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juushikaA Simple Plan, film, 1998, dir. Sam Raimi
A straightforward but effective take on the premise of a small, uneasy group forced into a conspiracy. It's discomforting to watch for exactly the right reason: everything feels justified yet is obviously unacceptable, and that tension provides significant immersion and momentum. The ending is overwrought and hinges on coincidence, but to be honest I didn't much mind. If you can overlook the limited scope and obvious flaws of the film (the all-white, nearly all-male cast among them, although there's some interesting class dynamics at play), this entirely satisfying.
Juu's Favorite Tropes/Subgenes So Obscure There's No Name for Them, #239: We all banded together, intentionally or otherwise, to commit [X] criminal act. Now, in order to cover that up, we keep aiding one another in criminal acts. This is having a telling effect on our relationships.
I'm watching A Simple Plan, which is the most straightforward version possible; I harvested it off of a delightful list of films about weird relationships. I love this trope because it does just that: the high-stress forced intimacy of co-conspiracy makes for weird relationships. Weird relationships are my second most favorite thing in media. Weirdly intimate relationships are my holy grail.
But in all the examples I can think of, co-conspiracy is something that forces relationships to unravel (albeit in revealing and fascinating ways). This is even more obvious in books like Tartt's The Secret History or French's startlingly similar The Likeness, where the group of conspirators were united, almost uncomfortably intimate, before their co-conspiracy, and the stress of the conspiracy tears their relationship open and down, revealing all sorts of interesting things about it as it brings about its destruction.
Subheader: Juu's Favorite Tropes/Subgenes So Obscure There's No Name for Them, #215: We are drawn together because only we can truly understand each other. Sometimes this is shared philosophies, sometimes life experiences; it's a great trope between erstwhile enemies, because the shared experience can be their competition. See: basically everything Gen Urobuchi has ever touched (Fate/Zero, Psycho-Pass). That shared understanding becomes so important that it overrides or strongly colors almost anything: animosity, taboo, or simply that the individuals are strangers.
I love the first trope for its unwilling, broken trust, its forced ragtag intimacy—but I'm always a bit brokenhearted when it functions to destroy intimacy. Conspiracy has the potential to be a shared experience, something no one understands but the co-conspirators; it can be a bonding point, even as it puts stress on (a) relationship(s). Maybe I've seen this in media before, but I doubt it, and I would dearly love to.
Jupiter Ascending, film, 2015, dirs. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski
This reminds me of YA literature: consumable trash filmed through a female lens—which doesn't make it magically non-problematic, but does make it a refreshing take on wish fulfillment. I don't care for the amount of spectacle; the action scenes in particular grow wearisome. But to my surprise, I love the my-love-interest-the-bodyguard dynamic, male as powerful and useful but subservient to female choice—full disclosure, this is a trope I adore (see: my love for Enslaved), but I'm still surprised that Jupiter Ascending pulled it off so well; I shipped the hetero leads and, let me tell you, that never happens. Anyway: not great, but a different and much improved variety of trash, and worth two hours of my time.
Big Hero 6, film, 2014, dirs. Chris Williams and Don Hall,
This should feel like merch bait, and it's so emotionally heavy-handed, and the antagonist(s) are shallow and I could do without the manpain motivation, and the end is predictable. And yet: I cared; I cared immensely. It's manipulative but effective, the character design is simplistic but charming, and Baymax is phenomenal. This is how to do mascot characters! Make them adorable and a little silly but also make them central to the story, make them the emotional lynchpin as well as the comic relief. (Great soundtrack, too.)
Kill la Kill, anime, 2013, Trigger
I loved Gurren Lagann, which was successful because it looks a simple concept and spiraled (ahahaha) it larger and larger—it was a deceptive, brilliant, effective device. Kill la Kill isn't simple and it certainly isn't brilliant. It's so energetic and ridiculous that it takes some time to adjust, but I did—and I enjoyed the show. To my particular surprise, I like the emotional and interpersonal arcs; they're hamfisted and obvious but have just enough underlying nuance, and the result is endearing. (Most especially, Mako.) But the plot's a mess. Spiral Power is an entire show worth of fridge brilliance; clothing-is-evil-except-not-also-fanservice lacks cogency and purpose. Is it unfair to compare this to TTGL? Probably, but oh well. Kill la Kill had bits I liked but as a whole was an unsuccessful successor.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (When the Cicadas Cry), anime, 2006, Studio Deen
Let's all take a moment to appreciate just how well the When They Cry series handles bad ends. They become tools to explore how a limited cast reacts to wildly different stressors, to explore multiple permeations and sides of the same story, and, best of all, the cumulative effect of the bad ends is the whole point. There's no frustrating dissonance between persistent viewer memory and reset character timelines—instead, the gap between them is the core the plot. Of course, the series originated as a visual novel—but games screw this up all the time! When They Cry is an aware, engaged, utterly satisfying take on the trope. (I've talked about this in length on Tumblr, crossposted below.)
