errant knight website

So, I read this webnovel and was left with pretty conflicted feelings about it. Overall- I didn't like it and felt actively frustrated a lot of the time. But that distaste was only made more unpleasant by the glimmers of meaning and very moving writing that showed up just often enough to keep me hooked in moments when the cast, their relationships, and their adventures all fell short of anything I would want or enjoy. I'm going to be pretty mean to this story here only because those fleeting incredible narrative beats made it feel as though so much more could be expressed. At least it's better than Worm.

To start there's the opening thematic spice of the story. It begins by being about girls being sad and gay and using magic that hurts them really badly. It transitions to being about self-harm through the nagic that hurts them really badly. And finally ends up at how the self-harm becomes liberatory and good for you. This is an unfair and overly harsh simplification, but it's not wrong. Some of the best work in the early story is the utter physicality of it. There's something nearly sensual in the vomit and full-body harm that the cast undergoes everytime they trespass into spaces and places not meant for humanity. It's intricately tied to trauma and disability and the spectre of pain left by those long dead. The issue comes when the characters adjust, and become more at ease in the unnatural, because it loses that universal grounding rod of pain. It's all downhill from there. The descriptions of the Outside tend to blend and smear together because it feels so... bland. The Yellow King's castle was yawn-inducing for how over-described it becomes whenever Heather visits. The strangeness, the warping, the ~incomprehensibility~ all just fades into a bland background hum and especially so without the physical harm such places initially brought to the cast to act as a grounding rod.

Heather's a real interesting little protagonist. Too shameful-bottom-horny for my tastes, but at least she's got something going on. Evelyn is the best character in the whole book, mostly because she's grating to the rest of the cast and is willing to start fights and be a source of conflict when the rest of the house tends to roll over for Heather's desires eventually. One of my biggest and earliest problems come from these two clashing- Heather, as the POV character, is hyper-aware of Evelyn's disability. Attention is drawn to her missing leg and twisted spine, her wheelchair, her wounded hand at near every opportunity. This is made all the more odd because by all accounts Heather herself is also disabled- or 'was'. In one of the most distasteful choices of the book, Heather's schizophrenia- responsible for a lifetime of being institutionalized and over-medicated- is revealed to be: not real! She's actually completely neurotypical and normal, and she just sees all the magic stuff that nobody else does. But a lifetime of traumas being shrugged off just for her to ogle a disabled girl and walk on eggshells without the slightest bit of solidarity feels so cartoonish and shallow.

Anyway that's all just small potatoes against my biggest problem with the entirety of the book of Katalepsis. It's a romance story, at its core, and it gets bored of romance. I can't think of any other way to describe it. It became so consistent and clear by the end of Heather's polycule formation I was sure it was going to come up or matter in some way or another. Nah. The effort put in the buildup, the courting, the beginning of her relationships with women- it's easily some of the best writing in the book. There's a broad spectrum of feelings and conflict caused by different characters really complicated feelings about Heather dating multiple women that feels like it brings out the best of the entire cast. And that only makes it feel more incomprehensible when the moment Heather locks in and is actively dating a woman all of that grinds to a screeching halt. Zheng runs offscreen every time there isn't actively a fight scene to the point I could predict the moment Heather would awake from her latest bout of unconsciousness to find her handsome zombie gone. Sevens is even worse because Heather, as narrator, continually notes that she's treating Sevens incredibly poorly but doesn't actually lock in or pay more attention to her- Sevens ends up getting another girlfriend (we'll come back to this.) that just serves to get her offscreen and out of Heather's hair more! It's maddening! One biting scene does not a relationship build. I liked the Gunner mask a lot. One of those fragments of meaning buried in a mess of a book I mentioned.

This problem only stings more because it feels like the finale of Book 1 understood the issue and was INCREDIBLE when it was fixing those issues. A sequence of Heather at her lowest, in an aslyum, forced to recommit to all of the people she loves while trying not to lose her mind. It's so good I actually liked Raine because of how evocative the scenes are! But that just makes the story trailing off into a mess of dream-logic and Heather too in her own head to be able to pay attention to the women she cares about anymore suck ass. It sucks the last real conversation with Zheng is her disabled and in agony and lacking, only for her to become all better offscreen.  Its even worse she doesn't get any conversations with Sevens and just hands her a sword, turning the girlfriend-into-fight-scene pipeline into the most straightforward its been the entire book. Raine's weird half-dreaming issues go unaddressed and get solved offscreen too when Heather just walks away from the women she loves. It's even more annoying because I like the initial winning over of the Eye, but it doesn't feel like something that required the dropping of every thread and emotional connection being built before it.

