eiko / clausewitz / an innumerable other number of online nicknames
any prns., go by vibe for me!
interests: project moon, alien stage, fiction (mostly webfiction), milgram, j and k pop, high effort posting/essays, danganronpa, anime
my favorite things include:
- worth the candle, a beautiful 1.6m word meditation on death, worldbuilding, TTRPGs, friendship, and narrative
- anything bavitz has ever written, but mostly modern cannibals and cockatiel x chameleon, two stories about art and consumption and a lot of other things
- worm, an amazing deconstruction of superhero fiction, and an experiment in doing the wrong thing for the right reasons
There's a type of media criticism that really grinds my goats on here, roughly along the lines of "I really wanted a cherry pie, but this is a chocolate cake"
But they can't ever leave it at that, and say that this isnlt their preference, and move on. Instead they then need to write a long in-depth analysis of all the different components of the cake and describe how the ganache is not a good pie crust, there arent any cherries and the syrup is all spongy. also it's way too tall and doesnt fit in a pie tin.
online, by far the worst offender of this is every review that expects a piece of fictional media to have coherent "worldbuilding" and then docks points for how many alleged "inconsistencies" there are in the world model the reviewer attempted to construct, as if the most important marker of quality is how easily something can be transformed into a major media franchise like star wars or tolkien.
golden age scifi authors like heinlein and asimov were not doing worldbuilding, they were constructing linked vignettes that criticized the society of their day through the lens of speculative fiction. if you're trying to analyze how the military works in starship troopers you have missed the goddamned point. if you hold it against heinlein that your vain attempt to make a coherent military out of his military novel turns up incoherent garbage, your head is so far up your own ass that it's coming out your ears. maybe go back to reading star wars expanded universe books and writing video essays about them, it's clearly what you prefer reading and likely about the edge of the limit of your intellectual capacities.
the backlash to purposeless worldbuilders, video essay writers, wiki editors and the fandom fandom has lasted long enough that we now have people who believe that internal consistency does not determine the effectiveness of your criticism. anything is excusable as long as you say themes and such at the end~
i love that you tagged this chainsaw man. i think i was less surprised than the fans on that one and i didnt read it. i assume you were similarly more upset than me at the end of rent-a-girlfriend, which i correctly predicted but also didnt watch.
im not going to pretend you're a bad person for enjoying animanga, i also love me some otaku garbage. but if you read some books written for adults you will quickly realize that "internal consistency" is not a common trait in world literature, least of all in the sense where you try to construct a coherent picture of the economy or the military or culture of its narrative setting! it's nonsense to expect this, because most authors are telling a story, not designing a world where a story takes place. it's only because you consume a bunch of fandom slop that you expect this, and even half the fandom slop manages to disappoint you!
i dont think this is true at all? (not to mention both of the people youve been talking at this entire string of posts are insane classicists...) for a story to say anything at all, mustn't it actually talk about something present?
you seem to have misunderstood the entire discussion so i'll give you an example to chew on: the iliad's trojan war and the odyssey's greece exist in a superposition of different times from the late bronze age to the mid-archaic, along with the fully mythic.
if we were to demand internal consistency, the numerous anachronisms between social insitutions that belong in 7th century BCE and weapons and armor that vanished from use centuries earlier would confound us. scattered between these historical elements also sit numerous fantastic elements such as cyclopes and giants and sacred cattle and mind-controlled boats and owl'eyed athenas that would add further difficulties to our attempts to place this story in any particular century or location in the mediterranean at all.
and to make matters worse, the economy of the phaecians is totally nonsensical! it's impossible to sustain these constant feasts and lavish gifts laid upon strange outsiders before they even manage to reveal themselves as one of the heroes we're already(!) singing songs about.
but all of these are not errors or flaws, most of them are even well within the awareness of their mostly illiterate audience, because they are the literary conventions of homeric epic. the fact that the greece of the trojan cycle doesnt really exist is no obstacle to writing about it!
i dont think any of the other people i was talking to on this post were classicists, but i couldnt imagine that a classicist who paid any attention during their degree could be unaware of the stark differences in literary convention in the centuries BCE. at any rate, the majority of the economic and social sciences background that modern "worldbuilders" demand for internal consistency was unheard of before the early modern period, so you will not generally find functioning fictional economies in anything written before the 1700s; even if the roman empire may have had a functioning economy in some sense compared to every other pre-modern mediterranean civilization, there's little evidence that they understood it well enough to write fiction about it, or even to manage it properly!
if you aren't going to engage with and actually the substance of what anyone here else is saying, i'm not going to engage with you. have fun being wrong? it must be nice to be unable to read.
There's a type of media criticism that really grinds my goats on here, roughly along the lines of "I really wanted a cherry pie, but this is a chocolate cake"
But they can't ever leave it at that, and say that this isnlt their preference, and move on. Instead they then need to write a long in-depth analysis of all the different components of the cake and describe how the ganache is not a good pie crust, there arent any cherries and the syrup is all spongy. also it's way too tall and doesnt fit in a pie tin.
online, by far the worst offender of this is every review that expects a piece of fictional media to have coherent "worldbuilding" and then docks points for how many alleged "inconsistencies" there are in the world model the reviewer attempted to construct, as if the most important marker of quality is how easily something can be transformed into a major media franchise like star wars or tolkien.
golden age scifi authors like heinlein and asimov were not doing worldbuilding, they were constructing linked vignettes that criticized the society of their day through the lens of speculative fiction. if you're trying to analyze how the military works in starship troopers you have missed the goddamned point. if you hold it against heinlein that your vain attempt to make a coherent military out of his military novel turns up incoherent garbage, your head is so far up your own ass that it's coming out your ears. maybe go back to reading star wars expanded universe books and writing video essays about them, it's clearly what you prefer reading and likely about the edge of the limit of your intellectual capacities.
the backlash to purposeless worldbuilders, video essay writers, wiki editors and the fandom fandom has lasted long enough that we now have people who believe that internal consistency does not determine the effectiveness of your criticism. anything is excusable as long as you say themes and such at the end~
i love that you tagged this chainsaw man. i think i was less surprised than the fans on that one and i didnt read it. i assume you were similarly more upset than me at the end of rent-a-girlfriend, which i correctly predicted but also didnt watch.
im not going to pretend you're a bad person for enjoying animanga, i also love me some otaku garbage. but if you read some books written for adults you will quickly realize that "internal consistency" is not a common trait in world literature, least of all in the sense where you try to construct a coherent picture of the economy or the military or culture of its narrative setting! it's nonsense to expect this, because most authors are telling a story, not designing a world where a story takes place. it's only because you consume a bunch of fandom slop that you expect this, and even half the fandom slop manages to disappoint you!
i dont think this is true at all? (not to mention both of the people youve been talking at this entire string of posts are insane classicists...) for a story to say anything at all, mustn't it actually talk about something present?
When the first season of Frieren appeared at the end of 2023, it was somewhat revelatory to see a big, well-produced fantasy anime that wasn't an isekai. One decade out from Sword Art Online, the subgenre's death grip over the anime fantasy scene seemed inescapable, even as the concept quickly cycled into self-parodic dregs almost impossible to believe. (Reborn as a Vending Machine is on its third season, airing now!) Alongside Dungeon Meshi, which aired concurrently, there seemed—briefly—to be a definitive door slamming on the isekai concept, and all the low-effort solipsistic power fantasy blight it betokened.
Well. The body may be altered, but the soul remains eternal.
