Saihate no Ima Video Update #1: The Good, The Bad, and the Gutenberg

Hello everyone, I hope you're all as well as you can be!

After a short break from video production following the To Love-Ru video so I could clear out music commissions (more on the fruits of that labor later), I've been getting back on track with video work. As I mentioned in the last blog post, and is clear by the title of this one, the subject of the next video is going to be 2005's beloved (?) cult classic (?), Saihate no Ima.

Semi-sarcastic question marks in the prior paragraph, because everyone I talk to seems to have a love/hate relationship with this game. But it's the kind where all the ragging is done in good faith and not necessarily to demean the work; it's just a weird, confusing, dense, and complicated title that throws everyone who reads it for a loop. This includes yours truly, as evidenced by the fact I am 16 hours into the game and I still genuinely cannot pinpoint what it's about.

Saihate no Ima is, so far, ostensibly, about a group of seven social outcasts who gather together at an abandoned building (their 'Holy Grounds') and talk about everything from dirty jokes to the fragmentary nature of human communication and connection in the 21st century. There may also be a serial killer on the loose, a rival group of misfits which includes a smug blonde brat with martial arts skills, witch hunts against a group member, and some probably unintentional gay tension between many of the women.

As I understand it from talking about the game with friends who have actually completed it and read dozens of essays on it after finishing it, Saihate no Ima does, eventually, have something resembling a coherent throughline. But the main meat of it stays as more or less what I've described: Tanaka Romeo basically just vibes-ed out the writing and threw together a hodgepodge of ideas and philosophies he found curious, pulling from a wide variety of sources, to capture his feelings about the fragmentary world that we live in.

In this regard, I think Ima is absolutely brilliant so far. For a game that does ultimately seem to be about the internet, it truly captures the feel of a late-night Wikipedia binge interspersed by random AOL instant messenger conversations. The story is non-linear and jumps around constantly between different points in time; so-called 'hyperlinks' appear in the dialogue to connect to infodumps about everything from folklore to pharmaceutical lore, which in turn lead to more hyperlinks about more things; conversations flow between witty shimoneta and tortorous psychological horror as you watch a depressed teenager have to listen to someones mother explain why abusing a child is actually necessary for their growth as he can do nothing but recoil and shrivel up.

I think if this game were written by anyone besides Tanaka Romeo, it would not work. Ima is, so far, incoherent, challenging to decipher, confusingly structured, rambles incessantly, and brings up new plot points with no abandon. But there's two things Romeo excels in that make this come together: he has a sense for story structure that allows him to pace and place everything in a way that feels more mysterious/thematic than broken/baffling, and he's incredible at making every single sentence feel profound.

I seriously think Romeo could find a way to write about a grocery store plastic bag and make it interesting. Every single line in Ima drips with style and flair that few other writers can rival, period; not just in visual novels but in literature as a whole. All of the dozens of concepts that he randomly explores through his brilliantly written characters are described in such flowery yet human ways that it's hard not to be pulled in and lost in the moment. It doesn't matter how confounding the overall story is when the moment to moment is so good, and each little moment feels like it's giving you a tiny hint at what the larger puzzle might be.

In a way, I think reading Saihate no Ima gives me the same kind of anthropological and detective-like joy that playing Myst and Riven did. Ima presents you with fragmentary snippets of these peoples lives, generally and even gleefully without the context to explain how they connect, and asks you to solve how these events go together, why we're seeing these specific events, what these hints at other events are referring to, what the goals of these characters even are, and so forth. All of the questions about the narrative arise naturally simply through observing these peoples lives.

Even without the game specifically getting into the internet as it appears to later, this already feels like it beautifully captures the mysterious and ethereal nature of connection in the internet age. We can never fully understand the lives of people we meet online, nor can we fully understand the events occuring around us on the internet. All we have to go off of are fragments that people choose to expose to us; random conversations and hyperlinks upon hyperlinks that regularly lead us off the trail, but perhaps enlighten us to something else.

Reading Ima makes me think about all the people I've known, the people I considered friends, who I really understood nothing more about than disconnected snippets of their lives. It makes me think about the deluge of information I've been exposed to, and how it's given me a very wide-reaching comprehension of the world yet a very narrow awareness of it at the same time. And the very fact the game is unfinished, missing 2/5ths of the entire story, makes me think about how the internet is full of holes that we can never patch; websites, histories, lives, gone missing, because of corporatization and digital rot.

Saihate no Ima is very much the internet embodied in a 60 hour brainfuck of a visual novel, and I'm excited to see where it goes from here.