Anyway the true sin of Katalepsis. The pedophilic wizard woman with a loli demon girl bound to her. Crazy fucking sentence, but that's just text. It's how she's introduced (actually she's called a 'pederast' which is just the complete wrong word, and I still don't get it and just assumed it was a british-ism or something). A pretty shocking offhanded inclusion, but I could immediately see at least some of what it could be going for- wizards are fucked up, as Evelyn oft repeats. Or an inverse of Heather's abuse at the hands of the Eye as a child, of an adult human wielding that same harm over a demon as some statement of power dynamics or whatever. None of that is in the book, because eventually when the pedophile comes up again halfway through the book, it gets walked completely back. She's actually just a normal sad woman and the demon child is just her sponsor in the AA sense. She's then safely shunted off into a boring love triangle with two other (adult) side characters that don't actually matter, whatever and her demon girl starts dating Heather's girlfrined Sevens, whatever. But introducing that space, introducing the concept of that type of violence and pain into the world only to rugpull it away and go "JK JK JK" feels incomprehensible. That's what I'm most frustrated by- it was stupid to ever introduce the concept if there wasn't actually anywhere the author was willing to go. I just didn't understand. I still don't, at all. Felicity doesn't matter, really, she truly isn't important to the narrative in any way, she doesn't NEED to be there. But the introduction of her was placing a loaded gun on the table only to "um, eto, bweh" when it's actually loaded with blanks. I have a distate for any stories that don't treat SA and similar cruelties with immense care and this is just about the most unbelievable usage of it I've read. Left a bad taste in my mouth. Blech.

I also read Necroepilogos. And, almost surprisingly, I liked it a lot. Way more than Katalepsis. It hones in on what the earlier webnovel does best- physicality, pain, and intense conversations between women- and bases the entirety of the world the cast awaken into around these things. It's really good (aside from using the r-slur and SA as a threat a lot, which, blech) and I felt a setting more completely steeped in the unnatural does a lot of favors for a baseline of weirdness that gives Necroepilogos more room to grow, like some sort of living meat mech, perhaps. Unforch it suffers from the same issues of relationship atrophy. I'm not asking for romantic dates in a dead and rotting apocalypse but I felt crazy when Elpida goes arcs and arcs without talking to certain members of her crew squeezed together in her living-tank-little-brother at all. Yes, the ensemble is ever-growing, but when Amina and Ilyusha's perspective and focus chapters are given such love and care only for them to be reduced to a couple of additional background voices in group scenes it feels so shallow. It's just hard to sell building a community if the narrative skips forward in time past any chance for everyone to change and grow and even just talk. This feels mildly alleviated by the willingness of the narrative to stray from Elpida's perspective but it could absolutely go so much further. Oh, for one last pro, though: I think whatever the fuck Elpida and Yola have going on rules. Weird fascists developing psychosexual feelings for communist protagonists deserves to be a time-honored webnovel tradition (its happened twice, so, two nickels). But s'my feelings. Despite my harshness I know im just gonna remember the sprinkles of meaning and swag in Katalepsis fondly. So time will continue to plod steadily onwards and mellow out my feelings. At least it's better than fucking Worm.

So I’ve been playing the Chrono Jotter. It's a Chinese yuri visual novel that's about a girl with a real messed up brain. I like it a lot. It wastes no time in such a beautiful way. Everything’s wrong from minute one.

Ran Ibuki wakes up with amnesia (pretty standard). But this is not your bog-standard anime protagonist amnesia. She is a beautiful girl with disorders. schizophrenia and bipolar disorder that have gone untreated for years because her main caretaker was also her girlfriend- Ann Sakura- that went missing four years back. This is; rough. You are immediately greeted by the most core mechanic to both the games conceit and Ran's selfhood; a notebook. Within it, she writes everything. Everything she learns, knows, thinks, and feels- because after particularly bad episodes it's all she's got to base her identity off. It’s the titular chrono jotter due to literally being the only stable thing grounding her in time. Her memories, feelings, and senses will all lie and harm her, but the book is something she can trust.

So, she walks around, jotting things down- you decide some basic stats for her through mental exercises that let you yoink different scenes out of the upcoming novel. And she has a breakdown before you've taken two steps. She hallucinates things leering and hungry for her. And she stabilizes herself in the only way she can grasp without a partner, medication, or any familiarity to ground herself- by eating a page of the book that is, in her mind, adjacent to her missing girlfriend. It works. The hallucinations fade, she can breathe again, but she's a page shorter in the book that's her lifeline. At this point in time, it's unclear if this is pure placebo or an actual cure.

Ran Ibuki and the things wrong with her are the core of the game, because it has nothing but love for her and how she's treated (and how she thinks she's treated). Characters will say things that cause her to lash out and break down over and over again- and every time she's overwhelmed by the worst feelings afterwards, of being side-eyed and whispered about and excluded from this strange school and the even stranger students she's found herself among. Even if this new setting is kinder to her than she's used to. Ran's life, to her, was defined by other people and how much they despised her, until she was able to find the singular person that didn't, who loved her instead. We find this isn't true. Ran had several important people who loved her in her life in a variety of ways. She wasn’t bullied in school (aside from for her race, which is an afterthought to her against the 'real' slights she perceives- which is also a lot to unpack) and was mostly left alone. Her psychosis was the source of every rumor and cruelty against her, and the bitterness she directed outwards wasn't ever matched by anyone around her. This doesn't invalidate Ran's suffering, to this story. The harm was real, even if the source wasn't 'real' as we'd consider it. This becomes a core theme of the game.