Frieren's initial "fresh" feeling does not solely come from its context. The story frames itself explicitly as what comes after the classic-to-the-point-of-cliché Japanese fantasy narrative: the journey of a party of heroes to defeat the Demon King. The Demon King plot predates isekai—it emerges from the progenitor of Japan's take on western fantasy, Dragon Quest—but isekai leaned on this plotline hard, especially in its more comedic iterations, where a Demon King served as a familiar shorthand on which to festoon jokes. (For example, while KonoSuba has a Demon King plotline, there is none in either of the two main works it parodies, Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei.)
Frieren is also using the Demon King as narrative shorthand, just not for the purposes of parody. Since its story is premised on happening "Beyond Journey's End," the journey itself needs to be self-explanatory, and using a simple template that the audience already knows fulfills that purpose. But whether intentional or not, there is an implicit message in this framing: Isekai is over. Here's what comes next.
Now, I don't intend to drag Frieren through the mud. I still remember in 2016 hearing about how My Hero Academia was a bold new take on shounen, how it was subversive, how it was a DECONSTRUCTION, how this time the female characters are just as strong as the boys—look! Bakugo said he respected Ochaco after he beat her in the tournament arc!—only for My Hero Academia to quickly reveal itself as the most boilerplate shounen of all time. People are quick to proclaim any new popular shounen as different from other shounen, and they're almost always wrong. Frieren, too, is deploying a lot of classic shounen tricks, and the entire back half of its first season is taken up by what is, effectively, the Chūnin Exam arc from Naruto. However, if Frieren is not wholly original, there is at least one original synthesis in its core plot structure, a combination of two genres not commonly mixed. On one hand, you have shounen, not only in the form of the aforementioned exam arc but also in the big set piece fights, which usually involve the protagonist squad encountering a villain squad of suspiciously identical numbers, allowing everyone to divvy up into 1-on-1 combat where each fighter is of relatively even power level with their opponent. (This way the hero can be the strongest by an order of magnitude while their support crew still gets to seem like they're helping.)
The genre Frieren fuses with shounen is iyashikei.
Iyashikei means healing-type. Wikipedia is a bit confused and seems to think any slice of life anime is iyashikei (it lists K-On! and Azumanga Daioh as examples), but "healing" implies that it comes after some sort of wound or trauma. The most obvious examples of iyashikei are calm, wistful meditations set post-apocalyptically, as in Yokohama Shopping Log or Girls' Last Tour, or after a real-life tragedy, as in the many Ghibli films framed against the background of World War II. Frieren, of course, is "Beyond Journey's End," set after a massive war that ravaged the countryside and brought the world to the brink of destruction. At the same time, it depicts Frieren's personal trauma; her antisocial tendencies and warped sense of time allowed all her relationships to slip through her fingers, leaving her isolated and empty. The new journey Frieren takes not only puts her in contact with towns and people and descendants of people that have recovered after the Demon King's war, but is also an opportunity to reestablish human connections and lead a more fulfilling life. Hence the "healing."
It makes a lot of sense a work like this would blow up at the time it did. Rather than simply the tail end of isekai's "decade-defining groan," 2023 was also only a couple years after the period of COVID isolation that affected more people globally than any other single event in history. Frieren's healing is framed not in terms of recovering from the trauma of war, but from the deadening effect of social isolation. (The manga began in April 2020, by the way.) I'd argue Frieren is the best—perhaps the only good—meditation on COVID, even if it only tackles it metaphorically. Lord knows every work that tackles COVID explicitly hasn't done so hot a job of it. Since everyone seems perfectly eager to consign that two-year period to the memory hole, maybe a metaphorical response is the only real response possible. There's a power in that first episode when Frieren emerges from years of self-exclusion just to look down at the grave of her best friend and suddenly realize how the world has been turning without her. Perhaps far more power in the anime in 2023, in COVID's wake, than in the manga in 2020, when nobody knew exactly what this pandemic was going to look like long-term.
It's this perfect confluence of events—isekai fatigue and COVID—that allows Frieren to lead with its iyashikei aspects as its hook and actually succeed. You'd think with fights as well-animated and tailored to the shounen formula as Frieren keeps in its back pocket, it'd start with them, but no. However, the fusion of iyashikei and shounen is conceptually bizarre. One is calming, tranquil, and feminine, while the other is action-packed, violent, and literally called "boy." Frieren the character's status as a popular shounen hero is itself kind of novel, as the picture of her standing next to Jinwoo Solo Leveling in the collab advert emphasizes: she's a cute girl in a world of tough dudes. In Solo Leveling itself, female characters—even those who are ostensibly strong—exist only as damsels for Jinwoo to save, family members to provide for, or trophies to notch in his belt. It's kind of crazy to see him standing side-by-side with a girl on his own cover, and not just due to their really funny difference in height.
(As an aside, if you get into high level battleboarding, meaning arguments about who the strongest character in all of fiction is, there's a generally agreed-upon slate of potential candidates. Most of them are chalky outlines of a figure whose name is something like "The Ultimate Power" or "God," or some oogly-boogly Lovecraft monster, but one of them is Featherine Augustus Aurora from Umineko, and she similarly stands out.)
If the combination of these two genres is so novel, though, how did Frieren pull it off? How did she become The First Female Shounen Character Who Really Is Just As Strong As The Boys?
When I watched the first season, I didn't have a ready answer to that question. The second season pulls back the curtain and reveals much more of the machinery. The answer is that it doesn't really combine the two genres. There are two Frierens, the iyashikei and the shounen, and they do not intermix despite existing within the same show.
Structurally, Frieren's first season has four distinct parts:
1. Episodes 1 through 6 introduce the premise and core characters, almost exclusively through the iyashikei lens. This is "Beyond Journey's End," and Frieren's only real goal is improve her human relationships after seeing her past ones literally die. In line with the iyashikei tone, the plotlines are episodic, and even when they do involve action—such as in Episode 3, when Frieren fights the unsealed demon Qual—the fight is emphatically trivial, or else Frieren deliberately avoids intervening, as during the dragon fight in Episode 6.
2. Episodes 7 through 10 are the first non-episodic arc, though only in the sense that it takes up more than one episode. (Frieren has no real macro plot so everything that happens is in some form or another episodic—remember that for later.) Here, Frieren and company fight an equal number of demons, splitting up into several big, cinematic battles. This is the first time the series tips its shounen hand.
3. Episodes 11 through 17 return to the episodic formula of the first part. There is a somewhat recurring plotline involving Sein, the priest that temporarily joins Frieren's team, but this is mostly "Himmel used to like the Costco hot dogs" type storytelling.
4. Episodes 18 through 28 are the mage exam arc, a long recurring plotline with a ton of battles, including one where Frieren has to fight herself. Peak shounen.
My instinct was to view the third section, Episodes 11 through 17, as an aberration in the story's progression, a flawed retreat after the escalation of stakes in Episodes 7-10 that was rectified by the mage exam arc, or more charitably a transitional state to move from Point A to B in the plot. If the third section is ignored, Frieren Season 1 consistently goes from shorter, more episodic storylines to longer, more substantial ones, with the stakes rising in a way that aligns with traditional models of narrative progression.
After all, I still believe in traditional narrative progression. Which I am starting to realize is a mistake.
