Audiobook review: Julian by Gore Vidal

What a cover. That’s the copy I bought in paperback in some used bookstore somewhere. It looks very 60s, but it also pretty accurately depicts the types of guys you’ll find in the novel. Also more interesting than the generic Roman legion helmet on the audiobook cover. If I were designing one, it would feature a bloody spear — violent but totally fitting. Maybe that’s just my morbid side.

Julian was published in 1964 by Gore Vidal, a prolific American author with a political family background and a history of left-wing activism and attempted runs for Congress. While Vidal was concerned with politics in the mid-20th century, that political interest still comes out in Julian, the fictionalized autobiography of the short-lived 4th century Roman emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus or simply Julian. Quite a few of the Roman emperors around both the mid-third century AD and this period only lasted a year or two and weren’t that interesting — a general is declared emperor and gets killed in battle or by his own troops for not giving them enough money, stuff like that.

Julian was different — if he’d lasted a few decades, he might have massively changed the course of Christianity and world religion to this day. He lasted less than two years, killed in battle while invading Persia (bad fucking idea, by the way, unless you’re Alexander) and so he didn’t change the course of much of anything, but that wasn’t for a lack of trying. Known both as Julian the Philosopher and the Apostate, this kid was born in 331 AD the nephew of Constantine, the emperor who made Christianity the state religion of Rome. As Julian grew up with his older brother Gallus, he had to endure the murder of their father and most of their family by Constantine’s son Emperor Constantius II, a devout Christian. Throughout their childhoods shuttled between palaces around Anatolia as virtual prisoners, Julian comes to love philosophy, to revere the old gods, and to turn away from Christian belief.

Despite his rough start, Julian ends up outsurviving his insane and violent brother, eventually being raised to Caesar of the West alongside Constantius.* Unfortunately, Constantius is a paranoid wreck, and when the college-aged philosophy nerd Julian ends up leading an army to huge victories in Gaul against the Germans, the Augustus panics and starts trying to undermine his cousin to tone down his popularity and make him less of a threat. Julian fully understands the threat to his life — Constantius had already had his brother Gallus tried and executed after his own disastrous stint as Caesar of the East. After constantly denying his desire to unseat his cousin Jon Snow-style, Julian goes ahead and rebels at the behest of his troops in one of those “if I don’t do this I’ll get killed anyway” instances, being declared Augustus by his army in 360 in place of his cousin.

Constantius has big ass armies and will probably end up crushing Julian despite the kid’s unexpected skill at war, but Julian lucks out and Constantius dies of a fever in 361, leaving the entire empire to him in his will together with a surprisingly thoughtful note about how only they can know the burden and loneliness of being the emperor.

Julian on a gold coin. Note the beard, which was apparently seen as a sign of his love of philosophy and pagan/Hellenistic stuff. Nice portrait, too — the Greeks and Romans are where we get many of our modern western coin designs from. (Source: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 2.5.)

And finally Emperor Julian Augustus gets to put his plans into motion. As a Hellenist, Julian is kind of like a weeb, only instead of anime and idol groups and Touhou Project, he obsesses over ancient Greek philosophy and religion. He’s as excited to study in Athens before his elevation to Caesar as we would be to visit Akihabara. So naturally, he plans to reopen the temples, restart the sacrifices to the gods, and remove the Christian church from its supreme place under Constantine down to just another religion.

Obviously his plans to restore the old gods didn’t work, otherwise some of us today might be going down to the Temple of Apollo to sacrifice a goat on the holy day instead of going to church.† Julian instead ends up getting convinced to invade Persia to do some regime change and gets himself killed in the process (bad idea as stated previously, though we have the benefit of hindsight now.)‡ The Christians of the empire understandably don’t mourn his loss too much, given that it means an end to his measures against them. But even after they regained and solidified their position as the only religion, Julian was still generally admired or at least acknowledged for his energy and bravery, leaving a mixed and complicated legacy of the emperor that lasts to this day.

Julian being a fictionalized account from the title character’s own pen, like Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, it contains a lot of the author’s interpretation about character. Both used the existing histories to create or recreate these real figures, but the interpretation still has to be there, otherwise we’d end up with a wooden block for a character instead of a human. Vidal’s take on Julian is of a conscientious, smart, and likeable prince with strong feelings that he let control him too much, sometimes taking him beyond the bounds of practicality and occasionally into cruelty. Julian is fairly humble, or as humble as you could expect a Roman emperor to be, and being a follower of philosophy and pretty self-reflective, he admits some of his faults and mistakes and tends not to excuse his behavior in those instances.

But he still glosses over some of the negatives of his personality and rule. Thankfully, we have two other guys to fill in those gaps: Libanius and Priscus, philosophers who taught and accompanied Julian through his short reign. Julian is presented as the manuscript of an autobiography of the emperor with Libanius backing it and Priscus providing the firsthand materials. Both make their own comments in the text when they have something to contribute to Julian’s account. And while both were sympathetic to Julian, both on the personal and professional levels — Libanius was a Hellenist or pagan, and Priscus more or less an atheist, but both very much against the rise of Christianity in the empire — they also correct the record when they think Julian is making convenient omissions or isn’t representing the public mood accurately.

More often than not, the two philosophers chalk these oversights up to Julian’s naviete in a few matters or his increasingly uncompromising stance on religious practice. The emperor notably doesn’t kill anyone for practicing Christianity unlike some of his predecessors, but he clearly has a lot of disdain for the religion in his references to churches as “charnel houses” and Christians as “Galileans” (Nazareth being in Galilee, a region of northern Palestine — maybe an attempt to belittle the religion as regional instead of universal as its followers claim?) It helps Julian that he knows the Bible inside and out, having been raised a Christian and taught theology by bishops, but the serious internal conflicts over the nature of Christ in Christian doctrine hadn’t been resolved by that point, and he attempted to set the Athanasian vs. Arian turf battle aside as pointless and irrelevant in the fact of his restoration of the worship of the old gods.

Julian certainly gave the two sides in that conflict a common enemy to fight against. I can’t take any sides in this historical battle, not believing myself in either the Trinity or any of the western or eastern pagan religions of the time, but the Julian of the novel is a genuine believer in his gods, and considering the great efforts he took to restore the pantheon, the historical figure was as well. It would have been a lot easier for him politically to accept Christianity at least outwardly, but he didn’t, and I have to respect his commitment somewhat at least, even if he is understandably reviled by many Christians for it. On the other hand, as several characters who sympathize with his views point out to him, the reigns of his uncle and cousin had by Julian’s time cemented Christianity so completely that his cause was lost and futile even then.

The Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople where Julian was buried. He probably would have totally hated that.

There’s an interesting link between Julian and the fictionalized Claudius of I, Claudius three centuries earlier: both were committed to lost causes. Entirely different lost causes, but equally lost: Claudius yearned for a return to the good old austere, serious days of the Roman Republic, but while in his day the republic was still in living memory, it had already been killed by his own family starting with his grandfather, the first emperor Augustus. By Julian’s time, the republic was a centuries-old relic of history, so maybe understandably he instead tries to use his powerful office to impose his own vision of a reinvigorated Hellenistic religion.

But by the 360s, the old religions were already fading away and their temples falling into disrepair. One of the most affecting parts of the novel comes at the very end, where Libanius recounts his conversation with his former best student, now a popular bishop, who ends up almost taunting his old teacher with the Christians’ victory. The two old pagans Libanius and Priscus aren’t just putting Julian to rest with this manuscript, they’re also putting to rest the world he tried and failed to save. Shouldn’t have invaded Persia, dumbass (and there’s a nice lesson that I hope to God my own country’s government understands, though I don’t hope very much considering our recent history.)

If Julian sounds all dry and dour, though, don’t worry — it has plenty of humor to spice things up, a lot of it provided by those two old pagan philosophers sniping at each other between their notes and letters that are interspersed through Julian’s account. The audiobook excels in these parts with the different actors playing Julian, Libanius, and Priscus and especially in the fights between the old guys. My favorite character in the book is the catty Priscus, who I’m pretty sure I’ll resemble if I reach my 70s (not damn likely, but I can hope.)

But hell, even if he is the Apostate, I like Julian too. He seems like a massive nerd at heart with his love of ancient religion and history, and that’s why he’s on my short list of Roman emperors I’d have dinner with (not most of them; they tended to be murderous.) That’s keeping in mind that the Socrates and Plato and ancient Athens stuff he never shuts up about was all in the 400s BC, almost 800 years earlier. We think of both Pericles of Athens and Julian as ancient guys, but “ancient” is an incredibly broad range of time: if Julian lived today, Pericles would have lived in the 1200s, as far from him as we are from King Edward I, the Braveheart guy. I can appreciate a stupid level of dedication to the study of history more than anyone.

All that said, Julian’s cause was lost in the end, and he does have an overbearing quality to him — no surprise considering he spent most of his life consciously being carried along by destiny. But really, invading Persia was a fucking dumb idea, man.

A carving in Persia showing the investiture of a new king, standing on top of the dead body of Julian. Partial credit for the energy and bravery and all that, but you still failed. (Source: By Philippe Chavin – Own work, CC BY 2.5.)

As for the novel, it’s great, and I highly recommend it. Julian is a fascinating novel about the use of political power to change a culture and a nice reminder of the historical lesson that that usually doesn’t work. At least I hope it doesn’t, because living in America these days when people with massive influence are trying to fuck our political culture utterly, I feel like this is a relevant work. And the audiobook form is well-acted and produced, so if you get to drive on shitty, slowly crumbling American highways like I do, it’s a good choice to pass the hours in traffic.

Though your mileage may vary if you’re a Christian. I get the impression Gore Vidal wasn’t a fan of Christianity from this novel, but even as the tragic hero, Julian still lost and the world he tried to preserve would soon be dead. No idea whether that was for better or worse, but I’m no historian. I actually did miss my fucking calling, man.

 

*A short background to all this: in the early fourth century AD, the emperor Diocletian reformed the Roman imperial system, dividing the massive empire into West and East and giving each side a senior emperor called the Augustus and a junior called the Caesar. These and other reforms became necessary after decades of mostly military dictator-style emperors getting constantly murdered by rival generals or their own officers. This Tetrarchy was the system Julian was born into, and we see just how poorly it ended up working in this novel. Diocletian was a smart guy, and his plans did sort of hold together while he was still alive at least, but I guess it was just too late at that point. Note that Constantine, Constantius, and Julian all ruled the entirety of Rome as sole emperor in their days, not what he’d intended.

