Sohtak wrote:
As writers...does it make you Happy,Creeped out or Concerned the way people have bonded with the girls?
Everyone has that one thing they latch on to now and again, and it becomes SUPER IMPORTANT and LIFE-CHANGING for a while, and there's absolutely no telling where it will come from, and there's always someone to shake their head and wonder whether you might not be better served going outside rather than, you know, obsessing over a drawing. But sometimes stories do that to you, and that's okay as long as you don't forget to move on at some point--you're allowed to still love the thing, but all things in moderation, you know?
Frankly, however, I'd be a huge liar if I didn't say that I feel oddly pleased that Emi has got so many people out and running (or claiming to do so, anyway). That's something tangibly good to come out of the whole thing, and that's neat!
Kon22 wrote:As the creator of a VN, and just in general, do you think it's necessary for a work, a VN or a book, to be anything more than just something fun, or an excercise on storytelling? Alternatively, do you think a work is 'better' when it has something to say, than when it's just telling a story? This kind of discussion is very common in music and the such, not so much in mediums which involve storytelling, but I'll still ask.
Fiction is, according to some dead guy whose book I read, "about what it is to be a fucking human being," and so as a result all fiction is about
something, either intentionally or not. Setting out to deliver a hard message of truth to the people is a lousy way to write a book, although sometimes it works out okay (see:
Invisible Man, one of my favorite books hands down, and, unfortunately, still relevant). You always want your story to be
about something, and that something is usually about something very human that you either think you've got figured out, or you're trying to figure out, or maybe it's just an idea that interests you and you want to explore it. Sometimes writing a short story is about flexing a creative muscle ("can I write science fiction" or "can I talk about this thing that bothers me without being explicit about it," or just "can I write porn and have it not be hilariously bad?" (the answer to that last question is a resounding "nope!")), but the good stuff? The stuff that sticks with people? That's going to be the stuff you write where you tried to figure out what it is to be a fucking human being, in some fashion or another.
As a younger man I liked to point to Tolkein's denial that LOTR was anything more than a story for fun as a way of shitting on literary criticism, but Tolkein's stated intent with his whole Middle Earth deal was to give a mythology to Britain, which had sort of never had one, because it abandoned it in favor of obsessing over Rome's mythology--and what is mythology but a series of stories trying to explain what the fuck is going on in the world? Plus I mean dude had some heavy shit to work through after watching literally all his friends die in the first world war, so there's going to be a lot of people carrying on in the face of daunting, impossible, depressing-ass odds (I mean the elves literally refer to their whole time in Middle Earth as the Long Defeat, holy SHIT my boy Tolkein is a depressing dude). Even Oscar Wilde, with all his aestheticism and "art for art's sake" wound up writing Dorian Grey, which is basically a big ol' book about how sooner or later a rotten fuck is going to be exposed as a rotten fuck (in simplistic terms), so I mean, dude was talking out of his ass a little.
Like Aura said, though, there's a difference between being about something and wanting to deliver a message--although I tend to think that the best message books and the best books without messages kind of share the same ranking, if only because even the books without a message are still saying something about being alive, and that's worth looking at and discussing and hey, it can even change your whole goddamn outlook on life.
When we sat down to do KS, we settled on the idea that our various heroines would all be fully fleshed people, and their disabilities would not be the center of whatever conflict they had to overcome in order to send the message that these were just people like the rest of us. I'm not sure how successful I was on that score--Emi's conflict is sort of centered around the events that caused her disability, after all--but even we started out with a message of sorts.
Everything means something, even "storytelling exercises." The measure of whether or not they are any good is partially reliant on whether or not the person writing realizes that and pays attention to what they're doing. Otherwise it's poorly written crap.