The Aesthetics of Hell: Why Yoko Taro's games are good
Dragonsphere Report
I will begin to expound on my own personal aesthetics and values, since indeed there is little else to really talk about at present. Since I have difficulty speaking except in reference to examples, I will instead begin with my examples and analyze them for what is good in them. Kino's Journey. The first anime, not the second, was extremely good, and rises to the tier of one of my favorite films, the seventh seal, in its philosophical character. With the tagline "The world is not beautiful, therefore it is", it is perhaps the perfect embodiment of the Japanese notion of Wabi-Sabi. However, there are also traces of western aesthetic and moral sensibility. Kino goes from country to country armed with guns, without which her travels would be impossible, but she is nonetheless a non-interventionist, an observer, who only reacts defensively. The gunplay is fairly realistic, even if Kino is at the 100th percentile of ability. A Schopenhaurian sense of the sublime pervades the entire series. Aside from a presumed illiteracy, Kino's character and lifestyle seem ideal to me. She is depicted as a "boku-girl", but still has a female identity. She is not butch. I appreciate these things as well, since femininity has always seemed performative and superfluous to me, at least as a public expression. Something performative and superfluous generally lacks character.
As a "boku-girl", Kino is authentic in a simple and direct way. She in not, like Sartre's waiter, in the mode of or the guise of. Authentic femininity is what is left over after all concerns of practicality and character have been met. It generally manifests as a subtle aloofness or inability to engage entirely with male social patterns, or else (perhaps more endearingly) as an overcompensation thereof. It is almost never self-conscious in the natal female. The antithesis of this is performative femininity as a means of manipulation. The women depicted in the original Kino's Journey are all realistic, mostly authentic, and do not suffer from annoying anime character syndrome.
The world building of Kino's Journey is also subtle, suitably semi-real, and permits both sufficient degrees of freedom for the story and characters to shine, and enough metaphysical doubt to keep things interesting. Kino's Journey has definitely been a major influence on me, and would have been one of the major aesthetic inspirations for my second game, Liber Perturbatio. As for the metaphysical doubt, it comes in the form of a reference to If on a Winter Night a Traveler, which is quite charming, although a bleak scenario is also presented as possible, in which a sick girl is dwelling in a sort of VR construct of her favorite stories, in a world where everything else but her father has died. The world of Kino's Journey is not ideal. However, it contains structures, patterns etc that approach my set of ideals, certainly in a teleological historical or narrative sense, if not always in themselves
To begin with, there are many different countries, which scarcely interact, but seem to all share a common tongue and a common set of rules for interacting with outsiders. Each country is thus able to develop according to its own character without ever departing a context that allows it to remain compatible with diplomacy and visitation at the limit these exist in the setting. In the long run, post-singularity human society could hope to look as nice as this universe, with people retreating into artificial cultures and worlds but maintaining communication, peace, and freedom of movement. The world of Kino's Journey is a bowdlerized hell in which people pick their poison. I like bowdlerized hells, because they permit real character. But the principles remain important to me even under ostensibly utopian conditions. For some reason I recall Bora Horza Gobochul's arguments against The Culture and think, I have espoused something he would have found agreeable had he lived long enough to settle down.
I turn my attention now to the subject of hell in general, which is quite aesthetic to me, in limited doses dependent on the strength therein. I will first analyze the concept of a Bowdlerized hell in more depth, and then go 'down', so to speak, until I have exhausted everything. I will do so in the context of various media as well as more traditional concepts to the extent I think they apply. To begin with, it must be noted that the ironic hells of both Dante and Buddhist cosmology demonstrate extreme sadism. Sadism is only truly possible with an empathetic link, since it belies understanding. Moreover, many ironic punishments fail to, at least on their face, appear evil to those they are portended to. Warring devas has the same appeal as Valhalla to many hot blooded people, and secondhand descriptions of Dante often come across as trivial. Walking in circles while looking backward, for example. If the punishment is deireified and interpreted as a mere metaphysical abstraction for the here and now, it becomes Bowdlerized in a sense.
Demons become men again, and the thing in itselfness of the punishment allows for a multitude of possible interpretations and coping strategies. Yoko Taro's games are all, to various extents, Bowdlerized hells, albeit of a more extreme form than would be desirable in real life. The second game in my own series, Liber Perturbatio, is closer to a Bowdleried hell that is livable and has desirable features, and it shares most of these features in common with the world of Kino's Journey. The principal virtues of such worlds are in contrast, the possibility of spontaneous selection for virtue; and here I must note, the reason the virtues of the pagans are gilded vices is because pagan virtue is ex post facto based on what produces outcomes that are found desirable later; and in a very real sense the cohabitation and comingling of both angels and demons. There is something structural at work, something profound that I cannot do justice to, but must nonetheless try.
Deleuze said stuff about rhizomes, I am not sure what. There is something rhizomatic about the demonic components of these worlds, and something tree-like about the angelic components. When a tree partially asserts itself over the rhizome, its roots go down into it but without totally reorganizing it. The effect, if perceived internally in a phenomenological sense, is of something rigid and deterministic asserting itself over something either free or stochastic. I think of video games with branching and web structures. If a video game has a main quest line, then even if it is an Elder Scrolls or Fallout game, the tendrils of a tree are asserting themselves over something rhizomatic. But this is merely in relation to time and choice. This structural confluence has some relationship to spirit as well, which is difficult but important to grasp. Demons are all metastable but important aspects of the soul, while angels are stable forms that in a healthy person keep a hierarchy.