The sheer size of the empire also led to a change in culture over the five hundred years since the Roman republic had conquered Greece, Anatolia, and Syria. The spread of Christianity and its adoption as the state religion was the obvious change and is central to the novel, but the city of Rome by the fourth century was also on its way to being a political backwater — the capital now stood at New Rome aka Constantinople, and the imperial administration suddenly got a lot less Latin and a lot more Greek. Julian and his family only speak Greek, and he refers to himself throughout as an “Asiatic” as the people of the eastern part of the empire were known. This Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine, would endure for a thousand years after the fall of the West in 476, and this is more or less around where that polity started.

† It’s interesting to think of how the old pagan forms of worship might have changed if they’d hung on. I know there are still followers of the old Greek and other pre-Christian European religions around, but that feels like more of a throwback for history nerds who want to really commit to the past, and as far as I know there are so few of them that they’re barely a blip in the statistics.

But if Julian had his way and people were still honoring Helios and/or Mithras today, I doubt we’d still be sacrificing goats and bulls and checking their livers for omens. Then again, followers of Santería still sacrifice animals down in Florida and the state can’t do a damn thing about it.

‡ This was the “spear of destiny” some believe was wielded by a saint in revenge for the emperor’s anti-Christian measures. We do get an answer to who killed Julian in the novel, but while a Christian conspiracy against him was suspected by some in real life including Libanius, it might just have well been some Persian guy in the Great King’s army who got a lucky stab in.

Whether it was God’s doing or not, Julian still had a pretty good death in Roman terms, getting killed in battle heroically and all. So I thought it would be fun to highlight a few of the less glamorous deaths in Roman emperor history (not counting the later Byzantine period, which I sadly don’t know enough about to comment on except that those guys really enjoyed blinding each other.)

• Vitellius (69) – found hiding from a rival general’s coup attempt in a Roman inn, thrown down a very long flight of stairs.
• Commodus (180 – 192) – killed by his wrestling instructor in an assassination plot after being a murderous incompetent ass for his whole reign and trying to name everything in Rome after himself (not killed by Russell Crowe in the Colosseum, sadly — but Gladiator also toned Commodus’ insanity way down.)
• Pertinax (193) – successor of Commodus, killed after three months by the Praetorian Guard for refusing to bribe them.
• Didius Julianus (193) – successor of Pertinax, killed by one of his own soldiers after paying the Praetorian Guard for the imperial seat in an ancient eBay auction, then being hated by everyone and besieged by rival generals for two months.
• Caracalla (211 – 217) – a colossal asshole of an emperor; murdered by the head of the Praetorian Guard while taking a dump on the side of the road. Perhaps the most fitting of all imperial deaths.
• Elagabalus (218 – 222) – found hiding from the Praetorian Guard’s coup attempt in a latrine, stabbed to death. (There’s a lot more interesting about Elagabalus than this; he’s worth looking up.)
• Jovian (363 – 364) – one of Julian’s generals in Persia and his immediate successor; choked on fumes from a charcoal fire while sleeping in a newly painted room (though considering the times, this might have been the coverup for an assassination.)
• Valentinian I (364 – 375) – got so mad and screamed so hard at an enemy envoy while on campaign that he had a fatal stroke on the spot. That’s a rough one.

Sky diary #9: Solitude

After a long break, I’m back in No Man’s Sky. Not that I didn’t do some “work”, or more accurately fucking around, in the game in the meantime. In fact, I’ve built several new homes in the game in my search for a decent climate that I still haven’t found.

But the Hello Games guys have been far busier. Check out the update with its far more impressive space stations. I like the vaulted ceiling here or whatever you call it, looks like a space cathedral.

I think I prefer this pink world more, though. They really expanded these stations and made them a little more distinctive, which I appreciate.

There’s some trading to be done here, especially since I now have unlimited money thanks to even more illegal addons to my suit that give me far more money than I should be getting for scanning rocks and plants on new planets. I’m convinced this all plays into an in-game interstellar MLM or crypto scheme somehow. Maybe that’s one of the quests I need to unlock. Either way, something’s not right.

But there’s only so much time I can spend on these stations, hanging around in the seating areas and wishing I had some fucking coffee to order. I guess I have to make my own coffee. Time to explore again.

This is some Lovecraft bullshit, I hate it. I’d rather live on the neon volcano planet than here.

My primary goal at this point, having totally forgotten the mainline quest or any of the other goals I had a month or two ago, was to find a planet that 1) was hospitable to my kind of life, 2) had abundant resources, which my current temperate planet base was lacking in, and 3) didn’t look like a portal into a nightmare world of radiation and toxicity with monster plants and eyeball creatures rolling around.

I found a barren wasteland covered in creepy as fuck leather ball sacs sitting on leg-like struts — that was out. Then I found an ice world, and I was desperate enough to try to settle on it. Plenty of resources were around, at least, making the extreme temperature more worthwhile to brave (though it will still kill you if you’re not careful.)

These strangely humanoid uranium and gold balls might also want to kill me, so I killed them first and extracted all their resources. Not sure I like the implications of the quotes there.

After looting the land and scanning everything in sight as usual, I found a clearing in a nice wooded mountaintop and built a base there. Behold, the tour of my new homes that I’d never be able to afford in real life despite all my working (and fuck Dave Ramsey, just incidentally.)

I am a little proud of the design on the right, even if it is pretty simple.

This is a pretty inviting base for a forbidding environment like this. You know that feeling when you’re inside with the fire going while it’s freezing outside?

Just like this. Though the hospital bed isn’t all that inviting.

I might have missed my calling as an interior designer. I have some sense for what feels good to me in a living space, anyway, even if I can’t achieve it in real life yet. If I ever build a house (this is in the pure fucking fantasy category) I will have this kind of bedroom with a far more massive bathroom attached. Just imagine a large brightly lit tiled room with a giant hot tub and TV like in Scarface.

Here’s still another design I tried out to see if I could have a base perched on a small island or even rock like this, and it turns out I can — utility/storage room on the lower floor, living quarters on the upper with a nice glass ceiling and balcony wrapping around almost the whole thing. This reminds me of Gehn’s hideout in Riven, especially considering the fucked up red ocean and many islands around. People knock the Myst series these days a lot, and while it did have its serious limitations, I still think the first two at least were interesting and had a nice scope.

Here’s a house in a far more pleasant place, in Windows XP Bliss land. The house looks a little stupid and boxy, but I like the setting, so it’s all right. Though this place strangely feels more lonely than the last. That annoying fucking message down there in the bottom right doesn’t help. There’s probably a way to get rid of that, but I just try to ignore it.

Speaking of lonely, I also thought I’d build a base on one of those ocean planets with just a few islands around. You don’t get more isolated than that. I tried to build a tall tower on this flat island with no other features, but it turned out to be a total mess:

It’s a good thing nobody else is on this planet, because this certainly violates the universal building code if one ever existed.

I tried to make this structure as inviting as possible anyway. The inside is of no interest at all, just some empty rooms to connect these outer balconies with awnings (purely decorative and nonfunctional — they don’t do anything to keep the burning rain off, because of course this god damned planet has that too.)

112-degree weather is horrible. Even a normal summer here on Earth is bad enough, and God knows what’s to come. But at least it’s pleasant here at night if it’s not raining, so to add to that feel, I built a fifth-story bar area here overlooking the sea. There’s a rooftop bar back in my college town I liked, not for its drinks (their collection sucked) but for the view and atmosphere. I think they survived off of that atmosphere, and the scenery there wasn’t as nice.

In case the dangerously stupid architecture wasn’t obvious from the other screenshot, here’s a better one. That tower at the top looks ready to topple over at any moment.

Of all the places I’ve seen in No Man’s Sky so far, this is the one I’d like to visit most, burning rain aside. I like this janky fucked up tower I built here with nothing useful in it: it’s a horrible waste of space and material, but it’s my house now, and not even those asshole NPC pirates know where I am here since they haven’t attacked me like they have on other planets. I also like the solitude out here, just like a Baker or a Jarvis Island, tiny guano mine islands in the Pacific that people tried and failed to live on back in the 40s. I named the island St. Helena after Napoleon’s South Atlantic-bound prison; I bet the French emperor wished he could have ended his life in a structure as equally cool and probably about to collapse as this.

As I travel, I keep coming across existing structures, many of which are locked and guarded by those fucking sentinel robot shits that attach to your ass every time you make a step in the wrong direction. I was happy to blow up one of them recently with a new weapon attachment, but then the sentinel defense squad showed up within 5.98 seconds to destroy me and cut my engines so I couldn’t escape.

Luckily, a few of these facilities are open, sometimes with NPC workers hanging around inside to talk to and sometimes not. I prefer when they’re not around since they tend to get in the way and even get pissed off and ask me to leave, imagine that. The above structure was seemingly abandoned, however, so I felt free to move in, placing a new base computer and effectively taking the place over from whoever owned it last.

It’s fully furnished! Also nice of them to leave their nanites behind for me to steal.

This place may have been abandoned because of the planet’s hostile environment. It’s not the weather this time, but something far less predictable and more difficult to deal with: the wildlife. After first landing on this planet and doing some scouting and scanning, I had to flee to this site to escape predators out to kill me. My suit upgrades have made it a lot easier to flee like the coward I am with my speed and boost capabilities, but an astronaut who flees from every potential danger is at least more alive than a dead one. The better part of valor is discretion.

But it was also here that I finally learned about an entire aspect of the game I’d been ignoring until now. While standing on top of my ship to protect myself from a tusked and extremely pissed off animal, I found the “feed animal” option. I quickly made some animal food pellets and fed one to the angry predator, who instantly calmed down and became ready to submit to my authority. A far cheaper price for its loyalty than I was expecting, but I’m not complaining.

This Tai-Tai is now my companion, and I have no idea what to do with it. I guess it’s a she, since I soon learned it’s able to lay eggs, but then I think that might be true of every animal in this game, so maybe that’s not a relevant point. I’m just happy it’s not trying to kill me anymore. Even better, it’s prepared to defend me from other predators, though it can also be too zealous in its defense by going more on the offensive when I don’t want to draw attention to myself. Still better to have around than not, and I can summon and put away my friend at will (though where it’s going when I put it away, I have no idea. Maybe the pokeball is implied here.)