In the short 28-episode first season, Frieren gets away with the transition from iyashikei to shounen because there is a natural logic to it. Iyashikei is "healing." Once you're healed, though, what do you do next? Kick ass, I guess. The logic is actually quite similar to that of Solo Leveling, where Jinwoo starts out powerless, gets powerful, and then spends the rest of the series flexing One Punch Man-style on anyone in his way. Frieren is physically (magically?) powerful from the start, but emotionally and socially weak. During the iyashikei episodes, maybe better referred to as the Himmel episodes, Frieren's accomplishments are framed as some sort of cathartic coming-to-terms with her past relationship with Himmel, usually leading to her better understanding either him, herself, or her new companions. That's her version of the shounen training arc, and it pays off in the season's big final fight against her clone, which she wins thanks to her relationship with her protégé/ward, Fern. (Notable that "friendship is my superpower" is another classic shounen trope. Frieren has a bit more aura about it, at least.)
But the end of Season 1 is not the end of Frieren. Because, despite the show's subtitle, nothing can ever end.
Frieren's second season is 10 episodes, of which 7 are of the episodic Himmel type. The other three, spanning episodes 6 through 8 (not even positioned at the exact climax of the season), are a shounen set piece fight where everyone gets their own demon to battle. Even this mini-arc is a de-escalation of the stakes established in Season 1's mini-arc: it's shorter, its villain is less of a threat, and Frieren doesn't even consider it worthwhile enough to lift a finger herself.
In the overall structure of Frieren as a story, these ten episodes are clearly a transitional bridge between the mage exam arc and the arc teased at the end of the second season, the Golden Land arc. It is only the arbitrary seasonal division of the anime adaptation that emphasizes it as its own narrative bloc; in fact, the episode numbers tick up from 28 (the count at the end of the first season), as though to emphasize the two seasons as part of the same cohesive whole. But the years-long pause between the seasons exposes the deception. Consuming Season 2 as a distinctive unit reveals that the two Frierens, shounen and iyashikei, do not flow naturally into one another but are rather two completely different narratives that the story switches between arbitrarily.
By now, Frieren is "healed." She has been healed since around episode 5 or 6 of the first season at the latest. The episodic narratives no longer serve any purpose to her as a character, and in fact she is never emotionally challenged once across the entire second season; the Himmel statues in every town remind her of the past, but they are only idle reminders, devoid of greater understanding or even catharsis. As such, these iyashikei episodes become more typical slice of life, which puts them directly at odds with the shounen arcs. The transition is jarring. One episode features Frieren humorously being sent to the mines to pay off a debt that has collected 80 years' interest; the next involves Frieren and company gearing up for a big set piece battle against demons who have slaughtered an entire village. The show has always had its gags, even in those early episodes, but the emotional power of the iyashikei setup created a consistent sense of gravity that wedded the two halves. The second season attempts this gravity—the mining episode ends with a sublimely animated moment where Frieren uses her magic to pinpoint a silver deposit—but it's hollow, devoid of any emotional underpinning. Frankly, Frieren herself doesn't seem to care about anything that happens in the second season. Even in the shounen mini-arc, she decides not to participate for no real reason; the arc still manages some potency, but only by focusing on Genau, a hitherto-irrelevant side character who functions as a blank slate to drape fresh emotional stakes on. (The hook for the next big arc, Golden Land, similarly suggests it will emphasize Denken, a side character tangentially relevant to Frieren.)
My question becomes: Why is the story like this?
The second season reveals that the stretch from episodes 11 to 17 was not a fluke. The story is designed to be the way it is. It will not escalate linearly. It will always return to its episodic, slice-of-life storylines, no matter how grandiose the shounen arc that preceded them. Even its shounen arcs are increasingly episodic, modular, able to be mixed around in whatever order. Why did the story not end with Frieren and Fern teaming up to take down Frieren's clone? What, really, does this story still have to tell? Why is this story so long?
If Frieren the story has a single overarching idea, it's the passage of time. Frieren is immortal, but her friends are not, and this creates the story's first conflict, when Himmel dies of old age after Frieren spent the previous 60 years faffing about. Much of the early episodes involve Frieren needing to learn to respect time, as she constantly wants to spend years doing some irrelevant special interest activity, forgetting that her human companion Fern can't afford to waste so much of her life. Every episode begins by announcing the number of years that have passed since Himmel's death; almost every plotline involves history, or descendants, or something that happened years ago. The show is a master of montage, able to convey the passage of time—either great or small—through a series of images without dialogue.
The speed of time's passage quickly scales from wide swaths of years in the opening episode to the needlessly quotidian by the second season. This scale represents Frieren's own sense of time, which she recalibrates in response to Himmel's death and Fern's needs. By the second season, one of only two meaningful time skips is instigated at Fern's urging, against Frieren's protests, when the party wastes several months opening a seal in exchange for a few gold pieces. (Like time, money means nothing to Frieren, at least until she is sent to the debtor mines.)
The obvious argument is that the form mirrors the meaning. Frieren must learn to appreciate time, so the story shows every little moment of her journey, regardless of its relevance to the broader narrative, as a representation of this day-to-day appreciation. Yet ironically, in proclaiming a message about respecting time, the story starts to waste its audience's. Is falling into this endless sinkhole of villages with Himmel statues and demon teams with convenient one-on-one opponents anything other than its own form of special interest isolation for the viewer, the sort of useless magical knickknack Frieren collects for no reason other than that it tickles her fancy? Again: why is this story so very, very long?
The very, very long story is a relatively new phenomenon.
The Bible is just shy of 800,000 words. Throughout human history, this has typically been the upper limit of how long a book can be, though the Bible is not really a single story, rather a collection of stories written by different people, in different countries, across several different centuries. Despite the name, ancient epic poetry is not particularly long by modern standards—The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid are all under 200,000 words (even accounting for different translations), making them all shorter than Moby-Dick. Even as the novel rose to prominence in the 1800s and authors produced massive tomes published serially, the longest—War and Peace, Les Misérables—are just short of 600,000 words. Infinite Jest is 550,000 words.
The web serial Worm is 1,700,000 words.
Consider that. Prior to the internet, no novel even came close to 1 million words. Worm is over 1 million words longer than the longest novels.
I single out Worm because the digital format enables a "single work" to exceed the physical limits of bookbinding, making it a more impressive figure, but in truth there have been longer stories that predate it due to the emergence of the novel series. The 7-book Harry Potter series is a million words; the 15-book Wheel of Time series is 4.4 million. Though split up across multiple novels, each of these series comprise an overarching narrative with its own beginning and end, thus a complete singular "story."
One could technically argue the Bible also comprises a singular "story"—of God, perhaps, or Earth—but the actual reality on the ground is that Exodus and the Gospel of Mark are two completely different narratives. Most mythological or religious compendiums are similar, and even the omnibuses that collect these myriad narratives don't reach the length of your average fantasy franchise today. The same can be said for the great narrative cycle of the late Middle Ages, the Arthurian romance, which does keep a consistent cast that it follows from beginning to end as though in a singular narrative, but is only reaching about 300,000 words in its most comprehensive collections like Le Morte D'Arthur.
In addition, these older compendiums formed the groundwork for shared cultural consciousness. Christendom was culturally united by a common understanding of the Bible—even including the heretics and schismatics—just as Greece was united by a common understanding of its mythological cosmogony. Though some of the long works of today, like Harry Potter, have attained a similar level of reach, it's increasingly startling to me how there are 100 random stories on RoyalRoad you have never ever heard of that are similarly gigantic, not to mention the endless array of long-running manga, of which Frieren is only one (and nowhere near the longest), well-known in this internet niche but not so much in society at large.