The art is simplistic. The empty-eyed psychopathic tendencies of apparently all schoolchildren can be repetitive, although Keiichi's paranoia is a compelling change of pace. Higurashi isn't hugely refined, to be sure. But the scenery-chewing is its own delight, and what this series gets right I simply adore.
(as an aspect of Multiple Endings) in various media, shall we?
One of the things that Corpse Party did best was to give the Bad Ends purpose: they didn't feel like mistakes which were undone by finding the Good End; they felt like alternate realities, perhaps not existent but always implicit, an impression supported by the fact that many characters face unavoidable Bad Ends—they outright die in the course of the game. The frequent encounters with death, some avoidable, some not, make it a constant figure in the hell dimension, a character nearly as distinct as Heavenly Host Elementary School.
I found 999's Bad Ends disappointing by comparison; too often they feel like mistakes rather than parallel/potential realities. Eventually this destroys immersion because there's a disconnect between the information that the player retains, but the protagonist forgets, with every Bad End—although the very end of the game corrects (and in fact capitalizes on) this.
I talked about** one aspect of the multiple/bad end trope when playing Ib, a game which uses multiple POVs and multiple endings to create a new POV/character: the player, whose knowledge exceeds the canonical characters and so who, however ironically, has the greatest effect on the plot.
Right now I'm watching Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, and what it does with the Bad End trope is even better. (I believe the Naku Koro ni anime series copy the games's narrative structures, but haven't played the games.) The Bad Ends are actually successive narrative arcs: individual stories in themselves, but the information gleaned from each is approximately permanent, for the viewer certainly but also for the characters, and the cumulative effect creates the overarching narrative.
Bad Ends and horror work well in tandem because tension without climax fizzles out but killing off a character frequently prevents future character growth. The latter is what made Corpse Party excel: character death became character development, because in a world where death is so present, a character's interaction with their mortality is as important to the viewer as their relationship with their best friend. As for the former, Bad Ends allow for better pacing and atmosphere, they allow for plenty of, well, horror, without necessarily weakening the narrative. But how cool to see a narrative grow stronger for its Things that Never Happened (except that maybe they did).* Each individual arc has the entertainment we're looking for, the atmosphere/tension/payoff. But the overarching structure invites the viewer to be an active jconsumer of a more complex puzzle, one increasingly rich in both detail and characterization.
I love to watch tropes stitch uneven, half-hidden threads across multiple stories because I love to see tropes evolve/invert/self-commentate, and otherwise become larger than their examples in a single story. But when a single story is not only trope aware but builds its entire self around that evolved, inverted, commentated trope, well, that's magic.
*See also: "Five Things" fanfiction trope and its "That Never Happened" evolution/inversion.
**As evidenced, I don't naturally expect games to have multiple distinct character points of view. In fact, I don't necessarily expect them to have any: I'm adept at projecting and roleplaying, but the default character is often an intentional blank; RPGs offer an alternative, but most of them put the emphasis on role rather than playing, which is to say that character is explored, but never defined, by the player. There are a few exceptions, and I've already made the connection to Persona 3 (and other Persona games, but 3 left the greatest impression on me in this respect) and the invitation to create the player character.
Ib does some of the latter with Ib herself, whose reactions and relationships are within control of the player. But it also offers up more traditional RPG-styled fixed role playing with Garry, who is part audience surrogate (guys did you see that? guys that was really weird. guys WHY IS NO ONE ELSE FREAKING OUT) and part his own person. Having both is, frankly, impressive.
But more impressive is that it has a third POV: player. It's neither Ib nor Garry who provides the Juggler painting's date. Likewise, it's the player that replays the game, building up metadata that exceeds the limited POVs of the characters. I felt this also in 999, which made some of the game infuriating and the ending hugely rewarding: "I don't know anything about that!" Junpei would say, and I would say YES YOU DO GODDAMNIT BECAUSE YOU ENCOUNTERED IT LAST PLAYTHROUGH. The game never acknowledged me directly, but it did eventually acknowledge my metaknowlege, and it was one huge FINALLY.