After a while, Tai-Tai laid an egg and immediately got weirdly possessive, but not in the way I would have expected.

I appreciate that you’re not trying to kill me anymore, but this is a little too far in the other direction. Don’t need my combined pet/security system killing any other animal helpers I might recruit out of jealousy. Maybe I should keep them separate in the future just in case.

I didn’t exactly ignore the egg as its parent suggested — I put it in storage. I’ll hatch it in good time, though I really don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it otherwise. The potential animal companions in this game are interesting, especially the truly bizarre ones, but I think there might be a lot more depth to the breeding system than I’m willing to get into. Much like with the Chao Garden in Sonic Adventure 2, I can appreciate the depth of a game mechanic while also mostly ignoring it.

It’s a good thing No Man’s Sky is so hands-off in that sense. There’s also a cooking system full of recipes that I’m sure can get you all kinds of benefits, and while I did try it out a little bit, I didn’t get too in-depth with it either.

I’m not bothering to make any more food for this Cronus guy since his judgments seem to be so wildly randomized anyway. Get your own cocoa, asshole.

I didn’t expect to write so soon after my last post, but I think I had a lot built up here, and that along with one sleepless night. Things aren’t going so well for me right now, though that has less to do with my material wellbeing, which I could easily deal with on its own, but more with my general mental state. That’s to say that if I were someone else in my situation, I’d probably be just fine, but since I am unfortunately myself, I’m not.

As a totally unrelated aside, there was a notorious preacher some years back who would take a camera crew and try to convert people on the street by asking if they were good people, then advancing the argument that they could only truly be good and get their souls saved if they joined his church or sect or whatever. I wasn’t interested in the preacher’s argument, which I’ve heard a thousand times in similar form — the only reason I know him is because I once received one of his fake million-dollar bills featuring a tract that failed to turn me from my infidel ways. No, I was far more focused on the interviewees’ responses that they were in fact good people.

I don’t believe I’m naturally a “good person”, whatever that is — I’m actually selfish and want to be totally left alone, which probably isn’t good — but I try to be as good as possible and to act against that selfish nature, which causes me some discomfort even if I have some understanding of my own faults. More than anything else, I don’t understand the supreme confidence some people seem to have in their own goodness, especially when so much historical evidence suggests that true goodness is rare when doing the right thing means taking a serious personal risk. Self-reflection is hard, but that’s the only real way to improve moral character, sort of like exercise for the soul. (Edit: I stand by all this, but after thinking about it a minute more, most likely a lot of those people on the street just didn’t want to be bothered by some asshole and basically gave him a “yeah, sure, whatever” kind of answer hoping he’d go away. I probably would have myself in that situation instead of going on a long philosophical bullshit argument, which might be more fun but also a lot more time-wasting.)

Sorry, now I’m the one preaching. I have to get some self-flagellation in every so often, and where better than in these NMS posts where I mostly go on about personal stuff. Until next time.

 

 

Currently watching: Yuru Camp S3 (+ a few unrelated updates)

Didn’t see this coming, did you. The fact is the first and second episodes of the newly airing Yuru Camp third season are the only anime I’ve watched in about a month, the rest of my leisure time taken by the Persona 3 remake and fucking Balatro, which has been both fun and painful (fuck gold stake, which taught me the limitations of going for flush runs with the checkered deck. I just got lazy. I did get a 20 million point hand in a five-of-a-kind run, though, so I feel like I came as close to beating the game as I can hope for.)

So here’s a nice lazy topic for me. I’ve written more posts about Yuru Camp at this point than any other anime probably. Strange to say for an anime with not much plot compared to most, at least in terms of scale, but somehow “girls go camping” gives me a lot to talk about. It’s a meditative kind of show, or at least I feel that way about it. Might explain why I take the opportunity in so many of my reviews to go on about personal feelings, even though nobody but me could really give a shit about them — I like this kind of contemplative anime, even if it’s not extremely complex in its message. The sincerity of it all more than makes up for that.

Rin in the first episode, making a fire the hard way

Since there are just two episodes out so far, not too much has happened yet, but talking about things happening in a slice-of-life show like this is a little weird anyway when there’s barely any conflict in here by design. In the first episode, Rin thinks back to her days as a kid, when her grandfather began teaching her about camping. I always liked Rin’s solo camping and the series’ positive attitude about it, that wanting to be and to travel alone sometimes is legitimate and not a sign of depression or self-hatred or whatever else. Rin’s contemplation on this trip leads her to try to start a fire with two pieces of wood alone like her grandfather did, where she learns just how exhausting that method is and sympathizes with him — another nice example of how Yuru Camp can make mundane tasks feel emotional in a way that isn’t cheap or overly cheesy.

The show is masterfully made, that’s why I write about it

I think part of that has to do with the show’s style of humor. It’s not a pure comedy series like Azumanga, Nichijou, or Asobi Asobase are, but Yuru Camp has a heavier slice of comedy than I think most other slice-of-life anime does, which I appreciate. The third season isn’t a letdown in that sense so far, with the usual observational humor and tight comedic dialogue. Just the thing if you grew up with Seinfeld and old Simpsons like I did — from those to The Office to Yuru Camp, a progression I never would have guessed at if you told me that’s where I was headed 20 years ago. (Though I did first watch Azumanga 20 years ago. What a depressing fucking thought.)

Club teacher advisor Toba, still a wild alcoholic, though she’s pleasant when she’s sober. I still don’t get these characters who always have their eyes closed, though. They’re all over the place if you start noticing that trend.

The series continues on to the Outdoor Activities Club, Rin’s friends, classmates, and camping colleagues (is that right? Camping buddies, or comrades?) and to a lot of that humor that comes especially from Chiaki being overly excitable and dramatic, Aoi being an outrageous liar, and Nadeshiko being too gullible not to believe Aoi’s lies for at least a minute. These three are always gold together, and with Rin and her other friend Ena and her dog Chikuwa (an important character in himself) they’re better. Though I also hope to see their teacher Miss Toba going out and being stupidly irresponsible and drunk on a trip in the woods with them. Maybe they can finally have a fucking intervention for her and get her some help.*

Soon enough, of course, we get to the food. Yuru Camp is partly a cooking show and can’t go ten minutes without bringing up what the characters had for breakfast and what they’ll make for lunch and dinner, which they’ll probably make on screen. That’s something this series has in common with Type-Moon stuff, weirdly enough. At least with Fate/stay night — no wonder they put out that cooking spinoff (it’s very good, I reviewed it here so check it out too.) I also appreciate all the food and cooking in Yuru Camp, since it contributes to the camping theme and it’s nice to see good food on screen even if it means you get a craving for tempura udon or whatever they’re making.

Having grown up not eating pork, I never had any taste for sausage. I don’t even like bacon that much. But tonkatsu is good enough for me to feel like breaking the commandment every so often.

The only minor complaint I have so far is with the changed look to the show. Yuru Camp passed from C-Station to 8-bit for its third season, and while I have no idea about anything else either studio has done, I miss the slightly blobby look the characters sometimes had before. They look a little less distinctive to me now. But maybe I just got used to how they looked before and this isn’t actually worse.

But that’s a very minor complaint in any case. The real appeal to Yuru Camp for me is in its characters, and they’re just the same as before, which is a good thing. Same source material with the same manga author writing the original story, so there’s no reason to think the third season won’t also be great. Just watch Yuru Camp, because you may end up liking it even if you think you wouldn’t. It converted me at least partly to the slice-of-life genre, coming from a purely action/sci-fi/drama watcher along with the more typical kind of comedy.

Thank you for existing, good SOL anime; you make life a little less unbearable

That’s all I have for the beginning of this new season. Maybe I’ll dig around for still another OVA I might have missed, but I think I could be entirely caught up by now. This is an anime worth keeping up with, and easily, since there’s no real conflict and characters change and grow gradually more like they tend to do outside fiction. It’s all very relaxed, and that’s the major positive for me.

The review section is over, but since this post has been extremely self-indulgent so far anyway, I may as well go all the way and add a couple of general updates I couldn’t shove in anywhere else. The first is that I watched Dune Pt. 2, the first film I’ve seen in a theater for five years, and though it doesn’t need my praise on the massive pile it has already, it was very well done. I’m generally not into these massive franchises; I quit Star Wars years ago just out of fatigue and frustration. Same with Game of Thrones, which I couldn’t possibly give a shit about anymore beyond still holding out a little hope that we’ll get The Winds of Winter, which I will buy on the off-chance we actually get the damn thing (helps that Martin drew a clear distinction between the books and all the HBO stuff.) I’ve heard similar sentiments from friends about Marvel, and though I was never into Marvel, DC, or western comics in general, I can relate to the feeling.

I’m on board with Dune, though. I’m wary of hype, but I don’t think this movie has been hyped more than it deserves, and thankfully there’s a lot of source material written by Frank Herbert for Denis Villeneuve or whoever else might pick the series up to work from. I’ve only read the first novel so far, but I’d like to check out more of the series, at least through the Frank-written books — I’ve heard people say his son’s continuation of the series is a lot more like standard pulp sci-fi, and if that’s true I’m not interested, though to be fair I haven’t read any of it and can’t judge for myself. I just like the space travel/drug trip combination together with the future Space Islam Herbert came up with. That weird mix of determination and fatalism in both the novel and the films you get from the Fremen feels authentic to me having grown up in the faith and partly in that culture, though mixed with all my American decadence and selfishness (only half-joking there.)

The other update is a VTuber one, since it’s become a tradition for me to put VTuber stuff at the ends of posts. If you missed Pomu Rainpuff like I have, and why wouldn’t you, there’s a newly returned streamer on YouTube with the same voice and style: a ghost maid named Mint, who retired just before Pomu debuted. You know the deal. It’s great to see her back and doing well, and I hope the best for her and her ex-colleagues who have also returned either at VShojo or as indies. I worked at a shit company once; I can relate to that too.

Finally, a personal note. My bills and rent are mounting and my salary isn’t so much, so I’m planning to do some freelancing on the side. Moonlighting is frowned upon for us, but since society doesn’t seem to give a damn whether I make ends meet, I say fuck the rules (within moral and ethical bounds, of course.) I’m not in big trouble or anything, but the situation is becoming difficult to keep up without a boost in my pay. Thankfully I have a couple of ideas I’ve been working on. That’s part of why my writing here has slowed down, but as always I will keep writing on this site if only to help maintain my sanity. I’ve been working through another audiobook, and the next post will probably be about that — another controversial one, though for very different reasons than the last. So until next time, whenever that is.

