The Bog

I like video essays about games, other people like video essays about games, so here's another one I liked!

Amelie Doree is a channel that does outrageously in-depth analysis of obscure, older visual novels and eroge.

(My weeb confession I need to make right now is that despite the Saya no Uta icon and recent Hatoful Boyfriend posting, I actually don't like visual novels all that much as a genre, despite the enormous presence they have in Japanese gaming history, hobby gamedev spaces, and erotic games specifically. It's notable that Saya no Uta and Hatoful Boyfriend are both fairly short, and Saya no Uta has only two choice points. Maybe I'm just too smoothbrained for it but VNs with a ton of story-impacting choices tend to just make me stressed, and novel-length text on a computer screen is hard for me to focus on. Extremely detailed discussions of cool VNs are thus super good for me specifically, since I probably wouldn't have the same positive experience actually playing them as a genre enthusiast would.)

Anyway, she's extremely knowledgeable about Japanese retro computing in general, but what really stood out to me is that I don't think I've ever seen someone quite so passionate about eroge who is also willing to take the genre seriously, even at its silliest. She did an extremely long video on Dasaku, a guro yuri VN I'd never heard of before despite being a big guro fan, from a trans perspective that was honestly fantastic (though like...WARNING even I was surprised by how gruesome the story got).

The video that brought me to her channel, though, was one about the hilariously-named PC-98 eroge Sex 2. It's really only partially about Sex 2, using the game as a springboard to talk about her own history with creating things, how we communicate with each other as people, and how there's meaning and beauty to be found in all art, no matter how tacky or maligned or silly or seemingly shallow -- and often the niche, weird, and cringey stuff can be the most affecting.

I dunno, it just kinda resonated (also it was interesting to learn the true story of Sex 2...the sequel to Sex [for the PC-98]).

Side note, the fact that you could release a porn game that was just called "Sex" in the early 90s is really funny to me, and kind of reminds me of the old Atari and Intellivision cars we'd get in at the game store I used to work at, featuring games just called "Combat" or "Golf". The days when there were few enough video games that these qualified as distinguishing features lol

Dropped off the face of longform posts for a variety of reasons but I'm back now.

Not on track to win NaNo but I DO have a pile of about 20k words worth of meandering that I can maybe edit into part of something presentable. At some point I sort of accepted that if I ever got this fic readable I was going to have to cut a lot of what I was writing and just made peace with it.

I feel like I write a whole lot of stuff that doesn't work out lately, way more than I used to. Not sure if my standards got higher or what.

I cannot give up posting on Twitter for the life of me but my posts have started occasionally blowing up again (like in the range of 500-1k likes/retweets). It's equal parts dopamine and stressful. One of these was a joke post about how goofy the lines people draw between RPG genres are and I got people legit arguing about what constituted a "JRPG" in the replies, as though the totally arbitrary nature of these categorizations wasn't the whole point of the joke. Oof.

I've been replaying Hatoful Boyfriend (I played the original so now I'm cruising through the HD version on Steam) and I'm yet again struck by how good it is. This game kicked off an arms race of sorts where indie devs tried to one-up each other on insane dating sim premises and pretty much all of them flopped drastically because everbody really took the wrong lesson from it. Like, Hatoful Boyfriend has a silly premise but it completely commits to it, and builds on it to make something with substance.

There's just really no getting around just giving a shit, plain and simple. Even the goofiest, dumbest idea imaginable is worth making but only if you actually DO think it's worth making. Obviously this isn't the only thing wrong with the glut of failed gimmick VNs but I think it's like, the central problem. You can tell somebody thought the pigeon dating sim was worth making. Hatoful Boyfriend kind of leans into the "silly premise taken seriously" angle (though it is still pretty funny) but the content doesn't have to be serious -- I mean, I think another example of this is Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, which is 100% a joke from start to finish but it's a joke somebody thought was really fucking funny and committed to harder than I think anybody has ever committed to a joke in video game history. You just have to take what you're doing seriously.

I've been thinking a lot about game design, and ideas, and art, and ambitions lately. I don't think your idea has to be grand or meaningful or even like...good, necessarily, for any particular value of "good". You just have to think it's worth doing for some reason, even if it's just because the concept makes you laugh or you think it'll be fun to put together or you like to imagine people looking at the result and going "what the fuck". That's, like. That's the thing.

Of course, like all thoughts about art, this is a principle I struggle to apply to myself, lol.

Objectively I don't THINK I have more stuff to do the next two weeks than usual, but for some reason I'm feeling an extreme sense of overwhelm. Just like constant stress like a coiled-up spring.

Traveling any distance always stresses me out, I guess.

Anyway, I have been crossposting fic and I realized that it's kind of dumb to like, keep it all squirreled away until I'm done, for some value of done, so I pinned my fic masterpost. Kinda satisfying looking at a compact text list of stuff.