Replaying some parts of Ib to get some other endings is a combination between Ib's player-defined POV and the player's metatextual POV: I must use what I know to save Garry, because Ib needs him. Any sort of replaying some of this, of course, but generally I can't embrace it: the way I play the game becomes the One True Way, because I grow so invested in either the character I project onto the blank or the character I create with the game's encouragement; deviating from that, using knowledge beyond that character's limitations, seems unfaithful and unreal. But here it's not like cheating, because the game recognizes it—by which I mean me—and invites me to use what I know for the best.
And written 2016: , and I have feelings.
When They Cry may not objectively be the smartest (or admittedly the most cogent) of the stories that hit me right in the "ahhh yes that's some good storytelling," but it is absolutely one of the most narratively aware, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (aka Juu's most very favorite sequel)-levels of intentionality and self-awareness, the cumulative effort of everything I've wanted from Bad End-style storytelling, an entire narrative built on itself and so by necessity larger than the sum of its parts.
I was once upon a time so impressed with the first season of Higurashi for offering a cumulative narrative, for the meta-knowledge of the bad ends, in the viewer, seeping over to the cast
—that it didn't even occur to me there would be cogent resolutions? because that extended awareness was in itself already so satisfying, compared to similar stories that overlook it.
And those resolutions are just okay, not particularly clever in plotting, belabored in pacing, but with enough nakama-feels to balance all manner of sins***
but they are literally built!! on meta-narrative! on cumulative effect! it's a groundhog day premise, but the solution doesn't just come from knowledge via repetition—it comes from the character growth that occurs as characters experience alternate paths and bad ends. It takes what makes bad ends interesting (creative, extreme circumstances have the potential to develop characters in unique ways) and makes it meaningful (character development is persistent and/or relevant to the narrative) more explicitly than ... almost any story I know that uses the trope. It is so fulfilling that I can't quite fit words around it.
*** and may we take a moment to acknowledge that, despite the questionable moe/fanservice/overall aesthetic, and the fact that Keiichi is the protagonist in the questions arc, Keiichi ends up with a supporting role and his contribution is "Magician of Words"—which often means manipulating or convincing outsiders, but among his circle means providing support, acceptance, encouragement, enabling the otherwise entirely female circle to inhabit and exhibit their personal strengths to the fullest, which is surprisingly awesome
A straightforward but effective take on the premise of a small, uneasy group forced into a conspiracy. It's discomforting to watch for exactly the right reason: everything feels justified yet is obviously unacceptable, and that tension provides significant immersion and momentum. The ending is overwrought and hinges on coincidence, but to be honest I didn't much mind. If you can overlook the limited scope and obvious flaws of the film (the all-white, nearly all-male cast among them, although there's some interesting class dynamics at play), this entirely satisfying.
Juu's Favorite Tropes/Subgenes So Obscure There's No Name for Them, #239: We all banded together, intentionally or otherwise, to commit [X] criminal act. Now, in order to cover that up, we keep aiding one another in criminal acts. This is having a telling effect on our relationships.
I'm watching A Simple Plan, which is the most straightforward version possible; I harvested it off of a delightful list of films about weird relationships. I love this trope because it does just that: the high-stress forced intimacy of co-conspiracy makes for weird relationships. Weird relationships are my second most favorite thing in media. Weirdly intimate relationships are my holy grail.
But in all the examples I can think of, co-conspiracy is something that forces relationships to unravel (albeit in revealing and fascinating ways). This is even more obvious in books like Tartt's The Secret History or French's startlingly similar The Likeness, where the group of conspirators were united, almost uncomfortably intimate, before their co-conspiracy, and the stress of the conspiracy tears their relationship open and down, revealing all sorts of interesting things about it as it brings about its destruction.
Subheader: Juu's Favorite Tropes/Subgenes So Obscure There's No Name for Them, #215: We are drawn together because only we can truly understand each other. Sometimes this is shared philosophies, sometimes life experiences; it's a great trope between erstwhile enemies, because the shared experience can be their competition. See: basically everything Gen Urobuchi has ever touched (Fate/Zero, Psycho-Pass). That shared understanding becomes so important that it overrides or strongly colors almost anything: animosity, taboo, or simply that the individuals are strangers.
I love the first trope for its unwilling, broken trust, its forced ragtag intimacy—but I'm always a bit brokenhearted when it functions to destroy intimacy. Conspiracy has the potential to be a shared experience, something no one understands but the co-conspirators; it can be a bonding point, even as it puts stress on (a) relationship(s). Maybe I've seen this in media before, but I doubt it, and I would dearly love to.