 

* As a serious aside, when I was looking for some information I came across the Yuru Camp subreddit and found a few people mentioning they weren’t a big fan of Toba and her treatment by the show, having lived with severe alcoholics themselves. Even as a former alcoholic, I never really took offense to these kinds of “funny drunk” characters, but then I also grew up watching sitcoms featuring drunks, so maybe I was conditioned to not take offense. I also didn’t grow up around alcoholics and mostly drank in solitude to hide my problem, so while it was extremely harmful, at least I wasn’t badly influencing the youth.

Anyway, I found Toba a lot easier to take than I did the K-On! teacher advisor Sawako in the first season with her occasional perving on her own students, not a joke I’ve ever found funny in that form with the partial exception of Kimura from Azumanga, maybe because of just how pathetic and reviled he is by every other character aside from his wife. But I know other people who never had a problem with Sawako even before she was toned down, so maybe it’s all just a matter of taste.

The right of preservation

There’s so much going on in the world now that Nintendo shutting down a pair of emulators doesn’t feel like such a big deal. It certainly was a big deal to many of us online, people who take an interest in games, but it’s not exactly a life-and-death situation in a world where life-and-death situations seem to be looming over us.

But it’s still an issue I’d like to talk about here, especially since it gives me the opportunity to talk more broadly about something I’ve never really addressed fully: the right of the audience to maintain and preserve media. Outside of the statutory public domain and a minority of works whose authors actively give up their copyright, this “right of preservation” is not a legal but rather a moral one stemming from the idea that the public has an inherent interest in preservation separate from copyright interests. The situation is further complicated because this moral right is advanced despite and in some cases in opposition to copyright holders’ legal rights, and legality beats morality every time, at least until Judgment Day comes.

I don’t remember why I had this Sumerian tablet in my library already on this site, but these guys’ records got preserved pretty well. But that was back when everything was written and could be baked into clay, not something a major solar storm can wipe out. (source, Marie-Lan Nguyen / public domain)

So Nintendo was almost certainly on solid legal ground in demanding that the developers of the Switch emulator Yuzu and the 3DS emulator Citra cease their operations. Even if they weren’t on solid legal ground, it hardly matters in a practical sense, Nintendo having far greater resources to file an international lawsuit than some guys making an emulator. There could have been no question about the outcome.

But what about the moral right of preservation? I don’t think this is a very strong argument against the takedown of Yuzu, which emulated a living and thriving console (though this will definitely change in the future) but then we have to consider Citra. Nintendo discontinued production of the 3DS in 2020, removed its 3DS eShop in 2023, and is scheduled today as of this writing to shut down the console’s online service with a few exceptions. With its two screens and 3D function, the 3DS already seems like a pain to emulate, making the problem of game preservation for the public benefit an even greater one in this case, and greater still thanks to its hundreds of digital-only titles in North America alone. Some of those games were shovelware crap, sure, but then not all of them were, and we can even make a good argument for preserving that shovelware given how subjective that call can be (and even if a game is widely considered to be garbage, does that really mean there can’t be any legitimate interest in preserving it?)

Loss of media thanks to copyright holder takedowns and discontinuations isn’t just a problem for the gaming community. The decline of physical media and rise of streaming services have forced movie and TV watchers into a wide variety of subscriptions that can easily end up equaling the cost of a cable plan, with the added benefit of getting to wait for Hulu or Netflix to stop buffering so you can actually watch the thing. And just as with eShops and similar online game vendors, what media gets hosted and what gets taken down is probably mostly determined by popularity and licensing costs without much consideration for whether it will still be legally available.

But then there’s that word legally. People have been getting around availability problems for decades now with torrents. Yes, this kind of filesharing is a violation of copyright law, that’s obvious. But it’s also obvious that a sizable part, maybe even a majority, of the audience doesn’t give a damn about legality in this case. And since the RIAA’s heavyhanded lawsuits against regular people back in the early 2000s for using Napster turned them into moneygrubbing bastards in the public eye, it’s now even more difficult for anyone to try to enforce that part of the law as long as people aren’t actually bootlegging and reselling the ripped movies or whatever (and do not take any of the above as legal advice of any kind. I say support creators, though exactly how much you want to support massive media corporations is a different question.)

That’s why I support indie games, that and their wholesome family-friendliness.

Copyright holders would argue back that this is all illicit activity whether the ripped media is being redistributed or not. But again, while they win in the court of law, they lose in the court of public opinion. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem for a group of multinational corporations — just consider BP and Exxon Mobil and every other hated oil and gas giant out there and just how little they need to care about being hated — but since entertainment corps have to care at least to some extent about how their customers think of them, this is a serious concern and must be one of the main reasons we haven’t seen aggressive litigation out of them over filesharing for 20 years. They can just ask Cary Sherman how that went for him.

If it’s true that these media companies need to consider public opinion, then they also need to be concerned over having so little moral authority that their audience doesn’t have serious qualms over piracy. I believe this is partly why public support for it is high online (and also not having to pay money, can’t discount that.) The fact that Nintendo and these other behemoths don’t acknowledge the importance of game preservation only further decreases that moral authority, even if, from a purely self-interested point of view, they absolutely shouldn’t acknowledge it. They uphold their copyright, and they have the money to enforce it — that lines up exactly with the advice I’d give if I were on any of their legal teams. This moral right of game preservation interferes with the copyright holder’s full rights in the work, including the right to withdraw it from publication and make it effectively unavailable.*

But I’d add to that advice a suggestion that they take a softer approach and listen to their audience. Speaking not even as a lawyer but just as a human, and one who doesn’t like getting ripped off and screwed, a hardnosed attitude won’t get these corporations anywhere either on or offline. Illicit or not, an angry audience will defy the copyright holders’ rights. When a manga publisher recently announced the use of AI tools to translate and localize a popular title, readers could credibly threaten to go back to fan-made scanlations. Anime watchers would be able to make the same threat, and gamers can as well. Emulators have been shut down before, but a few more spring up in their places when they go.

I should repeat that I’m not endorsing any particular action here. However, if you decide to take the less legally advisable option to watch your favorite show or play your favorite game, depending on the context behind that choice, I might not care at all, even less than if I had any personal interest in maintaining the copyright being ignored. Corporate policy, even if it was sound from the point of view of the media companies, put us in this position. Maybe if Nintendo and the rest met its audiences halfway, the audiences would at least mostly reciprocate.

We have a major example of this tactic working: while I’m not a fan of Apple or its products, the company had exactly the right idea with iTunes. Where the RIAA went after copyright violators with a hammer and ended up maiming themselves in the fight, Apple used a softer and far more productive method by giving people access to a massive music library at more affordable prices than you’d see at HMV and Tower Records, and the old style of filesharing rapidly fell off thanks to this new service.

For my part, I’ll keep buying physical when I can. I’m too old to think a digital-only library actually counts as a library, at least if it’s held on a platform that could collapse or shut down one day. But when physical copies are impossible to come by, maybe the publishers have a duty to correct that access problem. If they claim they don’t, or more likely just continue to ignore the issue, pirates will be only too happy to do it for them by cutting them out of the process entirely, and I don’t know many people who would regret that.

 

* Though I have a few big problems with Valve’s management of the platform, I’m happy we have Steam for this reason. Though every game you buy is still attached to that platform, so we’re all counting that it will never go down, and maybe that’s not much better.

Edit: I’ve been a real idiot the past few days, and this post caps that: I wrote about exactly this concept last year in the context of delisting and completely forgot about it. That’s where I posted that Sumerian tablet, in fact. I guess at least I was able to link that idea to Nintendo’s recent takedown of Yuzu and Citra, but still. Well, it’s not like I haven’t repeated myself on this site several times over anyway.

Audiobook review: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Not the cover the audiobook uses, but I much prefer this one, or any that don’t have an actual girl on the cover, some depicted in the way Humbert would see her (which a shocking number do, or maybe it’s not really that shocking.)

I’m about to get flooded with work, probably for a month at least, and between that and family obligations, the time I have to myself will be reduced to almost nothing aside from the only time I truly have to myself: when I’m sitting on the interstate stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. And since I do get plenty of that kind of alone time, I’ve been filling it up with podcasts (a subject that I took up here) and audiobooks.

And since I’m taking on audiobooks now, I may as well get the most controversial by far out of the way. I’m not even that happy writing the title of this book on this site, considering all the implications it carries (no fault of the author’s, since a lot of them are totally false and against the spirit of the novel) but it is a great piece of work very worth a look if you can handle it.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote a lot of novels both in his native Russian and in English, but his 1955 work is by far his most famous or infamous depending on who you ask. Lolita tells the story of a “nymphet”-obsessed late 30s-aged French-British writer and academic who moves from Europe to New England, lodges with a widow near his age, Charlotte Haze, and becomes completely obsessed with her daughter Dolores, 12, whom he names Lolita. Humbert Humbert, as the protagonist names himself, pursues and sexually grooms Dolores, all while acting as her stepfather after marrying her mother under extremely false pretenses, then takes her on a tour of the entire lower 48 states after her mother’s sudden (and highly convenient for Humbert) death, where the abuse continues and escalates, eventually ending in his captive’s escape. Leaving some stuff out there, but that’s the gist of the story up until close to the end.

I read this novel in college, then much later listened to it in audiobook form as read by Jeremy Irons, who also played Humbert in the 90s film adaptation of the novel. I haven’t seen either Kubrick’s or Lyne’s adaptations, though I’ve heard they’re both lacking, but Mr. Irons does an excellent job reading as Humbert and as every other character. I used to have a few issues with these kinds of single-reader audiobooks, especially when the reader reads a character far out of their range, but it’s totally appropriate and even ideal to have one guy read all of Lolita considering that it’s framed as Humbert’s own account of his life in the US, written while in prison to be presented to a jury at his trial (though he’s not on trial for the crime you might suspect.)

This is also a post-mortem novel, both literally and figuratively — at the time of its release in the story’s universe, both the author and his subject are dead, but that subject may have already died in some sense earlier. As Humbert himself admits once, during their roadtrip while in a motel with Dolores, he feels as though he were sitting next to the ghost of someone he’d just killed.