This last point could be a byproduct of the fractalization of culture. The Bible helped medieval man reach a shared understanding with every person he was likely to interact with in his life, and thus was to an extent necessary for his social existence. Frieren might help modern man reach a shared understanding with his friends on Discord. Of course, to modern man, the Discord friends might be as much a cornerstone of his existence as the village was to the medieval. Yet even within the Discord framework, Frieren can only ever be a small scrap of the overall fabric of culture. You also better keep up with Chainsaw Man, Jujutsu Kaisen, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera... A better comparison might be to the educated minority of the past, whom were expected to know a "canon" of classical texts, which in sum total was quite long. Unlike Frieren, though, in its holding pattern of redundant, episodic, interchangeable parts, most of the classical canon expressed a diversity of ideas from a wide variety of authors.
The alternative to social enrichment is that watching Frieren—or any of these endless stories—provides personal enrichment. Even when nothing is happening in Frieren (i.e., always), the show has charm, it has quality directing and visuals. We're currently in an anime Golden Age; many of the best-animated shows of all time have aired in the past few years, and Frieren is among them. For all its lack of stakes, the mini-arc in this season works. The action is excellent, the ebb and flows of the fight are exciting, there is emotional weight even if it comes via an otherwise-irrelevant side character in Genau. The directing, especially in the episode establishing the situation before the fight proper, fosters a heavy, somber mood as it lingers on the ravaged buildings or the villager corpses lined up in a church. There is a Miyazaki-like attention to detail as Genau carries a wounded man on his back and the man's subtle but clearly-conveyed twitches and shifts indicate his exact procession to death. As a three-episode short story, it's fantastic. As a piece of the broader tapestry of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End, though, it's deviously pointless. Underminingly pointless. Frieren is paying closer attention to the details of time, but in service of what? Is this obsession with minutiae not simply another form of Frieren's obsession with useless grimoires, just for the audience instead of Frieren herself?
And in yet another way, Frieren is becoming exactly like the isekai it suggested it was different from: Its journey will never end. How many isekai heroes have actually defeated their Demon King? Is this a journey at all, or just a treadmill?
The truth about the very, very long stories that have begun to promulgate in the internet age is that they are almost all modular and episodic in some way or another. The sense they are a singular narrative is an illusion. There may be a singular goal, but the steps to approach it are a Shepard tone, seemingly always rising while actually staying the same. All fiction, of course, is an illusion. If the dying man on Genau's back doesn't really matter, neither does the dying Hamlet. But the longer a work a goes on, the more likely it is for the illusion to be revealed. In that sense, I find that most authors still have not figured out how to really write the very, very long story. Perhaps that's to be expected, for such a new art form. But I also wonder if the very, very long story is an art form to strive for at all, at least to the volume at which it is being produced today. How much information is too much information?
Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table (anime)
Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, also known as Shiboyugi, is the best anime released in the past 15 years. As someone who assiduously tracks and rates everything they watch, I don't say this hyperbolically; I have to go back to 2011 to find a show I think is better. I'd rank Shiboyugi as the third-best anime of all time. (Limited, naturally, to anime I have seen.)
Typically, my essays aren't focused on how much I like or dislike a work. Instead, I tend to write about a work's importance, context, or what it might mean, without expressing a value judgment such as "This is good" or "This is bad." As such, these essays are generally written under the assumption the reader has seen or read the work themselves.
This essay is an exception. It is more of a review than an essay, and its goal is to convince the reader to watch the work (which is currently on Netflix). It is aimed toward an audience unfamiliar with Shiboyugi and won't reveal any spoilers. If what I've said so far has at all intrigued you, I recommend you read on.
Given the audience for this essay, I'll start by explaining Shiboyugi's premise, though its full translated title offers some hints. Shiboyugi tells the story of Yuki, a shut-in loner who competes in death games as a full-time job. Rather than a single game, the show depicts a series of them, arranged in non-chronologic order. The games vary in scope and rules. Some are escape rooms filled with deadly traps, while others are glorified battle royales. Rather than react with terror or panic, Yuki approaches these challenges in a detached, professional manner, doing what is pragmatic to win without being excessively cruel to her fellow competitors (usually).
I have a theory—perhaps it applies only to me, but I believe I've seen it in others, too—that the most important determiner of whether someone likes or dislikes something is based on whether its premise innately appeals to them. (Or, similarly, that they find a major character relatable.) A work's technical quality, uniqueness, narrative consistency, and so on are secondary factors in comparison, and when a reviewer brings up these elements to explain why a work is good or bad, they are typically dancing around the core issue.
For instance, someone who is personally interested in robotics, transhumanism, and speculating about the future—or even a more general interest in science and technology—will find a cyberpunk dystopia an innately appealing concept for a story. Upon a viewer being "hooked" by the premise, the work's technical qualities will enhance its appeal, while its technical flaws will be acceptable or even ignorable. Whereas someone like me, without much interest in robots, might find the work boring even if it is well-made, and its few technical flaws will stand out more glaringly.
Despite this, I find that a lot of criticism is often rooted in these secondary details. It makes sense, since "I like Cyberpunk Edgerunners because I think cyberpunk is cool" is not a particularly interesting argument, whereas analyzing technical details lends a sense of objective nuance to an opinion. But I find this type of review disingenuous, which is a big reason why I don't typically write about whether I liked a work or not.
With that preamble out of the way, Shiboyugi is, at its core, combining three things that strongly appeal to me:
Death Games. I love death games. To me, they are similar to slasher horror stories, where the core tension is the question of who will live and who will die, a question that more conventional narratives—even ignoring the question of the protagonist—often resolve with predictable tropes (i.e., the likeable comic relief character lives, the old mentor dies). A death game has an element of unpredictability to it, combined with clear and immediate stakes (win or die), that immediately piques my interest.
Ennui. I wrote a whole novel about this one. I find works about the existential emptiness of contemporary life compelling and relatable. The question of how people create meaning for themselves in a fundamentally meaningless environment is one that matters a lot to me.
Liminal Spaces. Shiboyugi's death games take place in surreal locations that are often uncanny and unsettling in their layout and presentation. As someone with a strong interest in geography, I've always found strange permutations of space—including the internet itself—to have a fascinating pull. The popularity of liminal spaces in independent internet fiction has only magnified my interest.
Simply by being about these things, Shiboyugi already "hooked" me before it really even lifted a finger. If none of these appeal to you, you might not have as powerful a reaction as I did, and that's something I intend to be upfront about, rather than present a bunch of excellent technical details (of which there are many) to claim they make Shiboyugi "objectively" good or some nonsense like that.
But while I said technical excellence is a secondary factor in whether one finds a work good or bad, it is a factor. A shot that looks good will look better than a shot that looks bad, even if you're more interested in what the bad shot depicts. My love of death games and slasher horror has put me into contact with a lot of low-quality works that are "doing the thing" I want, but that I am forced to admit flub the execution. In fact, sometimes my most hated works are those that are something I should ostensibly like, but which are such an unmitigated disaster that I am more personally offended than by a worse work I had a neutral interest in. A work I particularly dislike is The Hunger Games, which takes a death game premise and does everything in its power to cram it into the shape of a conventional, predictable narrative that goes against what I find so exciting about the genre to begin with. (A death game with deemphasized death game, if you will.)
As such, when I first started watching Shiboyugi—knowing nothing about it beyond it being a death game story—I felt my stomach sink in dread as the first few minutes played out. Shiboyugi's tone and visual style is one of quiet detachment. It is, in a word, "artistic," established via very pretty backgrounds and an unexpressive protagonist (whose silence, surely, means she is ponderous and profound!), which frankly suggested to me that Shiboyugi would do everything in its power to distance itself from the chaotic brutality that makes the premise so appealing.
I was afraid it was going to be pretentious.