Jupiter Ascending, film, 2015, dirs. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski
This reminds me of YA literature: consumable trash filmed through a female lens—which doesn't make it magically non-problematic, but does make it a refreshing take on wish fulfillment. I don't care for the amount of spectacle; the action scenes in particular grow wearisome. But to my surprise, I love the my-love-interest-the-bodyguard dynamic, male as powerful and useful but subservient to female choice—full disclosure, this is a trope I adore (see: my love for Enslaved), but I'm still surprised that Jupiter Ascending pulled it off so well; I shipped the hetero leads and, let me tell you, that never happens. Anyway: not great, but a different and much improved variety of trash, and worth two hours of my time.
Big Hero 6, film, 2014, dirs. Chris Williams and Don Hall,
This should feel like merch bait, and it's so emotionally heavy-handed, and the antagonist(s) are shallow and I could do without the manpain motivation, and the end is predictable. And yet: I cared; I cared immensely. It's manipulative but effective, the character design is simplistic but charming, and Baymax is phenomenal. This is how to do mascot characters! Make them adorable and a little silly but also make them central to the story, make them the emotional lynchpin as well as the comic relief. (Great soundtrack, too.)
Kill la Kill, anime, 2013, Trigger
I loved Gurren Lagann, which was successful because it looks a simple concept and spiraled (ahahaha) it larger and larger—it was a deceptive, brilliant, effective device. Kill la Kill isn't simple and it certainly isn't brilliant. It's so energetic and ridiculous that it takes some time to adjust, but I did—and I enjoyed the show. To my particular surprise, I like the emotional and interpersonal arcs; they're hamfisted and obvious but have just enough underlying nuance, and the result is endearing. (Most especially, Mako.) But the plot's a mess. Spiral Power is an entire show worth of fridge brilliance; clothing-is-evil-except-not-also-fanservice lacks cogency and purpose. Is it unfair to compare this to TTGL? Probably, but oh well. Kill la Kill had bits I liked but as a whole was an unsuccessful successor.
Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (When the Cicadas Cry), anime, 2006, Studio Deen
Let's all take a moment to appreciate just how well the When They Cry series handles bad ends. They become tools to explore how a limited cast reacts to wildly different stressors, to explore multiple permeations and sides of the same story, and, best of all, the cumulative effect of the bad ends is the whole point. There's no frustrating dissonance between persistent viewer memory and reset character timelines—instead, the gap between them is the core the plot. Of course, the series originated as a visual novel—but games screw this up all the time! When They Cry is an aware, engaged, utterly satisfying take on the trope. (I've talked about this in length on Tumblr, crossposted below.)
The art is simplistic. The empty-eyed psychopathic tendencies of apparently all schoolchildren can be repetitive, although Keiichi's paranoia is a compelling change of pace. Higurashi isn't hugely refined, to be sure. But the scenery-chewing is its own delight, and what this series gets right I simply adore.
(as an aspect of Multiple Endings) in various media, shall we?
One of the things that Corpse Party did best was to give the Bad Ends purpose: they didn't feel like mistakes which were undone by finding the Good End; they felt like alternate realities, perhaps not existent but always implicit, an impression supported by the fact that many characters face unavoidable Bad Ends—they outright die in the course of the game. The frequent encounters with death, some avoidable, some not, make it a constant figure in the hell dimension, a character nearly as distinct as Heavenly Host Elementary School.
I found 999's Bad Ends disappointing by comparison; too often they feel like mistakes rather than parallel/potential realities. Eventually this destroys immersion because there's a disconnect between the information that the player retains, but the protagonist forgets, with every Bad End—although the very end of the game corrects (and in fact capitalizes on) this.
I talked about** one aspect of the multiple/bad end trope when playing Ib, a game which uses multiple POVs and multiple endings to create a new POV/character: the player, whose knowledge exceeds the canonical characters and so who, however ironically, has the greatest effect on the plot.
Right now I'm watching Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, and what it does with the Bad End trope is even better. (I believe the Naku Koro ni anime series copy the games's narrative structures, but haven't played the games.) The Bad Ends are actually successive narrative arcs: individual stories in themselves, but the information gleaned from each is approximately permanent, for the viewer certainly but also for the characters, and the cumulative effect creates the overarching narrative.