These two dominate the story once Charlotte is out of the picture, but even our view of Dolores, as central as she is to the story, is obscure — we see everything through Humbert’s eyes, since he’s our only source aside from the brief foreword by a fictional psychologist who points out how morally deficient the author is. And this is where some readers seem to badly misinterpret what’s going on with this novel. It was always clear to me that Lolita is a love story only in a very twisted sense, from Humbert’s twisted perspective. From a more clear-minded angle, Lolita is a horror story written from the perspective of the monster, one made all the more dangerous by his old-world charm and eloquence. All Nabokov’s flowery language and fancy prose style work perfectly here for Humbert, who makes a ton of literary references and slips into French pretty often despite the American jury and readership his account is addressed to (good reason to get the annotated version if you have the luxury of being able to read the novel in print instead — I know about three words of French, but I think more Americans had a working knowledge of it back in the 50s.) Humbert is worldly and learned, but he’s also an arrogant, self-absorbed liar who uses that charm to commit vicious acts without facing the natural consequences aside from the paranoia he ends up causing himself.

Lolita is a criminal’s self-portrait, even if Humbert himself wavers over whether he’s actually a criminal or not. He makes weak attempts to convince the reader that his urges are totally natural and harmless, insisting that he only obsesses over young girls because he lost his own childhood sweetheart to a deadly disease when they were both kids. He points to Dante falling in a pure kind of love with the nine year-old Beatrice (and doesn’t mention that Dante was about the same age at the time.) He even cites a practice in Sicily between fathers and daughters that sounds like something he just dreamed up for his own benefit. It all comes off far more like he’s trying to convince himself that he’s not in the wrong, and he doesn’t even seem to succeed at that, since he also admits throughout the novel that he knew he was hurting Dolores. Even his name for her is his own creation — her mother and friends call her Dolly and Lo, but only Humbert calls her Lolita, and in one rare moment of real self-insight he recognizes that his “Lolita” isn’t a living being and has no connection to the real-life girl he claims to love aside from the pain that imposition causes her.

So it’s hard for me to get how Dolly can be depicted as a temptress based on a careful reading of the novel. Maybe this is a vulgar kind of comparison, but I watched some of those trainwreck TV Dateline predator trap investigations way back in the 2000s, and the argument of “she seduced me” (an exact Humbert quote) came up either explicitly or hinted at by some of the guys who got caught up in the show’s investigation. I guess this isn’t exactly a bold stance to take, but that argument is complete bullshit, an excuse used by people who give in to their darkest urges but still want to convince themselves they’re not really predatory or depraved. Humbert himself tells us that Dolores cried herself to sleep every night they were together on their trip after he pretended to go to sleep, but his selfishness combined with his sexual attraction always seem far greater than any remorse he might feel over them, even when he recognizes them in himself.

And if you want more clues that we’re not meant to sympathize with this man, look to that foreword, or even to Nabokov himself, who made it clear in a later afterword that Humbert’s thoughts and morals are not his own and that he is meant to be monstrous (yet somehow some still accuse the author himself, as if the protagonist must always represent the author — maybe those people only read self-insert power fantasies? They need to get some god damn media literacy, for sure.)

Lolita is a beautifully written novel about a horrific subject, and it’s worth either reading or listening to in audiobook form if you want a look into both a legally and morally criminal mind from the criminal’s point of view. All that said, it’s pretty obvious why some people wouldn’t want to read it. You probably already know if you’d be able to bear this book or not; even someone who hasn’t gone through the kind of trauma Dolores does in Lolita may find the text revolting just because of what it’s about, or they may not want to read the self-absorbed account of a man trying for hundreds of pages to make out like he’s more than just a pedophilic predator. There’s nothing pornographic in this novel, anyway — a false impression of the book a lot of people seem to have.

My next post may or may not be a look at another audiobook, but it will definitely not be on as heavy a subject as this. Until then.

A review of Balatro

Another unnecessary post, considering how many people started playing this thing when it came out.

This game has gotten big press and 250K+ sales since last week when I read about it. After watching ten minutes of a streamer play it (GEEGA if you’re curious, she’s yet another cool VTuber over on Twitch) I knew it was for me, even though I’d never played another roguelike aside from the Shotgun King demo last year, and it’s been interesting to try to understand why.

Frostilyte’s review of Balatro is a good place to explore that point further — his is a view of the game from an expert roguelike player’s perspective, and he breaks down a lot of the mechanics that make it fresh and exciting. My view of Balatro is from a novice’s perspective, for whatever that’s worth if anything at all, but I’ll give my thoughts anyway.

Balatro is a card-building game based around poker in which the player must beat successively larger opponents with a limited number of draws and plays. Hands are scored according to card point value in blue and the hand multiplier in red. However, you won’t get far without Jokers — 150 of them. These cards can be bought in the shops between rounds and have a wide variety of effects, some of which can work together to massively stack up your point value and multiplier. Together with the tarot, planet, and spectral bonus/hand-building cards, these are what you’ll need to beat a full game of 8 antes (24 rounds if you don’t skip any) and each ante’s boss.

So Balatro operates with five full sets of cards: the regular French playing card deck we all know, the major arcana tarot (I’m also still playing Persona 3 Reload — very relevant!), and the game’s custom Joker, spectral, and planet sets (Pluto included as a dwarf planet, along with one surprise and two others I haven’t unlocked yet.) I would have thought all these decks might make the game too convoluted or complicated for an impatient asshole like me to bother with, but just the opposite somehow — it’s easy to get the hang of Balatro, since all the above decks serve purposes that make sense and are easy to get down.

Not sure why planets, but I appreciate the space theme

But then, what’s the appeal of this game? Why has it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, why so much play among streamers? I think Frostilyte covered that very well in his post, but from my own beginner’s perspective, I think the main hook to Balatro is its combination of chance and the wide variety of effects you can mix to get those high scores. Chance is a major part of the game — my last run just ended in the most frustrating way possible, and I’m not the most patient player on Earth when it comes to that kind of frustration. I can play through a 100+ hour JRPG, but that’s a different kind of patience — this is the kind that makes me crack a little when I’ve only spent 20 or 30 minutes building up what I thought was a really great deck, then falling just about 250 points short of a win.

This made me want to break something

Being pretty new to the genre, I found the whole “start from the beginning” aspect of it off-putting at first, but it certainly helps that a typical game only runs about 20-30 minutes if you get near the end of its eight antes. What stung me more was losing my deck and the Jokers complementing it, along with all the hand upgrades I’d received. It does sting in the moment, but it’s really not so bad wiping the board clean and starting over.

The lack of a save function may even add to the game by making each choice over what to buy and how much, what hands to play, and how to balance money with upgrades far more meaningful and demanding of close attention, since you can’t just savescum it as the kids say. I like that I can start a new game with a certain strategy — say, adding and converting cards to a particular suit and going for all flushes, or piling money into building up an easy hand like pairs — and that strategy can become more or less effective based on the hands I get and the Jokers and planet cards I end up with. Even if you think you have a good deck with plenty of upgrades, you can end up losing to an unlucky round or a difficult boss, and at the same time it’s possible to turn around a mediocre setup with a few lucky hands and draws in the store.

You might think your deck and Jokers are unbeatable, but while this is an easy end boss, a few of them feel like the game just telling me I don’t get to win this time (the fucking massive blind, I hate that one.)

If that kind of challenge appeals to you, I’d check out Balatro. Even if you’re not very into card games, the visuals are trippy in a good way and the single theme with variations that plays throughout is so good that it doesn’t get old, joining HoloCure in that category. The Balatro BGM has a similar lasting power, though it reminds me more of a few contemplative tracks from other games — see “Dead Angle” from Umineko and “Digital Root” from 999 for two other examples.

Even the sound design itself drew me in. I am not a sound engineer or sound guy or anything, but I know when something sounds good to me, and it’s all very engaging in Balatro, especially when you have a set of Jokers that add multipliers to each card and bounce off of each other like a pinball.

Just get some multiplier on this fucked deck and you’ll be hearing that, one of those flush decks I put together.

Even though I still get a little pissed over my really bad RNG runs, I’ll keep playing Balatro off and on. It’s a good time, and if you’re afraid of compulsively playing this game as a lot of other people are, at least it’s not compulsive gambling — you only have to pay for this once, and the price was worth it.

Next post, I’ll probably take on another anime series. I’ve really fallen off from the anime this year, but at least I will definitely be watching Yuru Camp season 3, which you probably could have guessed anyway with all the praise I’ve constantly showered on it. Work has been a lot more stressful and hectic lately, making it harder to find time to write, but after ten years writing here is almost a religious habit now. I might compensate by writing some audiobook reviews, since I’ve been listening to a lot of those in the car while stuck in rush hour interstate traffic. I’m in the middle of The Power Broker so far, a biography of a power-crazy New York city and state park department head, and while that might sound like a dry read, just the opposite — the writing is engaging and the subject is fascinating, though I sure as hell wouldn’t want to have worked for him. Until next time.

OVA review: Yuru Camp Specials: Survival Camp, Tall-Tale Camp

Isn’t that a mouthful of a title, and especially for another set of Yuru Camp spinoff episodes that total about 18 minutes this time. But they’re also both worth a look, and since I’ve already covered that Yamaha-sponsored OVA Sanrin Bike, then why not these, especially if you still haven’t had enough Yuru Camp to last until next month when the third season starts its run.

Starting with the longer 12-minute episode:

Survival Camp

All the main girls (Rin, Nadeshiko, Chiaki, Aoi, Ena) head off on a grand camping trip to Australia on a private jet they somehow managed to scam their way into. But we don’t get to see Australia in this half-length episode: instead, the plane has some temporary engine trouble, and the gang all excitedly bail out with parachutes onto a tropical island before the pilot can get across to them that everything’s fine (doesn’t help that he only speaks English, though it’s a second language for the VA, which always makes it better.)

He does say “oh, shit!” in English, which is probably the most fluent part of his few lines of dialogue.

After landing on the island, the girls freak out for a few minutes before getting their wits together and coming up with a survival plan that doesn’t go so well on the first day. Day 2, however, sees better results, with Chiaki somehow finding a massive cache of bananas and Rin catching a big ass fish.

What kind of fish is this anyway? Pretty sure I’ve seen it somewhere before.