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Obviously, a work of this density and general weirdness demands some sort of external reading in order to make sense of, and I do feel that modern readers of Ima probably have it easier than those back in 2005 did. A lot of what Romeo was thinking about with Ima (the disconnection that the loneliness of the internet induces, the incoherency of modern digital life, and even later on apparently the privatization and destruction of public internet spaces by corporations) has been expanded upon greatly by writers in the current day.

I have a couple of books lined up to read about all of this, and I intend to go to the public city library to see if I can track down anything more, particularly in Portuguese if possible since I feel that here in Brazil, we have some rather... not necessarily unique, but interesting issues with the internet, particularly with the fact that WhatsApp (owned by Meta of all people) has completely subsumed all other messaging and communication platforms to the point you more or less cannot live without it. I've been managing getting my balls removed through it for fucks sake. Surely a brilliant academic from USP or UFRJ must have written about the all consuming green blip...?

At any rate, I have a few books arriving in the mail that I think will be somewhat helpful for this game. Verso Books (which is, frankly, the best book publishing house I'm aware of at this point) had their year-end sale, so I picked up three books. 'Future Histories' by Lizzie O'Shea uses historical parallels to things like the Paris Commune to find hope for freeing ourselves from our current digital shackles. 'The Internet Con' by Cory Doctorow explores how the freedom of technology was stolen, and how to get it back. I also picked up 'Crude Capitalism' by Adam Hanieh because I was impressed by an article he wrote for a publication, even if an exploration of oil in the modern economy might not be especially relevant to this video. Then again, who knows.

But pulling entirely from modern sources is not necessary here I think. The past can say plenty too, and for that I've been looking in a few places. I was already reading Roland Barthes for a scrapped previous video, and I've found his essay collection 'Mythologies' to be surprisingly relevant for what I've gathered out of Ima at this point. His explorations of how modern myths are formed and hidden within plain sight in society, be it in the form of marketing or a boxing match, capture the idiosyncrasies of modern life in a pretty brilliant way. In particular, I find that his prediction of how one who studies myth becomes alienated is pretty poignant to what it feels like to be critical of technology so critical to our modern life.

"[...] the mythologist cuts himself off from all the myth-consumers, and this is no small matter. If this applied to a particular section of the collectivity, well and good. But when a myth reaches the entire community, it is from the latter that the mythologist must become estranged if he wants to liberate the myth. Any myth with some degree of generality is in fact ambiguous, because it represents the very humanity of those who, having nothing, have borrowed it. To decipher the Tour de France or the 'good French Wine' is to cut oneself off from those who are entertained or warmed up by them. The mythologist is condemned to live in a theoretical sociality; for him, to be in society is, at best, to be truthful: his utmost sociality dwells in his utmost morality. His connection with the world is of the order of sarcasm."

Good stuff. But the other author I, somewhat unfortunately, chose to read, was Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is a name you may not know, but are certainly familiar with as the pioneer of the quote 'the medium is the message' and the concept of the 'global village'; where people become more interconnected thanks to media and (tele)communications, but not necessarily connected through knowing one another personally and in-person. ...Or something of that sort.

Defining any idea of McLuhan's specifically is somewhat of a trial in futility, or so I've learned from reading his breakout book, 'Gutenberg Galaxy.' Release in 1962, it's what I can only describe as what would happen if Nostradamus became extremely racist and decided to write about the future of human communication and the effects of media & art on society. It is a baffling, incoherent series of predictions and assumptions that occasionally hit the mark, but only because so many of them are thrown out that one or two or five must eventually be true.

The book is ostensibly an exploration of how exposure to different forms of art and media have shaped societies. McLuhan discusses how "natives" of "Africa" (can you really summarize an entire continent, white boy?) don't "understand" film (because they focus on the "wrong" things) due to their "oral" and "tribal" society, how "illiterate" societies are "incapable" of processing certain concepts, and how over time, the exposure to things such as writing, hand-done transcription, camera, film, the printing press, audio recordings, etc, have shaped how we view the world.

You may see how, despite the horrifying racism, this is relevant to a game about communication and community, and I do think there's a lot of interesting ideas within this book, in isolation, which actually relate to Ima pretty well. One of which is how the book is written as a so-called 'mosiac;' with semi-disconnected pieces that all fit together when taken from a larger view, but require the reader to pay attention and assemble them, make their own interpretation. Sound familiar?

