I’m very happy to be here with you guys, you know? Not only is the fanbase small enough that no real big discourse really happens, you guys actually like the series. A lot of fanbases can get very weird about their ironic hatred of flaws they perceive to be in the work, but then say nothing good about the series they supposedly like.
It’s very tiring to be around people like that. Why can’t others learn that their “criticisms” only mean anything if they approach it with a compassion for storytelling? Too many things depend on context to approach it with the same criticisms just because you think it resembles something else that you hold negatively. The amount of disrespect people have for authors is upsetting too.
Sorry, this is out of the blue, but it’s a subject that makes my heart heavy. Please always read more, interact with more people, and don’t immediately dismiss anyone’s opinions just because you yourself haven’t adjusted to that train of thought. Think about why you disagree with them and try applying that line of logic to a similar subject to test how far reaching its legitimacy truly holds.
Wayama Yama is a very talented author with solid storytelling techniques because she’s very concise with her approach. Karaoke Iko is so short because she only tells what the story needs. I’m very touched by this because it’s similar to my own approach to writing stories. When she said that she scraped the idea of writing about Satomi in high school, I could immediately understand why she did.
Karaoke Iko is a story about adolescent and adjusting to change that feels scary to you, a change that makes you feel like you’re different from everyone else and would love to hide away if it meant you could stay the way you are. All that praise, love, and normalcy that you get from society would be gone. All of it from Satomi being in choir and his voice changing, to his love for Kyouji that he can’t make due of, to Kyouji being in the yakuza, ALL OF THAT is meant to build up that main idea behind Karaoke Iko.
I’ll write about all of those things in a future post eventually, but the main point is for you to imagine the plot of Karaoke Iko and then imagine what would happen if the story continued into high school. Satomi has his big change and…. then what? Everything stagnates, that’s why Wayama couldn’t write it. Wayama doesn’t strive to write a slice of life series with Karaoke Iko, she strives to tell an idea through her characters and the interactions that build them up.
If a story was told for when Satomi was in high school, could it really contain Kyouji without collapsing? Could it really be continued if it didn’t have Kyouji? I’m sure there could’ve been a short story about that time for Satomi, but it’d be cold. That’s why Karaoke Iko ends with him freshly an adult, and why Famiresu Iko starts with that too. With Kyouji gone for the rest of his adolescence, he can still pretend that nothing had happened and that nothing had changed after all, but it did.
Famiresu Iko is the aftermath and where Satomi acknowledges a change had happened, even if he tried to pretend it didn’t all those year. Each chapter of Famiresu Iko is, of course, telling an overarching story about that, but every chapter focuses on one aspect of their relationship skillfully through metaphors, parallels between the plot of Masanori and the Kumicho, symbolic gestures, etc.
Not a single scene is wasted to “pad out” the story and that takes a lot of awareness for what you want your story to be. If, one day, she decides to write a longer form story other than Onna no Sono no Hoshi, I hope that her fans be forgiving and love her story regardless if they find a flaw or something that could’ve been improved upon in it.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on that tangent. I just wanted to complain about fandom interactions with an author’s work being inconsiderate and how I appreciate that people here do care (but now I’m just fawning over wym). So thank you, seriously. I get goosebumps imagining a world where the fandom was slightly more mainstream and people complain about how unnecessary the age gap between kyosato is.
I’m sorry to those people, but it’s very necessary. Content exploring those gaps will always be necessary, even if it isn’t a clean subject. I already sometimes see people try to fit their relationship into something found family ish or like Reigen and Mob from Mob Psycho 100, which is…. very misguided to say the least, but that’s a very small minority of people haha. It’s not worth mentioning or getting mad about compared to what I see in other fandoms.
This is… a much longer post than I wanted it to be. Hmm. Didn’t nearly complain enough about fandom behavior enough to satiate myself. I don’t know what this fandom will look like if it does get bigger, but I think there’s enough about it that will attract less attention to it and I feel peaceful like that.