After a day full of feasting and playing in the ocean and pretty much turning their predicament into a camping trip, the group realizes that they’re still stranded and may have to spend the rest of their lives on this island, and so we return to the very first scene with the girls panicking and yelling for help. This time, however, the camera pulls out to reveal that they’re just off the coast of Japan. Somehow, this tropical desert island (not an oxymoron!) exists within the territorial waters of one of the most densely populated countries on Earth.

And while I’m nitpicking, do bananas like this grow in the wild? From what I’ve heard, wild bananas look and taste very different from the Chiquita product you find in the store. But I’ll stop thinking about bananas before I get into the crimes of United Fruit.

But enough “well actually” bullshit from me. This OVA clearly isn’t meant to be taken seriously anyway — it’s just one of those fun departures from the main story, which is still very much grounded aside from the occasional dream and hallucination. It all reminds me a little of the only other “girls crash-land on a desert island and have to survive” anime I’ve seen, Are You Lost?, only this is a better and more effective take on the subject despite being far shorter. Maybe I’m not being fair because I already liked all these characters — put them in just about any situation and I think I’d enjoy the result as long as the comedy continues to be as tight as usual for Yuru Camp. But then writing likeable characters is a skill, and manga author Afro and whoever else might have contributed to the story earned my goodwill with that skill, so it’s not unfair at all.

Tall-Tale Camp

If the writing weren’t so tight, this second OVA might not work as well as it does. Officially titled Tall-Tale Camp (“Hora Camp” in Japanese, which I think comes from hora or something like “hey, look”?) this one is better titled Bullshit Camp in English, featuring prime bullshitter Aoi and her sister Akari, both established as liars throughout the main series. Only this is a light comedy, and Aoi and Akari’s lies are all harmless, just meant to fuck with their friends in the Outclub. Not with Rin, who’s still not in the Outclub and is too sharp to buy any of Aoi’s bullshit, but that’s not the case for her opposite, the overly trusting Nadeshiko. Not much to say about Bullshit Camp other than if you like the rest of Yuru Camp, you’ll like this — it’s basically a short few segments that would have otherwise fit into most any regular episode.

Lots of internal Japanese prefectural infighting here too. I didn’t know Japan had the kinds of rivalries we do in the US between a lot of neighboring states, but it figures that things wouldn’t be so different over there. Even if the prefectures don’t have anywhere close to the kind of autonomy our states do that let them get into long drawn-out legal disputes over water and resource extraction rights.

Sorry, work seeping into my review here. I can’t get into specifics, but shared natural resources don’t make for good neighbors, and especially not when said neighbors didn’t like each other much to begin with. If you want a break from work, try out these two OVAs, though again, I have no idea where you’re supposed to find them unless you’re willing to resort to the option we all know about. Perfectly fine in my opinion if whatever it is you’re seeking out is otherwise unavailable.

And on a related note, fuck Nintendo for taking down Citra. You assholes weren’t even supporting the 3DS anymore, and we all know you’re only too happy to let games be lost forever. Does an IP owner have the right to make its works completely unavailable to the audience after it’s been put out there? That might need its own very long post. Until then or whenever else I manage to post something, all the best from me here in my work cave.

Historical drama film review: The Hollow Crown: Richard III

Look up a list of the top five most controversial kings of England and you’ll probably find something among all the crap and detritus of the internet with all its garbage listicles. Even I wrote a few of those way back in the day when I needed the money. Now it’s all AI, I’m sure — these sites aren’t wasting good money on human writers anymore considering the quality of their output.

That complaint has nothing to do with King Richard III or the play named after him, but I think he’d have to be on such a list. Richard was a hard and ruthless man if Shakespeare is anything to go by, and he had plenty of energy fueled by his pure love of always being as evil as possible. Truly the most based of English kings, right there with Harold Godwinson, who he shares something big in common with that’s important to the course of this story. However, there are also significant gaps between Shakespeare’s character and what we know of the real guy, with one prominent mystery around his short reign that will probably remain unsolved forever.

Returning to that story, following the events of Henry VI, we find the House of York firmly in control of England. With his Lancastrian rivals all but wiped out, King Edward IV is free to sit on the throne and get as drunk as he liked (really, reading about this guy, he seems like one of the most fun English kings to hang out with. Imagine the feasts.)

You’d think the king’s youngest brother Richard would be happy about this. After all, as Duke of Gloucester, Richard has plenty of power and wealth where he’d have nothing at all if the Lancaster faction had remained in power. But he’s also more distant from the crown than ever with the birth of Edward’s first son by his wife Elizabeth Woodville, and the crown is what he covets.

But he’s not out of luck. According to the royal inheritance law of male primogeniture that England practiced, Edward’s crown would first pass to his elder son Edward, then his younger son Richard (again and again — everyone in these fucking plays is a Henry, an Edward, or a Richard, no naming creativity at all.) After them came Edward’s childless middle brother George, Duke of Clarence, and then finally Richard. No problem: just kill them all. And Richard spends most of Richard III doing exactly that, either working on plots to kill his whole family or carrying them out.

While he complains about this time of peace and how he hates everything and everyone, Richard meets George on his way to the Tower of London, arrested by the king for plotting treason because of a false prophecy Richard secretly planted for Edward to find about a guy with the name of G. being a murderer. After Edward falls deathly ill shortly afterward from his decades of hard living and hard partying, Richard jumps on his chance, sending hired killers with a warrant to take George out in his cell.*

Following the deaths of both his brothers, Richard is made protector of Edward’s two young sons, the elder of whom should now be proclaimed King Edward V of England. But as children, he and his brother are under the now-total control of their ambitious uncle, who puts them up securely in the Tower upon their entry to London ahead of the coronation, absolutely with their best interests in mind. That’s also the reason he has their maternal uncles suddenly arrested and executed for treason. Can’t be too careful with treacherous bastards lurking around, after all.

Contemporary portrait of Richard III. You can track how art was developing through these royal portraits — right around the Renaissance hitting England, we start getting these realistic representations.

Throughout the play, Shakespeare depicts Richard as utterly hateful and without any sense of humanity or pity, so it’s no surprise when he orders the murder of his nephews. The Princes in the Tower is one of the classic evil ambitious uncle stories, right up there with Hamlet and The Lion King that heavily borrowed from it (and also ripped off the anime Kimba the White Lion — let’s never forget about that.) Edward IV’s sons, from what I’ve read, just disappeared into the Tower, declared dead soon after Richard also had them declared bastards, sons of Edward but not by his wife.

If Richard were raised from the dead and put on trial for the murder of the princes, his conviction wouldn’t be a sure thing. But the old concept of “no body, no proof” is an exaggeration: a jury can convict a murderer even without the relevant corpse. Most damning for Richard is the fact that the boys were in his complete control and custody combined with the massive benefit he gained from their deaths. On the other hand, Richard has his defenders even to this day, and it’s not impossible back in 15th century England that the princes just got a fever and died, back when that was a far more common type of death than now with our medical technology.

But this isn’t a true crime podcast. If you’re interested, you can probably find several of them that have covered this cold case in five seconds with a Google search. Richard the character is guilty as hell and even puts off one of his most loyal supporters, the Duke of Buckingham, who subsequently falls from favor and gets his head cut off.** Meanwhile, Richard enjoys his new throne, having himself crowned Richard III in 1483 after the declaration of his nephews’ bastardy.

For all the faults leveled at Richard in this play and the histories, the king’s one positive trait as depicted here is a high degree of physical courage. Richard is vicious and resorts to hiring killers and plotting intrigue, but he also doesn’t shrink from battle when it’s coming for him. In real life, he reigned for two years before the rebellion that would unseat and kill him, though in Richard III it feels more like a week or two. But by 1485, the last serious Lancastrian contender Henry Tudor had landed in his native Wales from exile on the continent to destroy Richard and the Yorkist faction and win the crown for himself. Henry’s claim by blood was weaker than Richard’s, but when the king is an asshole, people tend not to care about bloodlines so much anymore.

In the course of their showdown, now known as the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard charges directly at Henry after realizing Henry’s stepfather, one of his chief generals already under a cloud of suspicion, has turned on him. Anyone would have realized that the death of either warlord would mean the total defeat of their faction, no matter how the battle had gone up to that point. And despite his fierceness and courage (or because of it, maybe?) Richard is cut down, first losing his horse (and that famous “my kingdom for a horse” line) and then being killed trying to take down Henry.

Richard’s death meant the end of his royal lineage and of the House of Plantagenet, which had ruled England since Henry II took the throne 300 years before. It also meant the end of the civil wars that had racked England with the beginning of the Tudor era, running from 1485 all the way up to the death of Henry’s granddaughter Elizabeth I in 1603 and seeing massive changes to culture, religion, and England’s place in the world with the beginnings of its American colonies.

Of course, nobody knew that at the time, but that’s one of the interesting issues with Richard III and these other plays to some extent: Shakespeare wrote them in the late 1500s, over 100 years removed from their ending, and he wrote them in Tudor England. It’s only natural that he turns Richard III into a monster — you wouldn’t praise the enemy and slain rival of the queen’s grandfather who established the dynasty, after all. Richard may well have been an asshole, and probably nobody would be surprised if he’d killed his nephews given the history of court politics around the world. But Henry sure as hell wasn’t the kind of angel Shakespeare portrays him as at the end of Richard III.

That’s not to say I don’t like this play, because I do. Richard revels in being a completely evil asshole, and that kind of villain is fun to watch, all the more so when he doesn’t have any complex motives but simply wants power, and Cumberbatch does a great job in that title role. The simplifications to the story do result in some weirdness, like his engineering of his brother Clarence’s death: in reality, Clarence was an honest-to-God dumbfuck who rebelled against Edward three times before the king put him to death for treason. In the play, Clarence is a nice guy led astray, and all it takes is Richard planting one vague prophecy for Edward to imprison him. I get the feeling that a few other figures were also depicted as better than they really were to suit whatever narrative had to be told to make those in power happy, or at least content enough that you wouldn’t get dragged off to prison for publishing it.

But in the end, Richard III still makes for a good story. The problem is when storytelling gets conflated with actual historical study. The conflict between telling a good historical drama and telling an accurate one has come up over the centuries all the way up to the present, often with these kinds of political implications: just look at any of our own American Civil War dramas for that tension, one of which I’ve covered here. Of course, a relatively accurate story can still be a good one — I’ve rewritten a few in my head already — but I can accept that in Richard III, again considering those political considerations Shakespeare had to deal with.

