Well... If you Insist!
First of all, the NejiFumi stock continues to pay dividends. Always bet on the banter.
I'm going to be completely honest and say I didn't actually WANT something like Pecker to come out. The Neji-Chui divorce has an almost mythic status in the game proper, and any attempt to pin it down into a canonical form was always going to fail to live up to the allure of the unknown and all its potential. But that's the curse of serial fiction, for ya.
Though, I can't actually be all mad because Neji making goo-goo eyes at Fumi wearing a nun habit and fishnets and being so captivated by the gorgeous mess that is Wild Horse Era Fumi that his brain latches on with a vice grip and won't let go is amazing.
pictured: someone who is clearly just platonically fascinated with what he's seeing. But also in the sense of the platonic ideal of fascination.
I also totally called the idea of Neji leaving before the results were even announced, mind overflowing with ideas, frantically writing them down. I've just always imagined it that way, and this panel is amazing. Gremlin Energy unmatched.
Might as well throw the rest under a cut, to spare everyone a wall of text so high it rivals the 50m tall stage Kielce was performing on.
This dropped like a few days (if that) after I'd just written out a big ol' thesis on my thoughts on what happened, and what the balance between "Running From" vs "Running Towards" was, and I feel like Pecker has a pretty decisive answer to that question. Neji was chasing after his brain, which was running towards the messy broken disaster that was Quartz with all its hidden potential and all it's challenges.
He says it several times in the game, that he likes the imperfect, the human, the unpolished gems. That he finds more creative thrill in working with broken and unfinished things and seeing what he can make of it all. In assembling a grand mechanism from scraps rather than simply maintaining a perfectly oiled machine.
There is a lot of merit in the idea that creativity actually thrives in dissatisfaction and frustration and imperfection. There's a very famous quotation from an early book on Fandom Studies that the internet finds itself reinventing every few weeks that goes:
“Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.”
There's nothing about this dynamic of frustration and fascination that is limited to fannish works, and Neji is articulating a very similar sort of idea. The frustration and fascination drive each other. The title, of a woodpecker, drilling into places to try to get the morsels out from inside, drawn to rotted or diseased wood where more bugs are likely to crawl. Trying to break open the suit of armor because underneath it is where all the fun and potential lies.
The whole "satisfaction is a problem" thing does come up again on his route, but in a way that feels very much like he's trying to integrate two gears, to use his own metaphor, that don't really want to fit together. On the one hand, he has this experience with his own mind and the world and with art, of constantly being drawn to messy things with hidden potential, and a mad dash desire to run to the next shiny thing. On the other, he has this story, this narrative he's crafted about talent and his father and loss that refuses to ever run without clanking and jamming. It keeps getting caught because it's inherently nonsense, but he needs it to work, or the rest of the cobbled together machine of his brain will fall apart. So he tries to apply what he's experienced in creating art, to the story and the situation in front of him and tries to use it to explain whats going on in a way that feels, in the game, incredibly strained. That being in love is simply too "satisfying" and that creation requires dissatisfaction, so clearly that's the problem here. Clearly.
So I think this gives some really good context to that, an origin for what he's referencing in his own head. A version of it that makes more sense vs the one he's trying desperately to apply to keep a failing narrative coherent.
There's another articulation of it, a clear attempt by Neji to work through it all and understand his own relationship with art and the creative process, in Neji's Route's Sissia, and it's probably my favorite scene in all the versions because Sissia of the Central Nation is, ultimately, a play about creating art and the power of art. So I love the scene where Crowley talks to Sissia about using his political dissatisfaction as fuel. About how art requires something as fuel to drive it, and that his is the revolutionary instinct. What is revolution, after all, but a manifestation of creative drive born of that same fascination with what could be and frustration with what is.
It's not actually the whole "artists must be unhappy to make good art" and when Neji tries to apply it to that, it feels incongruent and messy, because that isn't what he really thinks or what the dynamic he's describing really is. The creative drive is about, well, it's about the impulse to take a void or empty space and fill it with something. To take the incomplete pieces you have and make something new.
Which brings me to the ending.
I really loved that last bit. Like his birthday story, there's another instant of Neji Kokuto and his Narrative Brain. They echo each other, his riff in his birthday story about how every choice makes a story, about the infinite stage vs finite time and options. This is another side of the same coin. Another face of the same crude cut gem. Another gear in the same metaphor or whatever.
It's very Neji to be able to muse philosophically about it all and miss so much of how he uses this same framing as a means of coping with trauma. Like if you had found Neji, waxing poetic about how it's human nature to take a void and fill it with meaning or create something when faced with a space for that creation and told him that is what he's doing with his own past, too, he probably wouldn't be quite able to connect those dots.
It's not that its an inherently maladaptive tool or instinct. Quite the opposite. The narrative drive is the creative drive. And everyone creates stories about themselves and mythologies of their past. But Neji is a character of narrative, for good and for ill. But like, he's not wrong, about human nature, and it was a fun articulation. And, as I said, extra fun to read as companion to his birthday story. I'm thrilled to see the writing continuing to pull on that thread.