I don't like using the word pretentious. It's a word that gets thrown around often, and in an online milieu where people like to think they are smart but do not like to think, I tend to worry that "pretentious" is shorthand for "I didn't understand it and don't care to try, secure as I am in all the facts I already know."
Even so, there is stuff I do find "pretentious," especially in anime, a medium primarily targeted toward teenagers. Stuff that presents a lofty tone, but when it comes to substance seems to express almost comedically childish concepts. (Do you think the light, will defeat the darkness? No, I think the darkness, will defeat the light.) More generally, if a work's tone doesn't appropriately complement the content, the work starts to feel emotionally manipulative. How well, I wondered, would an elevated tone complement a death game?
The answer to that question came about 20 minutes into Shiboyugi's first episode. After a lot of meandering, a lot of pretty backgrounds, a lot of atmospheric music, a quaint and bloodless blowgun trap, and most of all plenty of silent thoughtfulness, suddenly the lights go out. The ceiling opens. The players, chained to the wall, look up. Eighteen buzzsaws start descending. Everyone has to fight among themselves for the key to escape before they are gruesomely ripped to shreds.
It's essentially a trap from the Saw franchise—it even features saws—and despite the elegant if increasingly surreal setting in which it takes place, it is every bit as savage. What's more, the tone of the preceding 20 minutes emphasizes, rather than detracts from, the savagery. The opening produced a false sense of security, a feeling that despite this being a death game, it would adhere to a sort of sporting propriety, a PG-13 distance from its own concept, and the reality crashing down from the ceiling is such a stark juxtaposition that the emotional impact is phenomenally potent despite the short amount of time spent getting to know the characters beforehand. The airy, atmospheric music of before continues to play, layered with the loser's horrific screams as they are diminished into pulp over a period of several excruciating seconds. For almost a minute afterward, stillness and silence reigns as the survivors stare at the unrecognizable remains, broken only by one—the last to escape, dooming the loser to their fate—softly repeating, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
This was the moment when Shiboyugi gripped me. The "pretentious" tone was, in fact, being employed for a reason, one that generated an impressive amount of power regardless of its intellectual content. Shiboyugi is punctuated by many more examples of sudden horror movie brutality that is made more impactful by the refinement on display everywhere else, and any punches it seems to pull are only the setup for a harder punch somewhere unexpected. For example, it's established that the participants of the death game are injected with something called the "Preservation Treatment," which causes their blood to turn to a cotton-like material when it leaves the body. While this at first seems to be a Danganronpa-esque blood substitution censorship, it ultimately leads to even more extreme dismemberment and body horror, as players are able to survive grievous wounds without bleeding to death. Despite the lack of blood, the show doesn't shy away from showing exposed bone and internal organs after a character is disemboweled.
Not to mention, the cottony blood creates the unmistakable impression that these bodies are doll bodies, that these players are something less than human.
This is where the second aspect of Shiboyugi that innately interests me appears: ennui. The elevated tone and impressive visual framing doesn't only enhance the impact of the death game formula, it also feeds into the protagonist Yuki's unsettling and sometimes sociopathic emptiness.
Yuki is Shiboyugi's second great surprise. My initial impression of her was that she was a fairly generic protagonist whose primary purpose was to provide a consistent, objective point of view. This isn't inherently a bad thing, as a neutral perspective character helps place the emphasis on the things they see, which in this case would be the death games. It does, however, diminish some of the surprise factor of the death game format to have a clearly defined protagonist who the audience can expect to survive. Though I theorize the ideal death game would have a fully ensemble cast with no protagonist, that's not an easy narrative for most authors to pull off, and honestly I've only seen it done once in a death game before (the second arc of Magical Girl Raising Project). Even a story like Battle Royale, which creates the feeling of an ensemble cast through its anonymizing uniforms, has a singular protagonist.
But even with the limitation of a protagonist, a death game story can still play to the strengths of the genre by showing the perspectives of other characters and emphasizing their importance, rather than leaving the non-protagonist cast as virtual nobodies who only exist as cannon fodder or challenges for the protagonist to overcome. Shiboyugi does a trick I enjoyed in Magical Girl Raising Project by stating upfront that several people are capable of surviving the game, not just one; this immediately invites the viewer to invest themselves in the side characters, as they have a legitimate chance to win too. Within this framework, Shiboyugi is quite good at making its survivors unexpected. Sometimes side characters who have a lot of emphasis survive, sometimes they die; sometimes minor supporting characters wind up being fodder, sometimes they unexpectedly crawl past the finish line. The show never falls into a pattern; I, at least, wasn't able to reliably pinpoint who would live or die.
(I watched with a friend of mine, and during one hectic death game we disagreed whether a certain inconsequential minor character had died; my friend said they had, while I said they hadn't. When said character showed up alive at the very end, I had a massive pop off. This is the stuff I live for.)
Nonetheless, that still leaves Yuki. As far as "plot armor" goes, she sometimes has the strongest of all: the non-chronological order of the games often means she is guaranteed to survive by default, since the viewer has already seen her in a future game. (Hence why I can bring this up, despite my statement I wouldn't include any spoilers.) What makes Yuki compelling despite this is the unexpected complexity of her character.
At the beginning of the first episode, Yuki introduces herself to the other players as someone who plays "altruistically," willing to help as many people survive the game as possible. Given she's already a 28-game veteran by this point, the newer players glom to her for help. But while her description of herself isn't a lie—at least from her perspective—it slowly becomes clear that her perspective is not, in fact, a neutral one aligned with the perspective of the audience. Yuki is startlingly sociopathic. Her emotionally detached pragmatism reaches extremes that come across as outright cruel. She is without scruple and also without hesitation. She truly will help as many people survive as possible—under the belief that doing so means a survivor might help her in a future game—but "as possible" does the heavy lifting in that statement. These games, despite their Saw-like brutality, lack Saw's twisted morality; they are often designed sadistically, and Yuki is perfectly willing to act sadistically as soon as it is required.
At the same time, though, the non-chronological nature of the games presents Yuki as a much more dynamic character than one so pragmatic would at first seem to be. She appears as both a hardened veteran and a more uncertain rookie; she is shown both strong and vulnerable, in control and out of it. In one game she taunts a girl with a knife just for fun, while in another she risks her own life to save others. Similar to Memento, there is a somewhat erratic nature to her personality that only makes complete sense once the games are rearranged into chronological order, at which point it becomes clear that her actions are a reaction to whatever happened in the game previous.
That begs the question of why the games are non-chronological to begin with. To an extent it enables a more logical drip-feed of information, but in depicting Yuki disjointedly it emphasizes her sense of disassociation.
Yuki is viewing herself from outside herself. At times she slips into third person, or else her voice is layered, with one track using first person while the other uses third. She is unclear what day of the week it is. She lives in a squalid apartment overflowing with trash and seems to do nothing but rot in bed during the day. At night she goes for aimless long walks to nowhere. She walks to the same spot on a highway overpass and stares down at the cars passing, which leads to a brilliant fridge realization I won't elaborate on.
Yuki cannot clearly communicate why she competes in death games. The show's title, Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, is kind of a lie. Yuki lives in squalor by choice, not circumstance, unlike many of the other competitors who are in debt or similar dire straits. Yuki doesn't need money.
The Japanese title, Shibou Yuugi de Meshi wo Kuu, is a bit more ambiguous, with "Meshi wo Kuu" translating more directly to "Eat Food." The ambiguity of what "food" Yuki is actually eating correlates to her aimless attempt to create meaning out of her meaningless existence. If anything, she is "eating" the people she meets in the games themselves, taking on bits of their personality from game to game. Even her stated goal of completing 99 games is stolen from someone else.