Bad Ends and horror work well in tandem because tension without climax fizzles out but killing off a character frequently prevents future character growth. The latter is what made Corpse Party excel: character death became character development, because in a world where death is so present, a character's interaction with their mortality is as important to the viewer as their relationship with their best friend. As for the former, Bad Ends allow for better pacing and atmosphere, they allow for plenty of, well, horror, without necessarily weakening the narrative. But how cool to see a narrative grow stronger for its Things that Never Happened (except that maybe they did).* Each individual arc has the entertainment we're looking for, the atmosphere/tension/payoff. But the overarching structure invites the viewer to be an active jconsumer of a more complex puzzle, one increasingly rich in both detail and characterization.
I love to watch tropes stitch uneven, half-hidden threads across multiple stories because I love to see tropes evolve/invert/self-commentate, and otherwise become larger than their examples in a single story. But when a single story is not only trope aware but builds its entire self around that evolved, inverted, commentated trope, well, that's magic.
*See also: "Five Things" fanfiction trope and its "That Never Happened" evolution/inversion.
**As evidenced, I don't naturally expect games to have multiple distinct character points of view. In fact, I don't necessarily expect them to have any: I'm adept at projecting and roleplaying, but the default character is often an intentional blank; RPGs offer an alternative, but most of them put the emphasis on role rather than playing, which is to say that character is explored, but never defined, by the player. There are a few exceptions, and I've already made the connection to Persona 3 (and other Persona games, but 3 left the greatest impression on me in this respect) and the invitation to create the player character.
Ib does some of the latter with Ib herself, whose reactions and relationships are within control of the player. But it also offers up more traditional RPG-styled fixed role playing with Garry, who is part audience surrogate (guys did you see that? guys that was really weird. guys WHY IS NO ONE ELSE FREAKING OUT) and part his own person. Having both is, frankly, impressive.
But more impressive is that it has a third POV: player. It's neither Ib nor Garry who provides the Juggler painting's date. Likewise, it's the player that replays the game, building up metadata that exceeds the limited POVs of the characters. I felt this also in 999, which made some of the game infuriating and the ending hugely rewarding: "I don't know anything about that!" Junpei would say, and I would say YES YOU DO GODDAMNIT BECAUSE YOU ENCOUNTERED IT LAST PLAYTHROUGH. The game never acknowledged me directly, but it did eventually acknowledge my metaknowlege, and it was one huge FINALLY.
Replaying some parts of Ib to get some other endings is a combination between Ib's player-defined POV and the player's metatextual POV: I must use what I know to save Garry, because Ib needs him. Any sort of replaying some of this, of course, but generally I can't embrace it: the way I play the game becomes the One True Way, because I grow so invested in either the character I project onto the blank or the character I create with the game's encouragement; deviating from that, using knowledge beyond that character's limitations, seems unfaithful and unreal. But here it's not like cheating, because the game recognizes it—by which I mean me—and invites me to use what I know for the best.
And written 2016: , and I have feelings.
When They Cry may not objectively be the smartest (or admittedly the most cogent) of the stories that hit me right in the "ahhh yes that's some good storytelling," but it is absolutely one of the most narratively aware, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (aka Juu's most very favorite sequel)-levels of intentionality and self-awareness, the cumulative effort of everything I've wanted from Bad End-style storytelling, an entire narrative built on itself and so by necessity larger than the sum of its parts.
I was once upon a time so impressed with the first season of Higurashi for offering a cumulative narrative, for the meta-knowledge of the bad ends, in the viewer, seeping over to the cast
—that it didn't even occur to me there would be cogent resolutions? because that extended awareness was in itself already so satisfying, compared to similar stories that overlook it.
And those resolutions are just okay, not particularly clever in plotting, belabored in pacing, but with enough nakama-feels to balance all manner of sins***
but they are literally built!! on meta-narrative! on cumulative effect! it's a groundhog day premise, but the solution doesn't just come from knowledge via repetition—it comes from the character growth that occurs as characters experience alternate paths and bad ends. It takes what makes bad ends interesting (creative, extreme circumstances have the potential to develop characters in unique ways) and makes it meaningful (character development is persistent and/or relevant to the narrative) more explicitly than ... almost any story I know that uses the trope. It is so fulfilling that I can't quite fit words around it.
*** and may we take a moment to acknowledge that, despite the questionable moe/fanservice/overall aesthetic, and the fact that Keiichi is the protagonist in the questions arc, Keiichi ends up with a supporting role and his contribution is "Magician of Words"—which often means manipulating or convincing outsiders, but among his circle means providing support, acceptance, encouragement, enabling the otherwise entirely female circle to inhabit and exhibit their personal strengths to the fullest, which is surprisingly awesome