As a coda to all this, Richard got his own final ending just a few years ago, when an investigation traced his remains to a parking lot near the site of his final battle. His bones were dug up and reinterred in a cathedral, and Mr. Cumberbatch himself delivered a poem at the service. The dead king might not appreciate Shakespeare’s take on him, turning his scoliosis into a hunchback and turning that exaggerated physical condition into a reflection of moral evil, but at least he finally got a decent send-off 500 years later. Even if the guy was really an asshole, there’s an appeal to lost causes. And there’s his link to King Harold 400 years earlier, the last Anglo-Saxon English king who also died in battle for his crown, though that change was more earth-shaking for his realm. (Or see Constantine XI Palaiologos, arguably the last Roman emperor,*** for an even more potent example if you’re Greek.)

And that’s The Hollow Crown, covered in a less detailed and far rougher way than I would have reviewed a slice-of-life anime that’s 50% girls eating cake and making Japanese language pun-based jokes (which I do plan to cover more of in the future.) It’s an excellent adaptation of Shakespeare’s work full of great acting and is well worth a look. If you’re a kid who thinks Shakespeare is boring or impenetrable, you should at least check Richard III out for all its intrigue and treachery. And Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which has no relation to these plays but is pretty damn fun as well if you’re morbid enough for all the madness and tragic death.

 

* There’s a reference to the legend of his death here, where the murderers drown him in a container of wine. It’s said that the real Clarence, being the king’s brother, had the privilege of choosing his execution method, and he chose to be drowned in a wine cask. I guess he was just as much of a partier as the king, if not even more of one.

** The Hollow Crown and Shakespeare’s history plays are full of beheadings. It’s a quicker death than injection if it’s done properly, and a lot less painful for the victim from what I’ve heard. Are we less barbaric than these guys were, but just want to convince ourselves we’re not? A real question to consider.

*** Don’t even get started on the “when did Rome fall” question. That’s not just a blog post, that’s an entire book — but to simplify it as much as possible, Rome fell in 1453. If you get that answer called wrong at your bar trivia night, refer them to me.

First impressions of Persona 3 Reload

Well here I am. My pointless life continues on and a game returns from 17 years in my past to visit me again in a new form. I played the true original Persona 3, the one people call P3 vanilla that came in a cardboard box with the tiny artbook and everything — it’s still on my shelf. Persona 3 was my introduction to Megami Tensei, which would become one of my favorite series (still around the top even if I’ve fallen off over the years for lack of time) and Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne one of my very top games.

After a decade plus of all the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona and Devil Summoner, I finally got fatigued with the series a few years back with Persona 5 Royal, no doubt a great addition to the series but I just couldn’t keep going at that point anymore. I thought I might have been done with the series for good, having totally missed out on SMT V (not having a Switch is my excuse there.) But then Persona 3 Reload came out early this month, and I had the chance to relive a game that still stands up as a classic, as a bright spot in one of the less bright times of my life as sad as that might sound, so I took it. Even with that price tag.

Just give me a coffin, I don’t want to pay bills anymore

Enough bad poetics: let’s get on to the game, a remake of the 2006 RPG Persona 3, done in the graphical style of Persona 5. P3 has a reputation for being the darkest in tone of the three modern Persona games, which you might have guessed from the image above. That reputation is pretty well deserved, and the gloomy fuck that I am, I can appreciate it, though this isn’t just a case of “dark for dark’s sake” — there is a point to all of it that I won’t give away here.

Our protagonist in Persona 3 is nameless high school student, this time an orphan who lost his parents years earlier in a massive industrial accident. Protagonist has moved to Iwatodai, home to Tatsumi Port Island, a fancy neighborhood in the nearby bay with his new school Gekkoukan High right in the center.

Living in a mixed dorm as a high school student? A dream for plenty of boys this age. Or is it? (It’s not, there are Shadows that want to murder you.)

Protag (I named him Minato Arisato after his name in the manga — I know, no creativity, but still the cool hipster choice for his name*) settles into life in his new dorm, meeting a few of his classmates and seniors, but not before witnessing a secret 25th hour at midnight when most people turn into coffins and having to sign a mysterious contract offered to him by a ghostly boy. Just normal dorm entry procedure. This place reminds me a little of my first college dorm, right in the middle of a big city with easy-to-get liquor everywhere.

Unfortunately, not so for our cast, all high school students, including our classmates Junpei (unstudious baseball hat guy) and Yukari (who people like to dump on, but I liked her, she was fine) and our seniors Akihiko and Mitsuru. Turns out we all have the power of Persona, a representation of the self that can also fight and shoot lightning and fire, and we’re using it to fight the mysterious Shadows, monsters who show up during that Dark Hour. And our school turns into a giant tower called Tartarus too, and it’s full of Shadows, so why not go there and fight them too.

But we’re also just going to school and hanging out having fun slice-of-life times.

I guess I just described the whole concept of Persona (if you want more on the series in general, I wrote a whole long ass post about Persona years ago, so check that out) but for those few who don’t know about it, Persona 3 was the start of what this subseries would become — Persona 1 and 2 introduced and established the high school setting, but they didn’t feature all these social sim mechanics. It gets described as a dating sim plastered onto a turn-based JRPG, but it’s quite a bit more than that (and far less when it comes to the dating sim part — go play Katawa Shoujo and tell me Persona 3 is a proper dating sim.)

I forget his line, but it must have worked.

After playing through a little over one in-game month, I think I have enough to give some initial thoughts, and good news, they’re almost all positive so far. I might be biased towards Reload given the positive memories I still have attached to the original Persona 3, but they are more or less the same game so far aside from the restoration of player control over your allies in battle as in Persona 3 Portable — in the old P3 on the PS2 you couldn’t control them much to all our frustration. I do miss Mitsuru spamming fucking Marin Karin in every battle when the team needs healing instead, but that can remain a memory.

The kids who joined Megaten with Persona 5 will recognize the look and feel of battle somewhat, though they might not recognize the old weird Shadow creatures the series used to use before P5 got more SMT-ish by adding actual demons and negotiation. I still love 5 the most of all these games for that, but the lineup of enemies in 3 works perfectly well, as does battle in general. It’s just a turn-based system with a strong emphasis on hitting weaknesses, same as always, and not quite as fun as the challenging/bullshitty SMT III Press Turn system.

What I’m really wondering is how new players feel about Tartarus. Aside from the isometric to full 3D upgrade, it’s basically the same as it was before: a randomly generated dungeon crawl. Not as interesting as the Palaces of Persona 5 with their fixed floor plans and fancy puzzles, and not even as interesting as the randomly generated but story-themed TV world of Persona 4. I always thought Tartarus was kind of a drag at times, feeling very samey despite the changing look as you ascend (if not for that it would be nearly unbearable) but it’s also paced decently enough that you can jump out and back to your school and social life when you get bored or your SP runs out. Sure, those barriers that prevent you from ascending past the story are a little dumb (who’s putting them up and taking them down, and why?) but it’s not a huge deal for me.

As for that sameyness, it still seems to be present in Reload, though for all I know Atlus threw in a lot of extras as you climb. Persona 5 players might be upset either way at the fact that the entire gameplay sections of 3 outside of the full moon boss fights is just a bigger Mementos.

Hey, there’s Bondage Angel again, good to see her. The Velvet Room is also just the same as before. I’m not a big fan of these slogans that come with each Persona, though. I agree, vanquish evil, but I already know the angel I’m carrying around in my head along with seven other demons and beasts wants to do that.

Speaking of school and social life, Persona 3 Reload replicates that just as well so far. I can’t just keep saying “it’s pretty cool to run around the setting I played in 17 years ago in 3D now” but that applies here and to most of the rest of the game. Everything in Gekkoukan is clean and shiny and friendly, and the same goes for most of the city around it, again a far cry from the rustic countryside of Persona 4 and the main streets and back alleys of the Tokyo of Persona 5. But then that shiny exterior hides some dark mysteries, ones that only the protagonist and his closest friends and enemies know about.

I can’t believe I never had the dark magic class at my high school, what a waste. I could have been a great sorcerer.

It’s been a while since I played through one of those social links, but I’m reminded now of how nice a break it can be to run through and upgrade a lot of your relationships between deadly battles in the shadow realm. Persona 3 had some fun traps and pitfalls in store with the possibility to reverse and break certain relationships if you give the very worst responses in a few set conversations. I believe 4 did away with those, but P3R hasn’t entirely at least since it makes reference to reversals in a brief tutorial. I mean hell, if your girlfriend catches you going out with another girl in a romantic setting, I’m pretty sure it could sour your relationship for a while. I know, crazy. Sadly the Shaggy defense doesn’t work in this case, but the Shaggy defense doesn’t work anyway — that’s the joke of the song.

At least she doesn’t know about my secret MMO girlfriend

Some players may find Iwatodai small and limited, with far fewer of the options and far less space than the various Tokyo neighborhoods of Persona 5. This game certainly has a more modest setting, similar to 4, but the city still manages to pack plenty into that space. Again, the fact that I’m returning to Persona 3 might make a difference, since it’s giving me exactly what I expected, but I don’t mind the reduced scale of the setting.

Where else can you get such great pork belly? I don’t think I’ve ever had it, probably partly because of the whole no pork thing in my tradition, but it sounds like magic here with its skin-beautifying qualities.

As for the social links, they also feel pretty much the same. It’s all very familiar. Funny enough, Persona 3 Reload does contain at least one downgrade: the loss of the Persona 3 Portable female MC links, though I suspect they might have been happy to keep the awkward (to put it lightly) FeMC/Ken link out as well. Lady MC is a P3P exclusive forever, it seems — go get it on Steam if you want her, or better still, play it on your Vita like I did.

Ha ha, yeah, I can’t even imagine the protagonist of a Persona game having a thing with his teacher. Can you?

Someone, I forget who, mentioned years back that the cast of Persona 3 was more interesting than later ones because while 4 and 5 had a group of friends made for each other who just happened to share powers and a goal, Persona 3 threw together a bunch of people who didn’t naturally fit all that well together, gave them shared powers and a goal, and created a bond out of that. I agree with that assessment. I like the casts of all these games, but P3 feels a little more natural in that way. Not that natural automatically means good — something contrived can work perfectly when it’s done right — but natural works here.