This is where the show's liminal spaces come in. Yuki constantly refers to the "world" of the death games as its own distinct environment, divided from the real world. It's akin to an escapist fantasy: a gamer transported to a video game world where their exact skillset allows them to thrive. Yuki is a permanent zombie in the real world, a skilled and successful elite in the world of death games. But unlike Sword Art Online, which presents its game environment with an uncritical allure, Shiboyugi's games take place in unsettling, uncanny, and twisted realms, disquieting structures that seem subtly impossible. The calming and peaceful music, the pretty visuals, the serene pace lure the viewer into Yuki's perspective, suggesting the beauty that she sees, but the lurking menace always remains, and when the buzzsaws descend, the disconnect between the viewer and Yuki is severe and uncomfortable. The space itself is the threat, as unlike most death game stories Shiboyugi almost never shows any host or gamemaster, and its uncanny presentation is similar to the presentation of Yuki herself. It is a hole made only for her, though what comes out the other side is increasingly nonhuman.
I've said all of this while only barely touching on the actual directing, which is some of the strongest and most unique I've ever seen in anime. Most anime that look good—including this season's many juggernauts, like Jujutsu Kaisen and Frieren, but also more historically respected works, like those of Studio Ghibli—look good because the director understands animation, and is able to bring out the stunning details of movement that allow anime characters to really impress. Shiboyugi, the directorial debut of Souta Ueno, generates its stunning visuals less through animation than through an eye for framing and composition more reminiscent of western live action auteurs like Kubrick. Every episode has five or more shots that wow, not just by looking aesthetically pleasing but by weaponizing that aesthetic into emotional impact.
Similarly, the director leans on the visuals, rather than dialogue, to communicate meaning, a technique that massively revolutionizes the show's pacing. In 11 episodes, Shiboyugi adapts four different death games, each with their own characters, rises, falls, and climaxes. On paper, it's a blisteringly fast pace—fewer than 3 episodes per game on average. Because of the effective visual storytelling, however, the games unfold at a calm, quiet pace, establishing the tone necessary for every brutal rug pull. The visuals are aided in this regard by the story's sharp focus on the games themselves. Shiboyugi went to the Battle Royale school of justifying its death game; other than a single card of text ("This is a story about a deranged world," with the world in question as ambiguous as the "food" being eaten in the title) and a few offhanded statements here and there, there is no emphasis on why the games are being hosted, who hosts them, or any other ancillary details that would detract from what Shiboyugi is actually about. Minimalism in some areas is paid back with depth and complexity elsewhere.
Studio Deen, who produced the show, lacks the budget of Mappa or Madhouse, but manages to create something equally if not more visually impressive on the back of the fundamentals of cinematography. I probably would have enjoyed this show even if it looked like any other anime, but the incredible filmmaking is what pushes it into the territory of masterpiece.
To discuss much more would probably require me to delve into more specific aspects of the plot. Hopefully, by this point I've at least convinced you to consider watching this show, which has gone criminally under the radar in this jam-packed season. If nothing else, you can expect something unlike any anime you've seen before.
@fipindustries has tagged me in a tag game thing- the challenge is to name five completed works (optionally, in different mediums) from the last ten years that are "actually 10/10".
So obviously the first question that needs to be answered is "what is a 10/10, actually?" Because there's like, two simple senses of the word which are both make this task impossible:
10/10 in the mathematical sense- 1, 100%, a perfect score. Has no flaws whatsoever, would appeal to absolutely everyone. This is a bar that no artistic work has ever cleared, making this trivially impossible. (Even in the weaker sense, where something's flaws are tiny and irrelevant and we're restricting scope to the audience who would enjoy the thing it's doing, I can't think of anything I've ever consumed that didn't have some sort of noticeable flaw that could be improved upon, and I'd be embarrassed to implicitly claim as much.)
10/10 if you sort all artistic works into quality brackets- the bottom 9.091% of works being 0/10, so on and so forth in 11 equal buckets. Unfortunately, there's a huge amount of truly terrible slop out there, vastly overwhelming everything good- basically anything I would even give a shot is going to be in the 91st percentile if you sort that way. Here it's not hard to think of something that meets the bar, but picking between all the stuff that qualifies becomes impossible.
So somehow you've gotta split the difference. When I do my yearly game reviews, I split my scores into a goodness/10 and a badness/10- but if I were to break down the goodness category more, it would look like sort of a weighted average of... "how cool and ambitious is the thing it's trying to do?", "how successfully does it realize that ambition?", and like an X-factor for how much does the thing appeal to my sensibilities personally.
So what does a 10/10 look like? Last year, the only 10/10 I gave out in the goodness column was to Expedition 33, but... I don't think I'd call it a 10/10 game. I gave it a 3/10 badness, because it has some real structural issues with punishing exploration and failing to direct the player in the back third or so of the game when suddenly every single area unlocks at once and you're massively underleveled for almost all of them. If my friend Kyle hadn't pushed me to finish it, I might have just put it down out of frustration. Likewise, while I really liked what it was doing with its story, it's multifaceted enough that I'm sure someone coming at it from even a slightly different angle could end up confused or disappointed.
But I might call Disco Elysium a 10/10? I only gave it a 9/10 goodness, but I gave it a 0/10 badness- I never hit some kind of unfairly frustrating mechanical issue or boneheaded writing decision. It's a little more niche and not as laser-targeted at my sensibilities, but if someone were to ask me "what is the best video game?", it would be a hot contender. That or maybe Tunic.
And then there's the mediums thing. Y'know, I'm a video games guy mainly? I also read books and webfic from time to time, but like, I barely watch any TV, and when I do it's usually because there's some groupwatch going on and we're watching something trashy on purpose.
Or movies- I haven't lived in walking distance of a movie theater for like six years, so I've seen maybe 30 movies total over the past ten years. And before that, it was mainly like, kids' animated movies that my dad would take the family to. With my limited perspective, it'd be kind of embarrassing to list my subjective 10/10 when anyone who actually watches films is going to have so many better points of comparison and I'd look like a basic bitch. Like, my current favorite movie is EEAAO, but before that it was probably like, the Lego movie? Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs? The situation is dire.
Or anime- I genuinely don't think I've ever seen an anime that was a 10/10. Like, at all. (At least, not a completed one- Chainsaw Man might get there; I hear that shit gets pretty crazy in the manga and Mappa's animation goes way harder than it needs to.)
But, okay, uh, gun to my head...
Videogame: Disco Elysium, 2019
Movie: Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022
Book: Cockatiel x Chameleon, 2022
Manga: Dungeon Meshi, 2023
Visual Novel: Umineko no Naku Koro ni, 2016 (that's when the english release was! and if Fip can count animated TV and live-action TV separately I can do that with VNs and RPGs!)
Oh, and like, it's one of them viral tag-someone posts too, so I guess I'll go ahead and concede to perpetuating the memetic virus: @eternalfarnham @lumsel @k25ff @weaselandfriends @flairina
I've mentioned before I'm something of a fanatic for logging everything I watch or read and rating it on a scale from 1 to 10, so this challenge is exactly up my alley. The issue is, I'm stingy with my 10 out of 10s, and have become even more so during the past decade, as I've become increasingly critical.
From my Letterboxd and MAL, there isn't a 10 out of 10 I've given in the past ten years at all. (The most recent on each is Madoka Magica and Rebellion.) As far as literature goes, I've long held the opinion that there hasn't been a great work of literature since Roberto Bolano's 2666, which was released in 2004. I recently read Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu which, while not on the level of 2666, I would still consider a great work, but it was released in 2015.