Right now it's heavily weighted towards FF14 because that's a lot of my more recent stuff that I also didn't think would need an overhaul -- I have a tendency to lose track of what's going on moment to moment in a story and doing dumb shit like having someone take off their pants twice in a scene and I think that should probably be rectified.

Also, looking at my old fic leaves me with some questions, such as:

1) Why did I tag a story with "Water"? Just "Water". Like people would be cruising the archive for some water fics.

2) I had completely forgotten that I had a story where Dr Lugae was an exiled royal scientist from Damcyan, which I think was because of that "Damcyan is technologically advanced" headcanon I mentioned earlier, but like...holy shit was I implying Edward knows this guy????? what on earth. Wondering if I should stick with this for a fic I'm working on because it's kind of an insane idea, but on the other hand...it's kind of an insane idea.

3) At what point do you officially start considering bladed weapons to be sexual implements because I'm up to a solid 4 fics about this specifically

4) god I have so many phrases i reuse across fics and they are all so weirdly specific and they're usually something kinda gross

Also, for the record I have no real intention of playing FF16 ever (don't own a PS5, don't like super realistic graphics, don't like action RPGs much) but i jumped on a bandwagon and now I am kinda obsessed with this screenshot I took of my WoL as Dominant of Diabolos, Eikon of Nightmares. I have no idea if it fits the vibe of the game -- everybody seems to be wearing armor in it. They've got wizards, right?

(Diabolos's element in most games, aside from "darkness", actually seems to be "gravity", or possibly "fractions", but you know)

I...really want to be doing stuff, but the combination of picking up more work in the isekai mines and trying not to have this cosplay come down to the absolute wire is just eating up all my time. I feel like I can't do any projects outside of the stuff I committed to before I decided to make this costume, and I can't play any games that require, like...thought. Of course, this means I distract myself a lot with games that are pretty mindless and thus I can put them down whenever and start working, honest.

I've been playing Torchlight 2 again, because it's peak mindless, and...man, you know how people say a book has "workmanlike prose"? Torchlight 2 is that but for video games. It is absolutely the most unambitious game I have ever played. It adequately checks all the boxes and isn't interesting enough to actually be bad, so it's easy to just kind of plow through it with zero thoughts.

I tried to revisit the original Torchlight as well, but for some reason the game (and only that game) made my computer start producing a high-pitched noise whenever the window was focused. Nothing else happened but it made me nervous so I uninstalled it without playing, lol.

Have been slowly working on crossposting and making a Personal Website and...god I cannot overstate how much I hate a lot of my old writing. I keep being tempted to orphan it. A lot of it is for fandoms I'm still into, because my interests have apparently barely changed since the 90s, so I'm tempted to write "replacements".

I also keep running across author's notes like "definitely going to write a sequel!" or "major edits forthcoming!" and like. Girl. Did you seriously think that was gonna happen. Be real.

Will probably start crossposting my fic from AO3 to here at some point. Waffling about the idea of having a separate fic journal/community but I kind of like the idea of being able to post whatever even if its not "archive quality" and I feel like a separate thing would just become Archive: A Realm Reborn.

I've also been around a very long time and writing fic for a very long time and it's just like. Really hard to look at my writing from more than a few years ago, let alone close to a decade or more. Like I literally have trouble even looking at it directly; one time I wanted to lift a few lines from something I wrote in like 2011 and it took me like a week to work up the mental fortitude to work through a few thousand words to find the stuff I wanted. It's like staring directly at the sun, if the sun were cringe.

There are also fandoms I just don't want to engage with anymore, to varying degrees of seriousness. World of Warcraft, for example, was a thing I just grew to actively dislike but I might still like a couple of things I wrote for it if I went back and read them now, and while the company that makes the game is shit my main objections to engaging with the fandom itself is that I just don't like the story (although I used to get really, REALLY mad about the way the narrative went with the Forsaken, like "whoa I need to step back" kind of mad, because IDK I over-identify with zombies this is just a thing I do).

On the other hand, back in the 200X era I wrote a handful of Roman literature RPF fics and quite frankly that stuff is literally painful for me to read, an awkward relic of a time before I crashed and burned academically and had all these hopes and aspirations that belonged to functionally a different person. Ironically those are my fics that get the most interaction, so OTHER people clearly like them and I'm glad, but I would rather just forget they exist.

I feel like my interests used to be just way classier in general, and I guess another advantage of a personal fic archive is that somebody won't be crawling the tag for some Capital L Literature fandom, see one of my old stories, and then be extremely disappointed all of my work in that area is old enough to be in middle school and most of my recent output is video game characters doing things to each other that are varying degrees of objectionable. Like I used to live atop an ivory tower and while the tower is still there I currently live in the bottom of a swamp. I personally like it here but I could understand if someone came to see what the tower-dweller was up to and found themselves knee deep in mud.

Part of me worries that all this shuffling around is a way of avoiding actually WORKING on anything creative, but. Eh it's not like I don't find those anyway.