Other than it collapsing the waveform of the divorce in general, I think my main critique of it is that it gives Neji the lines about his inability to be the "vessel" Chui needs. I had always assumed this to be a mutual understanding the two came two, both from their own freaky theater brains assessment of how the rehearsals were going, even before the final show. They both say it in game, and I'd always assumed it was a thing they agreed on, at least tacitly. I think, like Fumi, Chui can tell there is more that Neji can do and and just isn't doing here, and I think the rest of what Neji is capable of, and his devotion to the stage, would have been enough for Chui to continue the partnership despite that.
We see Chui in game continually able to read someones insecurities and weaknesses on and off stage very clearly and to articulate them, to that person's face, often with his classic metaphor laden dramatic seriousness. Momonashi is a black bird stealing others feathers. He is not even a vessel. He cannot hold anything. Kamiya is clouded and selfish and can only succeed on stage following that selfishness. He can tell Kisa's insecurities and emotions at a glance. It's a thing he does repeatedly and he's very good at it. He has many extremely on point observations about Neji, as Neji does about Chui, because both of them spend Neji's route waxing poetic about the other, but that's for another time.
Which is to say that I thought it was a bit unfortunate to place those words as coming from Neji, denying Chui the conclusion on his own. I think one can still easily read Pecker as Neji voicing something he knows Chui already thinks - I don't think the text as is precludes the "mutual conclusion" reading. But as it is, I think it takes away some of Chui's own reasoning. Chui already speaks in metaphors Neji-senpai left to him - death and blood and seafoam - and even if this was borrowed, much of the rest he still filled in on his own. Still, I think it does Chui's ability to read people for filth extremely accurately a disservice.
The way it's framed in the manga, it seems almost like an afterthought, a way for Neji to try, and fail, to soften the blow. We don't even get to see Neji say it. Neji has returned to working on his new ideas, we only get Chui recollecting it. It isn't given the weight of Neji's wide eyed viewing of Fumi on stage or the panels of him frantically writing all the ideas in his head. It's an interesting choice, for sure. Everyone seems to agree with it - that Neji isn't really suited to being that kind of actor, though everyone also seems to say Takihime wasn't really written for Neji, and that's some bullshit if I've ever seen it. Taking Neji at his word about Neji is always questionable, too.
I think all of it was much too short, as well, and that's part of the issue. Just because Tagane gave up super fast, doesn't mean Chui had to do it. Maybe if he really didn't believe what Neji said about his own ability was true, he would have said more, who knows. Neji's a very "yes and--" kind of guy and it's a shame Chui seems to have just left to go take his anger out on a column instead of have a longer throw down screaming fight with him. I think maybe if Chui had punched one of his bookcases over Neji's brain's shiny thing detector that was pinging off Wild Horse Fumi might have been forced to reorient, at least for a second.
By the way -- obviously I can't speak to authorial intent, but-- Chui being strong enough to punch through a stone column is very Frankenstein's Monster of him. And I've already laid out my whole "Neji and Chui is a Frankenstein Story" thesis elsewhere. That's another version of the story it'd be fun to see -- Victor abandoning his creature not out of disgust or terror but because he found another fun mad science experiment to do and toddled after his brain. Neji is very mad scientist coded, deep down. Terrible lab etiquette, though.
I do think it's hilarious to learn that the ever formal in speech Chui, who talks like an academic essay crossed with an old fashioned gothic horror, drops into informality when he's really pissed off. To anyone else reading this, let it be known that letting Chui say "fuck" was debated. It's not quite what he says, but the sudden drop into informality is very funny. I hope they let him do that again somewhere. I wanna see Kamiya's reaction.
And now we've got confirmation of the next manga, because Ishida and Towada too, it seems, cannot help but to try to fill the gaps in the story they've created. Which is very annoying as a fan, who has the same impulse, to have it superseded by the creators with the same exact desire. Goddammit. Because oh, boy, do I and everyone else have 101 headcanons for how things went down once Neji transferred to Quartz.
Well, I suspect the NejiFumi shares will continue to pay returns, at least.
Neji voice: Sorry Chui, I gotta go Fill that Hole. Tagane did say it was a shame Neji wasn't content to just be a --
There are a bunch of other little things I could talk about but this is already so long. Longer than Pecker itself, probably. Fascination and frustration, what can I say. But if you or anyone else want my thoughts on anything more specific, or want to add to or rejoin anything in this, do feel free. That's what this space is for.
Sometimes I wish I could draw because I'd LOVE to do those boppy head animation memes
Like those were my life a few years ago, they were so cool!!!! Like especially Piggy animations!!!!
Like I want to be the CrazedCake or the Chui or Kiffy or KittyChannelAfnan or Zissy or like so many others but I can't remember them off the top of my head
