#remind me to write an analysis on the moniker ‘end of the world’ next

[saionjeans]

yet another moment where saionji says something incredibly trenchant and insightful only to be completely dismissed due to the ridiculous framing and the general cringiness that pervades everything he says and does (eg, pointing out that the castle is a trick of the light, announcing that they must shed the coffins end of the world has prepared for them, etc etc). obviously in this instance, he is both saying something that is proven correct throughout the show via a myriad of dynamics, but is also shown to be a precept that is teleologically challenged and rejected by anthy’s final choice.

upon a first viewing, one might assume saionji himself is talking about anthy here, whether by presumptuously assuming that she loves him despite his abuse, or claiming that her rejection of him does not lessen his love for her. either way, he seems totally delusional and moronic. i can only assume that utena, who has even less information than we do regarding saionji’s true feelings, assumes that he is talking about anthy, and thus dismisses him out of hand for being a violent idiot. and rightfully so. but also, he’s clearly not talking about anthy, even if he may think he is (or at least would claim that he was if questioned). and this statement is truly definitional to his relationship to touga, whom he resents, envies, and maybe even loathes, but whom he cannot seem to ever actually abandon.

even when he’s given the chance to start fresh, he returns to ohtori (and in this case you can say that it’s because he has nowhere to go, no family, the outside world is scary, ohtori is all he knows, he felt he had no other choice… but this was also true of anthy, and she eventually found the courage to leave! it’s very very hard, but it’s not impossible, which is the point). even as he vocally condemns akio’s system, he nonetheless participates in it, albeit reluctantly, for touga. he is freer, healthier, and kinder in wakaba’s dorm, but he is also deeply unhappy. which isn’t to say that he ever seems happy (at least, not after losing the rose bride), but his unhappiness in “wakaba flourishing” is that of depression, whereas his unhappiness around touga is that of resentment. he’s rightfully angry over constantly being mistreated, but at least he’s not lost. he has a purpose. even if it’s just the purpose of receiving abuse and putting up a futile fight, it’s a role he can play with the only person who has ever truly mattered to him. it’s all he knows; it’s the closest thing he has to real love. and so he stays.

nanami is in a very similar situation as saionji is. they both idealize a version of touga who never really existed, and cling to him despite his blatant mistreatment of them because he is the only person who has ever shown them true affection in their entire lives. he manipulates them, makes a laughingstock of them, facilitates and participates in sexually abusing them, but also makes sure that they are too dependent on him to leave them. nanami is even more blatant in illustrating this idea than saionji is, as for most of the show, she does not even resist against touga like saionji does, rather she purely venerates and worships him, to the point of parody. he is a terrible brother to her, but in such a way that makes it seem like he’s actually a good brother to an obnoxious, ridiculous sister. he is actively grooming her, and she has nowhere to run, because he has fashioned himself her entire world. she cannot fathom a world beyond his limits, her very own personal end of the world.

it’s somewhat unclear whether touga thinks that controlling saionji and nanami is necessary to keeping them around, or whether he only wants them around because he enjoys assuming control over others. it’s probably a mix of both. he probably does hold some affection for them, but cannot conceive of a way to keep them as close to him as he would like without exploiting them, because he believes that true friendship is for fools and true love is impossible. to touga, if every relationship must be imbalanced in some way, then he at least wants to be the one with the power in his deepest relationships, unaware (or at least, willfully ignorant) of the fact that by corrupting and perverting their dynamics, he is slowly tainting their naive childhood love and affection that drew them to him in the first place. so in touga’s case, he inverts saionji’s logic to refigure it as “love can only be facilitated through abuse, no one will truly show you love unless they have to (through exploitation).” it’s the logic of someone who sees the world through an almost 2D framework of abuse, exploitation, transaction, and control. it’s the logic of someone desperately sad and desperately cynical. nanami is very wise (and brave) to ultimately reject him/it, even though it, too, is all she knows.

tsuwabuki complicates the nanami/touga dynamic by aspiring to inhabit both their roles simultaneously, and so he allows himself to be subjected to nanami’s exploitation while simultaneously subjecting her to violence. he is happy to be abused by nanami not because he loves her per se, but because their abuse is mutual. shiori and juri have a similar dynamic, wherein they are both at fault in different ways, both attempt to avoid the other (physically and psychologically) and yet constantly collide like magnets. however, the i would argue that the abuse they face is largely systemic, and their behaviors are primarily a symptom of their internalized homophobia rather than overt malice (even though shiori may pretend otherwise). miki and kozue’s tension is also mutual. they both harm the other despite loving them deeply. because love is not a bandaid that revolves all pain, misunderstanding, and miscommunication. see: the utena and anthy ledge scene.