Ran's disorders are discovered- one of the girls in school literally quotes entries from a book of psychological disorders, which results in Ran screaming and sobbing in misery. Both for being acknowledged as being 'unwell' and someone who was beginning to be considered a friend spilling forth the most worthless things to hear. She should be medicated, the things she experiences aren't real, and she needs to be cared for. Ran's shouting objections in the group bath are that it's real for her. It's all real, and hurts, and makes her miserable. Being told it's not doesn't fix her or help her in any way. Her only solace was a girl who saw something in her- and something with her.

Almost as an afterthought, a few hours in, you get an offhanded line from ran about some unusual 'cases' she dealt with earlier in her life she recalls (not Recalls, which is something else fun you can do with the notebook). You get an entry in the jotter- and unceremoniously find out that magic is real. Horrific creatures, relics, and locations inhabit the world and Ran is an old hand at dealing with them. At first, discovering this from Ann in the flashback brings her joy. She's not insane- a glimmer of 'normalcy' becomes a way out. But Ann crashes her back to reality. Magic is real, and Ran is still schizophrenic. She still sees things that aren't there for anyone else, and there's no solace or peace. The most difficult thing, the worst possible thing for Ran's psychosis and identity: the horrors haunting her aren't all in her head. Some things that are real to other people want to hurt her.

Ann (yes, she shows up) at one point brings up something important – Ran is fragile. Her psyche and sense of self is always brittle and on the edge, and the best thing for her is to avoid new people, stick to and consistently see people familiar to her, and take solace in routine and repetition. Even then, going to school on the regular was beyond Ran, and her ability to be there continued to degrade even with Ann’s assistance.

So, a school that's a weird bridge between comfort (everything is in Chinese-Ran's native language- and everyone speaks it) and unsettling (they're all Japanese schoolgirls and seem unable to comprehend when Ran speaks to them in Japanese) is exactly the opposite of what Ran needs. She has no medications lovingly pressed between her unwilling lips by her partner and no true understanding of the world she's found herself in. And so; psychotic break galore.

Overall, the journey of this novel isn’t about Ran finding independence, or a way to exist without struggle or relying on her loved one’s touch to push away hallucinations- it’s just about caring less about other people. Ran starts out jagged and harsh, rejecting everyone who approaches her- but can’t stop thinking about what they think of her, of how they’re reacting and whispering or fucking with her. Ran needs ritual and romance to persist but these things also push her to the edge because of the horrors spinning around her head. I think the games finale and answer to this struggle is incredible. Ran’s doing her best every day, with a routine that is probably going to kill her, because it’s all she’s got.

It’s very special. I like the game a lot. Seven hours for twelve bucks. A bargain. You oughtta check it out.

So. A blog. Scary. Formal-ish-er writing in a space longer than a tweet. I do this all the time for school and work and just for fun but having a page just for a blog- it’s scary and weird. I’ll figure it out. The idea really appealed to me, and I figured if I was gonna post a link to my blog somewhere it might as well have a lil thing on it to start. I’ve got some ideas on things I wanna write about but they’ll take time and maybe some slight research (I kinda can’t help myself).

My friends blog about their lives, the games they play, and the stories they make. All of these are a bit difficult for me: I’m unbelievably opposed to sharing basically anything real about myself outside of contextless snippets in a post or pictures. It’s also why I stopped posting selfies lol. My name’s Kim or KB and I think stories about dames are neato, and that’s all you need to know. The only video games I play nowadays are visual novels and things that are goof-off-with-friends games, which can be written about but I feel a bit silly writing about VN’s. The text is already there, for you to read, and you can just read it yourself. I guess “writing” is different than “posting” in a material way to me because I do love posting screenshots with comments alongside ‘em.

And finally, the stories they make. This is the scary one. I can turn something around a lot in my own head and like it a lot but the thought of sharing anything with another human being- horrifying. Vomit-provoking, literally. It’s why for the most part the writing I’ve put out in my recent time has been fanfiction- it’s a crutch but it’s one that feels safer to me. More comfortable to lean on existing apparatus’s of thought and interaction, even if I’m adding my own interpretations atop it. Beyond this- the medium of the written word has its appeal but I’m a visual dame. I need to learn how to draw better and program better and etcetera before I want to put anything out there, in any format. So that’s on the backburner.

So for this blog; keeping it simple at the moment. Initially it’ll be just stuff I’ve posted about in twitter but given more time to cook into what I feel expresses myself more earnestly. So yuri, art, books, you get the gist. I’ll try really hard to blog only about things I like and care about but no promises on me getting really mad about TLT or something and just going off for a bit. But for the most part- you’ve probably read my tweets, and this blog will almost certainly just be more comprehensive versions of those, for a bit at least.