McLuhan's scope is massive, and to his credit, he does manage to explore the scope pretty damn thoroughly. It's interesting to read the book and, when it's not being racist and flat out incorrect, learn about how the different ways humans communicate with each other fundamentally reshapes and reforms society; oral traditions and the need for storytelling eventually lead to mass-market paperbacks available to all, arguably devaluing the information and its social import. Information is stored in your pocket rather than memorized, affecting how we view information. Education through its formalization becomes less free-form and instead becomes more rigid, etc.

Unfortunately, I cannot hammer home how skull-crushingly racist McLuhan is and how this tinges the entire book. The book is dripping with dry academic content for any culture which is not the (Northern) US, (Western) Europe, the UK (but only England), or the (Ancient) Romans and the (Ancient) Greeks. He attempts to keep a somewhat neutral tone when discussing places such as the Southern US, Africa, Russia, or China, but it's blindingly obvious he views them as backwards to some extent, or not as 'developed' as his glorious western imperial powers and his glorious enlightened ancient civilizations. This is without even getting into how uber-racist and wrong it is to act as if entire continents and massive countries can be summarized as having a singular culture, hell even TINY countries.

He plays very wishy-washy with terms like 'illiterate' and 'tribal' seemingly just so he can keep calling them these things without ever really making clear why China or Japan is 'tribal' or 'oral', or why ideographic languages don't affect society like alphabetic languages do. For instance, can you actually, genuinely decipher his logic behind this? A coherent logic?

"Diringer’s observation that the alphabet is “now universally employed by civilized peoples” is a bit tautological since it is by alphabet alone that men have detribalized or individualized themselves into “civilization.” Cultures can rise far above civilization artistically but without the phonetic alphabet they remain tribal, as do the Chinese and the Japanese. It is necessary to stress that my concern is with the process of separation of sense by which the detribalizing of men is achieved. Whether such personal abstraction and social detribalization be a “good thing” is not for any individual to determine. But a recognition of the process may disembarrass the matter of the miasmal moral fogs that now invest it."

Why is it that the alphabet can 'detribalize' and individualize people into 'civilization?' Why is it that China and Japan of the 1960s, two rapidly developing and industrializing (industrialized?) nations are still 'tribal?' Why does a phonetic alphabet have such different effects on society as compared to ideograms? He makes this same claim of Russia as well, that Russia is yet still an 'oral culture' because of their writing and communication, BUT RUSSIAN HAS A GODDAMNED ALPHABET?!

It genuinely irritates me how much he attempts to escape any responsibility for his blinding racism by saying things like 'whether such personal abstraction and social detribalization be a “good thing” is not for any individual to determine' when he so very clearly throws intense weight onto these matters throughout the book, and constantly plays loose with words so he can keep using these derogatory words. He also loves to quote people who call people 'savages' and other things of the sort, so, sorry, I don't trust his 'neutrality' at all.

Ultimately, I gave up reading the book at 2/3rds through. Friends of mine who have read the book back up that I've gotten most everything I can from it, which includes someone who has read pretty much all of McLuhan's works. Funnily enough one of those key 'take-aways' is that McLuhan is incapable of managing the mosaic he pioneered. While Ima revels in its diatribes, diversions, and disconnections, everything McLuhan writes feels bloated and borderline nonsensical, with constant rambling quotations and frustrating structure that takes 150 pages to finally click. He lacks the style to make it worth getting to the substance, and even the style to make his style substance.

So what's the overall verdict so far? I think Saihate no Ima is a banger that captures the idiosyncrasies of being a weird little social outcast in the fragmented internet age, and I think Tanaka Romeo is crazy (positive) for being able to pluck good ideas like the Mosiac and the Global Village out of McLuhan's godawful horrendous writing. I'm also glad I finally read some Barthes, even if he's kind of weird about the Chinese (why is this a running theme for white academics), and I'm looking forward to reading some good new releases about how we can, maybe, possibly, make technology less insufferable going forward.

Okay, that's all for now. I'm going to go back to melting my brain with Romeo's ramblings. Once I'm done with the game or get completely ownzoned by a later chapter, I'll make another post to sort my head out. I've heard something called the 戦争編 (War Chapter) is challenging even for native readers, which has me excited but deeply mortified.

...Oh wait, I said I'd talk about the fruits of the music work labor. Some of it I can't show publicly (yet), but I can at least say I'm working on an RPG Maker thing and a cute little game for the WonderSwan. For some things I can actually show -- I just wrapped up doing the music and sound effects for a friends game jam visual novel about two gay robot girls, and I did the music for a new puzzle game on the VIC-20, C64, and PET. The former is free and the latter probably won't cost much when it comes out, so if you like sexually confused robot girls and/or vintage computers, then boy howdy do I have two radically different games for you.

Okay byeeee o/