it's unlikely it'll ever hit other consoles. I just can't find a lot of time where I can sit on my PC-desk and play this game in particular. I hope I can, because this game is far too remarkable to be left unfinished.
Atelier Escha & Logy (a game)
*looks up through the list* Huh. Lots of cute anime boys in this list, huh? (Yes, Paul Atreides can also be an anime boy if you try hard enough). Here's one more. The Atelier series is a comfort food JRPG series where you can be vastly underleveled and yet destroy your enemy anyway because you spent the last three hours crafting an overpowered item. It is also loaded with enough cute anime boys and girls to make gacha aficionados weep.
I got this on a silly whim because I've been listening to the soundtrack of Mana Khemia (a spin-off of the Atelier series which I played years ago) and by god, I miss this laid-back slice-of-life JRPG that sometimes is scored with very heavy metal. Atelier Escha & Logy doesn't go as hard as Mana Khemia, but it scratches that itch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXNHY7V8a84&t=7s
Projects and whatnot
I'm getting a bit more serious with studying Japanese. I think I have grammar and conjugation okay but my vocabulary is rubbish. Let's not even go about how bad I am at remembering kanji. When I watch anime I can feel what they're saying, but the meaning of their words are still tantalizingly out of reach.
On a stupid whim, I'm also trying to pick up a bit of (standard Mandarin) Chinese. Right now I'm still just struggling to make the sounds with my tongue (sa? za? ta? cha? what's the difference??). It's so interesting to me how wildly different Chinese is to Japanese. It's also killing me. Yay. Maybe I'll get back to learning French just to hurt myself further.
On my previous playlist post I mentioned I was "almost done" writing a fanfic novel of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Well. Uhh. I finished it. I finished it a while ago, hitting the ending at about 40k words. I'm now in the process of of editing/rewriting it and let me tell you, it is agonizing. Wow writing a novel is hard. Who would have thought? I still love the characters and the story I've made here, even though it's a whole mess, and it's a really good learning process, but it's still agonizing having to go through the whole thing again and realizing I need to rewrite whole chunks of it. Hopefully I can still finish this at some point in my life.
On the subject of fanfic. I wrote some Genshin Impact fic about my favourite pairing, Tartaglia/Kujou Sara, a pairing so rare the tag on AO3 only has three works and two of them are mine. I am very invested in these two. If you write or draw about them I will owe you my life.
I'm also in the process of writing a guide of some sort for theorycrafting in Genshin, because you have no idea how much this game is consuming my life. I wake up some days thinking inane things like "hmm, would it be better to give this character more stats in Elemental Mastery if he's paired with this other character" it's nuts. I need some outlet for all this useless knowledge. Writing it is giving me a headache, though. So this one might take a while.
And then there's the research project for my thesis. I decided to take public diplomacy in social media as my main topic, specifically as done by Chinese government officials. It's mostly reading a lot of previous literature, then gathering tweets from the relevant officials on Twitter, and then just... stare at them. Try to find patterns in them. Excel spreadsheet them up. Crying because I can't read Chinese and am probably missing a million subtext. Apparently my professor thinks it's good enough to submit to an international journal, whenever I'm done with it. Said professor is also impossible to contact at the moment, so who knows if any of that is true.
It's a fine thing to research, I think, I hope, even though it does often feel like I'm just reinventing the wheel of communication studies sometimes. Not what I imagined my final project is going to be when I first enrolled here but, considering how much time I spend on Twitter, it is funny that I didn't see it coming.
Afterword
I don't think I've ever actually finished any long-term projects. None longer than a couple of months. So this novel I'm editing, working on something of this length, it's new. The only other finished story of my mine that came close to this wordcount was a 9k words short story about mecha gay deicide drama (which I'm still extremely proud of, by the way!).
In a way, this thesis, and my time in the university, is also another long-term project. Been here a little over four years, and that's before counting the two miserable years I spent in the wrong department/university. Hopefully I'll be done with this research by the end of next month. I feel like I learned a lot here, but I do also feel so done.
And then I'll graduate in a couple of months. And then I'll really have to think about what I want to do with my life. I have some web development skills so I think I can get a software engineering job, if it comes to that. What I really want to do, though, is to be a professional translator. That job's barely recognized and famously underpaid, a whole can of discourse I'm not entirely sure I can confront on my own. My family wants me to take a Master's degree and honestly, I'm more interested in linguistic or English literature than I am in further study into International Relations or political science.We'll see, though.