finally, i think this quote is actually most powerful when figuring it through the lens of utena, anthy, and akio. of course, akio has fostered a dependency in anthy much like touga has with nanami, and so she does not know how to leave him despite being in incredible pain at his hand. but she is not “happy,” as saionji puts it. she is the most miserable girl in the world. she doesn’t love akio as much as she loves the memory of him, the idea of dios (which is of course also true for nanami and saionji re: touga, arguably also true for juri re: shiori, miki re: kozue, etc etc) — but anthy needs akio. or at least, akio has convinced her that she does. he is end of the world, she cannot envision a life beyond his imposed limits.

but i actually find it more interesting with regards to utena and akio. i don’t think at any point in the show, utena ever actually has real, romantic feelings for akio. i think that she is terrified of him, and in her desperate feelings of trapped helplessness as he ensnares her, she convinces herself that those heart palpitations, startled movements, shocks and thrills she feels in her presence is the emotional response not of fear, but of affection. but we know that in anthy’s presence, she doesn’t feel afraid, she feels calm, relaxed, happy. being with anthy isn’t wildly exciting, constantly requiring rationalizations to explain away the dread and internal rejection she feels towards akio’s advances. being with anthy feels like coming home. and it’s why she is initially so happy to be accepted into anthy’s family, to have a big brother like akio, to live under their roof. in utena’s naive, hopeful mind, she is joining anthy’s family in the most innocent possible sense. and she endures it, the grooming, the abuse, the rape, the end of the world; she fights til her very last breath, because she is in love. no matter how [utena] may be abused (by akio), she’s always happy to be near the one she loves (anthy).

[gosmelters]

Hello to [the] Your First Video Game: A Personal Reflection on My Scholarly Beginnings

I’m finding the writing process for this blog harder than other platforms because of one issue I hadn’t considered when making it: my audience. 

How much do those reading this know about me? How much will I insult my instructor if I copy-and-paste the syllabus goals with every post? I am simultaneously overconfident about my plans for this blog and hitting backspace every time I try to post on it.

I figure it might be easier to be explicitly clear about my research from the jump. Every week, I’ll be responding to this course’s assigned readings by connecting them to games of analytic interest -- specifically Night in the Woods and Doki Doki Literature Club -- to further hone my feminist and queer perspectives on game mechanics, games as cultural artifacts and close-reading conduits, and, ultimately, what games studies mean to me. 

The latter question has been especially pressing as this course begins, as its importance surpasses any other project I’ve undertaken in my academic career. When I was young, about fifteen or so, I knew I would one day have an opportunity like this one. I had no idea how, but I was destined to figure it out. My dreams of entering the games studies circuit were fostered by countless presenters at the late Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, Wisconsin; modeled by the research of colleagues and close friends Kyrie  Eleison Caldwell and Sean Seyler; and thrown into overdrive by the classic work of Tom Bissell and his adventures in virtuality. And here, now, listening to the instrumental of “Your Reality” and pondering ever so lightly how mine reached this point, I begin to understand what Caldwell and co. told me just a few years ago as I failed to find an undergraduate program at which I felt at home: “you just kind of make it up as you go along.”

Sebastian Deterding's "The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research" concludes with the thought that games studies are “increasingly coalescing into a relatively closed community within it, composed of humanities and cultural studies scholars with homogenous epistemic cultures.” The split between “games studies scholars,” mostly comprised of film studies, comparative literature, and art and design scholars, and the vocationally focused game design programs have created “more of a narrow multidiscipline than the broad interdiscipline [games studies scholars] set out to become.” The quantification of interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and economically validated game studies fields reminded me of those early days of college searching: without a holistic understanding of what games studies was or even did, I picked a new keyword every week (”comparative literature!” “COMMUNICATIONS.” “narrotology, maybe.” “lu...dology?”) and sought out a (usually liberal arts) school that could foster that keyword the best. Yes, foster the keyword: the dream I had was so undefined, as if faded over months of sleep and never recorded in the bedside journal, that I was gambling my future on whatever “theory/method coupling” seemed right to me at the moment. I wonder if seeing these issues from the academic bird’s-eye view of Deterding would have given me any insight into Caldwell’s suggestion to MacGyver my future rather than reverse-engineer it, but I doubt it. I would have seen Deterding’s conclusion, his call to coalesce sociology, media philosophy, and the vocational education of game design to dissolve that “closed community,” and would have asked my inspirations the easiest way to guarantee a spot at that table. 