In a Bowdlerized hell, that hierarchy asserts itself in a limited capacity on the same things as the demons, with better and more potent results; but the angels themselves are more indifferent to these demons, which thus revert in a sense phonetically to daimons, and concurrently in practise as well. The relationship between demons is rock-paper-scissors with a metastable component, while the relationship between angel and demon is hierarchical rather than circular, stable rather than metastable. When angels impose themselves onto the rhizomatic ecosystem of daimons excessively, they become less and less stable, and more demonic in a sense. Some descriptions and diagrams as I continue rambling: The world of Kino's Journey is a sort of rhizomatic mass with independent but partially identical tree like structures imposed on it, in the sense that each nation is a collection of neuroses with an organizational logic imposed over the top of it. But the nations rarely interact, so the organizational logic of each nation, with its hierarchical features, never competes with anything except the neuroses it has a sort of topological or territorial access to. So it is sort of like this:
Except where the trees are actually trees. Compare my own world in Liber Perturbatio, which has the same sort of rhizomatic mass, but with the hierarchical structures in a constant state of conflict, vying, albeit in a controlled manner, for supremacy. This is depicted something like this:
If you think of the center as a kind of mandelbrot that is built recursively at smaller and smaller levels. The former is centrifugal, while the latter is centripetal.
The type of bowdlerized hell represented by the former is summarized fairly precisely in the wabi-sabi aesthetic, while the latter is precisely Bolgia four of Malebolge, reimagined as a punishment for intellectuals attempting to forecast and immanentize the future: Scarlet the accelerationist, Libens the imperialist, etc. However, what makes it Bowlderized is that the punishment is the self-same thing as the crime, which is to say, arguing endlessly, groundlessly, and in circles. Nor is the crime in this sense such a great evil, but rather a comedic but enjoyable aspect of nature, as evidenced by the fact it is engaged in. It is not the hopelessness of hell but merely the irony of it, the obviousness of it, etc. This sort of centripetal mandelbrot essentially constitutes my preferred structure of governance, ideally with smaller and smaller incrementations of hierarchy taking place at lower and lower levels of violence, with escape valves, and a rhizomatic soil that expands to balance the centripetal force. I think of Miyazaki's films and find something similar in them, though they do not have much of hell in them per se.
Going deeper into less bowdlerized hells, I still find virtues, though none worth staying long for. To begin with, I imagine hell more generally along the lines of a place separated from God, rather than a place of torture, and think of the increase in duration and torture to correspond to the depth of a given hell. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Well, as, at worst a Universalist, that is nonsense, but aesthetically it still provides a useful frame of reference. What I am imagining now is that a crucifix, that sacred symbol, somehow finds its way into hell. Notwithstanding various stories and apocrypha in which forces of good find themselves vanquishing or overcoming forces in the underworld, we imagine for our purposes that this crucifix, being separated from God, is totally inert. Nonetheless, thrown before an unfortunate group of damned souls it is quite the catalyst, and instantly serves to reveal several important types of character.
The first, largest group and the most obvious character scramble towards it, hoping to receive its power in some way. They are fully captured by it, perhaps fighting over it, before at some point giving up and likely cursing it as useless. It is important to note that at a certain level of suffering, such behavior is likely reflexive, which is another reason why hell becomes less aesthetic the further down you go. Now, there are two other responses to this crucifix, and both of them demonstrate a sort of existential heroism. One of them is the person who would hold tight to the crucifix even when it is know to have no power. The other is the kind who would reject it not knowing whether it has power. We might also imagine a lesser character who knows by reason or intuition that is has no power, and a lesser character who goes to the crucifix pragmatically but without attachment. These lesser characters are interesting and have some value, but they lack heroic character.
The first and third share the virtue of being the only ones to truly realize they are in hell, while the first and second possess the most existential heroism. The first three, however, are all very special because they have found a way to live without hope; the first, by investing their own meaning in the crucifix. The second, by affirming their own meaning against the crucifix, and the third by stoic recognition, reducing pain and hopelessness to mere fact. I think of zero from drakengard 3 and find her to be some combination of the second and third character. In the end her mission and achievement is to save the dragon Mikhael, which she does at the cost of herself in Ending D, the semi-canonical ending. In ending A we best see her acceptance that she is in hell by her resignation to death, which in her case cannot be interpreted as escape or reprieve, but as acceptance that she will not receive a happy ending. The world of Drakengard 3 is an outer limit to the concept of a Bowdlerized hell, only because combat is enjoyed.
It is the hopelessness of Yoko Taro's worlds that make the characters within them beautiful; and this is why Nier Automata is aesthetically inferior to previous efforts, even though it represents a great step up in terms of gameplay and general design. Annoying anime syndrome becomes existential heroism against a hopeless backdrop. It gains a mature character as something like a spontaneous aristophanes play achieved through attrition; like it was just waiting to be whittled out of larger, blockier characters. The eponymous character of the first Nier, as an old man, adds both the aesthetic of Dad-aloofness and a sort of Achilles vs the Trojans pagan bloodthirst, which work together shockingly well. Nier Automata feels like it was trying to do to Nier what Count Zero did to Neuromancer; to provide a glimmer of hope at the last moment.
However, Nier Automata is more of a sterile world than a dying world, and substitutes a sudden double swerve at the ending for the traditional overarching sense of hopelessness in the series. It suffers from Shyamalan syndrome in a sense, thinking that surprises are more important than world building and atmosphere. This is not to say the atmosphere is bad, per se, there is just a discongruity between the elements of the game that limits it aesthetically in comparison to previous efforts. Hell becomes aethetically uninteresting when it loses its obviousness and immediacy as a punishment that is the self-same thing as the crime.
Taro's games, on some level, understand this very well, and this is what makes them stand out as great works of art. It is unfortunate that Nier Automata got a bit sloppy somehow; likely due to self-consciousness.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report