There have been some great works of web fiction released in the past decade, but are any a 10 out of 10? Possibly Chili and the Chocolate Factory or Almost Nowhere.
I might be willing to rate Umineko a 10 out of 10, but it was released between 2007 and 2010, and I don't agree with Benedict using the English translation's release as a technicality to include it.
I don't play video games much, but I did play Elden Ring which I would place in my top 10 favorite games of all time, so I might be willing to include that.
Even so, I'm not sure I would really give Chili/AN or Elden Ring a 10 out of 10 if I were rating them to the same standard of my other ratings, and not simply trying to find a 10 out of 10 to fulfill the specifications of the list.
There are some films I've given a 9 out of 10 that I might be willing to upgrade to a 10 out of 10. Burning (2018) and Uncut Gems (2019) in particular fit the time cutoff. I don't have any real problems with these films, I'm just gun shy about rating a work a 10 out of 10 even if I think it's great. I want to have seen a work multiple times before I give it that rating, and I've only seen each of these films once.
So yeah, I can't meet the criteria. In exchange, I'll put the best completed work I've seen or read that came out in the past decade, regardless of whether I consider it a true 10 out of 10 or not:
Video Game: Elden Ring (2022)
Novel: Almost Nowhere (Oct 2016-2023)
Film: Burning (2018)
Television: The Curse (2023-2024)
YouTube: The Oldest View (2023-2024)
The anime landscape for Best Since 2016 is pretty dire. I've only got five candidates, all of which I gave an 8 out of 10:
Dededede hits the highest highs of these five, but it also has the most blatant flaw, which is its weak ending. I thought I might give it to Made in Abyss but then I realized it's not a complete work. Neither is Land of the Lustrous... Mob Psycho is a complete work, but I don't like its 2nd or 3rd seasons as much as the first. Fuck it I'll give it to Magical Girl Raising Project (2016).
So yeah, I'm overly critical and too unwilling to accept joy into my heart. I do appreciate that two of these I've seen done by other people include works I created, though.
Unfortunately I also don't have friends to tag to maintain the virality.
i definitely try to be stingy with my 10s. less so than you, i have more proportionally thank i think you do, bu i try to make them mean something---what though?
i don't grade on a scale of artistic perfection; i don't like works that are 'artistically perfect' or without technical flaws. a work needs some amount of roughness and gristle for me to really be affected by it, to think on it, to keep interest in it.
there's this really excellent essay that poodlenoodles wrote on When I Win the World Ends that really helped me to see a lot of the inner workings of the story. despite this, despite the fact that it is a really complex story, it is a really good story, it's closest to perfection among any of the bavitz ouvre---i don't like it as much?
and i think maybe this is a function of ambition as much as it is 'having interesting knots.' CXC and 1 Over X (and Chicago, and Modern Cannibals,) are all more flawed stories but they also feel like they're reaching to more complex ends.
so a 10 has to be ambitious, at least, and often for me a 10 tends to have a failing or a flaw. i don't agree that Almost Nowhere is a 10 but i do think it's quite good; and though it's good it's also, at points, just flat-out bad---on purpose, i guess, but bad is bad.
i also think that a 10 for me has to have some sort of spectacle or wow factor or something, some explosive quality that leaves you feeling different by the end of it, that makes it feel entirely bound up into itself.
like, let's take CXC for example. ottomh every important character in CXC has a different narrative strand or arc after which they fall out of relevance, you see this midway through the story with papimon and royce and mimmy, and you see this near the end of the story where sister and car both fade away for the final chapter ([1/0] x). all of the character arcs then end with some sort of individual explosive finality (yeah i guess this is just called a climax), down to ending harper/vdg's own with the 'what a pretty picture' scene.
this makes it complete on a structural level, but i don't know if i'd consider it a 10 without the effect of CXC's very strong presentation---all of the arcs end with large amounts of spectacle that makes it feel really enjoyable and fun and rewarding and you-spending to go through. spectacle is important for a 10! and while i do think that it's reductive to say prose is entirely presentation, i think it's definitely part of that, and so that rules out books like Worth the Candle that i'd rate higher if they were more competently written.
so, like, with that in mind, i don't think that most other people would think any of these are 10s, but here's my list:
Video game: Dragon's Dogma 2 (2024)
Novel: Cockatiel x Chameleon (2020) but that's overdone so my controversial pick is The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen (2024)
Film: Parasite (2019)
Manga: Goodnight Punpun (2013-2017) or Land of the Lustrous (2012-2024) if the English translation hack doesn't work
oh fuck this is hard. i mean i agree with Benedict on Umineko 10/10 rating so maybe that? the English translation hack is dire though lmao
@lurinatftbn @julirites if either of you are on tumblr
@fipindustries has tagged me in a tag game thing- the challenge is to name five completed works (optionally, in different mediums) from the last ten years that are "actually 10/10".
So obviously the first question that needs to be answered is "what is a 10/10, actually?" Because there's like, two simple senses of the word which are both make this task impossible:
10/10 in the mathematical sense- 1, 100%, a perfect score. Has no flaws whatsoever, would appeal to absolutely everyone. This is a bar that no artistic work has ever cleared, making this trivially impossible. (Even in the weaker sense, where something's flaws are tiny and irrelevant and we're restricting scope to the audience who would enjoy the thing it's doing, I can't think of anything I've ever consumed that didn't have some sort of noticeable flaw that could be improved upon, and I'd be embarrassed to implicitly claim as much.)
10/10 if you sort all artistic works into quality brackets- the bottom 9.091% of works being 0/10, so on and so forth in 11 equal buckets. Unfortunately, there's a huge amount of truly terrible slop out there, vastly overwhelming everything good- basically anything I would even give a shot is going to be in the 91st percentile if you sort that way. Here it's not hard to think of something that meets the bar, but picking between all the stuff that qualifies becomes impossible.
So somehow you've gotta split the difference. When I do my yearly game reviews, I split my scores into a goodness/10 and a badness/10- but if I were to break down the goodness category more, it would look like sort of a weighted average of... "how cool and ambitious is the thing it's trying to do?", "how successfully does it realize that ambition?", and like an X-factor for how much does the thing appeal to my sensibilities personally.
So what does a 10/10 look like? Last year, the only 10/10 I gave out in the goodness column was to Expedition 33, but... I don't think I'd call it a 10/10 game. I gave it a 3/10 badness, because it has some real structural issues with punishing exploration and failing to direct the player in the back third or so of the game when suddenly every single area unlocks at once and you're massively underleveled for almost all of them. If my friend Kyle hadn't pushed me to finish it, I might have just put it down out of frustration. Likewise, while I really liked what it was doing with its story, it's multifaceted enough that I'm sure someone coming at it from even a slightly different angle could end up confused or disappointed.
But I might call Disco Elysium a 10/10? I only gave it a 9/10 goodness, but I gave it a 0/10 badness- I never hit some kind of unfairly frustrating mechanical issue or boneheaded writing decision. It's a little more niche and not as laser-targeted at my sensibilities, but if someone were to ask me "what is the best video game?", it would be a hot contender. That or maybe Tunic.
And then there's the mediums thing. Y'know, I'm a video games guy mainly? I also read books and webfic from time to time, but like, I barely watch any TV, and when I do it's usually because there's some groupwatch going on and we're watching something trashy on purpose.