Therein lies a self-referential issue I have with the problem of interdisciplinary identification: on the most practical level, one that I experienced in my early days of higher education, there is no solution to the problem that is the proposed solution. In an ideal world, I would have liked a solid understanding of these game studies components because I saw them in action. I asked myself (and others) at Well-Played sessions how I could get paid by close-reading games (I’m so glad, if extremely surprised, no one responded with a snappy “you don’t”) -- because what is an interdisciplinary field if you cannot in some way categorize its facets and pedagogical inspirations? It’s hard to reconcile how much “easier” it would be to go into “games studies” when even that moniker made little to no sense to me. This article (or at least its evidence; it is clear that Deterding’s desire for cohesiveness [figure A] is contrary to my next claim) is a fascinating example of how the breakdown of scholarship at the highest of higher educations facilitates no understanding of how to break into its world at the freshman level. In other words, if I had read this in the keyword-obsessive summer before my senior year of high school, I know I would have ultimately picked one of the article’s own buzzwords (”OMG THERE’S LUDOLOGY AGAIN! WE’RE GOING WITH THAT!”) and defeated the article’s call for homogeneity -- as what constituted “games studies” was still too far beyond what I academically understood at the time to feel comfortable going into it.

(Figure A) The above, for example, are solutions to the problem that would have made my break into academia much smoother, and less reliant on right-place-right-time philosophies. From “The Pyrrhic Victory of Game Studies: Assessing the Past, Present, and Future of Interdisciplinary Game Research.” Sebastian Deterding. Games and Culture Vol 12, Issue 6, pp. 521 - 543. First published September 1, 2016.

This sounds like a simple non-argument without a proper point of comparison, and I’ll concede that my issue could have been solved with proper (and simple) designation of what games studies actually is. Yet I found a perfect point of retroactive validation in the first chapter of Jonas Heide Smith,‎ Susana Pajares Tosca's textbook Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Their four-point breakdown of video game study -- the game, the players, the culture, and "ontology" -- which correspond to four different types of analysis (figure B) made a still-extant insecure part of my sixteen-year-old self feel reassured by his desire to learn all of them. 

Figure B - “Four Major Types of Analysis.” From Egenfeldt Nielsen, S.., J. Heide Smith, and S. Pajares Tosca. Understanding Video Games: The Essential Introduction. Routledge, 2008.

It seems I’ve covered a lot of contradictory points in a few short paragraphs, but my reasoning is rather simple. I’m hyper-aware of the fact that there could be kids still struggling to understand how they might break into games studies, and need the most basic intellectual foundation upon which they may rest a future. To this end, I can say that studying what has interested me -- the visual arts, gender, feminist, and queer theory, and history of all kinds -- has provided me with a more-than-appropriate framework for studying video games. And I hope that on some level, our definition of “games studies” does not radically dissolve individual humanities identities. This “closed community” of humanities scholars that Deterding critiques may be borne of those four major types of analysis, but I didn’t know the latter even existed when I was trying to find the former. The knowledge I now possess of how to MacGyver this field is a privilege only in contrast to how ill-defined “games studies” as an “interdisciplinary field” was to me at the time. The closed communities must be open to visibility, especially at that aforementioned “freshman” level, but they should not lose their identities as interlocking methodologies that are available outside of a Platonic form of games scholarship. I wanted a path, so I made my own, but the structure to do so should have been clearer to me earlier. 

Sounds like a lot, huh? Of course it is! And that’s why I’m kicking off my blog with these deep-running contradictions and this confused psycho-scrubbing: to show that this blog is the end result of years of worry, anxiety, and, well, making it up as I go along. To have this kind of platform, to showcase my theoretical side in a space upon which my name is attached? That’s progress. 

And, hey: if you were just like me (I’m sorry, ‘cause I wouldn’t wish that on anyone), struggling with what games studies is or what it means, I hope that this little corner of analysis, self-reflection, and citation does you as much good as it does for me.

Now, about those video games...