That setup also makes the “outside” social links more meaningful to me. Starting a few of these, I’d forgotten how heavy some of them can get.

Kid, this is way above my pay grade. I don’t even have a pay grade yet even, I’m still a fucking student.

Like I need more to be depressed about. I’ve been thinking about rewatching Evangelion after like 25 years, on that topic. I’ve heard I might get a lot more out of it as a bitter fuck of an adult.

I guess I’m more or less out of thoughts about Persona 3 Reload now, aside from those about the music, because these games (the whole of Megaten too) rely on their excellent music just as much as your Final Fantasy does. This is where I have to be slightly negative, because I don’t like the new parts of the soundtrack quite as much. It’s still all good aside from the Lotus Juice stuff — I just don’t like his style, and I can’t say “I’m just not into rap” anymore because that’s not quite true now (just five albums so far that I’ve really liked, but I’ve barely listened to any and that number is growing.)

But the rerecording of When the Moon’s Reaching Out Stars? No, I much prefer the original. How can you take out the line “your love came all over me”, especially when the meaning is actually completely innocent?

Thanks for the advice, Yukari

On that note, I am actually done with my thoughts. P3R is pretty damn good so far, meeting my high expectations. New players will certainly have a different experience with it than I’m having, but for me that nostalgia especially works, since the game actually is a fine recreation of the original (again, so far. Maybe it will fuck up at some point, but I don’t see it.)

Now I still have a stack of anime to finish, including that fucking Kongming Eurobeat one that I actually like up through episode 8. Until next time.

* Weird thing with the Persona protagonists past 2: they each have a manga name and a different anime name. The spinoff games always go with the latter if they need to assign him a name, which is too bad, because I always prefer the manga ones. It’s too confusing to call this guy Makoto ever since Persona 5 anyway.

Behind the curtain

Now here’s a hard post to write. The hardest I’ve had to write on this site, probably, even if there’s harder stuff on my other one I never promote. Naturally that subject is far heavier than this one in terms of scale and horror, but this story is also important to many of us, and certainly to me on a personal level, having been in this fan circle for years now and having experienced some of the feelings Dokibird brought up recently.

The story is still unfolding — I briefly brought it up in my last post, but if you want an overview in video form, VTuber YouTube commentary guy Koefficient has put together a couple of good ones, together with big commentary channels Critikal/Charlie and Someordinarygamers/Mutahar to show just how much traction this story has gotten. Briefly put, popular streamer Selen Tatsuki was publicly terminated from the agency Nijisanji EN following what she has confirmed now to be two of her suicide attempts stemming from abuses suffered while in the company. As of this writing, Niji EN has put out a bizarre statement presumably in an attempt at damage control, using three of their own talents as combined mouthpieces and shields.

This statement, for some reason released on Elira’s channel instead of the main agency channel Nijisanji EN as it should have been, turned out to be what many suspect was a recitation of a corporate script in which the three attempted to attack the credibility of their former colleague Selen Tatsuki, now known as Dokibird after returning to her old indie channel and character. Legal documents sent by Dokibird’s lawyer to Nijisanji’s parent corporation Anycolor in the course of legal business were reportedly shown to the three talents, and certain documents were discussed that very obviously should not have been. Nijisanji’s script ridiculously attempted to spin the real names of VTubers on said legal documents — which, again, were meant for attorneys’ eyes only* — as doxxing and a veiled threat, while insisting that Selen was able to leave freely if she didn’t like conditions (despite the fact that these livers work under contracts that presumably have terms governing that, and also in a complete contradiction of Selen/Doki’s own account.)

Audience response was about as negative as it could have possibly been. A large majority of fans, already angry with Anycolor over their treatment of Selen, boiled over in the chat. Everything about both its content and delivery was so vile that this short stream, meant to discredit Doki, instead destroyed what little confidence the agency still enjoyed at that point, and that together with the reputations of the three livers and most of all of Elira, who hosted and led the stream.

I watched this shitshow in real time, and it felt like having my heart ripped out. Maybe that’s extremely silly of me to say, but fuck me if it wasn’t the truth. I watched Elira and really enjoyed her chilled out feel, her voice, and her love for niche Japanese games. Her drunk stream years back is one of the most entertaining I’ve seen. And now here she was, perhaps being forced by corporate to carry out a character assassination on her former colleague, and for all we know at risk of also losing her job. Or not — nobody knows what’s really going on aside from the people most directly involved.

I’m not interested in handing out moral condemnation to individuals. There’s a lot of speculation going around right now, much of it likely way off the mark, and it shouldn’t even have to be said that harassment of these three or any other Niji talents is entirely unacceptable as Dokibird herself has repeatedly stated. Moreover, though I have dropped in on her streams, I don’t actually know what Elira is like, being a character and an entertainer as she is, and having watched no Vox or Ike at all, I can’t say anything about them aside from Vox’s part in the black-screen stream being especially infuriating (if you want a great example of victim-blaming, of a suicide survivor no less, watch his section of the stream if you can bear it, because it’s not harassment to express my opinion about the words that came out of his mouth.)

But that’s just the point: I don’t know her or any of these other entertainers on that level and never will. I visited their streams occasionally and had a good time, and that’s about it. That’s not a friendship, it’s just an entertainer-viewer relationship and nothing else.

Now you might say, well shit AK, isn’t that obvious. Of course it is. But watching VTubers, it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the color and music and lore. It’s meant to be a spectacle, and it’s absolutely effective if you’re into the style — some of the music is definitely too sugary/idol-ish for me, but even some of that works in the context of what these idol-like groups are trying out.

I should note that I’m not saying not to watch VTubers. I still have a few that I drop in on to this day, and I’ll continue to do so. I certainly recommend Dokibird, but the newest Hololive wave also has some great streamers (Fuwamoco alone have deservedly become a staple by now) along with VShojo, the rapidly growing agencies Phase Connect and idol-EN, and the not very rapidly growing but still highly talented Prism Project lineup. Three of these groups have also had to deal with terminations, and two of them with especially scandalous ones. But in contrast with Nijisanji, they’ve all handled these public firings with some tact and professionalism, keeping the confidence of their fans as a result.

However, this bitter drama has put all this entertainment in perspective again. It’s easy to assume things are fine behind the scenes when you never witness those backstage happenings. I believe this is especially true for VTubing, just about the most escapist form of entertainment I’ve ever come across if you can measure such things. The situation isn’t hopeless, though: I think the concept of ethical consumerism can and should be applied in this case. Don’t buy from companies that support corrupt and evil practices and actors, and don’t support VTuber agencies that treat their talent like product that should just be thrown away when they’re no longer of use, no matter the risk to their mental health. While some Niji fans will no doubt continue to stick their heads in the sand, I’m happy to see so many other fans taking a stand and disproving the common mainstream concept that VTuber watchers are all mindless, drooling idiots.

Finally, I stated above that I wasn’t interested in morally condemning any individual — but I will condemn Anycolor and Nijisanji. I have plenty of problems with my own country, but I thank God for the First fucking Amendment that lets me, along with so many other former fans, speak the truth about a company without being threatened with a defamation charge. I had honestly become kind of disconnected from Niji EN around the end of 2022, so I wasn’t following too closely when one of their other talents Zaion LanZa was terminated early last year, but I do remember her being very publicly and distastefully dragged through the mud similar to the treatment Selen received. Having never watched her streams, I don’t know much about her or her new/old form Sayu Sincronisity that she has since returned to, but her claims about working conditions at Nijisanji EN seem to have been vindicated, and she’s also enjoyed a boost in popularity in the last couple of weeks as a result. Though I can just imagine how complicated her feelings might be, given that she largely wasn’t believed until a far more popular streamer was mistreated.

To this day, I deal with depression and at my lowest points with suicidal ideation. I’m not in any danger to myself at all for a few reasons (family, a sense of duty to keep living in general, and religion though that’s a more complicated point) but these issues used to be far worse for me, especially back in the mid/late 2010s when I was a heavy drinker to the point that I might have actually killed myself with alcohol, working at a job so lousy I dreaded going into the office every single morning. That daily pit in your stomach gets hard to take after a while. This is all just to say that, even if I don’t know her and never will, I can directly sympathize with a lot of Doki’s account.

Now I pray that we’re at the end of this painful drama, and I hope the best for everyone in this situation, aside from Anycolor, which will sadly very likely keep coasting on its large, successful Nijisanji JP branch without having to account for any of its actions. Who knows where Niji EN is headed — a total collapse seems likely at this point given its reputation is now absolute shit among most western fans, but I’m officially out and done with it.

Next time I hope to write about something happier. I picked up Persona 3 Reload, the one single long JRPG that I consider grandfathered in under my “long narrative games are banned because I don’t have time anymore” policy, so maybe something about that. Until then.

 

* Attorney time, since I didn’t want to nitpick Niji’s stream up there (plenty of YouTubers have done that thoroughly by now): It’s absolutely natural and even necessary for a legal document to contain the names of people an attorney and client think are relevant to a case. “Here are the witnesses we’d like to interview”, that sort of thing. And naturally you can’t just put “Elira Pendora” on a document like that, being the name of a character and not of a real person.

What’s not natural is for a company’s legal department to share fucking legal documents sent by the opposing side to parties outside that confidence, and then for those parties to reveal information from said fucking documents to a live audience of tens of thousands. A child could probably tell you that, but for what it’s worth I’m speaking from a place of authority, since my job involves dealing with confidential and privileged material. I don’t know Japanese law, but the preservation of confidentiality in a legal context is such a universal concept that I believe if Anycolor has a legal department, and they were consulted and actually signed off on this trainwreck of a statement, the lawyers who so did should be fired.

P.S.: A few YouTube lawyers have commented on this issue. The one stream I was able to catch some of was by Runkle of the Bailey, a Canadian lawyer who looks like a Lord of the Rings elf for some reason. But he’s a good one to check out on this issue, Doki being Canadian and based in Canada, and he breaks down Canadian privacy law that I didn’t know anything about. I don’t know much more about Canadian law, but I do agree that Doki looks to be in a very good and very defensible position and that the best thing to do at this point for her might just be nothing legally speaking. Seems likely since she’s said she just wants to move on anyway. And for those who want to see Anycolor account for their actions, I wouldn’t hold my breath, not unless something happens to rock their main JP branch, which I honestly don’t know a thing about.