Or movies- I haven't lived in walking distance of a movie theater for like six years, so I've seen maybe 30 movies total over the past ten years. And before that, it was mainly like, kids' animated movies that my dad would take the family to. With my limited perspective, it'd be kind of embarrassing to list my subjective 10/10 when anyone who actually watches films is going to have so many better points of comparison and I'd look like a basic bitch. Like, my current favorite movie is EEAAO, but before that it was probably like, the Lego movie? Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs? The situation is dire.
Or anime- I genuinely don't think I've ever seen an anime that was a 10/10. Like, at all. (At least, not a completed one- Chainsaw Man might get there; I hear that shit gets pretty crazy in the manga and Mappa's animation goes way harder than it needs to.)
But, okay, uh, gun to my head...
Videogame: Disco Elysium, 2019
Movie: Everything Everywhere All at Once, 2022
Book: Cockatiel x Chameleon, 2022
Manga: Dungeon Meshi, 2023
Visual Novel: Umineko no Naku Koro ni, 2016 (that's when the english release was! and if Fip can count animated TV and live-action TV separately I can do that with VNs and RPGs!)
Oh, and like, it's one of them viral tag-someone posts too, so I guess I'll go ahead and concede to perpetuating the memetic virus: @eternalfarnham @lumsel @k25ff @weaselandfriends @flairina
I've mentioned before I'm something of a fanatic for logging everything I watch or read and rating it on a scale from 1 to 10, so this challenge is exactly up my alley. The issue is, I'm stingy with my 10 out of 10s, and have become even more so during the past decade, as I've become increasingly critical.
From my Letterboxd and MAL, there isn't a 10 out of 10 I've given in the past ten years at all. (The most recent on each is Madoka Magica and Rebellion.) As far as literature goes, I've long held the opinion that there hasn't been a great work of literature since Roberto Bolano's 2666, which was released in 2004. I recently read Solenoid by Mircea Cartarescu which, while not on the level of 2666, I would still consider a great work, but it was released in 2015.
There have been some great works of web fiction released in the past decade, but are any a 10 out of 10? Possibly Chili and the Chocolate Factory or Almost Nowhere.
I might be willing to rate Umineko a 10 out of 10, but it was released between 2007 and 2010, and I don't agree with Benedict using the English translation's release as a technicality to include it.
I don't play video games much, but I did play Elden Ring which I would place in my top 10 favorite games of all time, so I might be willing to include that.
Even so, I'm not sure I would really give Chili/AN or Elden Ring a 10 out of 10 if I were rating them to the same standard of my other ratings, and not simply trying to find a 10 out of 10 to fulfill the specifications of the list.
There are some films I've given a 9 out of 10 that I might be willing to upgrade to a 10 out of 10. Burning (2018) and Uncut Gems (2019) in particular fit the time cutoff. I don't have any real problems with these films, I'm just gun shy about rating a work a 10 out of 10 even if I think it's great. I want to have seen a work multiple times before I give it that rating, and I've only seen each of these films once.
So yeah, I can't meet the criteria. In exchange, I'll put the best completed work I've seen or read that came out in the past decade, regardless of whether I consider it a true 10 out of 10 or not:
Video Game: Elden Ring (2022)
Novel: Almost Nowhere (Oct 2016-2023)
Film: Burning (2018)
Television: The Curse (2023-2024)
YouTube: The Oldest View (2023-2024)
The anime landscape for Best Since 2016 is pretty dire. I've only got five candidates, all of which I gave an 8 out of 10:
Dededede hits the highest highs of these five, but it also has the most blatant flaw, which is its weak ending. I thought I might give it to Made in Abyss but then I realized it's not a complete work. Neither is Land of the Lustrous... Mob Psycho is a complete work, but I don't like its 2nd or 3rd seasons as much as the first. Fuck it I'll give it to Magical Girl Raising Project (2016).
So yeah, I'm overly critical and too unwilling to accept joy into my heart. I do appreciate that two of these I've seen done by other people include works I created, though.
Unfortunately I also don't have friends to tag to maintain the virality.
You seem to misunderstand me. I meant Moby Dick, the true hero of the story based on the real life hero Mocha Dick. What are your opinions on him as a character? Do you think it was wrong of Melville to whitewash history and cast him as the villain?
i dont think Moby Dick is cast as the villain at all, hes a big white whale with a mean streak. Moby Dick mostly serves to encapsulate the world, beautiful yet terrifying. but since Ahab says he's more than that, he is
in moby dick, there are no true villains. the story is written from ishmaels pov/understanding of what happened on board, so naturally there is bias against moby dick. after all, the whale did destroy the ship and leave ishmael the sole survivor, so its expected he depicts the whale in a negative light. and even bias from just hearing ahab drone on and on about how horrible it is, even if you think he's fucking crazy it does get to you eventually. ahab can be seen by some as an antagonist of sorts since he chased down the whale with minimal regard for the crews safety and 90% of the book would've never happened without him. he was selfish, and threw away the life of him and his crew for a goal he knew was unreachable. it's just a question of morality in the end, there's no one villain, nobody's perfect and everyone on that crew and in that book does at least one morally dubious thing. just like in real life, we all do things that make us villains in someone else's story, whether it be because of their prejudices or their moral standpoint. so it's up to the reader who's a villain or if there even is one.
i think that Moby Dick can be read in literally infinite ways and encapsulates the greatness of the world within its whole self, but a pretty relevant one i have here is uh
Moby Dick (the story) is a lot of metaphors describing the shape of the world itself through Ishmael/Ahab's eyes (there's not a definitive answer Melville ever gives us, i think---it's a lot of grappling which is why it's so gripping), Moby Dick (the whale) is principally the vehicle through which many of these metaphors are delivered but most relevantly here represents theodicy
we can see this principally in e.g. Whiteness of the Whale wherein Ishmael's grappling with the whale's conflicting whitenesses, with its beauty and its power
white contains all colors, but nothing at all.
the whale: simultaneously containing everything and nothing, beautiful and terrible, meaningful and utterly indifferent.
Ahab insists that the whale struck him with malice, that there's intentionality behind his suffering. Ahab has a religious impulse to him! the need to believe the universe notices us even if only to torture us. Ahab would rather have a malevolent God than no God at all; his monomania is, rather than revenge, this form of fighting against the idea that everything's meaningless.
Ahab's obsessive quest is this method of reclaiming meaning for himself; it's the only way. otherwise it'd all be noise without signal; the whale could not have just taken his leg... not like that ...?
the whale in this reading defies "good" or "bad" just as Ahab defies "good" or "bad". Moby Dick is the world, and Ahab drives his crew to ruin but is human; his monomania is destructive but understandable.
You seem to misunderstand me. I meant Moby Dick, the true hero of the story based on the real life hero Mocha Dick. What are your opinions on him as a character? Do you think it was wrong of Melville to whitewash history and cast him as the villain?
i dont think Moby Dick is cast as the villain at all, hes a big white whale with a mean streak. Moby Dick mostly serves to encapsulate the world, beautiful yet terrifying. but since Ahab says he's more than that, he is
i fucking love moby dick. i think it's the greatest book of the 19th century and it's one of the single books that's affected me the most. i read it over the course of 6 months, suffering through it a bit at the time; it's a transcendent experience, one that can't quite be described, one that has to be experienced. there aren't really good words for the struggle and pain it takes to get through the off-kilter pacing, for how hard it immerses you in the brutal world of sea and whale.
i think it's the most holistic classic i've ever read. i had an analysis essay cooking up about every single whale fact chapter and how it relates to the whole metaphor for humanity and evil in the world but i stalled out on that.
but yeah. love moby dick. it infested me and planted itself deep into my soul
